drwex | LJ comment/url blocking

In their rush to fight spam LJ has created a new filter - turned on in all journals and communities - that screens comments made with 'suspicious links'. Here "suspicious" is any link not on LJ's hidden whitelist, so pretty much the majority of the internet. There is no noted way to add to the whitelist and it doesn't even appear that the whitelist is visible to non-admins. You can't see screened comments, even if you're a community administrator.

As someone who links to random music blogs all the time this is a non-starter for me. Other people are chapped about that fact that LJ didn't inform us they were doing this until a week after it was done, nor do most people seem to know that it is automatically turned on.

To turn it off you must go to your Settings, click on the Privacy tab and, halfway down where it says Spam Protection, uncheck the box next to "Comments containing a link to a non-whitelisted domain will be marked as spam and moved to a special section."

This applies to both personal journal and communities and the option has to be manually changed in each one.

(h/t to