![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
Weekly Update: February 16th, 2010
Time for the weekly update! It's late this week because I was out with some friends yesterday and didn't get home until late, sorry about that. This week we bring you more information on cross-site reading and some updates on what's been going on around here in Dreamwidth land.
I'll cover this first since it seems to be a well received topic when mentioned last week. This is sort of scattershot facts, feedback is welcome.
* The feature is going to be a paid user feature, because of how much data we have to store and the load I expect it to place on our servers.
* We will only download new entries every 60 minutes (this may change). This means that, when you view your reading page on Dreamwidth, we only contact remote sites every ~60 minutes to ask for new entries.
(If you typically view your reading page and refresh it every 30 seconds to see if there are new entries, it won't work that way with cross-site reading. This 60 minutes might change when we see how many people are using the feature, but this is the main way that we are able to control how often we hit remote sites. If we hit them too often, then they'll ban us for being bots/bad/broken/etc. If we wait too long, we could miss entries.)
* Technically, we can only load the most recent 100 entries from the remote site. This is a limitation of the protocol, it only allows us to get recent items. Skipping back indefinitely won't work. However, if there never get to skip=100 on your reading usually, this won't affect you.
* Comment counts will be updated every time we download entries, but it could be up to an hour out of date. The same goes with edited entries; if we download entries, we won't be able to tell that they were edited until the next time we pull (next hour).
* We only download entries while you're browsing the site. In short, whenever you view a page on Dreamwidth (any page), we will update your reading page with remote entries if it's been more than an hour.
In effect, this feature will work best for average users. If you only watch 200-300 accounts and get fewer than 200-300 new entries a day on your remote reading/friends pages, you will find that this feature works pretty well for you. On the other hand, if you've maxed out your subscriptions and the people you read post hundreds of posts every few hours, you will probably not find this feature too useful.
Okay, with the technicals out of the way, let's discuss privacy. Since we're downloading entries for people that don't use Dreamwidth, privacy is a really tough question here and one we finally think we have a good answer for.
Downloaded entries are only viewable to the person who is using the cross-site reading feature.
That's the rule, and it is pretty simple. We will not show entries to anybody except the person who we downloaded them for. Even if it's a public entry; you will never be able to see it on the site unless you are logged in to the account that has cross-site reading turned on and subscribes to that account on the remote site.
Further, we will not allow any interaction with the entry on Dreamwidth. They can be viewed, but that's about it -- you can't add them to memories, bookmark, comment on, edit, or anything. It's a read-only view.
Lastly, entries are only stored for two weeks. At that point we remove them from our servers completely. (Similar to syndicated feeds.)
I've seen a meme floating about Dreamwidth since yesterday that I really like. It's about community participation and was originated by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rydra_wong:
http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/197790.html
In short, people who say 'DW is too quiet' can solve the problem by actually making it louder! If we all take a bit of time out of our week to post to a community about something we find interesting, we'll build them up and work towards being the kind of place people want to gather.
For this week,![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise recommends ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
poetry for all of your poetical needs. zarhooie further mentioned selfportraitweekly as a new community that is just getting off the ground and could use some participation, too.
If you have your own suggestions, leave them in the comments!
A lot of people have asked us about importing communities from remote sites. We've been doing this manually until now, but we are at the point where we want to start opening this up to everybody.
A bug has been filed to make the importer work for communities for everybody. There will be some guidelines (you must be a maintainer, you should get permission of your community first), but we will no longer be manually vetting every community that gets imported.
This is made possible because of all the OpenID changes we made to allow users of other services to actually maintain their entries in communities: delete them, moderate comments, etc. Now that these users have the tools they need to actually maintain their entries, we feel confident opening up the community import tools.
Please keep an eye on the weekly updates for more information about when this comes to fruition.
