Entry tags:
Progress Update: 15 June 2009
Greetings from glorious Arlington, VA, where I can see the Pentagon from my hotel room and the hotel internet is cutting out more frequently than I cut class in college. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sarah is here for a conference; I tagged along to keep her company.) This week we have a bunch of interesting things to mention, but first off, I'd like to welcome the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith back from their honeymoon in the Undisclosed Location, which can now be revealed: they went to Hawaii, and they had a lot of fun there. (The reason for the secrecy is that Mark wanted to surprise Janine with the destination.)
Most of our updates and announcements this week involve improvements and the like, so let's start with:
We have three paid user enhancements this week, two courtesy of LiveJournal and one all our own: reading page by date, the Network page, and increased interest limits.
* To turn back time and view what your reading page looked like on a particular date, add the date to the URL, in the form of ?date=YYYY-MM-DD. For instance, if I wanted to see what my reading page looked like on June 1, 2009, I'd go to:
http://denise.dreamwidth.org/read?date=2009-06-01
* The Network page is here! The network page is our equivalent of LiveJournal's "friendsfriends" view; it shows the entries of everyone read by the people you read. Paid and premium paid users can access your Network page by adding /network to the end of your journal URL, like such:
http://denise.dreamwidth.org/network/
* We've changed the hard-coded limit of 150 interests to something that we can configure instead, and raised the limits for our paid and premium paid members. A paid account can now add up to 200 interests; a premium paid account can add up to 250. Go be interesting!
Meanwhile, an extension to an existing paid user feature: you now have the option to exclude your own visits to your journal from your Google Analytics numbers, if you have Google Analytics added to your journal. Set this option on the Display tab of Account Settings.
Last night's code push included about three weeks' worth of development, including some new enhancements (aka, not bugfixes):
* Ever open up an entry in a tab to comment on later, come back to it two days later, and submit your comment, only to have the comment eaten by an "invalid form submission" error? From now on, you won't lose the comment entirely; it will get displayed underneath the error message so that you don't have to risk losing the text of your comment when you hit the back button.
* We added alt text to the comment subject icons -- those little smiley-faces that appear next to the subject of comments -- to enhance the site experience for screenreader users.
* The Manage Tags page now includes a count of both your current number of tags and the maximum number of tags you're allowed to have.
* We've improved messaging (both error messages and regular site copy) in a number of places, to make instructions clearer, to make sure that OpenID accounts are called by their URL and not the messy-looking backend name, to make error messages more explanatory, and just generally to make things more usable.
In addition to the new features and enhancements, we've fixed a number of bugs as well, including:
* problems with switching back and forth from the RTE to the HTML editor on the Update page
* maintainers being unable to leave a community: now, if there are no other maintainers and the community is deleted, maintainers can remove themselves from the community
* Adding users to custom groups via the console no longer resets group memberships; adding users to your circle via the console no longer adds them with random colors.
* problems with joining comms (fixing errors that led to new members not having posting access)
* Export Journal function is working again
* the Birthdays page is working again; the birthday page for communities will show the birthdays of all members.
* Errors on the Customize Journal page, along with errors previewing styles, in some cases
* Non-maintainers can now mark comments to their entries in communities as spam
* The page to convert a personal journal to a community now works properly again.
As always, if you want to stay updated with our changes, you can read![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
changelog, which contains every code change we make, or ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
changelog_digest, an unofficial journal that bundles everything together.
Improvements to the Transmogrified style this week include being able to select which side of the entry the user icons will display on, as well as a number of display fixes. If your journal uses the Transmogrified style, and you're noticing that it has wider margins than it used to, that's a relic of some of the display fixes! This entry indw_styles explains how to fix the problem if you're having it.
As we're pretty sure you've all noticed by now, the spammers never quit. If you're getting anonymous comment spam to your journal, you can block a good 99% of it by going to the Privacy tab of Account Settings and setting your Anti-Spam settings to use CAPTCHAs for anonymous commenters. This will force any anonymous commenters (as well as anyone logged into an OpenID account if they haven't set and validated an email address) to complete a human test before commenting in your journal. (The one caveat: if you have friends who use screenreaders or other assistive devices who regularly comment to your journal anonymously, you might not want to enable this option; human tests are not friendly to those using assistive technology.)
