Opting out of lj's image feed (now with added Syndication options!)

[darkhavens]

As some of you may know, lj has an image feed that displays recent posted images, and a few communities now gather and post these images (and so do some external websites).

One particular guy, iconscraper, is automated--he's set up a program to scan the feed LJ sends out which has people's icons on it. This process means that he hotlinks to all the icons he "scrapes" up. He think's there is nothing wrong with what he's doing and is pissed off that people are pissed off that he's stealing their icons and their bandwith. What a charmer, eh?

Anyhow, there is a way to keep people like him from linking to your icons/images and stealing both them and your bandwidth.

To remove your own journal from these feeds go to The Admin Console and input type set latest_optout yes and click on the execute button. Make sure that you are logged into LJ when you do this.

If you run a community, type set for communityname latest_optout yes, replacing 'communityname' with the plain text name of your community (no lj code).

ETA: As uniquewonders has just pointed out in comments over at bloodclaim, you can also set your syndication level via the Admin Console:

set synlevel option
set for communityname synlevel option

The options are:
* full - includes full entry text
* summary - includes excerpt of entry text
* title - includes subject lines only

examples:
set synlevel summary
set for bloodclaim synlevel title

You can see the links to your feeds and therefore what their content is in this FAQ.

ETA2: Also courtesy of uniquewonders, here is a link to a comprehensive list of privacy settings you can tweak to suit yourselves.

(Feel free to link here or repost.)

Comments

[ely-jan.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much!

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. I'm rather pissed at lj for providing these feeds in the first place, but they're not new, and people have complained before and got nowhere, so I figure the best thing to do is let everyone know how to turn off the access.

[siberian-skys.livejournal.com]

Takes all kinds. What an asshole. I just opted out. Thanks for the info. I had no idea that LJ had a feed like that. LJ should be required to tell us when we sign up so we can opt out at that time.

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

That's a good point!

[siberian-skys.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-)

[kitty-poker1.livejournal.com]

Done. What a tosser. I needed a shower after reading his self-congratulatory post.

Thanks, sweetie. *smooch*

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

YW, darlin'. There are quite a few websites out there which use the different feeds, so that's a big chunk of bandwidth being leeched.

[kitty-poker1.livejournal.com]

I really don't understand why he and others think what they've done is oh-so-clever and what anyone would have done if they'd just thought of it. Well, no. Most of us have respect for our fellow bloggers and their bandwidth and privacy.

Nice to see the LJ Abuse team has been so assiduous. Not.

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

LJ are the ones that produce the feeds that make these sites and comms possible and so long as we have the option to opt-out, I don't think the Abuse team are interested. :/

[kitty-poker1.livejournal.com]

We've never been given the chance to make an informed choice because that requires information. Weird. They can post about how jolly it'll be when we have adverts covering every square inch of our journals, but not about this. Irritated, moi? *g*

[tabaqui]

Yay, you, for posting this. I did it already for my own lj off of a comment left at sueworld2003 and intended to link to that in my next post. I think i'll link to you, instead, just because you're so succinct and the instructions are so clearly written.

Also - gah! LJ should tell us *everything* we have the option of opting out of, so we can *choose*. I wrote to the abuse lj and talked about this guy hotlinking and their response was 'it's from the lj feed and most of the images are not hotlinked'. So basically 'we don't give a shite'.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
*smoooch*
Thanks, bay-bee.

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

YW! :D

The whole mess had popped up several times on my flist so I thought I'd pass the message on. I cobbled this together from snippets of three different posts and added my own inimitable touch. ;)

Feel free to link; the more people see this the better. Opting out isn't an option if you don't know there's anything for you to opt out from.

[tabaqui]

Exactly! Tell me what i *can* opt out of - i'll bet it's a lot of stuff!

I wonder where, exactly, you find that stuff out...

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

There are a bunch of other console command lines here: http://wiki.noljads.com/Console_Commands but I don't really know what half of them do.

http://wiki.noljads.com/ is pretty new and buggy, but provides some information on where to find out stuff like this.

[tabaqui]

Yeah, i looked at that and was baffled, too. Gah.
Thanks for the other link, though - i'll poke around.
:)

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

uniquewonders has provided me with several links over at bloodclaim, so I've edited that post and this one to include the new data.

Go and poke around! *points upthread* :D

[tabaqui]

Cool cool. Thank you! Both!

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Thanks a lot for the info. I really wasn't all that pissed off with iconscraper until I read his "defense"... *insert profanity of your own choice here*. I've changed my settings at least, hopefully others will follow suit...

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I went to check it out too and was stunned by the attitude shown in the 'explanatory' post.

[tabaqui]

Jayzus, could that shite be *more confusing* please? Gah.
What are syndications, anyway? I'm confused.

Gah! LJ, you suck!

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

If you look at my profile, in the 'Friends' section there is a list of personal journals, followed by a list of the comms I'm watching, and then another string of comms that are actually RSS feeds.

RSS is a form of syndication. When you subscribe to the RSS feed of a particular journal or website, each post or update is pushed at your Feed reader - either an extra little program on your desktop or your browser (Opera, Firefox but not IE) - so instead of having to visit each website to see if it has been updated, the post, or a link to it, is sent to you directly.

LJ lets you set up feeds of websites you want to watch, so long as they provide an RSS link on the site. These feeds are updated regularly and the posts appear on your flist like any other post.

There's a list of available feeds at LJ here (http://www.livejournal.com/syn/).

And you're probably wondering what that has to do with your journal...

Each and every journal at lj has its own syndicated feed, which means that people can read your journal without actually coming to lj. They need only visit once to grab the RSS feed url and, once subscribed, your posts are all delivered to their desktop at regular intervals.

It doesn't appear that you can turn your journal feed off entirely, but you can minimise the information people can see without actually coming to lj by going to the Admin Console and inputting set synlevel title, which means they will receive nothing in the feed but the title of each post and a link to it.

NB Flocked posts aren't included in the feeds, but if you make a public post and then lock it, there is always the possibility that it has already gone out via the feed and there's no way to retroactively remove it.

[tabaqui]

Good fucking gods.
*sigh*
WTFever, you know? I guess i'll be turning that off, 'cause i don't like that, but wtf, lj? WTF.

Thanks for laying it out for me. Blah!

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

YW. LJ should really make all this shit more transparent and easier to find, but that would probably defeat the purpose. ;)

[tabaqui]

Yeah, prolly so.
*glares at them*

[saifai.livejournal.com]

Thank you, dearest. These are all lovely suggestions. I've setup one or two of them. ::mwah::

[darkhavens.livejournal.com]

I've set up a couple of others myself. *smooch*

[frk-werewolf.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for these codes!