The 2010 Winter Olympics are going! We've added a feed to the Latest Things tracker that will let you find posts related to the Olympics:
http://www.dreamwidth.org/latest?feed=olympics
Keep in mind this feed only updates when someone makes a post, so it looks a little barren right now (I just made it!) but should fill up as people post things.
denise wanted me to mention that our suggestions process has reached another milestone. We just passed 400 suggestions that have gone through the process, and the breakdown of results is:
* 86 (21%) suggestions rejected due to impracticality, community disapproval, or not being what we want for Dreamwidth
* 24 (6%) deferred for later review (read,denise and I sitting down and hashing them out)
* 221 (54.7%) in Bugzilla waiting for implementation
* 73 (18%) have been implemented
So, ~40% of suggestions have been resolved one way or another, and ~60% are still waiting for resolution. I feel this is a good ratio! I don't expect us to ever implement every single good idea people have (if only we had the developers to do that!) but to know that we're making progress on them and actually getting things done that users suggest is a good sign.
This is a big issue and we want to start getting everybody thinking about it now.denise has spent a lot of time (a LOT of time) on working on the update page. She's been putting together wireframes, researching other blogging tools, showing designs to people, and iterating. She's getting to the point where the wireframes can move to the next step, so let me take a minute to tell you what's going on.
In short, we're going to change the "metaphor" that represents posting to your account. Right now, the post interaction metaphor is akin to a "neverending scroll". You write an entry, post it, and that's that. If you want to edit it, you edit the "last entry" or you have to look around the scroll to find what you want to edit.
Similarly, if you want to create a draft, it only stores what you're writing at the newest end of said scroll. One item, there until you either rip it off or commit it. This metaphor has worked for a while, but it's not going to support the new functionality that we want to add to the system.
The new metaphordenise has been working on is in the wireframe stage right now. What we're going to do next is create a mockup (a small, non-functional preview) that you will be able to interact with. You will be able to get a feel for how it looks, how we want it to work, and then provide feedback.
Once feedback is received, we'll update the mockup and do another round of review on it. "Okay, this is what you told us about the first mockup, how do you like the second?" That process can repeat as many times as necessary, but at some point it will be considered done and we'll move to a full implementation of it.
One thing to note now: we will not be supporting the 'old update page' AND a 'new update page'. Once we've gone through the community review and gotten the mockup to a good place and implemented it, that will be the only update page.
Hopefully by telling you about this in the weekly update and in advance, we can make this process relatively painless. I know it will be a big change for everybody, and there will certainly be some people who prefer the old page, but I hope we can convince you with the great functionality the new metaphor will provide.
Stay tuned!
This is probably the longest update I've written in quite some time, but we've now reached the end. Yes, I didn't do a development update section this week, focusing instead on bigger items. Next week we'll dive into the development of the past two weeks and see how things are going.
Thanks to all of you for being part of the Dreamwidth community. See you next week!
1. Cross-Site Reading
I'll cover this first since it seems to be a well received topic when mentioned last week. This is sort of scattershot facts, feedback is welcome.
* The feature is going to be a paid user feature, because of how much data we have to store and the load I expect it to place on our servers.
* We will only download new entries every 60 minutes (this may change). This means that, when you view your reading page on Dreamwidth, we only contact remote sites every ~60 minutes to ask for new entries.
(If you typically view your reading page and refresh it every 30 seconds to see if there are new entries, it won't work that way with cross-site reading. This 60 minutes might change when we see how many people are using the feature, but this is the main way that we are able to control how often we hit remote sites. If we hit them too often, then they'll ban us for being bots/bad/broken/etc. If we wait too long, we could miss entries.)
* Technically, we can only load the most recent 100 entries from the remote site. This is a limitation of the protocol, it only allows us to get recent items. Skipping back indefinitely won't work. However, if there never get to skip=100 on your reading usually, this won't affect you.
* Comment counts will be updated every time we download entries, but it could be up to an hour out of date. The same goes with edited entries; if we download entries, we won't be able to tell that they were edited until the next time we pull (next hour).
