In the latest SixApart fuckup, it turns out the complaint they scrambled to act upon was from a Christian Identity/Dominionist group — that is to say, backwoods rednecks where neo-Nazis inbreed with Klansmen. Fabulous choice of bedfellows! Be sure to bring this to prominent attention in discussions of this matter.

Shitty apology (comments already filled, sorry!). Questions on the CEO's CNet/CNN quote remain notably unanswered.

"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues," countered Six Apart's Berkowitz. "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online)." Berkowitz said the company would "obviously apologize" to anyone whose journal was deleted in error but added: "That's going to be a very small minority of the sites. I would be shocked if it's more than a dozen."

Translation: "fuck off, you're almost all a bunch of paedophiles."

The number of journals is already going down. (Note that's a comment on the previous news post, bragging about the new high in journal numbers.)

My earlier posts on what to do if SixApart sends LiveJournal to shit seem somewhat more urgent. I personally have no plans to give SixApart my money ever again. Probably keep the account for now (or from January) as a freebie.

So: how are we going on maintaining the community aspect without putting all our eggs into another basket susceptible to this sort of gross stupidity? Networking public blogs is easy; the trick is how to friends-lock a blog post to be readable by third-party sites, in a manner usable by technophobes and yet not susceptible to phishing attacks. I invite suggestions from the exceedingly smart people reading this, and ask them to ask other exceedingly smart people they know.

Update: Considerably more than a dozen. Gosh! etc. I await evidence these people are not too stupid to give any more of my money. I wonder if I can do a chargeback.