In order to exit SUP, you first have to get into it. In order to do that, you have to use some type of services, which are either already provided by this company (such as LJ Plus services) or will be provided by SUP in the future. Infrastructure partnership between SUP and Six Apart is an inalienable part of LiveJournal service, just like hosting, lease of channels and acceptance of payments.

SUP is closely working with LiveJournal team to implement new services, which are highly demanded by LiveJournal’s Russian-language segment. We are talking about full-text search, visiting statistics, counters and ratings, removal of existing quotas and limits, modernization of LiveJournal’s most important service functions. SUP will complete the work on localization of existing services (posting via SMS, payment through Russian online payment systems) and will work with a team of LiveJournal volunteers to translate all service pages into Russian. In drafting the work plan for all of these activities, we are taking into account hundreds of wishes and suggestions from LiveJournal users, which have been received since October 17, 2006. (see question: What is the deal between Six Apart and SUP?).

We are working simultaneously on all of the aforementioned directions and there is no single start date. Russian versions of LiveJournal’s service interfaces, prepared by SUP’s editors, are being published since mid-December. In December we have also completed translation of the Terms of Service and at present time the document is being checked and approved by legal experts. In the near future we hope to provide the users in ruble zone with an opportunity for instant payment for LiveJournal services.

If you don’t need SUP’s services, you have a right not to use them. SUP will never force anyone to use its services.

There is no way to do that. That’s internal statistics of Six Apart. This tag exists to define the Cyrillic segment. SUP has no way to manage these service tags either.

It means that you will have an opportunity to use services provided by SUP. 

All of personal data continues to be kept in San Francisco, just like it was before. The only thing that loads from Moscow now are the user pictures.

Write a complaint to sup_ru community. Your complaint will be transferred to the technical department of Six Apart. You can also address Six Apart’s specialists directly at lj_maintenance community. 

No, they don’t. Each staff member of the company is entitled to his personal equipment, which may not coincide with the company’s policy. SUP does not control the blogs of its staff.

All new services will be announced at several places:

• at the page of LiveJournal news (news.livejournal.com);
• in sup_ru community;
• at www.sup.com website.

There is no way to fully protect yourself from the offers. Information about SUP’s new services will appear in LiveJournal news or in form of additional menu options at LiveJournal website. If you don’t want to use them, simply ignore them. 

You can promote your idea in two ways: right to sup_ru community or send a letter to info@sup.com e-mail address. It would be great if the letter’s “Subject” field was as informative as possible – that way it will find the right person inside the company as soon as possible.

There is no way to refuse the new interface, because it was introduced for all LiveJournal users by Six Apart. You can read more about these innovations and express your opinion in English at LJ news, which are published in lj_releases community. You can express your opinion in Russia in sup_ru community, which publishes translation of all the main LJ news (for example: community.livejournal.com/sup_ru/71465.html). At present time the new interface is still undergoing development: it will become easier and more convenient to use. 

No, this is not a service. It is statistical analysis, which is present at any other website – it measures the size of LiveJournal audience and its activities. It does not collect any private data about users’ blogs. It cannot be refused. 

According to the agreement between Six Apart and SUP, the latter receives a right to provide a part of LiveJournal users with various services as well as to manage existing advertising space and create new advertising positions. The services in question include search, statistics, navigation, management of journal layouts, bookmarking, mail, mobile phone integration, photo and video hosting, payment systems, etc. In addition to this SUP is licensed to use trademarks owned by Six Apart in the territories of former Soviet republics. At the same time the property rights to the project, service and LiveJournal trademark remain in the ownership of Six Apart. Six Apart will continue to fully control compliance of SUP with all existing agreements with LJ users (such as Terms of Service and Privacy Policy).

The agreement with Six Apart concerns Cyrillic journals worldwide and journals posted from IP addresses in the ex-USSR.

No, they won’t. To guarantee connectivity between all journals in LiveJournal system the common database with all users’ content will be stored at the servers owned by Six Apart and physically located in California (USA). To accelerate access to LiveJournal pages for users from Russia and other countries of the Eastern hemisphere SUP and Six Apart are working to create a platform that will combine centralized database and a system of so called “mirrors” that will allow providing users with static pages and graphics from Internet servers, which are the closest to the users at any given point.

Cyrillic is one of two Slavonic alphabets, which forms the basis for the Russian alphabet, the alphabets of Southern and Eastern Slavs as well as for the alphabets of several states of the former Soviet Union. Six Apart and SUP chose Cyrillic alphabet as one of criteria for the licensing agreement as opposed to the Latin alphabet, which forms the foundation for English and many other Western European languages. 

No, they won’t. Six Apart is bound by an agreement with users, stating that the Terms of Service, signed by each user at the moment of journal’s creation, are subject to the legislation of the state of California. Privacy Policy is regulated by the same laws. It should be noted, however, that the U.S. legislation is only capable of protecting the journals and comments themselves, but not the authors of these journals who live outside of the U.S. If, for example, the prosecutor’s office of Altai region decides to prosecute some user from Barnaul based on posts that he wrote in LJ or some other blog or even in an e-mail, the server’s exterritoriality may not prevent the prosecutors from doing this. This situation should be well understood by bloggers in all jurisdictions, where freedom of speech norms differ from those provisions found in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

No, nothing of this sort will happen. We believe that it is up to the user whether or nor to place advertising in his personal journal. 

