InsaneJournal Announcements

For those of you with paid or permanent accounts we have finally fixed the post by email feature. We found the problem during the move and made the corrections to the code that runs it.

If you have a paid or permanently insane account you can go to (http://www.insanejournal.com/manage/emailpost.bml) and set up your email post settings.

Also this had the side affect of releasing everything that had been queued up for several months, including email posts and support requests. You may get some responses that you weren't expecting.

The InsaneJournal server move has been completed. We are fully installed into our new home. Things should work better here, especially during peak hours in the evening (US). This also means that we are ending the sale we started a little over a week ago. Thanks to all of you who contributed and made this move possible.

I know the last part of the move yesterday was painful for a lot of you. I would have preferred to do it during the daytime during the week, but circumstances didn't allow for that. But we are done with 0% data loss, which is exceptional.

We are still working out some kinks with notifications. Seems that the big email providers don't like it when we move IP addresses. Gmail seems to be working, but it appears that AOL and Yahoo are both blocking our email. We hope to have these issues addressed in the next day or two.

Over the next couple of days we are going to be moving InsaneJournal into our new home. This new home should provide us with more speed and less downtime. As well as provide us with lower costs. In the next 3-6 months we are going to do an analysis of costs vs. income and restructure our pricing model here.

Please let everyone you know to follow InsaneJournal on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/insanejournal) as this is where we will be posting live status updates as we take parts or the whole site down to move it.

Thank you for your patience in this.

In an effort to provide better service at a lower cost we are going to be moving to a different hosting provider for our servers. Once this move is completed we will analyze our costs and pass along some of the savings to you.

In order to make this move though we are going to need to raise about $4000 of extra cash. We need to raise this money as soon as possible so we can get the new servers up and running and get the site onto them.

I am going to be setting permanently insane accounts for sale for $50 and insane userpics for sale for a discounted $125. This sale will go on at least for 1 week, if we still have funds we need to raise by the end of that week we will leave the sale on.

In addition we are going to be selling 6 month Self-Committed accounts for $10 and 12 month Self-Committed accounts for $20.

Thank you for continuing to support InsaneJournal

We are going to be extending the Permanently Insane Account sale to the end of the month to continue the celebration of the end of comment rot. We will be shutting of sales on June 1st, so take advantage of them now.

As an addition to the sale we are adding in the sale of Insane Userpics for $175. We know this is a lot of money, but we do not want to sell a lot of these. It is a unique item that we do not put of for sale very often, and we keep the price high to keep the number of account sold low. Also to purchase this item you need to already have a Permanently Insane account. If you already have Permanent Extra Userpics the price of this item will automatically be discounted in the Payment Center.

The sale of both of these items will be discontinued on June 1st.

We have introduced a new S2 style named "Complete Style". This is a very CSS driven style and can be used with your own S2 stylesheets. There are several different options available. Head to the Customization Center to check it out.

Thanks to branchandroot for the hard work on this style.

You may have noticed that we are changing out some of the ads on the site. We are testing out a new ad platform which seems to be more geared towards what we do. We are going to closely monitor this and if it doesn't work out we will not hesitate to roll back to using Google ads.

Since we fixed the biggest bug on the site we are going to compile a new list of current issues to work on. Here are the ones that I am aware of and am going to start working on immediately. If you know of any other bugs on the site let me know and I will update this list.

* directory.bml hangs searching
* Adding friends via the admin console causes custom groups to get emptied
* Joining a closed membership asylum
* Timezones on update page not reflecting change in DST in United Stats
* align= and border= options in image tags being striped by the HTML cleaner
* lynx sitescheme warning
* blank preview page
* Sometimes not able to change custom colors
* cannot log in with blackberry

Can someone who is experiencing this bug
* Adding friends via the admin console causes custom groups to get emptied
Please point me to an example of it happening? I am trying to duplicate it and I can't

Edit: I've made a change to the admin console to fix the adding friends bug. Please let me know if it is still a problem

I am still working on a mass uploader, but in the meantime I have created for you a light upload page that just lets you upload an userpic without having to load all of your other userpics. This should make it easier to fill your userpic slots especially if you have a lot of them.

You can go to http://www.insanejournal.com/uploadpic.bml to access the new page. I am also going to include a link to it from the old Edit Userpics page.

We have decided to not go through with the "Hospital Benefactor" sale for the time being. We have realized that we need to rebuild some trust here and get the site running a bit better before we can expect something like that to be successful.

As a way to continue to celebrate the end of comment rot, we have decided to run a 1 week Permanently Insane account sale starting immediately. They are available in the Payment Center right now.

I found the cause of comment rot. There was an old legacy setting that I didn't know what it did. It was among the last of the things to trace out in the code. I traced it out and found the offending code that was deleting comments and entry properties (status, userpic, etc) and removed it. Please let me know in THIS post if any NEW comment rot occurs after this post.