This week, we'd like to recognize our antispam team; they're doing a great job with processing spam reports and taking steps to block spammers from being able to access Dreamwidth. Thanks to all the people who've done at least one block so far:hilarytamar, laitaine, pauamma, fae, beatrice_otter, thedivinegoat, hatman, melannen, pixel, piranha, ysobel, exor674, and hermitty. Thanks also go to azurelunatic and invisionary, who head up the antispam team.
We're beginning the process of evaluating other antispam technology to see which we can integrate into our service to block these bottom-feeders before they even get to comment, but in the meantime, our antispam team is doing a great job. If you do get spam comments, delete the comment and mark it as spam. The antispam team will handle the rest.
Big, big thanks go to the Support team, who've been holding down the fort incredibly well these past few weeks! As always, if you're interested in volunteering with the support team, check outdw_support_training; zarhooie, one of our support coordinators, has been posting training posts to give people guidelines.
As part of our effort to make it easier for y'all to know if the problem you're having is a known bug or not, we've expanded our Known Issues FAQ list with major identified problems. Big thanks go tophoenix, liv, and ysobel for helping to get that up-to-date this week!
Meanwhile, congratulations go tojennifer, ct, and highlander_ii, who moved up spots on the Support High Scores list this week. Support points aren't the only indicators of who's helping out the most, but it still deserves a shout-out!
I had a very pleasant interview with NPR last week, and the segment should air sometime soon -- I'll be sure to let you all know when it does, and link to NPR's archives. As always, if you'd like to talk to me or![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark for an interview, if you'd like us to speak at your conference or convention, or if you need any kind of information from us for professional purposes, you can get in touch with us at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org.
That's it for us for this week! We'll be back next week with more thrilling tales from the front. (By then I will be out of the hotel with the crappy internet, at least.) 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.
We'll see you next week.
sarah is here for a conference; I tagged along to keep her company.) This week we have a bunch of interesting things to mention, but first off, I'd like to welcome the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith back from their honeymoon in the Undisclosed Location, which can now be revealed: they went to Hawaii, and they had a lot of fun there. (The reason for the secrecy is that Mark wanted to surprise Janine with the destination.)Most of our updates and announcements this week involve improvements and the like, so let's start with:
1. Paid User Enhancements
We have three paid user enhancements this week, two courtesy of LiveJournal and one all our own: reading page by date, the Network page, and increased interest limits.
* To turn back time and view what your reading page looked like on a particular date, add the date to the URL, in the form of ?date=YYYY-MM-DD. For instance, if I wanted to see what my reading page looked like on June 1, 2009, I'd go to:
http://denise.dreamwidth.org/read?date=2009-06-01
* The Network page is here! The network page is our equivalent of LiveJournal's "friendsfriends" view; it shows the entries of everyone read by the people you read. Paid and premium paid users can access your Network page by adding /network to the end of your journal URL, like such:
http://denise.dreamwidth.org/network/
* We've changed the hard-coded limit of 150 interests to something that we can configure instead, and raised the limits for our paid and premium paid members. A paid account can now add up to 200 interests; a premium paid account can add up to 250. Go be interesting!
Meanwhile, an extension to an existing paid user feature: you now have the option to exclude your own visits to your journal from your Google Analytics numbers, if you have Google Analytics added to your journal. Set this option on the Display tab of Account Settings.
2. Other New Enhancements
Last night's code push included about three weeks' worth of development, including some new enhancements (aka, not bugfixes):
* Ever open up an entry in a tab to comment on later, come back to it two days later, and submit your comment, only to have the comment eaten by an "invalid form submission" error? From now on, you won't lose the comment entirely; it will get displayed underneath the error message so that you don't have to risk losing the text of your comment when you hit the back button.
* We added alt text to the comment subject icons -- those little smiley-faces that appear next to the subject of comments -- to enhance the site experience for screenreader users.
