Yes, thank you for all your help in diagnosing. The report that came into us that you helped prepare was part of what helped track it down. Thank you so much!

I share your interest in having responsible and intelligent responses to
personal (or organizational) faults. Lest the phrase "my bad" be unnecessarily
tarnished by its use as an example here of the opposite, allow me to mention
what I think to be its value.

I believe this phrase provides societal value in equipping otherwise
inarticulate communicators with a comfortable means of admitting fault. An
alternative far too often taken is simply to deny fault, and that denial
entrenches itself because reversal of it compounds the appearance of fault.
Saving face was the initial reason for the irresponsible attempt to dodge blame.

Admitting fault is difficult to do for a variety of factors, but primarily for a
desire to maintain visible status. In any time when inconstant or ignorant
parenting can promote disunity from others or a general sense of distrust, self
valuation suffers. (The relation may not be obvious.) By scrabbling for
societally-measured criteria of worth, individuals try to stock up on esteem.
Being evidently faulty seems to lose one stock, thereby losing worth.

A feeling of unworthiness exacerbates the perception of disunity which in turn
exacerbates the perception of unconcern or even malice from others. This
distance facilitates behavior like robbing you or blowing you up or tying you to
a fence in almost-freezing winter and beating you just about dead.

"My bad" helps people to do the right thing, take accountability, by easing the
process. To be honest, I'm not really sure how it works. It appears to
trivialize the fault by putting a juvenile face on it. In trade for a momentary
mischaracterization of the fault's gravity, the very responsible acceptance of
fault is quite a benefit, especially when we often find accusers (perhaps
unwittingly) portraying the fault with the opposing tendency of exaggeration.

I don't want to appear to be chastising, so I'll say that it is unclear to me
whether you meant to indicate all use of "my bad" as rubbish. However, it is
exactly for that lack of clarity that I felt it was important to demonstrate its
usefulness.

Humbly,

IE + Windows + Icky websites = legions of computer users who require severe tech support!

I'm not sure how much LJ could do. Any action against the advertiser really needs to come from the ad company, since they're the ones who have a contract with the advertiser, not LJ.

P.S. It popped up like 5 minutes ago. Has it been removed yet, because if it has, the removal didn't work.

No, it does not. The previous version did, but it was retracted. The current TOS prohibits hiding ads on your pages by creating a custom style, or suchlike, but doesn't prohibit client-side solutions. (Although the standard disclaimer applies that I m not on the Abuse team and thus cannot know completely how to interpret the TOS. But this much has been said by site employees.)

Decide for yourself. Just make sure to ad an extra badge ad above the skyscraper in your head, since they added another ad to the page since that was made. My vote goes with Dear Diary--you can see it as Sponsored+ at the_unadvocate.

Go to http://www.livejournal.com/manage/payments/, hit the button to switch to a free account, then hit the button to confirm, and then you're out. ;)

Go to http://www.livejournal.com/manage/payments/, switch out of the basic level, then click the button on the confirmation screen, and then you'll be set.

(Yes, I know the Feedback option is available. But guess what? It suddenly DOESN'T WORK.)

How is it not working? Is it currently broken, etc? I'm curious.

Guide from switching from Plus to Basic.

Totally unrelated to ads on the site; the fact that it started when ads came on the site is unrelated, since it's been a problem with the @lj.com addresses for as long as I remember. The fact that you can add @lj.com to the end of a username to get an email address is something that spammers seem to have picked up on, so now all they need to do is just randomly screen-scrape any part of the site, pick up usernames, and then they've got more people to spam.

It's unfortunate, but there's nothing much that LJ can actually do about it; it's a separate group of people generating the spam altogether. If you want, you can disable your email alias (see the end of http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=113&view=full), but there's no way to stop the spam and still get legitimate messages. (We can't easily do server-side filtering, because LJ sometimes gets put on spam blacklists for sending out several hundred thousand notifications a day, and that'd mean that people's personal mail would also get blacklisted; we find that it's better to relay the spam, unfortunately, than to *not* send something that people actually wanted, you know?)

Yep, you can buy gift certificates -- check out http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=181 for more info. :)

I agree; they're pathetic and distracting. [See below]

Oh, and make sure that you actually pay attention to complaints. We have the right to be heard.