Weekly Update: 16 March 2010

[denise]

So, not only is Tuesday the new Monday, Wednesday appears to be the new Tuesday. Thankfully, I am able to take a break from the exciting world of Tax Time™ to bring you the update, only slightly late. (Not-thankfully, I am doing so after about 20 hours of uptime and while on serious painkillers, so if I am less coherent than usual, this would be why.)

We have an action-packed, thrill-a-minute blockbuster at the box office this week (IN A WORLD ... where denise likes to make stupid jokes in the weekly update introduction....) Coming soon to a theatre near you:

1. Development

The majority of our effort this week went to more long-term things, but we still got the time to do some smaller things ... and one very big one. yvi did this week's code tour, consisting mostly of styles-related fixes, new themes, and a forthcoming new layout (Nouveau Oleanders, with five themes, by branchandroot). However, the big big news in this week's development is ...

(*booming tympani drumroll*)

This week, yvi resolved bug #11 from our bugtracking database -- a bug that was entered into the tracker before we weven had a preliminary testing version of DW up and running for people to log into. Bug #11 is the option for community maintainers to disable comments on entries if they need to, to immediately halt discussion in the case of an outbreak of flamewar or other such serious issue, until they have the time to spend a little more time handling the moderation thereof. (Entry posters will be able to re-edit the post to re-enable comments if they don't really want comments off, and maintainers will be able to re-enable comments whenever they want. Also, maintainers won't be able to enable comments on a post that the poster has chosen not to allow comments on. We think that's the right balance between things that are useful for comm admins to keep order in the comm and respecting the poster's wishes.)

(This has totally been yvi's busy month -- she just finished her masters' thesis, you see. So we're especially happy she found the time to do this, and even happier that she's also just submitted the long-awaited 'tag merging' patch, which still need to undergo the code review process but which should also be coming soon.)

Additionally, this week Mark and I spent some time working on our Google Summer of Code application, and things are looking pretty good for us to get at least one position funded for the summer! Keep your fingers crossed. And if you're a student looking to run a proposal by us, our ideas list has lots of suggestions. Start thinking now, because student applications start on March 29 and are due April 9.

We'll let you know if we're accepted as a mentorship organization in next week's update (and probably sooner in dw_dev, since decisions go out on Friday), but you don't need to go through Google Summer of Code to spend a summer coding with us. We'll take anyone and everyone who's interested in hacking with us. dw_dev_training is where to go for beginner help, and our Dreamhack service will provide you with your very own development environment so you don't have to worry about installing the code. Even if you've never programmed in Perl before, or programmed at all, we would love to have you. Our development team loves teaching people, and we love watching people get excited about learning new things.

2. Codepushes

Or rather, not-codepushes-yet! Many people have been asking about things that have been named in one of the weekly code tours, wondering why they couldn't see the changes. This is because even though we might have checked a change into our codebase, we don't automatically put it live on www.dreamwidth.org -- we give it time for our developer community to examine new code, try it out in their testing environment, and look for problems or ways the code can be improved before we put it on Dreamwidth. (And then, of course, the minute we put it live, we find all the bugs we didn't notice!)

This process is called a "code push", and we don't schedule them regularly -- we try not to let too long go between each push, because the longer we wait the more changes we're pushing at once and the greater the chance something will break, but the exact timing is more or less dependent on our available free time. We more or less decide on the timing for code pushes based on how much spare time and energy we have to babysit the push -- since post-code-push time commitment can be anything from a few minutes to verify that nothing's messed up all the way to a few hours of quickfixes for show-stopping bugs that nobody caught in testing.

mark announces code pushes in dw_maintenance, and we try to give at least 24 hours' notice, since code pushes usually involve a few minutes of the site being unavailable. We're planning on doing a push later on this week or earlier next, probably over this weekend, so keep an eye on dw_maintenance for details on when.

After this codepush, all of the changes from the most recent code tours will be live. Also, if you ever get lost about whether something's live or not, you can check the Code Status page, which will tell you.

3. Support

IN A WORLD ...

