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Weekly Update: 18 May 2009
Another week, another Monday, and with it our weekly progress report!
This week we resolved 62 bugs (with patches from 14 contributors), including improvements to the crossposter, cosmetic updates to various site schemes, updates to the styles backend, and improvements to our payment system. These code updates will resolve several ongoing issues, including the problem with transparent backgrounds on the contextual hover popup (the box with useful links that appears when you hover over a userhead icon if you have that option enabled), problems with crossposting to various other LiveJournal-based sites if you'd entered a Location field or changed the adult-content setting, a bug that mis-counted how many communities a user could create per week (it was accidentally counting failed attempts as succeeded attempts), and a problem with saving certain options on the Edit Profile or Manage Settings pages.
We also made a number of small usability improvements to various places, including additional ALT text for screenreader users, links on create.bml to the "create a community" page for logged-in users to make it clearer that you don't need an invite code to create a community, and changing the interest search results to return the 500 most recently updated accounts for a particular interest, not the 500 first created. (The limit is for performance reasons.)
The big improvement this week that people should notice: the crossposter will now recognize custom friend groups on the remote site. Previously, if you posted an entry filtered to a custom access group, it would post as a private entry on the remote site; now, if you post to a custom access group on Dreamwidth, it will post to the custom friend group on the remote site. The two groups need to have exactly the same name for this to work; if the names don't match exactly, the post will still default to private on the remote site.
Welcome this week to new-contributor![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
snakeling with her first two commits! And as a reminder, if you're curious about what kind of developments we're making, you might be interested in the unofficial ![[community profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
changelog_digest, where a volunteer keeps track of everything we're doing.
We've posted announcements of unexpected downtime a few times these past few weeks in![[site community profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance that were due to hardware problems at Slicehost, our hosting provider. The bad news is that because we're in Slicehost's new datacenter, we may continue to have some failures. The good news is that Slicehost has been incredibly responsive to working with us, adding extra monitoring, and responding quickly to issues that we do have.
Our architecture is built for extra redundancy, and we're always working on ways to decrease the likelihood that any single failure is going to knock us entirely offline. We also run monitoring of our own that alerts us to any issues (as anyone who's ever been in irc with us when there's an issue can attest), so we can respond quickly to get the site back up and running.
This Saturday (May 24),![[staff profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark and janinedog will be celebrating their wedding (which, coincidentally, I happen to be performing for them) in Las Vegas. The line for offering congratulations and felicitations forms in the comments here!
This does mean thatmark will be on his honeymoon until mid-June, and thus unavailable to work on Dreamwidth, but fortunately, we'll be in good hands. Our backup sysadmins while Mark's away will be matthew, who was a sysadmin for LJ for a few years, and alierak, who's got tons of non-LJ sysadmin experience.
There are a few ways this will impact Dreamwidth. During this timeframe, we'll be on code freeze, meaning that any bugfixes or improvements won't be pushed live to the site. Also, because bothsarah and I will be out of town from May 21 to May 28, any check or money order payments that come in during that time won't be posted to your accounts until the evening of the 28th. Also, while both Mark and I will be checking in frequently, any technical support issue or account-related issue that requires site admin intervention might be a little delayed, although our kickass technical support team will be able to handle the routine issues.
We'll catch up on everything as soon as we get back.
Thanks to the generous support of everyone who's been making payments for their account, including those who purchased Seed Accounts in one of our sales, we're pretty confident in saying that we not only have our initial year's operating expenses in the bank, we're also pretty close to having our "war chest" for our intial colocation expenses. (Colocation means that we'll own our own physical hardware in a datacenter instead of renting it from someone else.) We're really, really happy with the results so far -- our non-Seed-account sales have been very strong, and the number of people who've chosen to pay for multiple months of service is highly encouraging. Thank you to everyone who's made payments to support us.
We're still working on our new-and-improved site statistics page, but you can see the first draft of our beta stats page, which contains information on our paid account numbers and percentages. Those numbers may be different than the numbers on our old stats page, since the script that updates them runs at a different time of day, but it should give you a pretty breakdown of our various account types and percentages.
You can also see our breakdown of paid account features, along with why they're paid account features and what we plan to add in the upcoming year to help make paid accounts more rewarding.
As a reminder, this week we added the ability to pay via credit card without having an associated PayPal account. If you'd like to do this, select "Credit Card" as your payment type when you check out the cart. This will bring you to a page with a "Buy Now" button. When you click the button, you'll be forwarded to PayPal, our merchant processor. On the left-hand side of the page, all the way down, is a header:
The "Continue" is the link to choose if you'd like to pay with a credit card without having a PayPal account. We also accept checks drawn on US banks and money orders in US funds.
