I deleted all my livejournal entries, though not the account.

[dr4b]

If you look at my LJ now, this is the only entry you should and will see. I'm not going to be crossposting from Dreamwidth anymore. The Russian TOS thing was the last straw.

I deleted all of the entries, but didn't delete the account yet -- I want to be able to still read friends and communities on LJ (to see where the few remaining folks end up), but I just don't trust my own stuff being there anymore. Plus I had some pictures in LJ entries that are only referenced on DW -- it didn't import them over, so I need to take care of that at some point.

If you are here because you were looking for one of my old MIT Mystery Hunt summaries or other puzzle hunts or whatever, you can still find all of those over on my Dreamwidth journal, under the puzzle hunt tag.

If you are curious about how I deleted my journal entries without deleting the journal, I wrote the following Perl script, which will delete the most recent 50 entries from your journal:

use LJ::Simple;

# Log into the server
my $lj = new LJ::Simple ({
          user    =>      "putyourusernamehere",
          pass    =>      "putyourpasswordhere",
          site    =>      undef,
			 });
 
 (defined $lj)
    || die "$0: Failed to log into LiveJournal: $LJ::Simple::error\n";
  
my %Entries;   # hash to hold retrieved entries

$lj->GetEntries(\%Entries,undef,lastn,(50,undef));

foreach $entry (values %Entries) {
    my $entry_id = $entry->{"__itemid"};
    print "Deleting entry $entry_id\n";
    $lj->DeleteEntry($entry_id) || die "$0: Failed to delete journal entry\n";
}

Only catch is that LJ doesn't like it when you try to "post" over 500 times in an hour, so it kept throttling me and it took me 10 hours to delete all 4800 entries in my journal. Oops. Also the GetEntries function maxes out at fetching 50. I guess I could have just written a loop around this to run it 10 times but I was even more lazy.

It was pretty funny to watch as I kept deleting 500ish entries and my journal's most recent kept getting sent back a few years. Fortunately it's all mirrored on DW so I don't have to figure out a better solution for what to do with it all yet.

So, yeah. What are you all doing with your LJ accounts? Those of you who still use these platforms, I mean?

Comments

[euthanasepam]

Is it possible to write a similar Perl script for downloading all user’s pictures (not userpics but so-called Photostream) from LJ?

[dr4b]

Not sure. The API for LJ::Simple mentions user pictures but I think that just means icons: http://search.cpan.org/~simes/LJ-Simple-0.15/Simple.pm

[euthanasepam]

Exactly so: icons (userpics) but not the photos or other larger pictures.

I’ve found some technique, though it doesn’t work for me, too: http://andlauer.de/biologie/apps/livejournal.html

Thanks for reply.

[cellio]

I'm done crossposting; that's for sure.

I have some posts that have probably been externally linked, so I need to figure out which they are and my current plan is to edit them to replace the content with links to DW. Which I'll probably route through my domain because, really, I should learn a lesson about publishing content on domains I don't own. (I haven't quite figured out the domain wiring, really.)

I'll probably delete most of the other entries. I'll probably do it in batches by tags. I haven't really figured this out yet, and Pesach is in a few days so this isn't the best time for me to start a Project. Sigh.

[dr4b]

The LJ::Simple module is actually really easy to figure out if you're familiar with Perl, if that helps :) You can delete based on tags and whatnot with it, if that helps.

[eustacio]

Just imported everything over here. Going to go nuke out all my old LJ entries and put up a generic "Moved to Dreamwidth, maybe I'll post more now," post.

Should probably update my icons at some point.

[tiedyedave]

I might delete my account entirely since I haven't used LJ in years.

I wonder if it's possible to modify the old entries in such a way as to remove all useful information but also reduce the probability that the original version will be logged or backed up. Just deleting/purging the account probably doesn't actually remove it from the database, which is now fully accessible to the Kremlin because police state. I'm not at all worried for my own sake and I don't plan to visit Russia any time soon, and I don't think any of my friends are at risk either, but it still bothers me a little.