...where computers are filled with glitches, documentation is never ideal, and some people are trying to do things with a website that are awesome but that the designers never intended ...

ONE TEAM...

...stands between users and utter confusion.

The DREAMWIDTH SUPPORT TEAM. Showing now at a support board near you.

*ahem* I mean, the Support team has been doing a totally kickass job this week with going through and making sure that people get answers, whether to a technical problem they're having, a question they wanted to ask, or anything in between. (The things that are left on the support board, in fact, are all things that Mark or I need to weigh in on. Sorry we're so behind, guys. :/)

So, the support team project leads would like us to remind you that if you ever need anything, you can ask them. (Okay, they probably won't come to your house, wash your car, walk your dog, and make you dinner, but YOU NEVER KNOW.) The Support area can be used for tons of purposes, including:

* When you think something might be broken
* When you aren't sure whether something's broken or it's supposed to work that way
* When you can't find something and it's not in the FAQs (and they will also take care of letting the documentation team know to update the FAQs!)
* When you're looking straight at something you think is probably awesome, but you have no earthly clue how to make it work.
* If there's anything in general that you have questions about, or want to know more about.

Please don't ever feel embarrassed about asking, and don't feel like you're bothering them! We see a lot of people posting entries to their journals saying stuff like "I didn't want to bother Support, but does anybody know...", and that's totally not something you have to worry about. The Support team likes being helpful. Really. They've got this thing. Plus, if you're confused about something, you are likely not the only one, and if you mention it, we get to improve things for everyone -- reporting issues is a great and easy way to participate in the process of making Dreamwidth better for everybody.

Also, if you're not sure whether your issue is a suggestion or a bugreport that should go to the dev team, send it to support. They will happily help you figure out where things should go.

4. Finding Cool Things (version: Content)

Something cool we came across this week: erda has started organizing a Dreamwidth anniversary fest revolving around posting more original content on Dreamwidth itself, which we think is a pretty awesome idea. People are starting to post content already, but the main project is slated to begin April 26, right near the anniversary of our open beta launch.

The project is designed to encompass both fannish and non-fannish content, and various communities and areas of the site are already planning on how they want to celebrate it. The basic plan: for three weeks starting April 26, post at least some fresh content (fiction, essays, icons, recipes, pictures, artwork, what-have-you) to Dreamwidth, and for the length of those three weeks, what you contribute for the project should remain exclusive to DW. (After the three weeks, you can archive it wherever you want -- your website, other journal sites, archives, etc -- and things you create that aren't intended to be part of the fest can be posted elsewhere with your usual posting policies.)

There's a Latest Things feed for this project already: Three Weeks for Dreamwidth. If you're a community admin who'd like to run a community-wide project, or a user who'd like to commit to contributing content to the plan check it out; any entries you tag with the tag "three weeks for dreamwidth" will appear on the feed. (Assuming you haven't opted out of having your posts included, of course!) Once the fest starts, this should be a one-stop shopping list of all the amazing things our awesomely talented users (that's youse guys) have made.

Meanwhile, this week I found a community that I think is just plain nifty, not to mention useful: create_my_comm. For those times when you really want to see a Dreamwidth community for a particular topic or idea, but you don't want to run it yourself. If you're an experienced community admin looking for ideas, or have a great idea that you know you can't do justice to but hope somebody will, or are looking for what kind of audience your proposed community idea might have, this might be the comm for you.

There's also dw_community_promo, for maintainers to advertise new communities and readers to find communities they might want to join.

5. And speaking of communities...

We're thinking of spending an upcoming month concentrating, development-wise, on community admin/promotion features. We've already made a bunch of changes based on both our experience and your suggestions, and there are even more that are already in our bug tracking database, but we'd love to hear your thoughts. What are some tools and ideas that would make the process of administering a community more easy for you?