Because of our success so far, we've been able to give out more invite codes to all of our users. If you have any available invites, they'll be listed on the Invite Someone page; if you're all out, there'll be a link to request more. And if all of your interested friends already have Dreamwidth accounts, might I suggest you drop a few indw_codesharing?
In an effort to make our "known issues" more easy to find (as well as offering workarounds, where we can identify them), we've added a "Current Issues" list to the site FAQ. This is in addition to the Known Issues list on the main Support page. We'll be working to fill that in with lists of issues that are affecting a number of users all at once.
If you've noticed any issue with your account that isn't listed there, you can open up a support request, and our team will work to diagnose the issue with you, figure out any possible workarounds, and make sure that the issue gets logged into our bug tracker so that we can get it fixed for everyone.
(Have I mentioned lately that our support volunteers kick ass?)
We've had a few queries about this lately, and it's our fault for forgetting to include it in our Privacy Policy: if you choose to give us your password to another site, to use the content import function or the automatic crosspost function, we will only use that information for the purpose you've given it to us. We don't store your password in plaintext in our database (we store the hashed version), and we don't use it for any function other than importing your entries or crossposting entries to another service on request.
If you're concerned about the security of your account on a remote service, you can change your password both before and after you run the content importer. Right now, there's no way to crosspost entries without storing your username and password for the remote site, but in the future, we'll be introducing a feature where you can enter your username and password for the remote site with each entry you choose to crosspost.
We'll be including that information explicitly in our next revision of the Privacy Policy, and we apologize for forgetting it until now.
Our FAQ team, never content to rest on their laurels, have been working to expand and clarify the FAQs. If you're interested in volunteering to help improve Dreamwidth's documentation,rho and ivorygates, the documentation project leaders, are looking to recruit new participants. dw_docs has all the information you'll need, including the process, some administrative details, and the application to join the docs team.
*
We're likely going to skip next Monday's update, since we'll all be recovering from the wedding, but we'll be back in two weeks with another roundup of tales from the Dreamwidthverse. In the meantime, if you're having any problems with your Dreamwidth account, our support team is standing by, and if you'd like to come hang out and be social with us in irc, we'd love to have you: irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw.
1. Code Work
This week we resolved 62 bugs (with patches from 14 contributors), including improvements to the crossposter, cosmetic updates to various site schemes, updates to the styles backend, and improvements to our payment system. These code updates will resolve several ongoing issues, including the problem with transparent backgrounds on the contextual hover popup (the box with useful links that appears when you hover over a userhead icon if you have that option enabled), problems with crossposting to various other LiveJournal-based sites if you'd entered a Location field or changed the adult-content setting, a bug that mis-counted how many communities a user could create per week (it was accidentally counting failed attempts as succeeded attempts), and a problem with saving certain options on the Edit Profile or Manage Settings pages.
We also made a number of small usability improvements to various places, including additional ALT text for screenreader users, links on create.bml to the "create a community" page for logged-in users to make it clearer that you don't need an invite code to create a community, and changing the interest search results to return the 500 most recently updated accounts for a particular interest, not the 500 first created. (The limit is for performance reasons.)
The big improvement this week that people should notice: the crossposter will now recognize custom friend groups on the remote site. Previously, if you posted an entry filtered to a custom access group, it would post as a private entry on the remote site; now, if you post to a custom access group on Dreamwidth, it will post to the custom friend group on the remote site. The two groups need to have exactly the same name for this to work; if the names don't match exactly, the post will still default to private on the remote site.
Welcome this week to new-contributor
snakeling with her first two commits! And as a reminder, if you're curious about what kind of developments we're making, you might be interested in the unofficial changelog_digest, where a volunteer keeps track of everything we're doing.2. Site Downtimes
We've posted announcements of unexpected downtime a few times these past few weeks in
dw_maintenance that were due to hardware problems at Slicehost, our hosting provider. The bad news is that because we're in Slicehost's new datacenter, we may continue to have some failures. The good news is that Slicehost has been incredibly responsive to working with us, adding extra monitoring, and responding quickly to issues that we do have.Our architecture is built for extra redundancy, and we're always working on ways to decrease the likelihood that any single failure is going to knock us entirely offline. We also run monitoring of our own that alerts us to any issues (as anyone who's ever been in irc with us when there's an issue can attest), so we can respond quickly to get the site back up and running.
