[4] American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.

Similarly, the website is translated into other languages by volunteers, although this effort is running down due to a perceived lack of involvement from the LiveJournal administration.

In February and March 2003, there was an effort, nicknamed the Bazaar, to boost volunteer performance by offering money in return for "wanted" enhancements or improvements.

[25] The Bazaar was intended to follow a regular monthly pay-out scheme, but it ended up paying out only once, after which it was neglected by the management, and shut down one year later.

Nowadays, voluntary contributions to the software are considered for inclusion less and less as the company has acquired more and more paid employees who focus on the organization's commercial interests.

During the early years of the site, Frank was treated like an actual living being by much of the LiveJournal userbase, and his brief "biography" as well as his "journal" reflect this.

[35] These pieces are often tied to weekly virtual gift promotions, where commenters that meet a certain criterion will receive a free v-gift sent by Frank.

Basic and plus accounts do not have an official web-based method, and normally must manually change such settings one by one; some third party clients, such as Livejournal Visibility Changer,[38] provide this functionality for non-paid users.

In April 2010, the Oh No They Didn't community was moved to its own database cluster to improve site performance for all users, due to its size and the amount of traffic it was receiving.

[55] The deal was brokered with Fitzpatrick's assistance, but expatriated Russians have expressed concerns, citing links between the company and state security.

The invite code system serendipitously reduced abuse on the site by deterring people from creating multiple throw-away accounts.

[67] The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as spamming, copyright violation, and harassment.

A small controversy arose in November 2004 when a policy document used by the Abuse Prevention Team was leaked to a group of its critics before it was due to be released.

[70] The incident attracted the attention of breast feeding advocacy groups such as Pro-Mom[71] who publicized the issue to gain larger media awareness.

The Social Contract went on to say, "It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages.

[76] In March 2008, LiveJournal discontinued the ability for new users to select the "basic" level of journal, which allowed for a minimal set of features with no advertising at no cost.

[78] Advertisement in LiveJournal is based on the user's preferable categories, gender, age, location, interests, or a small portion of public page contents.

Users can choose the preferences in their settings[79] among five or more categories of advertising, including Art & Humanities, Cars & Wheels, Books & Reading, Charities, Home & Hobbies, Housing, Internet & Media etc.

[80] As part of changes made in April 2017, Livejournal eliminated the ability of paid contributors to prevent ads being shown to their readers.

[82] In a subsequent posting to the LiveJournal news community,[87] he apologized, discussed some of the circumstances behind the suspensions, and indicated that the suspended journals would be reviewed and potentially brought back online.

[82] On May 31, 2007, Berkowitz released a statement to the LiveJournal news community[88] announcing that Six Apart was currently in the process of unsuspending about half of suspended journals.

[90] As previously announced, SUP Media, the latest owners of LiveJournal, decided to create an advisory board to help it make decisions.

The first members were distinguished people in the areas of law and technology, danah boyd, Esther Dyson, Lawrence Lessig, and the original LiveJournal founder, Brad Fitzpatrick.

[91] The English speaking election was marred with accusations of ballot stuffing, conflicts of interest, and multiple death threats.

Of the attacks, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev commented in April 2011 that "what has occurred should be examined by LiveJournal's administration and law enforcement agencies.

In 2007, Russian blogger Savva Terentyev was accused of fomenting social hatred to the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and sentenced to one year probation due to his comment in the blog of a local journalist.

The new terms prohibit users from posting "advertising and/or political solicitation materials" or performing any actions "contradictory to the laws of the Russian Federation".

149, which dictates that blogs with more than 3,000 daily visitors are classified as media outlets and may not be published anonymously, are responsible for the dissemination of unverified information, and are restricted from posting pornography, obscene language, or "extremist materials".

The new terms prompted wide concern from users who believed that their content would now be targeted under Russian censorship policies, including the country's "gay propaganda" law.

[59][110] This prompted an "exodus" to alternate platforms of groups who either support LGBT rights or wished to continue discussing those topics.