* The Manage Tags page now includes a count of both your current number of tags and the maximum number of tags you're allowed to have.
* We've improved messaging (both error messages and regular site copy) in a number of places, to make instructions clearer, to make sure that OpenID accounts are called by their URL and not the messy-looking backend name, to make error messages more explanatory, and just generally to make things more usable.
3. Bugfixes
In addition to the new features and enhancements, we've fixed a number of bugs as well, including:
* problems with switching back and forth from the RTE to the HTML editor on the Update page
* maintainers being unable to leave a community: now, if there are no other maintainers and the community is deleted, maintainers can remove themselves from the community
* Adding users to custom groups via the console no longer resets group memberships; adding users to your circle via the console no longer adds them with random colors.
* problems with joining comms (fixing errors that led to new members not having posting access)
* Export Journal function is working again
* the Birthdays page is working again; the birthday page for communities will show the birthdays of all members.
* Errors on the Customize Journal page, along with errors previewing styles, in some cases
* Non-maintainers can now mark comments to their entries in communities as spam
* The page to convert a personal journal to a community now works properly again.
As always, if you want to stay updated with our changes, you can read
changelog, which contains every code change we make, or changelog_digest, an unofficial journal that bundles everything together.4. Styles
Improvements to the Transmogrified style this week include being able to select which side of the entry the user icons will display on, as well as a number of display fixes. If your journal uses the Transmogrified style, and you're noticing that it has wider margins than it used to, that's a relic of some of the display fixes! This entry in
dw_styles explains how to fix the problem if you're having it.5. Spam
As we're pretty sure you've all noticed by now, the spammers never quit. If you're getting anonymous comment spam to your journal, you can block a good 99% of it by going to the Privacy tab of Account Settings and setting your Anti-Spam settings to use CAPTCHAs for anonymous commenters. This will force any anonymous commenters (as well as anyone logged into an OpenID account if they haven't set and validated an email address) to complete a human test before commenting in your journal. (The one caveat: if you have friends who use screenreaders or other assistive devices who regularly comment to your journal anonymously, you might not want to enable this option; human tests are not friendly to those using assistive technology.)
This week, we'd like to recognize our antispam team; they're doing a great job with processing spam reports and taking steps to block spammers from being able to access Dreamwidth. Thanks to all the people who've done at least one block so far:
hilarytamar, laitaine, pauamma, fae, beatrice_otter, thedivinegoat, hatman, melannen, pixel, piranha, ysobel, exor674, and hermitty. Thanks also go to azurelunatic and invisionary, who head up the antispam team.We're beginning the process of evaluating other antispam technology to see which we can integrate into our service to block these bottom-feeders before they even get to comment, but in the meantime, our antispam team is doing a great job. If you do get spam comments, delete the comment and mark it as spam. The antispam team will handle the rest.
6. Support
Big, big thanks go to the Support team, who've been holding down the fort incredibly well these past few weeks! As always, if you're interested in volunteering with the support team, check out
dw_support_training; zarhooie, one of our support coordinators, has been posting training posts to give people guidelines.As part of our effort to make it easier for y'all to know if the problem you're having is a known bug or not, we've expanded our Known Issues FAQ list with major identified problems. Big thanks go to
phoenix, liv, and ysobel for helping to get that up-to-date this week!Meanwhile, congratulations go to
jennifer, ct, and highlander_ii, who moved up spots on the Support High Scores list this week. Support points aren't the only indicators of who's helping out the most, but it still deserves a shout-out!7. Dreamwidth in the News
I had a very pleasant interview with NPR last week, and the segment should air sometime soon -- I'll be sure to let you all know when it does, and link to NPR's archives. As always, if you'd like to talk to me or
mark for an interview, if you'd like us to speak at your conference or convention, or if you need any kind of information from us for professional purposes, you can get in touch with us at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org. That's it for us for this week! We'll be back next week with more thrilling tales from the front. (By then I will be out of the hotel with the crappy internet, at least.) 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.
We'll see you next week.
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