Three hours to go!

[denise]

With three hours to go until our open beta launch, we're finalizing the last bits and pieces here and there. Some important information ahead of time:

* The Shop will open at 9PM EDT (GMT -4). Until then, if you load that link, it will redirect you to the main page, but it will be there when we're ready to start accepting payment!

* If you need a refresher about what each type of account gets, or about what our costs are, you can check out the paid account FAQ.

* 200 seed accounts will go on sale (for $200 USD each) at 9PM EDT. The other 200 will go on sale at 9AM EDT tomorrow morning, 12 hours from the first sale. If accounts sell quickly, don't worry -- it goes by when you put the account in your cart, so as long as you have the item in the cart, you'll be able to check it out and pay for it even if accounts have sold out. (Because of this, there may be a few more than exactly 400 sold, but it won't be more than a few more.)

* We will provide invite codes for our existing users to hand out as soon after 9PM EDT as we can. It won't be exactly at 9PM on the dot. Please bear with us.

* If you have sent in a request for more invite codes during the closed beta phase, we're going to be going through and mass-rejecting those requests right now, in order to clear out the requests for going forward. Everyone who has an account now will receive invite codes to hand out.

* If you have an OpenID account and set and validated an email address on the account, or if you're a subscriber to one of our project mailing lists, you will receive an invitation to join the site if you don't already have an account. Again, please bear with us. This will not be precisely at 9PM. (It may not even be tonight.) We need to do this manually, and we'll be very busy tonight.

T minus 3 hours and 10 minutes!

Welcome to Dreamwidth Studios!

[denise]

We are pleased to announce that we are now officially in our Open Beta! To pay for an account, visit the Dreamwidth Shop. Our first batch of 200 Seed Accounts are now on sale for $200 USD; they'll be available in the shop until all 200 are sold out. (The second set of 200 will go on sale at 0900 EDT (GMT -4) tomorrow morning, May 1.)

We'll be handing invite codes out to our existing users for them to distribute shortly. We'll also be providing invites to OpenID accounts that have set and confirmed their email address, as well as people who've subscribed to our mailing lists, if they don't already have an account, but that's going to take us a little bit longer.

One quick note: earlier in the week, we said that we were going to hold off on expiring the accounts of people who had used the beta helper tool to manually upgrade their accounts while we were in closed beta, in order to give them extra time to pay. While we were going over our checklist, though, we realized that would prevent some people from paying for accounts tonight. In order to prevent that, we had to expire everyone's accounts a little early. Our apologies for not realizing that sooner!

Meanwhile, if you're having issues, check the known issues list on our Support page. We'll be replying to support request as quickly as possible tonight, but we will be concentrating on any payment issues tonight.

If you have any payment problems, contact us through the Submit a Support Request page, selecting Account Payments as a category, or by emailing accounts@dreamwidth.org. (In particular, we know there's a bug where if PayPal times out at a certain point of the checkout process, you won't be able to get back to the cart and you'll have to make a new one. If this happens to you, you had a Seed account in your cart, and they sold out in the meantime, drop us an email and we'll help fix it for you.)


EDIT: We are looking into the issues with people getting invalid username errors and the issues with PayPal demanding a PayPal account to complete checkout, both of which didn't appear in testing.

Oops!

[denise]

As many people have noticed, we had two problems appearing in our payment system that didn't crop up during our testing:

* People who were paying to create a new account were receiving an "invalid username" error when they input their email address for the account creation code to be sent to;

* Our PayPal configuration is using PayPal's express checkout, which does require people to have PayPal accounts, rather than the option that allows people to pay as "guests".

Both of these were our errors, and we're really sorry about them. We did test those workflows, but we didn't pick up on those problems.

We've fixed the "invalid username" error now, and verified that the fix is working. If you were paying to create an account, it will work now, and tomorrow morning's Seed Account sale will work without this problem.

The problem with PayPal requiring a PayPal account is a little more complicated for us to fix, because it requires some more sweeping code changes and testing. We know that we told you guys that we'd accept credit card payments without requiring PayPal accounts, and we know that a lot of people missed out on buying a Seed Account in this sale because their payments wouldn't complete properly.

To fix this, we're going to do two things:

* We will put the second batch of 200 Seed Accounts on sale tomorrow morning, 0900 EDT, as scheduled. If you don't have a PayPal account, but you still want to buy a seed account in that sale, you can choose Check/Money Order as your payment type and send in the check or money order to us.

* Because these two errors were serious enough that they interfered with the Seed Account sale, we'll hold another sale in one week's time. We will sell 100 Seed Accounts on Thursday, May 7 at 9PM EDT (GMT -4), and 100 Seed Accounts on Friday, May 8 at 9AM EDT. This will let people who missed out on buying a seed account because of our mistake (either the PayPal problem or the invalid-username problem) have another chance at buying an account.

If you had any other errors during the payment process, we're working through our payment support requests as quickly as we possibly can, and we'll get to your request as quickly as possible.

We're really sorry about the errors!


Edit: And, the next problem identified and fixed as well. If you were having problems using the account creation code you were emailed, it should now be fixed.