* We only download entries while you're browsing the site. In short, whenever you view a page on Dreamwidth (any page), we will update your reading page with remote entries if it's been more than an hour.
In effect, this feature will work best for average users. If you only watch 200-300 accounts and get fewer than 200-300 new entries a day on your remote reading/friends pages, you will find that this feature works pretty well for you. On the other hand, if you've maxed out your subscriptions and the people you read post hundreds of posts every few hours, you will probably not find this feature too useful.
Okay, with the technicals out of the way, let's discuss privacy. Since we're downloading entries for people that don't use Dreamwidth, privacy is a really tough question here and one we finally think we have a good answer for.
Downloaded entries are only viewable to the person who is using the cross-site reading feature.
That's the rule, and it is pretty simple. We will not show entries to anybody except the person who we downloaded them for. Even if it's a public entry; you will never be able to see it on the site unless you are logged in to the account that has cross-site reading turned on and subscribes to that account on the remote site.
Further, we will not allow any interaction with the entry on Dreamwidth. They can be viewed, but that's about it -- you can't add them to memories, bookmark, comment on, edit, or anything. It's a read-only view.
Lastly, entries are only stored for two weeks. At that point we remove them from our servers completely. (Similar to syndicated feeds.)
2. Weekly Community Participation Meme
I've seen a meme floating about Dreamwidth since yesterday that I really like. It's about community participation and was originated by
rydra_wong:http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/197790.html
In short, people who say 'DW is too quiet' can solve the problem by actually making it louder! If we all take a bit of time out of our week to post to a community about something we find interesting, we'll build them up and work towards being the kind of place people want to gather.
For this week,
denise recommends poetry for all of your poetical needs. zarhooie further mentioned selfportraitweekly as a new community that is just getting off the ground and could use some participation, too.If you have your own suggestions, leave them in the comments!
3. Community Imports
A lot of people have asked us about importing communities from remote sites. We've been doing this manually until now, but we are at the point where we want to start opening this up to everybody.
A bug has been filed to make the importer work for communities for everybody. There will be some guidelines (you must be a maintainer, you should get permission of your community first), but we will no longer be manually vetting every community that gets imported.
This is made possible because of all the OpenID changes we made to allow users of other services to actually maintain their entries in communities: delete them, moderate comments, etc. Now that these users have the tools they need to actually maintain their entries, we feel confident opening up the community import tools.
Please keep an eye on the weekly updates for more information about when this comes to fruition.
4. Latest Posts - Olympics!
The 2010 Winter Olympics are going! We've added a feed to the Latest Things tracker that will let you find posts related to the Olympics:
http://www.dreamwidth.org/latest?feed=olympics
Keep in mind this feed only updates when someone makes a post, so it looks a little barren right now (I just made it!) but should fill up as people post things.
5. Suggestions Update
denise wanted me to mention that our suggestions process has reached another milestone. We just passed 400 suggestions that have gone through the process, and the breakdown of results is:* 86 (21%) suggestions rejected due to impracticality, community disapproval, or not being what we want for Dreamwidth
* 24 (6%) deferred for later review (read,
denise and I sitting down and hashing them out)* 221 (54.7%) in Bugzilla waiting for implementation
* 73 (18%) have been implemented
So, ~40% of suggestions have been resolved one way or another, and ~60% are still waiting for resolution. I feel this is a good ratio! I don't expect us to ever implement every single good idea people have (if only we had the developers to do that!) but to know that we're making progress on them and actually getting things done that users suggest is a good sign.
6. Update Page Redesign
This is a big issue and we want to start getting everybody thinking about it now.
denise has spent a lot of time (a LOT of time) on working on the update page. She's been putting together wireframes, researching other blogging tools, showing designs to people, and iterating. She's getting to the point where the wireframes can move to the next step, so let me take a minute to tell you what's going on.In short, we're going to change the "metaphor" that represents posting to your account. Right now, the post interaction metaphor is akin to a "neverending scroll". You write an entry, post it, and that's that. If you want to edit it, you edit the "last entry" or you have to look around the scroll to find what you want to edit.
