rabidsamfan | Frien*ditto (Reply)

Apparently some bobo out there has come up with a stupid idea called Frien*ditto. There's an explanatory rant here, which is all I know about it, but the gist is that you go to their site, give them your LJ password, and then they'll post up anything you're able to look at. I.E., all the stuff your friends have friends locked because they didn't want the world reading it.

Now, I doubt any of my faithful readers are moronic enough to have been suckered into giving their passwords out, and there's not much on my journal which is f-locked. But there are a few entries which I would just as soon not have splatted all over the web, and I object to the very principal of the thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if participating didn't violate the livejournal TOS, too.

So, if (in a moment of extreme sleeplessness) you've succumbed, change your password to minimize the damage, and drop me a note -- I'll screen comments on this entry -- and I'll defriend you for a month or two until the LJ folks find a way to shut these bobos down. (And if I have a list I can swing by once in a while to see how you're doing.) Honesty is the best policy here -- if I find that you're on Frien*ditto and didn't tell me, I'll make sure your entire f-list finds out about it PDQ.

Not to mention the folks who run LJ.

Remember. I work with kids. I don't make threats, I make promises.

ETA: Just to clarify, the "bait" for Fri*endsditto is "archiving" posts. (As if putting them in memories, or cut and pasting them into a file on your own computer weren't perfectly adequate.) The LJ abuse team is aware of the situation, but right now the best defense is to let your f-list about the problem.

I should think that if you sign in and lock your sign in to that IP address it would also fuddle the Frien*dsditto people, btw. Means only ever checking LJ from one computer, but...

ETA: I haven't checked the accuracy of the report, but have been told that someone's searching for LJ entries that mention FD and putting them up on FD. Hence the asterisks. I'm too sleepy to go and check tonight, and I'm not sure what the heck their actual URL is either.