More from the Russian bots....

Event
Event:
Participants:	"More from the Russian bots...."
Date(s):	5 March 2009, 5 January 2013
Type:	admin post
Fandom:	Mary Renault
URL:	"More from the Russian bots...." & "Enough already about the bots!" (posts to maryrenaultfics)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

On 5 March 2009, the moderators of the maryrenaultfics (MRF) LiveJournal community posted a warning to members about a malware virus targeting communities on various social networking sites, including LiveJournal.

The community profile had been updated on 1 February 2009; but, although members had been informed of the fact at the time, details had not been given. For this reason, in "More from the Russian bots....", the mods took pains to inform people explicitly that the new rules now banned the use of active links off LiveJournal.

Initially members followed the ban assiduously. However, once the immediate urgency passed, they tended to decide for themselves whether an external link could (or couldn't) be considered safe. In January 2013, however, the rule was invoked by the mods as justification for placing one of the members on moderated posting status.

Admin Post of 5 March 2009

Apparently there is a bit of nasty Malware Virus spreading through the social networking sites...including LiveJournal (of course). It targets communities, generating a mod-ish looking post informing the membership that the community is being closed, and then deletes all the community's entries. The post includes a couple of links which, when clicked, will infect the clickee, compromising their personal info as well as their f-list. Nice, eh?

So...please be aware that trueriver and I have no intention of closing maryrenaultfics. If you see such a post, do NOT click any of the internal links. Please do report the post to LJSupport by clicking the red flag icon or the "flag" link, depending upon your viewing option. We keep a pretty close eye on the page, but if you're inclined to email or text to let us know we've been hit, it would be appreciated. A lot.

This is probably as good a time as any to repeat that we've made some changes to the Community's Guidelines. (posted 1/02/2009) One of the changes is the request that external links (those leading outside LJ) be disabled...i.e.,not clickable. Two common ways to do this are changing http to hxxp, or removing the http and posting the link as www.sitename. A very grateful thank you to those of you who have recently had to deal with me enforcing that request; your friendly cooperation was much appreciated. As we learn more about the virus, we may have to ask that internal links be disabled as well. We'll share what we learn about this bug, and hope that you'll do the same here.

*sigh*

Russian bots.....really.

Follow-Up Post

No comments were posted at the time. However, the following day (6 March 2009), a second admin post was made, "Enough already about the bots!". This provided instructions on what to do if one were friended by an unfamiliar journal. This elicited several comments of thanks, such as the following:

Thanks so much for all this info! I had no idea, and was puzzled as to why I'd been friended by a random Russian journal. I reported it and now it's gone, so one less bot out there. :)

— comment by nostoi, 6 March 2009

I keep getting 'friended' by these LJs, and keep reporting them, and the LJs are deleted after a while, and then a few days later, two more pop up in their place. It's a losing battle.

I don't understand why they keep 'friending' me, though. My journals are as boring as hell. :-)))

— comment by greenlady2, 8 March 2009

Consequences

In the short run members were assiduous in disabling links, since they saw the rule as a reasonable precaution to protect both the community and themselves against what, at the time, was undeniably a serious threat.

As time passed and the Russian bot problem receded, many members returned to the practice of including at least some active external links in their posts. In doing so, they did not follow formal guidelines from the moderators, for the rule, as given on the community profile, remained a simple ban. Instead, members made the decision on their own estimation of whether it would (or would not) be safe to leave a link active. As a general rule, they linked freely to their own journals, even when these were off LJ: Dreamwidth, in particular, was seen as a safe site. They might also link directly to stories they had posted to AO3, articles on Fanlore, the Yuletide community, and the like. For the most part these transgressions of the rule (if that is the appropriate way to put it) were overlooked by the mods. Furthermore, the matter was not again raised formally within the community in later admin posts.

Example of Later Practice

Consider the following example. On 10 November 2012, queen_ypolita made a post, "Purposes of Love, different editions", in which she discussed an ongoing series of comparison essays she had been doing on her Dreamwidth journal. The following is an excerpt:

Some of you may have seen/heard me mention that I've been working my way (very slowly!!) through my older (a 1947 reissue of the original 1939 edition) and newer (a Penguin reprint of the 1968 revised edition) copies. I've been posting my bare-bones findings in my journal—this is the most recent and final instalment, with links to previous posts.

What I found was that the 1968 text has lost around 8,000 words in comparison to the 1939 text, and the impression I get is that for the most part the text was tightened up; conversations are slightly briefer, descriptive bits less wordy, and so on. We don't know who did the edits for the revised edition, but knowing that MR, when describing her writing method, said that she loved cutting and tightening up her texts, I would have no hesitation in seeing her mark all over the changes.

Most notably, the final chapter of the 1939 is cut, which doesn't really change the conclusion the book comes to, but does give it a sense of a more open, uncertain ending in the 1968 edition, leaving some things that the original ending sets in words as a promise between the lines.