Similarly, if you want to create a draft, it only stores what you're writing at the newest end of said scroll. One item, there until you either rip it off or commit it. This metaphor has worked for a while, but it's not going to support the new functionality that we want to add to the system.
The new metaphor
denise has been working on is in the wireframe stage right now. What we're going to do next is create a mockup (a small, non-functional preview) that you will be able to interact with. You will be able to get a feel for how it looks, how we want it to work, and then provide feedback.Once feedback is received, we'll update the mockup and do another round of review on it. "Okay, this is what you told us about the first mockup, how do you like the second?" That process can repeat as many times as necessary, but at some point it will be considered done and we'll move to a full implementation of it.
One thing to note now: we will not be supporting the 'old update page' AND a 'new update page'. Once we've gone through the community review and gotten the mockup to a good place and implemented it, that will be the only update page.
Hopefully by telling you about this in the weekly update and in advance, we can make this process relatively painless. I know it will be a big change for everybody, and there will certainly be some people who prefer the old page, but I hope we can convince you with the great functionality the new metaphor will provide.
Stay tuned!
7. Long Update is Long
This is probably the longest update I've written in quite some time, but we've now reached the end. Yes, I didn't do a development update section this week, focusing instead on bigger items. Next week we'll dive into the development of the past two weeks and see how things are going.
Thanks to all of you for being part of the Dreamwidth community. See you next week!
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LJ is offering this interface that you can't control via the feed settings (clients also download your entries to display them in order to be able to read your friends-list while offline, for example). You might want to try asking them for an opt-out option.
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What you're missing in all of this is that we aren't doing something like screen-scraping someone's journal to download the content and display it. We're using something that the remote site offers for this very reason -- to allow people to location-shift their friends page reading into a downloaded client or onto another site -- and we're displaying the data in such a way that the person reading it will be the only person reading it. In essence, Dreamwidth is becoming a LiveJournal client for the purpose of reading, the same way that crossposting turns Dreamwidth into a LiveJournal client for the purpose of posting.
I recognize that this upsets you, but we aren't going to be doing anything that isn't a) already possible and b) already being done by other people. I can almost guarantee you that right now, at least one person who is already reading you is doing this very thing through a downloaded client. Probably more. It's something that LJ (and all sites running the LJ code) makes available for this very purpose, and it's something they've been doing for the last ten years.
You can't call something unethical when it's using tools in a way they were designed to be used for the purpose they were designed to be used for, no matter how much you may personally dislike Dreamwidth and be looking for something to object to. If we were going to be unethical about this, we would have implemented it ten months ago with the incredibly easy-but-sleazy solution we had on hand in order to satisfy people who wanted the feature. We didn't. We waited until we could work out a way to offer this feature that respected privacy and security, even though it's more trouble, more effort, and less useful for our users than the easy way would be.
At this point, I don't think there's anything that anyone can say that will make you happy, and the basis of your argument appears to be that whatever Dreamwidth does is going to be unethical in this situation. I don't believe we're ever going to achieve any sort of agreement here and the argument has been sliding steadily downhill; I'd like to ask you to leave it be in the news comments for now. If you have specific concerns short of "don't do this at all" once you see how the feature is implemented, we'd be happy to hear them at that point; you can contact us at feedback@dreamwidth.org.
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With as hard as y’all have worked on this, and as open as you’ve been, about this feature and the ways you want to make sure the use (which I am dying to have, so that I never have to touch LJ again) doesn’t ever give anyone access that they shouldn’t have… well.
You asked for it to be dropped, so I’m not going to say anything except how much I respect y’all for the work you’ve been doing on this, and how grateful I am for it.
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Why is your problem with Dreamwidth instead of LiveJournal? Why is there a problem at all, since you can still use LJ's filters to control who reads your content?