Dear Friends,

The fantasy group I moderate on myspace called Luthiel’s Fantasy Group Luthiel’s Fantasy Group has been hacked. For those of you who love this group or who love fantasy in general, I’m asking you to lend your sword to my cause. (more…)

A small, but significant part of my story is my involvement with MySpace. This circumstance is not only due to the fact that I’ve spent two and a half years building what is, likely, the largest and most well recognized author profile on the site, but also due to the notoriety or, depending on your circle, infamy myspace commands.

For one, the site has vast public appeal. It provides what is essentially a free website to all comers with the capability to email, blog, post pictures and music. It also opens the gateway to a vast network of potential friends many of them bands and artists of varying renown.

As of this writing, there is nothing short of 5.5 million bands on myspace alone. The site boasts 163 million users and was ranked the most trafficked site on the web in November 2006. All in all, it is an impressive structure and, in many ways, exemplifies the freedoms and foibles through which the larger web has thrived and struggled.

In my assessment, which may very well be flawed, the website’s success rests on two pillars. (more…)

After a little digging, it seems to me that myspace is working hard to change some if its more controversial policies. For one, the proprietary rights to content clause has changed to acknowledge what persons post or share on the site is their intellectual property and that myspace retains the right to distribute the content electronically through myspace media. I think this is much more considerate to artists so Kudos to myspace! (more…)

Crazy happenings at myspace! In short, last night my email and comments were blocked. Worse, any time I send comments my profile was coming up under a huge nasty red X that said ‘this profile has been deleted.’

The Red X of Death

As I’ve spent two years building up my myspace and have established what is, likely, the most popular author profile there (www.myspace.com/luthielssong if you haven’t been there yet!), this made me very anxious.

But early this afternoon, my friend Matthew found the problem might be related to another MySpace problem: the one where it strips away HTML comments and IE conditional comments. When he fixed this comment problem, the Red X of Death (as Matt has officially christened it; trademarked-patented- restricted-all rights reserved) seemed to magically go away. What we’ll write about now is the fix for this Comment Curse.

If you have a custom designed profile, you may want to take notes as this may happen to you as well.

Note: The Red X of Death reappeared shortly after this blog post was written. The Comment Curse does not seem to be related to it after all (but is still a serious problem all by itself). It seems to be because of an unpublished “posting limit” imposed by MySpace, which we’ll talk about in a later entry. If anyone knows otherwise, please post a comment.

I’m going to invite Matt as a guest to the blog so he can explain some of the details for you. As this blog will be updated, you may want to check back periodically. Here are his comments about the issue:

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