LiveJournal.com Guiding Principles head<= <=head body<=

Work with the community, for the community

We will strive to keep you informed of changes to the best of our abilities without being intrusive, and to run our business based on feedback from the LiveJournal community, with the LiveJournal community's best interests in mind.

Honor the status of every account

We fully intend to honor the status of our users' accounts, as follows: Permanent accounts will be honored for the life of the service. Paid accounts will remain as paid accounts until they expire, unless they are renewed in advance. Early adopters will be granted access to the paid features that were freely available in the early history of the site. (Account status valid with the exception of account termination by means of Terms of Service violation.)

Maintain reliable uptime

We try to keep things running smoothly for everyone, especially since we use the system, too. Unfortunately, server hangups do occur, but we will plan ahead to try to avoid them.

Avoid banner advertisements

As it's one of our larger pet peeves, we have avoided putting banner advertisements on the site. Although our Terms of Service permits us to change our policy in the future, we've found throughout the past few years that our "paid accounts" business model has, so far, made banners ads unnecessary.

Avoid spam

We strongly believe that spam has no place on the internet, and we endeavor not to send you e-mail without your implied or explicit consent. When you sign up for the Service, we understand that to mean you want to communicate with us and hear from us about our products and services. If we do send you a message or contact you, we give you an option to opt-out so that we won't send you similar messages in the future. We are not in the business of selling lists of users' e-mail addresses or personal information, though we may share users' information under certain special circumstances, such as with an entity that owns or is owned by LiveJournal, with our service providers and vendors in connection with the operation of the service and our business, where we think it is appropriate or required by law or to protect our legal rights, or if the business is being sold or reorganized. (For more information on these special circumstances, click here.)

Support the Free Software movement

We're big supporters of Open Source software - we have used it and contributed to it extensively. As part of our contribution to the Open Source community, we have made available to the public a large amount of source code for software that we've used to run the LiveJournal service, and that contributed source code will remain free and open. We plan to continue to give back to the community by contributing certain bug fixes, testing, documentation and new code. In addition, we continue to encourage people to innovate using the open source code we have contributed.

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