Monday, Monday! And this time, I actually manage to get the update written and posted on Monday. Huzzah! We have a few things to discuss today, of various levels of importance, so let's dive right in.

1. Credit Card Payments (Again)

In a repeat of last month's situation, we have once again come under attack by the same group of people attempting to extort us out of business. We've been back and forth in discussion with Google Checkout, our current payment processor, but they've decided to terminate our business relationship unless we alter our Terms of Service to prohibit all adult content.

This means that we are once again temporarily unable to accept credit cards to buy paid time for your Dreamwidth account, since prohibiting all adult content on the site goes against our Guiding Principles of free expression. We're really sorry about the problem, believe me, but we think it's important to stick to our promises to you. More than important, really: it's a requirement. We're not going to go back on our promises simply because Google and PayPal are unwilling to work with us.

We are in discussion with several alternate payment processors who share our commitment to free speech, and we will have another -- hopefully more permanent -- solution implemented as quickly as we can. In the meantime, the offer we extended the last time this happened still applies: if your paid account is about to expire, email us at accounts@dreamwidth.org and we'll extend your paid time for you.

On behalf of both Denise and myself, please accept our apologies. I know that this inconveniences more than a few of you; we will have this resolved just as soon as we are able and we will keep you informed in the weekly updates.

2. Spam Volume Up

The amount of spam comments being posted has gone up in the past week. We've noticed, and our spam whomping team has been on top of that. In particular, thanks to beatrice_otter for all of her work on taking care of the spam reports that everybody's been making.

Please remember, if you get any comments to your entries that are spammy in nature, to check the 'mark this comment as spam' when you delete it. That will really help us by informing our spam team that you were spammed. It also gives us access to the IP address of the poster, which we can use to look for patterns to ban the spammers.

3. Development Update

This week's code tour is brought to you by yvi who took time out of her busy schedule to report on all of the bugs (23!) that have been resolved lately:

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/38178.html

One of the big changes: grimsniffer updated the current draft saving functionality so that it saves all of the metadata in addition to just the subject and body. This functionality will be used when we do the big update to draft posts, so thank you!

Work continued on the cross-site reading list, account renames, styles, and other suggestions, features, and bugs. To all of the people who help to make Dreamwidth go: thank you! I appreciate every one of you.

4. One Year Meetups

It's still two months away, but we're starting to think about meetups and parties and things for Dreamwidth's one year anniversary (of Open Beta). tajasel is kicking the ball off in uk:

http://uk.dreamwidth.org/3846.html

We'll be posting more in our weekly updates as the time gets closer, but Denise and I are planning on having some sort of official get together. We haven't decided on which coast, where, when, or any of the details, but stay tuned.

Speaking of, we're looking to create some Dreamwidth schwag. Stickers, shirts, mugs, things like that. We'll announce in a week or two some sort of contest where people can submit designs and we'll get the community involved to vote on what they think best represents the site. There will be prizes, so stay tuned.

5. And I Saved the Best for Last!

In this particular case, I saved the absolute best part of this weekly update for last, because it's just so incredibly exciting for us. Seriously. We've actually been contemplating this decision for some time now (months), but we finally decided to go for it. Things look good for us financially and we feel that this decision will benefit the site in so many ways that we can't even predict.

I suppose I should get to the point. :-)

We have made an offer to pay afuna to work on Dreamwidth full-time. She has accepted, and will be starting in early April once she wraps up the responsibilities she has at her current job.

The number of full-time staff for Dreamwidth is now up to three, and I couldn't be happier. Afuna has been one of our strongest contributors since the very beginning of the site. She stepped up and took over the styles process and is currently the go-to person for all styles related code questions, reviews, and commits. She demonstrated similar capability and determination when she started reviewing patches, earning herself access to commit privileges. She's been helping us on business related features (renames, payment system improvements). In short, she's been integral in getting us where we are now; we truly could not have done it without her.

This will be awesome!

6. That's All

That's all I have for this week. Remember, if you have a paid account expiring, let us know and we'll toss you an extension. I'll see you next week for my last update this month, and then Denise will take over for March.

And now: Monday night House (darn mid-season breaks), Heroes (forgot it ended), and 24!