One thing we want to do (and have wanted to do for a while) is to split up the concept of "community administration". There are a lot of things tied together in the idea of 'community admin': control over the journal's tags/memories/layout, ability to screen/unscreen/freeze/delete comments, ability to add/approve/remove members, ability to add/remove other admins, etc. We'd like to break that up, so you'd be able to (for instance) deputize someone to be a tagging admin without having to worry that they'll lock you out of the community you founded. (We don't have an estimated timeframe for this yet -- we don't even have a full spec, and it's not something any developer has claimed yet -- but if you're looking for a Google Summer of Code proposal ... *hint, hint*)

That's the sort of stuff I mean, though -- changes to the experience and model of running a community that make it easier for you to do the day to day functions of comm maintenance, to have access to a stronger range of antiabuse/security/privacy tools, to more easily moderate posts and comments, etc. We've got a bunch of ideas of our own, but we'd love to hear yours. Sound off in the comments, or make a suggestion.

And, while I'm on the topic of communities: dw_suggestions is one of my favorite communities on the site, because it's full of smart, passionate people who care an awful lot about making DW a better place for everybody. If you've got some spare time and some spare opinions, check out the posts to dw_suggestions and vote or comment on proposals.

We don't rely 100% on user votes and comments when we decide what makes it into Bugzilla (and eventually to the site), but we rely heavily on it. The more we hear a variety of voices, from a whole different range of use cases for the site, the better and more inclusive the final product will be. It's pretty common for proposals to take much more shape after discussion and feedback, but that does need you!

6. Finding Cool Things (version People)

One of the things we've been hearing people occasionally say about Dreamwidth is they feel out of place here, because they don't participate heavily in fandom, or their friends don't feel comfortable moving, because there isn't a lot of non-fannish content. We just wanted to reiterate: Dreamwidth is not a fandom site! We're very fandom-friendly (it would kinda be hard not to be, when I've been in fandom since the early 90s or so in one form or another!), but we are by no means fandom-exclusive. There's an incredibly broad range of general-interest communities and people who post neat things (as evidenced by the Follow Friday tag on the Latest Things page: your built-in source for interesting reading recommendations!)

For those of you who aren't familiar with the way fandom tends to organize and band together, it can seem pretty overwhelming when everything is Stargate this and Supernatural that and White Collar the other. Still, there is a thriving non-fannish presence here on DW, and we'd love to see even more of it, because our end goal is to make a place where absolutely everybody feels comfortable, welcomed, and respected.

This is why I was really happy to see liv start a non-fandom friending meme, for people who don't self-identify as part of 'fandom' or who talk about a lot of things beyond fannish interests to find each other and hang out. Go and take a look and see if anybody strikes your fancy, and give subscribing to them a try for a bit! (And hey, Dreamwidth makes it easy to subscribe to somebody without giving them the keys to your locked posts, so it's almost always worth trying somebody out for a few weeks. I mean ... actually, no, no matter how I phrase that, it's going to sound horribly dirty.)

There are also a lot of links in the comments there to interesting and compelling content on DW, so even if you're not looking to expand your Circle's radius, you can find some posts you might like to sample. And, of course, if you're feeling sociable, you can add yourself in the comments, and see who comes to play with you, too.

Another good method of finding people who write the sort of thing you like to read is to hover over read the full Latest Things page. The next code push will also include an enhancement to the Latest Things page that will display feeds of the 100 most frequently-used tags on the site (and it might even be over a certain time period -- I'm a little fuzzy on that), so it's a grand way to find the sparkling gems of posts that show up here. (Seriously. I've been reading the Latest Things page for ages when I have some time to kill, and I am consistently and constantly impressed by the thoughtful, articulate, intelligent posts we get about everything and anything under the sun. It always leaves me wandering around my apartment beaming stupidly at the cats and declaring "OH MY GOD, I LOVE OUR USERS.")

7. (and on that note)

On the 'people' note, though, I do want to take a second to interject something a little more somber. Lately I've been seeing a lot of people elsewhere on other sites objecting to what they feel is strongarm pressure on the parts of their friends and DW supporters, to guilt/shame/push people into choosing Dreamwidth over another journaling platform (whether it be LiveJournal or a smaller service like InsaneJournal, JournalFen, Inksome, etc.)

