death to capslock

Technical post for anyone who's interested!

Since we imported this community from LiveJournal, your comments show up as OpenID comments, like this: exampleuser@livejournal.com.

What is OpenID? Basically, it's a service several sites, including those derived from LJ, use to let you comment using the credentials for just one of them: e.g., you can comment on DW using your LJ log-in. For a longer and more accurate explanation, here's the DW FAQ page on OpenID.

If you have a Dreamwidth account, you can "claim" your OpenID comments so that they'll now be directly linked to your DW account and you will never need the credentials of another site to manage them. You can edit them and do whatever else you can do to comments you make while logged into your DW account, your user icon will show up, etc.

Here are the Dreamwidth instructions for claiming your OpenID comments on Dreamwidth.

There is a chance that sites hosted in Russia won't be accessible from outside Russia at some point in the near future. LiveJournal is hosted in Russia. Not in Russia: me, and probably a lot of other DTCL members.

So it's a good time to think about backing up LJ journals and communities.

To preserve "snapshots" of posts for future viewing, you can save the URLs into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This means that if someone has links to posts but they stop working, they can plug the URLs into the Wayback Machine instead and still read them that way. I've run some DTCL URLs through there when I remembered (including the calendar navigation pages), but I'm sure there a lot that have not been captured. If there are any posts you want to save in the Wayback Machine, go for it!

For backing up your own LJ, there are a few LJ-clone sites you can export it to, if you haven't already. I think Dreamwidth is the most-used and best-maintained one right now. Here's their page on importing from Livejournal to Dreamwidth and a guide to Dreamwidth for LiveJournal users.

And here are a couple of dw_maintenance posts about current conditions for importing your LJ into Dreamwidth:

2022-03-10
2022-03-11

I am not the DTCL owner and so can't import it to another site. It's been pretty quiet here the past couple of years and I don't know if there's enough interest in keeping it going on another site anyway, but if everyone thinks it's a good idea, it would be possible to import the community into Dreamwidth for preservation's sake at least as long as our community owner is in a position to do that right now.

I'm also on Dreamwidth as Sunnyskywalker, so if any of you are or will be on Dreamwidth too, you can find me there. I'm on Archive of Our Own as Sunnyskywalker too.

Please feel free to post links to your own Dreamwidth, GreatestJournal, AO3, etc. accounts in the comments so everyone can connect with people they'd like to keep following!