Strikethrough '07: I SURVIVED

48 of the longest hours of my LiveJournal life are over. The Strikethrough has come to an end.

After talking to the rest of the media and doing God knows what, LJ finally responded here. I've got a couple things to say about it:

1) Thank God they saw their mistake (after how many pages of comments, again?) and are trying to fix it. I'd assume they'd restore all the communities and journals with the exception of the ones that actually came up as supporters of illegal activities.
2) It's going to take a long time for Six Apart and LiveJournal to recover from all this. They've broken the trust of their customer base, and it'll take quite a while to repair that. Even then, it'll never really be the same - I know I'm not the only one who's going to be paranoid enough to keep looking over my shoulder. It's not going to stop me from posting what I want when I want, but still, the paranoia continues.
3) I have never seen so many people from such different walks of life and opinions band together so quickly and cohesively over something. This, to me, has been absolutely amazing, and even though (pray to God and knock wood) something like this should never happen again, I'm hoping we can keep some semblance of that sense of community alive. That's the whole reason I have this icon - that sense of community and working together. That's why I joined Paixao, and hell - that's why I joined LJ in the first place. Community.

As a final note, roaring made some awesome banners that you can find here and several great sets of icons by other users are here and here. Enjoy. :D

Never shall we die.

Strikethrough '07: Final thoughts (?)

So it's over. Supposedly. The fandom journals and comms are all being reinstated, the people who only had profile problems are also being undeleted on the condition they change profiles to clarify things, and LJ is supposed to be back to normal.

Like I said in my previous entry, it's going to take a long time for Six Apart to restore the trust its LJ customers once had. This could have been handled 100% better with 1) research into the profiles and such - is it just a bizarre username, or is this person really into child porn? In what context are they listing this interest? Is it a journal of a real person or a fictional RP journal? and 2) warning for the people with questionable interests (i.e. profile problems). The people who were doing illegal activities on the comms and LJ accounts? Yeah, they needed to head out. Those who were simply misunderstood? Deserved to be warned well in advance of deletion. Six Apart really screwed up going off half-cocked like they did.

I have to concur with my more pessimistic friends: the Strikethrough may be over, but I think the repercussions will continue for a while to come. Here's hoping they won't be too killer.

In the meantime, I continue on with life.