I think a certain amount of this is people making excited posts about how much they love Dreamwidth (and let's face it, we are really really stupidly happy that you love Dreamwidth), but I wanted to take the opportunity to reiterate two of our core tenets and guiding principles, which are:

* Interoperability. We think it's really important for us to play nice with other sites on the internet, both technically and socially.

* Respect. We try to make decisions guided by the simple principle that everyone is valuable and everyone's choices are valid, and we try to avoid judging people for their choices as much as possible (and we also try to avoid giving the appearance of judging, which is usually even harder).

We hope that you guys will adopt and embrace these guiding principles as well, so that over time, they become a sort of community ethos that spreads out from us to everyone. While we obviously hope that, over time, everyone will come to see the awesomeness that is Dreamwidth, we don't view "Dreamwidth vs. other sites" as an either/or option -- we've done our best to build tools that will let each individual person decide their own comfort levels and make their own choices about how much to move to Dreamwidth (if at all) and how much of their content they want to share on other sites (if any), and we think it should be up to each individual to decide their own position and stance on the matter, whether that stance is pro-Dreamwidth or anti-Dreamwidth, and for whatever reason. (Although it does remind me of the old LJ support volunteer ongoing flamewar: pro-cheesecake vs. anti-cheesecake. For the record, I am pro-cheesecake and pro-Dreamwidth.)

At any rate, back during closed beta and at the beginning of open beta, we wrote up a list of Dreamwidth advocacy guidelines that are mostly still applicable today. I'd really love it if the Dreamwidth advocacy posts I'm seeing started concentrating more on why Dreamwidth rocks, instead of why other sites suck. Putting more positive energy out there into the universe never hurts.

8. Meetups

There are more Open Beta party meetups being planned over at dw_meetups. New this week is a DC-metro area, US party (coordinated in dcmetro), and still from last week is the London, England, UK. (Mark and I are still talking over the SF bay area meetup, and whether we want to throw a semi-official party or not, since the Web 2.0 Expo is a few days after Open Beta Anniversary Day and if I fly out a few days early, we could throw a nice shebang.)

If you want to coordinate a local meetup or take place in a virtual meet-up, dw_meetups is your place to go.

And, finally, I'll be appearing on a panel about women in free software projects on Sunday at LibrePlanet 2010. If you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, why not consider attending the conference? It's a small conference, totally reasonably priced, and there's still a good seventy-some attendee slots available.

*

That's it for us for another week! (And it's only like five hours after I started this ...) A reminder: if you have paid time that's about to expire, and you can't renew using check/money order for whatever reason, just open a support request in the Account Payments category and we've got you covered until we can implement our new payment solution.

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, assuming I make it out of the tax forms alive.

(Annnnnd ... cut!)

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

So much awesome.

[cesy]

How come LJ rolled out their equivalent of bug 11 at almost the same time? Is it just a coincidence, or did some liaising go on somewhere?

[florahart]

Is it the same? I think I understood them to say they did one in which people can lock further comments without invisiblizing existing ones, but mods can't yet--but I am not actually sure whether that's what this one does?

[torachan]

I'm looking forward to tag merging! I just had to retag some posts the other day because I realised I'd started using a different tag. Thankfully one tag had sixty-some posts and the other had five, so it was very easy to just retag the five.

[denise]

I know! yvi worked her rear end off on this patch, and by the time it's reviewed/committed, I think she may have won the title of "suggestions queen" for the number of huge suggestions projects she regularly tackles with grace, style, and enthusiasm.

[softestbullet]

Thank you for explaining code pushes! I was curious.

[denise]

You're welcome! It's not intuitive, I know, but it's a real advantage, because it means that major, major, "the site won't even turn on" type bugs get caught really quickly before they get rolled out to y'all.

[sky]

they feel out of place here, because they don't participate heavily in fandom, or their friends don't feel comfortable moving, because there isn't a lot of non-fannish content

I'm really surprised to hear this because I have the opposite problem, lol. There's lots of interesting non-fandom stuff for me around here, but none of my fandoms have really followed me to DW. I guess anime and manga fans just aren't as interested yet.