This has been a very very long and trying road and I want to thank all of you who have stuck it out here in spite of this major bug.

( The offending code for any programmers who might be interested )

Edit: After looking at the code even more closely I am sure that this was the cause, I think we can call comment rot a closed issue. Now to getting to writing a mass icon uploader.

I have shut off votes and comments on the previous post. The comments I received there made me rethink things so this is going to be the new poll to gauge things

We are considering doing a fund raiser on IJ so we can move off our of Dedicated Servers and onto our own collocated servers. What this will allow us to do is lower the overall cost for running IJ and therefore be able to more easily upgrade our service as we will only have to add in hardware and not up our monthly costs to do this. In turn we can look at lowering prices around here once the site is moved and everything is stable.

What we hope to do is offer a new kind of account. The name isn't locked in stone but we are thinking of calling it "Hospital Benefactor". We will limit the sale to 350 of these accounts and charge $100 for them. We haven't finalized what the specs on the account will be, just that they will be a little more loaded than Permanently Insane accounts. Something like 1000 userpics. And more notifications, etc.

We will only move forward on this if we can be sure there is going to be enough interest. Moving onto our own hardware has a number of benefits and we think it is worthwhile to attempt this sale.

Edit: We will allow you to transfer Permanently Insane status to another account if you already have one and you purchase one of these accounts

Edit 2>: If you answer maybe can you please let us know what we could to do change that maybe to a yes. Also please let everyone on your f-list know about this poll so we can get a large enough sampling of answers to know what we should do.

Poll #3722 Upgraded Account
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Would you be willing to pay $100 for this account

Edit: Comments and voting disabled in this post, check the newest post and re-vote and please comment there

We are considering doing a fund raiser on IJ so we can move off our of Dedicated Servers and onto our own collocated servers. What this will allow us to do is lower the overall cost for running IJ and therefore be able to more easily upgrade our service as we will only have to add in hardware and not up our monthly costs to do this. In turn we can look at lowering prices around here once the site is moved and everything is stable.

What we hope to do is offer a new kind of account. The name isn't locked in stone but we are thinking of calling it "Hospital Benefactor". We will limit the sale to 175 of these accounts and charge $200 for them. We haven't finalized what the specs on the account will be, just that they will be a little more loaded than "Permanently Insane with Insane Userpics". We will only move forward on this if we can be sure there is going to be enough interest. Moving onto our own hardware has a number of benefits and we think it is worthwhile to attempt this sale.

Poll #3720 Account Type Generator
Open to: , results viewable to: All

Would you be willing to pay $200 for this account

Please leave any questions or comments in this entry and I will do my best to answer as many as I can. Please keep questions to this topic so I can better answer them.

I have made some changes to the notification center. First of all I have made it possible to mark items as read and delete items, also in the dramatic, worksafe, and monodramatic site schemes the link to the notification center now includes the number of read items.

I have also increased the number of subscriptions users can have to the following:

Free Patient: 50
Early Inmate: 100
Self-Committed [paid]: 500
Permanently Insane: 1000
Permanently Insane with Insane Userpics: 5000

Please be aware that the notification area is still in beta and there are some things that do not yet work.

All,

I want to make a post here regarding the current state of InsaneJournal.

First and foremost I want to let everyone know that I have not abondoned the site and I actually work on the site every day to keep it running.

We are still bringing in enough paid accounts to pay for the servers that we are using, but we may be having a unique sale at some point to raise capital to purchase our own servers and move into a colocation facility rather than stick with our current dedicated hosting facility. This is all dependent on being able to be sure there is enough interest in doing this from the user community

We are aware that comment rot still exists on the site. We have not been able to figure out the exact cause except that heavy load on the site is a factor. If we can move to new servers we can reduce the load and reduce the amount of lost comments.

We are aware that there are other bugs on the site, but at this time there just isn't the time for myself to look at them and we are not bringing in enough money to hire another programmer. These various issues will be looked and eventually fixed, but I do not want to promise a time frame as my days are very very busy right now.

Also there has been some rumors about us moving to a different code base, we might do this, but not without extensive testing. And if we do move to a different code base the function of the site should still remain similar, as what we are looking at is just a different version of the livejournal code.

I know I have not been responding to comments on this journal as much as I used to. Please know that I do read them all but as I said above, right now I just haven't had the time to respond to any of them.

Edit:

The subscriptions limit has been updated to 50 for all accounts. If this works properly we will update it again to give more to paid/perm accounts.

Also I think I have partially fixed the message center so you can now delete and mark your notifications as read.

Edit 2:

I have added the number of unread notifications to the menu item in the newer siteschemes (dramatic, worksafe, monodramatic).