SUP

SUP, or SUP Fabrik, is a Russian company that signed a deal with Six Apart concerning the 'Russian' part of LiveJournal. This upset many Russians.

SUP's deal with Six Apart
"According to the agreement between Six Apart and SUP, 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)."

Who are SUP-eligible users?
SUP-eligible users are users who meet at least one of the following criteria:


 * they use Cyrillic (they post in Cyrillic, their browser language is set to a language from an ex-USSR country, they are browsing the LiveJournal site using a language from an ex-USSR country).
 * they post from a country from the ex-USSR (determined by their IP address or by the location they've given).

SUP Services
SUP handles the serving of static files such userpics, graphics, and style sheets used in LiveJournal design templates.

SUP handles the serving and, in some cases, the placement of ads.

SUP users have extra services such as increased account quotas, private and public counters, free voice post phone numbers in Russia and CIS countries, additional Virtual Gifts, the possibility to pay with Yandex Money, their own gift shop, local language customer support, the possibility for SUP Plus users to use the Mass Security tool. Some of these services are provided by LJPlus, a third party website that SUP bought.

SUP has also adapted two of LiveJournal site schemes. In Horizon and Dystopia, a menu with links to the external website Livejournal.ru has been added. In Horizon, this menu replaces the link called 'Home'.

Opting out of SUP
Users who wanted to stop being considered as SUP-eligible users used to have to go to Support and ask to be removed from SUP. Now they can opt out by going to My Account. However, they "may continue to see static files, such as images and ads, served from a Russian-based IP if the networking would be more efficient for [their] particular location."

Communities

 * sup_ru -- SUP's community. A Plus community.
 * no_sup -- An anti-SUP community.

Links

 * Announcement in lj_biz
 * Announcement in news
 * Russia: Blog Wars
 * Russia: The Second Blog War
 * Wired: Russia Growls at LiveJournal Deal
 * Pictures of the party
 * Censor This! -- An article highlighting some of the differences between the Russian LJ community and US LJ community.
 * SUP's FAQ
 * SUP's FAQ in English
 * Russians do in blogs what few can in media
 * Brad's post for SUP questions
 * SUP Hook at the ljcom repository