[softestbullet]

True! Someone oughta organize a festival, or something.

[florahart]

I know people say it all the time, but: I so appreciate that you guys specifically tell us what's going on in a way that is organized and on a (rough ;) ) schedule, in which you tell us things like, hey, here's a nutchell, but there's a bunch of info about [topic] at [comm] so there's a balance between "no idea what's happening" and "information overload."

I mean, just today LJ made a bunch of changes and the announcements of them seem to have been (I think?) in three places, which mostly didn't refer to each other, made by three different people (maybe? at least one was made by the general staff account), and that happened some time after the changes started causing interesting drama with assorted features. This is not to say they mean to make people cranky (though I find it disheartening how persistent some behaviors which always do so seem to be), but just, you have this model under which communication is a starting point and not an afterthought, and every single week when this update shows up I am glad about that all over again.

[denise]

Well, this is a case where different processes really show through -- from my time at LJ, I can tell you that the news posts and announcements are written by committee, and even when I was posting something under my own name/as myself in certain communities I needed to have two or three people approve/edit/sign off on it. So: delays to make sure things are accurate/everyone has weighed in/everyone has signed off on what's being said, that weird tone that sounds like a bunch of people all wrote something (because a bunch of people did), etc. Whereas with us, whoever's got the update for the week has the update for the week, and the nice thing about owning the company is that either of us can give signoff to ourselves. ;)

We had the advantage of seeing a lot of things that got codified into tradition on LJ over time (amusingly, I think I probably created or pioneered half the non-news-but-official-LJ-communities over my time there, when people would bitch about news posts with too much detail they didn't care about -- that was the big bitching topic in '04-'05 or so) and see what worked and what didn't, so we could put this kind of framework into place right up front. A lot of what we're doing with DW, communication-wise, comes from lessons-learned on LJ.

[lacey]

I love this update!

Am hoping that some enterprising soul picks the option to create a mobile Dreamwidth client! That would be very happymaking for me.

[poulpette]

It looks like at least one is interested in coding a iPhone app :)

[egret]

Thanks for this update and all the good stuff.
With all the discussion of communities, I'd like to ask if there is any timeline for the once-mentioned possibility of importing communities from LJ? I have one I've been waiting on moving over, hoping the import capability would appear :)

[denise]

It is still on the list! Nobody 'owns' the bug at the moment, but I'm hoping to sweet-talk somebody into adopting it soon, since I agree it would be a very good thing to have.

[yvi]

Wow, massive update with so much shiny! Will need to appreciate it when I am more awake :)

[denise]

For those who didn't see before my edit, I promoted yvi's degree from a MSc to a PhD. *g*

[rho]

Heathen! Heretic! Apostate! Blasphemer! Unholy Beelzebub-worshipping wench!

Anti-cheesecake is the One True Way, always and forever.

[pauamma]

Heathen! Heretic! Apostate! Blasphemer! Unholy Beelzebub-worshipping wench!

You're trying to sweet-talk her?

[birguslatro]

How far away is image hosting on Dreamwidth? It's been a while since I've heard any mention of it.

[denise]

We can't give an ETA, since it's a major project that doesn't currently have a developer who's really interested in it, but it is a priority of ours and we hope to get to it later on in the year.

To fandom or not to fandom?

[jumpuphigh]

I will admit to a very long moment of glee when you mentioned "White Collar" cause wasn't the season finale fantastic? I just cannot get over it.

I entered this format via LJ solely for reading fanfic but in time it truly has evolved into something else for me and while fandom is fun here on DW, I'm really enjoying the other communities that I am playing in as much, if not more, than any fandom comms that I play in. I feel like I have a full, balanced life here. I talk about cooking and knitting and money and shoes. I read about mathematics and lube/not lube and ravens and rock climbing. Through it all, I feel like I am home and can be completely myself. What a wonderful gift you have created for us, denise and mark.

In my mind and in my heart, I have always wanted a place like this and here it is. Not only has it been created, it is being created and there is room for me. I have been virtually knocking on neighbors' doors saying, "Oh, you like that? I like that, too. Do you want to get some tea and talk about it?" I love reading my network and then finding someone to add to my circle. I love reading the latest. There are such treasures to be found. I cannot get enough of it and yet I am overwhelmed by how much wonderfulness there is here.

