Archiving Old LJ Comms

[primeideal]

Originally posted by tenlittlebullets here:
 

If you modded LiveJournal communities back in the day, please consider archiving them to Dreamwidth NOW. So much 2000s internet history lives there, and if LJ falls off the internet (as it very well might, depending on how things go in Russia in the near future), links will break and vast amounts of it will be lost. Wayback Machine only captures public posts; a Dreamwidth import can pull in locked posts and comments, and allow people to view them by joining the comm.

If you don't want to go to the hassle yourself, I will happily do it for you - just DM tenlittlebullets on DW and temporarily add 10littlebullets on LJ as a community mod. I can do it under this account, a catchall archivist account, or a specific one created just for the comm. If you want the Dreamwidth version to be co-maintained or transferred to your DW account, I can also do that.

If Dreamwidth's importer locks up, as it might if there's an archiving stampede, this Tumblr post (+reblogged mirror just in case) has instructions for exporting comments in XML format. LJ still has a built-in page that lets you do the same for posts. Dreamwidth won't let you import from these XML files, but they're still human-readable and can probably be imported to Wordpress if you want to host an archive later.

(Pre-emptive permission: Feel free to link, copy, repost, and spread this post wherever you want. Also feel free to translate it into any language you want. I would be both gratified and extremely relieved if any Russian speakers want to spread it around to people who were active on ЖЖ back in the day and are in a position to safely back up their old content; the offer to help with importing is still open, even if we have to communicate through Google Translate!)

 

 

Comments

[waterfall8484]

Thank you so much for the reminder! I finally got my act together and imported the community I modded way back when. Fingers crossed it works!

[yourlibrarian]

As far as I know imports from LJ to DW haven't been working for over a month? I know I tried several times back in early February and others were as well, and it was failing for the same reason that crossposting stopped working.

[highlander_ii]

imports do occasionally work - it's just very hit-or-miss on if/when it will. you may have to retry a number of times before it fully completes.

big note: make sure you have the LiveJournal password correct before you start as this seems to be one of the big reasons LJ keeps blocking DW IP addresses.

[yourlibrarian]

Thanks! I was able to successfully do my final LJ import (I stopped crossposting a while back). However whereas previous imports added comments into one's existing DW post, in this last import it duplicated all posts and essentially created an LJ and DW version.

What's more, for some odd reason, you can't page across them. So previously if I had two duplicate posts, I could use the "next post" button to go to the next one and then on to further posts. Not now. For some reason the LJ posts only forward to the next LJ post.

Fortunately for me, all my LJ posts had an embedded link to hop across to the DW version. So if I'm only looking back at one post I can find the paired post that way. But since I am currently trawling through all my old posts chronologically my workaround is to page through my posts through the Archive function.

Mind you, if someone has not used their DW account for posts previously this won't matter because there's nothing to duplicate.

[highlander_ii]

yeah - no idea why it duplicates... i would lay bets on something LJ did that jacked up how our importer works to pick up stuff from over there.

there is an option to remove all imported entries and do it all again - but given the state of 'importer may or may not work at any given time b/c LJ shenanigans' - welp - may be best to leave as is.

[yourlibrarian]

My thoughts exactly! I'm already not certain that I didn't lose comments in the attempt.

[xmarksthespotwhereistand]

Reading this post, it felt like witnessing one of the not all heroes wear capes moments.
Hope much of Livejournal can be saved this way.

[alias_sqbr]

Thanks for the reminder! *starts import*

[pumpkinlumpin]

Thank you for this heads up! It gave me the initiative to reach out to folks and back up at least one old fandom haunt. Hopefully word gets around and other communities can be preserved.