(no subject)

[coraa]

I usually don't do "pay attention, LJ is doing something wrong" posts these days, because I assume those of you who care will find out on your own. These, though, are big enough deals that I think that my friends who don't follow LJ news as closely will want to know.

First: The Facebook/Twitter crossposter. It allows you to crosspost your posts (sure), your public comments (probably okay?), and, crucially, your comments in locked posts, even if those locked posts are by other people.

What this means: Say you're talking about how you can't stand John Smith's books in Jane Doe's journal, and you choose to crosspost your comment to Twitter. The comment on Twitter will look like this: "Yeah, I agree, John Smith couldn't write a character to save his life. http://janedoe.livejournal.com/123456.htm"

Why you should care: If John Smith finds the tweet (and egosearching Twitter is not difficult), he doesn't just know that you think he can't write characters. (Presumably you wouldn't crosspost if you didn't want that to be known.) He also knows that Jane Doe's journal was the one hosting the discussion... and Jane can't do anything about it.

What you can do about it: Don't crosspost comments in locked posts. To be extra safe, don't crosspost comments in other peoples' journals at all, unless you know they're okay with it.

Second: The pingbacks. They function such that, if someone links to your entry in their post and both you and they have pingbacks turned on (they're turned on by default), you'll get a notification of the link. In theory, they only work on unlocked posts.

What this means: If you and the other person have pingbacks turned on, when they link to your post, you'll get a comment in your post with the pingback link and a chunk of the text around the link for context.

Why you should care: Reports from the Internetverse indicate that, in some situations, the pingback doesn't respect locks. This is contrary to what the News post says and may be a bug, but if it's a bug, it's a big one. It means both that you might wind up with your flocked text copied to someone else's journal, and that you might be unwillingly notified that people are talking about you behind your back.

What you can do about it: Turn pingbacks off, at least until the bug (if it's a bug) gets sorted out.

Comments

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was bewildered when I received a pingback notification about someone referencing a post I made in gay_marriage over six years ago. In a locked entry.

Now, they may have initially posted it publicly and then changed it to locked, dunno. But it was locked when I clicked the link

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Based on preliminary reports, it'll trigger the sending of pingbacks whenever a post is edited. Even if it's edited to change the security from 'public' to 'locked.'

Apparently posts that started off life as locked never trigger pingbacks, but if you want to go back and make your journal more secure... you'll be sending pingbacks.

Crazy, no?

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Huh. So maybe the referencing post was old, too, and they were just doing a flockdown. Of course, I can't know, bc it's locked. :)

[thumbie.livejournal.com]

Thank you soo much for this post. I have now disabled pingbacks. I was sort of nervous about the pingback popup but still didn't 100% understand it and haven't had time to figure everything out.