Paid Members

Back in October of 2006, we announced TXTLJ, a Paid Account feature that let you post to your journal via text message and also get notifications via SMS/text if you want.

The number of people who use TxtLJ has fallen through the past several years. Also, the feature has only been available to to U.S. mobile users using certain providers. We'd like to find out how you use your mobile phone or device so we can identify an alternative that works for more of you.

So, keep in mind that we have posting by email (which works with some carriers' SMS), a plethora of mobile apps (and a few more coming later this year!), and all that jazz. And now, on to our questions!

If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free cuddly puppies through Monday, April 12th at 4pm, PST! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 puppies displayed until they've scampered off to your friends. Please send only one at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each fetching puppy. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and check your settings. We wish you oodles of puppy love!

Statistics are here!

You can now see the number of people who have visited your journal, your individual entries, a chart of comments, readers of the RSS feed of your journal, and the last 100 logged-in users who have visited your journal directly (if you've enabled My Guests).

Things you should know:
-Stats are completely anonymous (only My Guests is tied to username); only numbers are recorded, not any other information
-The times and dates in the graph are based on server time, which is UTC/GMT
-The light grey number at the top left corner of the graph is the statistical outlier
-While the graph may go back in time to this summer, the stats-gathering server was not on constantly, so previous stats may be missing. Today, and going forward, full stats are collected and displayed.
-If you opt out of My Guests (meaning that your username will not show up on other people's reports and you will not be able to view your My Guests tab), it does not affect your use of the rest of the Stats - if you're a Paid or Permanent user, you'll still be able to see all the rest of the information on this feature

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If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now send 10 of your non-Paid friends a $10 coupon. Your friend will be able to purchase a Paid Account for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25).

• All Paid and Permanent accounts can send out the coupons by clicking here (it's also under Friends -> Holiday promotion in the site header)
• You can also send to people not on your Friends list by manually entering the username in the field provided
• If your friend declines the invitation, it will be returned to your available invitation pool and you'll be able to send to someone else
• You can send the invitations until January 15th

We've made some additions and improvements to Notes!

The Notes feature has been added to two action-taking pages:

• You can now add a Note directly on the Add a friend page - handy if you'd like to mark down where you met them or another name you know them by!
• On the Ban and unban users page (under Account -> Privacy) you can now add a Note, including to a group of users all banned at the same time (so that next year you won't need to ask yourself "hey, why did I ban these guys?")

Other changes:

• When you're viewing your existing Notes they're grayed out; click in a field to activate it to change the text (this page can be found from the header by using Profile -> Manage Notes)
• Changes to editing:
  • When you're going to create a new Note but one already exists, you'll get a warning that you're editing an existing Note
  • You can now delete a note from the "Edit note" pop-up in the hover menu
  • You can now delete notes for multiple selected users on the Manage notes page
  • When you change Notes on "Ban|unban users" page, they can be edited and saved with "Save Changes" button

As many of you may have alraedy seen, LiveJournal announced the Your Journal - Your Money feature today in news. This feature allows you to link your Paid or Permanent LiveJournal account to a Google AdSense account to display ads on your journal. You keep all of the proceeds from the display of these ads once Google takes their cut; LiveJournal does not keep any portion of the generated revenue.

Now, before getting into any of the technical details at all, let's cover the most important point right up front:  this feature is completely opt-in. If you choose not to use Your Journal - Your Money, nothing will change about your LiveJournal experience. You will never see any ads from this program on LiveJournal while you are logged in. Only those users who use this feature will see these ads.

So, those of you who know you'd never be interested in using Your Journal - Your Money can skip the rest of this post if you like and continue on down your Friends page. For those that want to know more, dive behind the cut for all the details.

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As many of you may already know, LiveJournal experienced about an hour of downtime on Thursday, August 6th due to a DDoS which affected LiveJournal and several other web service providers. In the days following that event some users may have noticed some site slowness or experienced connection problems as we worked on blocking "bad" traffic and making sure that all of you could access the site. We want to apologize for any inconvenience or frustration this caused.

Although the circumstances were out of our control, we greatly appreciate the patience and support you've shown us over the past week or two as we worked to mitigate the effects of this attack. For those of you who support us by owning a Paid Account, we'd like to express our appreciation by extending your Paid Time for a few days. Anyone who was an active Paid member as of any time Thursday, August 6, 2009 is eligible for a 3 day extension of Paid time. You can claim this extension anytime from now until 12:01 GMT on September 10th.

The extension isn't automatic so that people who weren't affected can have the option to choose whether or not they want an extension. You can choose to claim your extension by going to this page: http://www.livejournal.com/pay/claim.bml

We've had some conversations recently about some of the reasons people buy Paid Accounts. Rather than try to guess, we wanted to ask you why *you* have a Paid (or Permanent) Account. Hence, a poll.

On the first question, we're looking for the handful of top reasons you have a Paid Account, so please check any of the options that were motivating factors for you. On the second, we ask that you try to narrow it down to the single biggest reason. If there was a primary or motivating reason for you that we haven't listed, please do add it in the text box provided.



Thank you!

Pingbacks

As announced in news today, Pingbacks have arrived on LiveJournal! For the time being, this feature is limited to Paid Accounts. More information can be found in the FAQ.

Here is how it works: your entry (as Paid user) is linked to by another (Paid) user. As long as both entries are public, and you have your comment settings set so that you can receive comments from all registered users, you will receive a screened comment from pingback_bot showing you the link to your entry. All comments by pingback_bot will be screened, regardless of your account settings - you can choose to unscreen them if you wish. Pingbacks to and from Paid Accounts can also be sent to and from any blog that supports the Pingback protocol. If you would like external sites to interact with your entries through Pingbacks, you'll need to change your default setting for Pingbacks to "Open".

We're aware that some pingbacks aren't working, but don't have enough data to determine the cause. If you try out pingbacks and they don't work, please let us know! Here's how! EDIT 3/6/09: If you haven't yet been able to send or receive Pingbacks, you can resolve the issue by going to the Privacy tab on the My Account Settings page, scroll to the bottom and click "Save". Although the default setting is "LiveJournal.com only", this setting is not recognized until settings are changed or saved. This will be fixed in the next release.

1. First, make sure that you and the person linking to your entry are both Paid users and that both entries are public. The default setting for Pingbacks will be "LiveJournal.com only," but you can check or change that on the Privacy tab of your Account Settings page.

2. Make sure your comment settings allow comments from either "registered users" or "everybody" and that you have your CAPTCHA setting for comments on "anonymous commenters" or "nobody".

3. Wait 15 minutes - this is the amount of time needed for the Pingback system to check and deliver the ping. If you don't see the comment from pingback_bot, comment here with a link to the entry that didn't get the pingback. Developers will monitor the comments here and we hope to have this issue resolved as soon as we can.

View Friends Page by Date works in S1

In December, we announced the Paid feature View Friends Page by Date. At that time, it was not compatible with journals using the S1 Style System due to the fact that S1 had been retired and deprecated. In January, developers investigated and created a fix - so if you're still using S1 you can now view your friends page by date to your heart's content!

If you've ever been away from LiveJournal for more than two weeks or you've missed more than 1,000 entries on your friends page, you might wonder what entries you've missed (those are the current limitations on friends pages).

Paid Account holders can now view their friends list for a certain day by appending the date to the URL of their friends page: http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/friends/?date=YYYY-MM-DD. This will only show entries from those you currently list as friends, and will order the entries by server time.

EDIT: Editing to add new information. This feature does not work for users who have an S1 layout. Since S1 is no longer supported, developers will evaluate whether it is feasible to make it available in S1.