We bought LJ Plus in order to develop a powerful and flexible service tool for bloggers. It will include counters, photo and video hosting, catalogs, ratings, RSS engines and much more. LiveJournal is so popular in Russia that numerous services have been developed by LJ enthusiasts. At the moment these tools are external, accessing the LJ servers from the outside. Thanks to our agreement with Six Apart the most popular of these services will be integrated in LiveJournal and will work from the inside. In particular, this will be the case with server statistics.

The great thing about any Internet service is that it is only used by people who need it. This is equally true for internal services that are incorporated in LiveJournal (such as memories function or the services of Abuse Team) and for external services such as LJ Plus or ZmeYandex search. It is impossible to force anyone to use a service one doesn’t need. But we can offer Russian users some services they’ve been asking for in the last several years.

No, we won’t. All law enforcement agencies will have to go to California will any requests to disclose non-public user information, which is kept in LiveJournal databases. The only valid reason for such a request to be served is a court ruling in effect. 

Six Apart has entrusted SUP with a task of creating an analog of LiveJournal’s existing Abuse Team. The mission of the new team would be to accelerate the time required to process complaints from the Russian-speaking users, and to make sure that decisions on such complaints are reasonable. SUP’s intention is to fully preserve the existing rules, procedures and criteria of conflict resolution. At the moment we are considering several methods of solving this task. We will either have two structures that will work separately, or they will work in parallel, giving the user a choice of which team will rule on his complain. Another method could be a creation of a system in which one of the parallel Abuse Teams would serve as an appeals’ court. In any case, this decision demands serious consideration that will have to take many factors into account. 

Six Apart and SUP are very serious about preserving the confidential information of their users. Trading in passwords or transfer of private data to third parties is a violation of Privacy Policy and therefore cannot be a part of our plans. As for the threat of hacking user database from outside, 7.5 years’ experience shows that LJ is well protected from such attacks. Agreement between Six Apart and SUP does not include any technical decisions that could compromise LiveJournal’s existing security system.

We believe that existing ban on earning money by placing ads in LJ blogs leads to a situation in which interesting blogs, attractive for advertisers, might migrate to standalone platforms outside of LJ. There haven’t been too many instances of this so far, but we believe that as the popularity of blogging continues to rise, the number of candidates for standalone hosting among popular bloggers will grow quite fast. We do have Six Apart’s consent to lift this ban [in Cyrillic sector]. We will help all of interested Russian users to make sure that their blogging brings them not only fame and pleasure, but also commercial profits. We will definitely tell more about our plans and work in this direction in the future. It is understandable that commercial potential is not the same for all bloggers and that not all of the users would want to place advertising in their journals. The general rule is simple: everyone will decide for him/herself.

Yes, it will. Existing LiveJournal service has more such restrictions to address. As Brad Fitzpatrick explains, many of them are connected with financial difficulties that the project was experiencing seven years ago. The reason why Brad never thought of removing these restrictions when the financial situation got better, is quite simple: the average age of American LiveJournal users is 18 and the average number of their LJ friends is between 10 and 20 people. American LJ users simply have no idea that there exists a quota of 750 friends, 2,000 participants shown in poll results, or a limit of 5,000 comments to one post. The only people who worry about such problems are users of LiveJournal’s Russian-speaking segment. Brad says that it will be quite easy to remove these restrictions.

Yes, we do and we are already working on this.

Yes, it most definitely will.

It is good to see that from the moment of its launch our company has received such an attention from bloggers and mass media. We will try to take into account all of the opinions that will help us to improve LiveJournal and make it better. We are grateful to everyone who expressed their opinion, suggested improvements and congratulated us with successful launch of this project. 

We have no desire to function as a court, a censor’s office or a vice squad. We plan to provide quality services to each blogger and member of LJ community that needs those services. All of the user conduct obligations are described in full detail in the user agreement and during the registration you make your own decision whether to comply with these provisions.

At the press conference, which took place on October 18, we announced the laying of the first stone in the foundation of partnership between Six Apart and our company. Specific steps and introduction of new services will be announced when they are technically ready and will be discussed with users interactively. We have created sup_com community, where you can speak up on all issues connected with LJ functionality and other questions tied to the company’s work. 

The leader of SUP is Andrew Paulson, an American citizen who has been living and working in Russia since 1993.  He is the founder of Afisha Publishing House (Afisha Magazine, www.afisha.ru, Bolshoi Gorod, www.bg.ru, MIR, www.mir.afisha.ru).  SUP was established by Andrew together with well-known financier Alexander Mamut and other investors in the summer of 2006. Since then, Andrew has assembled a team including professionals from the spheres of Internet, finances, marketing, computer technologies, etc., to develop a range of projects which SUP will be announcing on a regular basis.

Users are.