Of the two mods, trueriver immediately commented that the posts represented "valuable work" that was "a wonderful gift to the community", while my_cnnr called it "another valuable resource for MR fans". Neither made any reference to the presence of an active link to Dreamwidth in the post.

Notably, in a reply to one of the other comments, queen_ypolita included a list of links to Mediafire, all of which were disabled—an indication that she was actually not ignoring the rule against links, but rather was interpreting it to mean that only potentially unsafe links should be deactivated.

With examples like this in front of them, it is not surprising that newer members were not always aware that there was actually a rule banning all active links. That would not only have required careful perusal of the profile, itself a fairly lengthy document, but a disregard for the actual practice of members of the community.

Another Case

It should be noted that, even though the moderators at maryrenaultfics often disregarded active links to members' Dreamwidth blogs, this was not always the case.

On the 5th or 6th of January 2013, Naraht posted a notice to the maryrenaultfics community (under her LJ username, emily_shore) with the information that she was about to host a chapter-by-chapter (CBC) discussion of Renault's novel, The Charioteer, on her Dreamwidth blog. She invited other MRF members over to participate, and included a live link.

Within very short order the announcement was deleted by the moderators, who placed Naraht on moderated posting status (i.e. any post she made to MRF would have to be approved by the mods before it would actually appear on the community).

The mods appear not to have directly informed Naraht of their action. She learned of the deletion of the announcement when asked by greerwatson if she had done it herself; and learned she was on moderated status when she tried and failed to post her story, "No courage in him"[1] to MRF.

Given the timing, this may be the incident referred to in the following subthread within "Mary Renault LJ fandom", a thread on Fail Fandomanon:[2]

DA

Posting access gets revokes as well, at the drop of a hat, without warning.

Not the way to build an active community.

— posted 2013-02-25 02:26 pm (local)

AYRT

... Yikes.

— comment posted 2013-02-25 02:41 pm (local)

(word vomit anon)

Holy shit. Was there any reasoning given after the fact or anything like that?

(You know what would be funny, in a really ironic way? If I went back and my posting access had been revoked for inactivity or something. *goes and checks* Phew, no, looks like it hasn't. I was having a serious paranoia moment there.)

— comment posted 2013-02-25 03:06 pm (local)

Yes, there was eventually reason given. (Though I was the one who had to get in touch.)

I don't want to say more for fear of revealing myself but the "reason" was that I had done something which would not have seemed at all out of the ordinary in 99% of LJ communities.

— comment posted 2013-02-25 05:47 pm (local)

At any rate, the incident continued to rankle (with both Naraht and the MRF mods) until, on 30 January 2014, she posted an entry to her journal, "maryrenaultfics and me,"[3] that discussed her impressions of the community over the period in which she had been a member (at that point, some three and a half years), with particular reference to the community rules. With respect to this particular incident, she said:

I also managed to unwittingly transgress the boundaries last year, when I posted to let people know that I was hosting a discussion of The Charioteer on my Dreamwidth. My post was deleted and I was banned from posting in the community, both without notification. I only got my posting privileges back after a lengthy discussion by PM with one of the mods. Apparently they would rather that members were not enticed to talk about Renault's works anywhere but in the community itself.

— from "maryrenaultfics and me", posted to DW by naraht on 30 January 2014

This omits the ostensible reason why she was put on moderated status (i.e., the failure to use an inactive link to her journal), but probably hits closer to to the underlying cause. Even more relevant, however, is something that Naraht only mentioned a day later in a comment:[4]

I remember when I got in trouble for posting the link to my Charioteer discussion: one of the problems was the mods had privately been discussing the possibility of having another within-comm CBC, but how on earth was I to know that?

— from "maryrenaultfics and me", comment posted 31 January 2014 01:38 am (UTC)

At bottom, then, the mods may have felt provoked into action by having their own prospective CBC discussion of The Charioteer pipped at the post.

It should be added that the mods insist that they do not care what Naraht does on her blog, but feel that it would have been polite of her to let them know about her plans instead of using MRF as a personal message board. Furthermore, not being particularly involved in fannish activites (other than modding the comm), they approach fandom, fannish spaces, and fannish practices with caution and reservations. For this reason, they maintain that the ban on external links remains justified, and her inclusion of an active link to Dreamwidth was a blatant breach of known community rules.

Current Rule

The mods never extended the ban to links that are internal to LJ.

The rule banning active external links still remains in the profile (as of November 2014).[5] However, a limited exception is now permitted for members' own personal sites. Specifically, the current wording states that, "For the safety of all members, links to most external sources should be disabled," but with no definition of how "most" should be interpreted in this context. Buried later in the profile, though, is the information that members may link directly to their own LiveJournal blog or other site which they maintain. However, they are told to indicate explicitly if the link leads to a site other than LJ.