Patch a potential privacy risk by deleting your ancient LiveJournal

The rise and fall of LiveJournal: How to back up your old logs and delete your account

Remember LiveJournal? If you were a teenager in the 2000s, you probably left a lot of fanfiction and/or melancholy texts out there. However, since then, the development trajectory of LiveJournal has become extremely tortuous.

LiveJournal lost its influence in the English-speaking world in the late 2000s, but remained popular in the Russian-speaking world. By the early 2010s, half of the traffic of LiveJournal came from Russia, where it became an important tool for the Russian opposition—anti-corruption activist and former opposition leader Alexei Navalny was in LiveJournal before becoming a political prisoner. Have a very popular blog on it. Eventually, LiveJournal was acquired by a Russian company that had rumored connections to Russian security agencies. By 2018, all servers were migrated to Russia and the terms of service were updated to comply with Russian law. This means you can basically not use the service to criticize the Russian government or discuss LGBTQ related issues, etc.

As I said: Things get weird. In this case, it is understandable if you don't want your teenage effort to stay on that site. That's why at the request of one of my friends, I started to look at ways to back up LiveJournal logs. This is not simple. not at all. LiveJournal provides an official export tool, but it can only export content for one month at a time, which is basically useless. I tried to grab old entries using Wget, but this failed in a funny way: LiveJournal blocked my IP address. After a lot of research, I found that using WordPress is the best way to back up old LiveJournal logs. Of course, if you are not interested in saving anything and just want to delete your LiveJournal account, you can jump right to the section below.

Set up WordPress Blog

WordPress is the most popular blogging tool on the contemporary web. WordPress comes in two versions: WordPress.com, where you can sign up and use this blog service; WordPress.org, which is an open source system that you can use with any web hosting service. (If interested, I have written a detailed analysis of these two versions for a previous employer.)

You can use any version of WordPress to back up your LiveJournal, and if you change your mind, you can easily migrate between the two. If you don't want to pay for web hosting, I recommend you start with WordPress.com. Just sign up for an account, select a blog name, and you're ready to go.

You may also need to set your WordPress blog to private so that no one can read your ancient LiveJournal logs before you decide what to do with them. To do this, please go to your website dashboard, click Settings, and then click General to find the Privacy section. There, click the button next to "Privacy" to make sure that only you (and anyone who provides your login information) can see what's there.

Migrate your LiveJournal log

1. After setting up WordPress, hover over the tool in the sidebar, and then click to import .

2. You will see several options, none of which is LiveJournal. Click at the bottom to select from the full list.

3. Now you will see the LiveJournal option; click to run the import program .

4. The system will ask you to enter your LiveJournal username and password. You can also choose to set a password for any private logs on LiveJournal - they will all be protected with the same password.

5. Click to connect to LiveJournal and import and the process will begin. It takes a while and it may seem like nothing happened. Please be patient and keep the tab open, but don't panic if you accidentally close it: you can restart the importer and it will continue from where it broke. Eventually you will receive a prompt to complete. You have now backed up your LiveJournal logs and comments – please check if everything is in.

If you want to delete your LiveJournal account

Once you confirm that your logs are all on WordPress, you may want to completely delete your LiveJournal, which you can do from your Account Status page. Simply select the two check boxes for Delete Comments and Entries and click the

Delete My Account and Logs button. Please note that you cannot undo this operation.

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