Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Hello, Dreamwidth! Another week, another Monday Update, coming to you live from my living room, where my girlfriend is watching Due South episodes and I'm eyeing the Christmas knitting and wondering if I'll finish in time. (This happens every year.)

Behind the cut: development update, the beauty of open source, a welcome to a new big community, the result of the styles poll, updates from a few of our volunteer teams, and a partridge in a pear tree.

1. Development

We've been mostly working on larger projects this week, but we still resolved 12 bugs, including bugfixes and two new themes. Check the weekly code tour for a summary. We've also applied a patch from LJ that will include the comment count on site-schemed comment pages, and changed our syndication handler so that the <dc:creator> field will display properly, meaning that any multi-author blog that uses that field to attribute authors will carry over to Dreamwidth.

2. The Beauty of Open Source

You'll notice in our last item that we mention a patch from LJ -- we've been quietly pulling in bugfixes and some feature development from LJ all along, which is the beauty of Open Source. We're happy to report that LJ has also been taking up patches we've written for bugfixes that are particularly annoying; this week they specifically gave us a shout-out in their news post for a fix they adopted.

And speaking of Open Source, this week, we extend our congratulations to the Organization for Transformative Works, whose Open Source project Archive Of Our Own went into open beta this week. They've been working on it for a long time, and we know how awesome it is to watch people starting to use your stuff. We're often mentioned in the same sentence because to the best of anyone's knowledge, we're both the only two majority-female Open Source projects out there and the only two that concentrate on teaching and coaching new developers, and we're thrilled to see the OTW moving into Open Beta and watching more people use the tools they've built. Congrats, folks.

3. Community Promo

This week, we're giving a big welcome to the members of scans_daily, a comic book discussion and review community that's moved to Dreamwidth. If you're a fan of comics, check them out. Welcome to Dreamwidth, folks!

Another good community to check out this week is intro_to_cs, a group that's working together through MIT 6.00: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, part of MIT's OpenCourseWare project. If you're interested in teaching yourself the concepts of computer science at your own pace, but with a group of people who are also working on the same exercises, take a gander.

4. News from Support

Support would like to let you know that if your paid time has lapsed and you've renewed it, but your inactive icons haven't been re-activated, you can fix it yourself by loading your Upload Icons page. You don't need to make any changes or even save the page, just load it.

As always, if you're having a problem that you can't figure out, you can bring it to Support, where friendly and knowledgeable people are standing by. Meanwhile, if you'd like to get started volunteering in support, you can join the dw_support_training community.

5. News from the Biz Side

We've had a few people point out to us this week that it's not possible to renew a Premium Paid Account as a Paid Account. This is actually by design; given the way the payment system works, and the way the conversion from one type of paid time to another is handled, someone could get an un-paid-for extension of time by buying a Premium Paid account, then immediately buying a paid account on top of it, due to the conversion factors from one type of paid time to another. We hadn't thought of the scenario where someone would be nearly out of their paid time and want to renew at a lower level, though, so the system blocks all paid time purchase for a premium paid account no matter how much time is left.

We're going to be changing it so that you can buy paid time for a premium paid account if the premium paid time is about to expire, only keeping the block for recent purchases, but in the meantime: if you've got a Premium Paid account and you'd like to renew it, but downgrade to a Paid Account instead of remaining as Premium Paid, the only way to do it is to allow your paid time to fully expire, then purchase the paid time once your account has reverted to Free. We're sorry for the annoyance of the workaround, and we'll have it fixed soon.

6. News from the Antispam Team

The antispam team would like me to remind you that comments you delete and mark as spam don't go to the Terms of Service team. If you need to report something to our Terms of Service team, you can do so by going to the submit form and picking "Terms of Service". Anonymous trolling, unwanted imported OpenID comments, and plain old obnoxious comments shouldn't be reported as spam; anything that isn't genuinely spam will be closed by the team and won't be acted upon.

This week the antispam team handled 436 reports and 32 of them (7%) were validly spam, while the rest of them weren't. Having the team's time taken up with handling things that aren't really spam can prevent them from being able to handle the things that are, which is to the entire site's detriment. Please be good neighbors and only report things that are actually spam.

7. New Default Layout

Last week's news poll is closed, and the new winner of the title of our default layout for new accounts is ...

*drumroll*

...Skittlish Dreams: Blue by kaigou!

All new accounts created on Dreamwidth from here on out (starting this afternoon when mark made the config change) will use this layout as the default. (It doesn't affect any already-created account, just new ones.) As always, you can change your layout by visiting the Select Style page.

We'll run another poll in three or six months (depending on how many layouts we add in the meantime) to see if y'all feel like changing it.

*

I know I'm probably forgetting something, but since I've been sitting here for twenty minutes racking my brain about what it might possibly be, I'm going to give up and say that this brings us to the close of this week's update. As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion; if you just want to come and hang out with us, join us in irc at irc.dwscoalition.org, channel #dw. (Warning: studies have shown that #dw causes you to be unable to think up funny or clever warnings.)

We'll see you next week for our next update.