Ok. I've made myself cry. I feel so passionate about this place in ways that I'm not sure that I can ever express fully. Thank you for creating a home.

Re: To fandom or not to fandom?

[denise]

Don't tell anybody, but you got me sniffling, too.

[kerravonsen]

I can't remember whether this was covered in suggestions or not - was there mooted an idea of community mods being able to make "official" posts AS the community user?
Here's a use-case:
I run a comm which has a co-mod. It's an icon-challenge community, and we take turns in posting challenges. Each challenge is in three phases:
1. Challenge post, where the challenge is posted, and participants post their responses in screened comments.
2. Challenge voting poll, where a poll is posted with all the icons, and members vote on the icons.
3. Challenge results; the results of the vote are posted; also the voting poll needs to be closed, and the screened comments in the challenge post need to be unscreened.

As things now stand, if one of the mods starts a challenge, and finds they can't finish it, we're stuck, because the other mod can't do things with a post that the first mod posted (such as see the screened comments).

But if "official-post-as-community" posts happened, would this enable mods to do things to "official" posts even if they weren't the one who originally posted it? Because that would be really handy.

[denise]

Not in the exact same form as what you describe, but we do want to add a "mod hat" type thing where an admin can designate their comm posts as official/admin business (as opposed to just using the community as another user), and the comments/posts will display differently. I think something like this would go well as part of that.

(As a side note, though, any admin of a community should be able to see all screened comments in the comm, not just on posts they posted, as long as they're actually an admin of a community and not just a moderator. And the distinction between the two is something that oh my god I am looking forward to killing.)

[princessofgeeks]

i love you and i love this place.

*mwah*

[jackandahat]

I find it really weird that people keep insisting Dreamwidth is a fandom place, because as far as I was concerned moving here was chosing principles over having any kind of fandom community. It's interesting how the different perceptions go. DW has been very difference for me because of the subscribe vs friend option.

[haruka]

Wow, thank you so much the mention of my community! See, that's just one more reason the DW admins are so awesome; they actually NOTICE what's happening on their site. :D

[elizaria]

♥

[thepastperfect]

TAG MERGE! That sounds fantastic! Of course, I manually fixed all my tags a few months ago, but it still sounds fantastic.

[lady_ganesh]

Thansk for #7, I'm sorry that it needed to be said but glad you said it. THE OTHER CHANGES SOUND SO EXCITING OMG.

[anya_elizabeth]

All that comm admin stuff just sounds... yes. Yes please. Drool.

In fact, as usual, every feature you mention makes me swoon with the awesome. You guys rock.

[cypher]

I love it here so much. And I love that reading dw_news always reminds me of that. ♥

[zarhooie]

(Okay, they probably won't come to your house, wash your car, walk your dog, and make you dinner, but YOU NEVER KNOW.)

Well, I don't wash cars as a general rule, but the other stuff isn't out of the question... I mean, um, HOW UNREASONABLE, I WOULD NEVER &c.

PS: ILU. <3

[dhobikikutti]

What I would love is the ability to hide members from the profile page of a locked-down comm. And possibly (though I am sure it might be more complicated), remove the comm from the list of comms on the members' profiles.

And a trench-coat.

[stormy]

You mean individually remove the community from your list of subscriptions or members?

Huh. I love hiding things.

You could always put that to suggestions? dw_suggestions / http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/suggest

[holyschist]

And hey, Dreamwidth makes it easy to subscribe to somebody without giving them the keys to your locked posts, so it's almost always worth trying somebody out for a few weeks.

Even if it sounds dirty, this was totally my killer feature. More and more I'm finding cross-site reading isn't as important to me as I originally thought, and split access/subscription is. <3 I think it is DW's very most awesome feature.

[stormy]

I second this. It was my most important feature as well. ♥

[bell]

Reading this post reminded me how much I love the DW team. :) Keep rocking!