Weekly Post: October 19th, 2009

[mark]

Hello and welcome to another weekly installment of What's New on Dreamwidth. Your host today is still mark, and I'm happy to have you aboard...

1. Support Updates

Our support team has some shout outs this week. Firstly, we'd like to congratulate yvi on hitting 300 support points. This ranks her as the most active support volunteer (as ranked by points) after our three support administrators. (And somehow she still finds the time to write new features and fix bugs for us, too!)

zarhooie, one of the aforementioned support administrators, would like to point out that this week they did a lot of work on the Known Issues box. If you run into any problems on the site, that should be your first step to figure out what's up. If anything is confusing or missing from that box, please send her a private message and she'll get it fixed!

I would also like to take this moment to remind you that, if you have a problem on the site that you aren't sure what to do, you can always submit a support request. Our team of volunteers will be happy to help you out.

2. Spam Fighting

We've noticed a slightly disturbing trend lately. Some people have started to, when deleting comments, marking them as spam even when they're not. We're not sure why this is, so I'd like to take a moment to remind people what exactly constitutes spam.

A spam comment is defined as unsolicted commercial advertisement, link farming, or other things like that. Someone commenting saying they don't like your latest post or being annoying isn't spam and we aren't going to punish them for being mean in your journal. Even if they commented twenty times to say it.

Additionally, if the spam comments are coming in anonymously and you have IP tracking turned off, there is very little we can do unless you turn on IP tracking. Therefore, if you allow anonymous comments and find yourself reporting spam, please make sure to turn on IP tracking. Thanks for listening!

3. New Features

This past week we did a code push that brought a number of new things to the site. Notably, we've integrated subscription filters with some other parts of the site. You'll start to see them showing up when you subscribe to someone or in other places that list that sort of thing.

We also added a number of new themes, of course. We're also still looking for more! If you happen to have a really neat theme on your journal, or you want to help contribute one to the site (we will give you free paid time!), please head on over to dreamscapes and take a look.

Another big feature we released this week is Site Search and the second edition of Journal Search. We're pretty happy with how it looks right now, we just need more usage! There are over 2.1 million posts ready to be searched. You can try it out here (all users, even free accounts):

http://www.dreamwidth.org/search

Also note that today we added the ability to specify how you sort your results, and we now respect phrases. I.e., if you want to search exactly for "ceiling cat" you can do so, just make sure to use the quotes and you will find 122 hits for that phrase. This should make searching for things a lot easier.

4. Development Updates

This week's new contributor is meowth! Congratulations for getting your first submitted patch in -- and live! -- and thank you so much for your help. I'm happy to have you aboard!

As you've come to expect, we've done another code tour:

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/26664.html

All of those fixes and features are already live, unlike most weeks, so you can immediately see anything that has changed and go try it out live on the site.

Now that search is "done" (for now!), we're taking aim at our next project. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo!) and what better way to celebrate authors and writing than to point our focus at implementing Draft and Scheduled Post support for Dreamwidth?

If you are interested in being part of this process, Denise has a post up in dw_biz soliciting feedback and telling you what our plans are so far:

http://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/3042.html

We'd love your help to make this project succeed.

5. Wrap Up

Another really exciting thing I found out this week is that one of users has just recently published a book! This is great news, and I'm happy to link to Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach by our very own juliet. Congratulations!

Also, for those of you curious, I have to date received almost three dozen postcards. Woah! Thank you so much to everybody who has sent one. I'll post a picture as soon as I get them all up. I have a lot of limericks to write, so I'll be slowly working on those... :-)

I think that's everything. As always, if you have any comments, questions, feedback, or whatever, please feel free to comment or email us. One of the best parts about running this site and being small like we are is staying close to the userbase. I love hearing from people, it really does make my day.

Enjoy your week!

Comments

[come]

Count on another postcard soon. =)

[afuna]

Oooh, I need to step up my search for an appropriate postcard.

The improvements to search are fantastic!

[denise]

Also, importing is safe again, in case people missed the edit!

[sineala]

Whee! Thanks for fixing!

...is there an ETA on fixing the, um, collateral damage of the importing problem?

(I have ambitions involving importing comments over. Which I sincerely hope will be safe. But I obviously don't want to do this with duplicate posts.)

[katieastrophe]

I utterly failed to remember to pick up postcards when we went to Philly on Saturday ;_; you are still on my list for next time, though!

[hebinekohime]

122 hits

All of which are watched by Ceiling Cat.

[foxfirefey]

Squee search!

[cesy]

You remain awesome :)

[yvi]

*does little Support dance*

Congrats to meowth!

[sethb]

There is stuff you can do about spam even without IP tracking: URLs in spam become suspicious, so other comments with those URLs are more likely to be spam.

[ai]

Thank you again for another weekly update. I enjoy reading them and actually really enjoying getting them in my mailbox the time they are posted.

And the search function... so awesome. Thank you guys for being so awesome!

[stheno]

I enjoy reading them and actually really enjoying getting them in my mailbox the time they are posted.

Same here! I keep waiting for the happiness of seeing the new weekly update to wear off, but it just hasn't gotten around to it yet. :D

[mskala]

What if you introduced a different option, when deleting a comment, for something like "mark as unacceptable"? It wouldn't have to actually do anything... just that people might be less likely to make false spam reports if they had some other way of venting their feelings.

[ardath_rekha]

Or maybe "mark as harassment." Obviously people have different ideas of what constitutes harassment, but it might let you begin to track patterns.

Of course, if it's just one user constantly reporting another person for harassment, you can say "just ban them already, dumbass." But if you have a person who gets repeatedly reported, by unrelated and unconnected people, for a pattern of harassment over a period of time, you'd end up with enough evidence to justify action.

Or if it's the same person being harassed, by several accounts that trace back to one location/person, it would let you catch ban-evaders better.

[mskala]

Ideally there might be five or six different choices, in a drop-down box.

[susanreads]

New themes, hurrah! (and other good stuff I haven't had time to try out yet).

Has anybody else noticed icon keywords disappearing from their reading page? They all say "(default)" now, even if they're clearly not. I've only noticed it since the last code push.

[foxfirefey]

Hey, susanreads--sorry for the delay! Yes, I'm noticing this too. I'll look into it and make sure it gets fixed.

[foxfirefey]

Okay, someone has looked into it and submitted a fix. I'm pretty sure it will be fixed on the next code push.

[susanreads]

Thanks!

The Amazon page you link to for J's book

[adric]

has only one review, of the "ebook" and it is quite negative.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1430224495/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

In addition to alerting her to this, perhaps there's a better link to use?

Re: The Amazon page you link to for J's book

[juliet]

Hi - thanks for the heads-up! I've contacted Apress to investigate the ebook problem mentioned in the review.

Alternative links: there's always the Apress' own site:
http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430224495

Re: The Amazon page you link to for J's book

[mark]

I've updated the post with this link.

Re: The Amazon page you link to for J's book

[juliet]

thank you!