3. Wedding Bells Are Ringing
This Saturday (May 24),
mark and janinedog will be celebrating their wedding (which, coincidentally, I happen to be performing for them) in Las Vegas. The line for offering congratulations and felicitations forms in the comments here!This does mean that
mark will be on his honeymoon until mid-June, and thus unavailable to work on Dreamwidth, but fortunately, we'll be in good hands. Our backup sysadmins while Mark's away will be matthew, who was a sysadmin for LJ for a few years, and alierak, who's got tons of non-LJ sysadmin experience. There are a few ways this will impact Dreamwidth. During this timeframe, we'll be on code freeze, meaning that any bugfixes or improvements won't be pushed live to the site. Also, because both
sarah and I will be out of town from May 21 to May 28, any check or money order payments that come in during that time won't be posted to your accounts until the evening of the 28th. Also, while both Mark and I will be checking in frequently, any technical support issue or account-related issue that requires site admin intervention might be a little delayed, although our kickass technical support team will be able to handle the routine issues.We'll catch up on everything as soon as we get back.
4. State of the Coffers
Thanks to the generous support of everyone who's been making payments for their account, including those who purchased Seed Accounts in one of our sales, we're pretty confident in saying that we not only have our initial year's operating expenses in the bank, we're also pretty close to having our "war chest" for our intial colocation expenses. (Colocation means that we'll own our own physical hardware in a datacenter instead of renting it from someone else.) We're really, really happy with the results so far -- our non-Seed-account sales have been very strong, and the number of people who've chosen to pay for multiple months of service is highly encouraging. Thank you to everyone who's made payments to support us.
We're still working on our new-and-improved site statistics page, but you can see the first draft of our beta stats page, which contains information on our paid account numbers and percentages. Those numbers may be different than the numbers on our old stats page, since the script that updates them runs at a different time of day, but it should give you a pretty breakdown of our various account types and percentages.
You can also see our breakdown of paid account features, along with why they're paid account features and what we plan to add in the upcoming year to help make paid accounts more rewarding.
As a reminder, this week we added the ability to pay via credit card without having an associated PayPal account. If you'd like to do this, select "Credit Card" as your payment type when you check out the cart. This will bring you to a page with a "Buy Now" button. When you click the button, you'll be forwarded to PayPal, our merchant processor. On the left-hand side of the page, all the way down, is a header:
Don't have a PayPal account?
Use your credit card or bank account (where available). Continue.
The "Continue" is the link to choose if you'd like to pay with a credit card without having a PayPal account. We also accept checks drawn on US banks and money orders in US funds.
Because of our success so far, we've been able to give out more invite codes to all of our users. If you have any available invites, they'll be listed on the Invite Someone page; if you're all out, there'll be a link to request more. And if all of your interested friends already have Dreamwidth accounts, might I suggest you drop a few in
dw_codesharing?5. Known Issues
In an effort to make our "known issues" more easy to find (as well as offering workarounds, where we can identify them), we've added a "Current Issues" list to the site FAQ. This is in addition to the Known Issues list on the main Support page. We'll be working to fill that in with lists of issues that are affecting a number of users all at once.
If you've noticed any issue with your account that isn't listed there, you can open up a support request, and our team will work to diagnose the issue with you, figure out any possible workarounds, and make sure that the issue gets logged into our bug tracker so that we can get it fixed for everyone.
(Have I mentioned lately that our support volunteers kick ass?)
6. Password Security
We've had a few queries about this lately, and it's our fault for forgetting to include it in our Privacy Policy: if you choose to give us your password to another site, to use the content import function or the automatic crosspost function, we will only use that information for the purpose you've given it to us. We don't store your password in plaintext in our database (we store the hashed version), and we don't use it for any function other than importing your entries or crossposting entries to another service on request.
If you're concerned about the security of your account on a remote service, you can change your password both before and after you run the content importer. Right now, there's no way to crosspost entries without storing your username and password for the remote site, but in the future, we'll be introducing a feature where you can enter your username and password for the remote site with each entry you choose to crosspost.
We'll be including that information explicitly in our next revision of the Privacy Policy, and we apologize for forgetting it until now.
7. Documentation
Our FAQ team, never content to rest on their laurels, have been working to expand and clarify the FAQs. If you're interested in volunteering to help improve Dreamwidth's documentation,
rho and ivorygates, the documentation project leaders, are looking to recruit new participants. dw_docs has all the information you'll need, including the process, some administrative details, and the application to join the docs team. *
We're likely going to skip next Monday's update, since we'll all be recovering from the wedding, but we'll be back in two weeks with another roundup of tales from the Dreamwidthverse. In the meantime, if you're having any problems with your Dreamwidth account, our support team is standing by, and if you'd like to come hang out and be social with us in irc, we'd love to have you: irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw.
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