Header design contest, vgift contest

Thanks, again, for your fantastic header entries! After much sweat and tears, the LiveJournal staff selected 15 finalists for your voting pleasure. Please take a moment and let us know which design you'd like to see on the top of LiveJournal in December! FYI: All entries that came in after the deadline will be automatically entered into the next contest. We thank you all for making LiveJournal your canvas!

Today we'd like to talk to you about how to manage your journal and community settings so spammers don't come around. You can manage your privacy settings by clicking Account in the site header and selecting the Privacy tab. You'll see several options covering who can post comments to your journal: Everyone, all registered users, your friends, or nobody. In addition, you can choose whether you want to screen comments from everyone, anonymous users, non-friends, or non-friends with links. We highly recommend that you screen comments from non-friends with links. Lastly, you can set all new entries to everyone, just friends, or private to ensure there are no unwelcome surprises.

Once you've updated your personal journal settings, if you're a community maintainer, you can stay on that page, select your community's name from the drop-down menu at the top, and then click switch and do the same for the community comment settings. You can access membership and posting settings for your community by clicking on the Communities Manage tab in the nav bar and selecting the Settings link beside the name of the community. You can update your adult content warnings, choose whether your community offers open membership, join requests, or closed membership (by invitation only). In addition, you can decide who can post to your community: Anyone, members-only, or select members. We strongly recommend that you choose either of the last two moderation options (see image).



A final reminder: Whenever you encounter a spam entry in the moderation queue, please be sure to click Reject and mark as spam. You can then use the username hover menu and ban the user everywhere to protect yourself from further unwanted entries from that user. For more information, please see this FAQ. We'll be back next week with another fun tip!

Congrats to mamontovich, who won our 45th lj_photophile poll! Click here to help choose the next photo of the week. We also invite you to vote on this week's themed poll on Crossings! FYI: We pick entries for the polls based on a combination of comments, +1 ratings, and staff input. Winners of both polls receive 500 LJ tokens. We thank you for sharing your talent with the global LiveJournal community.