Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Good morning afternoon evening $time_of_day, Dreamwidth! After discovering once again that February has 28 days (you'd think we'd remember this by now), and since the Olympics are over (seriously, did you see that hockey game yesterday?) and I need something to do with the time that was devoted to actually watching TV (it's a once-every-two-years activity), Mark has handed over the weekly update to me for my turn at the helm.

One incredibly long sentence later, let's start in on the update.

1. Development

This week we welcome new contributor noodles with his first patch for us! You can see the list of bugs resolved this week in this week's code tour; it's a small sampling, but it's a nice mix.

For March, we've declared a Suggestions hackathon: implementing things that have come through our Suggestions process. Since yvi declared the hackathon on 2/23, we've already gone from 193 unassigned suggestions down to 180 unassigned suggestions, so we're making progress!

If you'd like to join us, check out the dw_dev and dw_dev_training communities. (We are exceedingly friendly to newcomers!) The list of unassigned suggestions can be found here.

2. Antispam

Hat tips and huge thanks this week go out to our antispam team, who are still dealing with an incredible uptick in the amount of comment spam we've been getting. They're doing a great job in protecting DW users from spam, whether anonymous or from logged-in or OpenID users.

The antispam team on any site are unsung heroes, since you generally only notice them when they aren't doing their jobs. So, Mark and I would like to publicly thank ours, because they rock. Sing off thanks of your own in the comments!

3. Hidden Treasures

As part of our perpetual quest to make sure our documentation is as good as it can be, and in order to help me with the "Dreamwidth tour" that I've been meaning to work up for oh, about a year now, a question!

What's your favorite new feature that DW has implemented so far? Name them in comments.

4. Styles

If you haven't checked out our journal styles in a while, you might want to: the All Styles list has been steadily growing over time. This week, we've been working to get preview images made for the ones that don't have them yet; next week, afuna and the styles team plan on working to get entirely new layouts that have been submitted to dreamscapes converted into system layouts that anyone can choose.

If your talents lie in CSS, style creation, S2 theme creation, or even putting together pretty colors, dreamscapes could use you! In particular, there are 12 layouts that need someone to convert them from CSS to a system-choosable S2 layout. We could also use more color themes for the Blanket, Brittle, Drifting, and Refried Tablet themes, so if you've got good color sense (or enjoy spending time on Colour Lovers), check it out.

5. Payments

We've made significant progress this week in finding an alternate payment solution after the last few weeks of trouble, and we very much hope to have it implemented quickly. There are some advantages to all of this hassle -- our new processor will likely also give us the ability to accept electronic checks, so you'll probably be able to pay us through direct bank draft if you aren't able to use your credit card. (We'll likely only be able to accept Visa/MC through them; we've looked for a solution that lets us accept other cards that are more common outside the US, but the field there is more slim.)

Our new processor will also offer the option for recurring billing -- sign up once and have your payment automatically made when your account comes due, unless you cancel it. We'd need to implement the code for it on our end, though, and that's something we don't necessarily want to spend the time doing if there isn't interest in it.

Is that something people are interested in? If it's a feature that would be useful to you guys, we'll add it to the list of things we want to accomplish; I doubt we'd be able to get it in immediately, but if you guys would find it more helpful than pushy, we'll add it to the wish list.

In the meantime, we're still accepting checks and money orders in USD through our shop, and if you have a paid account that's about to expire and you can't use check or money order for any reason, contact us at accounts@dreamwidth.org or by opening a Support request in the Account Payments department.

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That's it from us for the week! We'll be back next week with more tales from the front, including news about what afuna will be working on as soon as she's able to devote her full-time attention to Dreamwidth. (Only a month left!) 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.

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