Invite system From September 2, 2001, until December 12, 2003, the growth of LiveJournal was checked by an
"invite code" system. This curbing of membership was necessitated by a rate of growth faster than the server architecture could handle. New users were required to either obtain an invite code from an existing user or buy a paid account (which reverted to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system serendipitously reduced abuse on the site by deterring people from creating multiple throw-away accounts. The invite code system was lifted after a number of major improvements to the overall site architecture. Elimination of the invite code system was met with mixed feelings and some opposition. LiveJournal's management pointed out that the invite code system had always been intended to be temporary.
The word "friend" The dual usage of "friends" as those whose journals one reads, and those one trusts to read one's own journal, has been criticized for being at odds with everyday use of the term. The individual users on a user's friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships and general interests, as well as
courtesy friendships where a user has "
friended" someone who friended them. A friends list may represent something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection or a puzzle. The difference between online and real-world friendships is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. LiveJournal friendships are not necessarily mutual; any user can befriend or "defriend" any other user at any time. In the Russian LiveJournal community, the word френд ("friend", an English borrowing) is often used to describe this relationship instead of the native Russian word "друг" ([ droog ]) that translates to "friend". The
Dreamwidth code fork of LiveJournal has split the 'friend' concept into its two component pieces of subscription and access.
Abuse Prevention Team decisions As LiveJournal has grown, it has had to deal with issues involving the content it hosts. Like most web logging hosts, it has adopted a basic
Terms of Service. The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for
free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as
spamming,
copyright violation, and
harassment. LiveJournal created an Abuse Prevention Team and processes to handle claims about violations of the Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the
law, and other issues. There is an ability for a user to report an entry as "spam", and it is a user's responsibility to separate spamming and bot activity from actual violations while reporting. If the Abuse Prevention Team determines that a violation has occurred, the user will be either required to remove the infringing material (as in the case of copyright violations); Another controversy arose when users complained after an unknown number of users were asked to remove default user pictures containing images of breast feeding that were considered inappropriate as they contained a view of nipples or areolae. The incident attracted the attention of
breast feeding advocacy groups such as Pro-Mom who publicized the issue to gain larger media awareness. LiveJournal responded by changing the FAQ on appropriate content for default user pictures. The current FAQ 111 says that nudity is not appropriate in
default user pictures; the original FAQ 111 said that graphic sexual content was not appropriate. Breastfeeding pictures were not restricted by the original FAQ, and the current FAQ reflects the fact that they are only restricted from use as a default user picture. Breastfeeding pictures are still allowed as user pictures that may be manually chosen while posting but may not be the default.
Account vulnerabilities In January 2006 the site had to make emergency changes to the way the site hosts
user accounts due to a
web browser-side security
vulnerability. The hacker group responsible was later identified as "Bantown". Approximately 900,000 accounts were at risk.
LiveJournal and advertisements In April 2006, LiveJournal announced it was introducing a new user type that gave free users some of the features available to paid members in exchange for ad sponsorship. This user type was initially called Sponsored+, but was later renamed to Plus. This announcement was met with a whirlwind of controversy. Between April 2004 and January 2005, one of LiveJournal's Social Contract promises stated the site would, "Stay advertisement free." The Social Contract went on to say, "It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages." Another ad-related controversy occurred in June 2006, when ads for Kpremium began installing
malware and triggering
pop-up ads on Australian and Western European users' computers, against the LiveJournal ad guidelines. LiveJournal responded by removing the advertisement from the website and issuing an apology to its users. Advertisement in LiveJournal is based on the user's preferable categories, gender, age, location, interests, or a small portion of public page contents. Ads are targeted according to information about the author, the viewer, and LiveJournal's ad preferences as a whole. Users can choose the preferences in their settings among five or more categories of advertising, including Art & Humanities, Cars & Wheels, Books & Reading, Charities, Home & Hobbies, Housing, Internet & Media etc. It is not possible to completely remove the advertisement other than by upgrading to a Paid Account. As part of changes made in April 2017, Livejournal eliminated the ability of paid contributors to prevent ads being shown to their readers. Instead, LiveJournal began showing ads on all pages, including postings by paid contributors, unless the reader of the page was also a logged-in paid contributor.
Account suspension In May 2007, LiveJournal suspended approximately 500 accounts and communities, causing what
CNET referred to as a "revolt" from "thousands of LiveJournal customers", after a number of activist groups, including one named Warriors for Innocence, reported pedophilic material on its website. According to Six Apart chairman and chief executive Barak Berkowitz, "We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up". Beyond merely fan communities, many were initially upset that communities entirely unrelated to anything but the discussion, sometimes therapeutic and other times literary, of rape or child molestation were among those suspended. announcing that Six Apart was currently in the process of unsuspending about half of suspended journals. The journals being reinstated fell into fandom or fiction categories or were journals that were suspended for problems related only to the contents of their profiles. In an earlier interview with
news.com, A further statement was made on August 7, 2007.
Advisory board election As previously announced, SUP Media, the latest owners of LiveJournal, decided to create an advisory board to help it make decisions. The first members were distinguished people in the areas of law and technology,
danah boyd,
Esther Dyson,
Lawrence Lessig, and the original LiveJournal founder, Brad Fitzpatrick. SUP announced two other members would be appointed from the LiveJournal userbase, one Russian and one English speaking. The English speaking election was marred with accusations of
ballot stuffing, conflicts of interest, and multiple death threats. The developer who wrote the poll software running the election called the ballot stuffing plausible.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks LiveJournal was the victim of several
DDoS attacks in 2011. The first attack on March 30 took down the site for several hours. The attack is reported to be the largest DDoS attack against LiveJournal since the site's creation. A second attack continued through April 4 and 5, causing service disruption for some users. A third attack in July caused the site to be unavailable for several hours at a time for a week. On December 2, 2011, another attack was recorded, with LiveJournal's status blog acknowledging it as such. Of the attacks, Russian president
Dmitry Medvedev commented in April 2011 that "what has occurred should be examined by LiveJournal's administration and law enforcement agencies." On
Russia's election day in December 2011, LiveJournal saw another attack.
Presumed database breach In October 2018,
Troy Hunt, creator of the
Have I Been Pwned? site, tweeted that he was getting multiple independent reports that email addresses and passwords from the LiveJournal user database were being used in a scam email campaign. In May 2020, admins at
Dreamwidth reported that they had repeatedly warned LiveJournal of an apparent breach with exposure of LiveJournal passwords, dating back to 2017 or 2014, but that LiveJournal had declined to disclose this to their users. This information was also passed on to (or somehow otherwise received by) the MyIDCare website, a site that was created in 2015 for Federal employees or retirees, who were given free lifetime monitoring to this service by the Office of Personnel Management (the "opm" in the URL), an agency of the Federal Government, after the personal information of millions of people was compromised in a major data breach involving approximately 21,500,000 records in that year (which was made even more serious by the fact that some of the compromised data included information such as fingerprints, which helped this breach gain national attention. The MyIDCare site sent out an alert (dated May 22, 2020) to their previously registered users about a potential data breach at LiveJournal and requested that users change their passwords to protect those accounts against potentially fraudulent activity. ==Legal cases and censorship==