Dreamwidth Update: 16 December

[denise]

Hello, Dreamwidth! This news post is full of a lot of exciting things, so I will dive straight in.

Behind the cut:

* Development news
* New Create Entries beta
* New themes and styles
* Also new in the last code push
* Open account creation
* Reminder: holiday promotion
* Possible import/crosspost problems
* Deleted accounts purged
* The Ada Initiative
* Version 2.0

Development news

Code tours for the bugs that have been resolved since the last update:

21 Oct - 31 Oct
1 Nov - 11 Nov
11 Nov - 21 Nov
21 Nov - 3 Dec
3 Dec - 7 Dec

All of those above changes are now live on the site and available for use, so if you see something interesting, you won't have to wait for it.

Welcome-back this week to kaisa, laitaine, and yvi, who return to us after a break from DW development!

I'll get into some more of the awesome changes included in this last code push in a minute, but first I wanted to talk about the ...

New Create Entries beta

It's been a long, hard road -- you would not believe what we had to do on the backend in order to make this work! -- but the first draft of our new Create Entries workflow is now in beta testing. If you're interested in participating in the beta test, visit the Beta Features page, and the second of the two beta testing opportunities is for the new Create Entries page. (The first is for the new-style Javascript behavior -- we've been working on modernizing all the JS across the site to run faster, better, cleaner, and more adaptably.)

Not everything is finished yet -- among the things not yet available are the "don't autoformat entry" option, the rich text editor, editing existing entries in the new workflow, and the saving of draft posts of any type -- but this beta is an opportunity to spot not only bugs but workflow, usability, and accessibility problems.

I personally turned on the new version the second it was live and I've been loving it -- fu and hope did an amazing job taking my original crappy pencil sketches with lots of handwaving and turning them, with your feedback, into something that Just Works. It's also amazingly customizable: if you hit the image, the page will enter "settings mode" and let you collapse, move, and remove any pane you don't use regularly (or put back something you got rid of and now you miss).

There are still some bugs we're uncovering -- no matter how well you test, having tens of thousands of people using something will always turn up something you don't find in testing -- so if you spot something weird, report it on the bug reporting post in dw_beta. We especially want to hear from anybody who has accessibility problems with the new workflow.

Massive, massive thanks go to everybody who's offered feedback on the changes so far. This whole process may have been relatively painful on the technical end, but it's been a delight to go through on the user-facing end, and y'all and your smart, productive, constructive feedback are a major, major reason why.

New themes

The last two code pushes included a massive number of new themes for customizing your journal -- 160 in total, spread out over 17 different styles. If you've been looking for a new look for your journal, why not try browsing through the featured styles and see if any of them strike your fancy?

There are also three relatively-new styles: Crisped, Dusty Foot, and Five AM. Check them out!

Also new in the last code push

Since our last code push, we've had a collection of interesting bugs resolved. A large number were to fix problems with the Create Entries beta (or the new-JS-on-journals beta), or backend things you wouldn't notice (go on, ask kareila about moving around all of our perl modules; I think she'll still be twitching about it in another six months), but there's still a whole host of things that you should find interesting. The full details are in the code tours, but if you're curious, some of the big ones:

Bugfixes

* Polls with more than 90 checkboxes in a single poll question weren't recording votes properly. This is now fixed.

* The display settings for when to show image placeholders for images of unknown size were accidentally switched around, so that never meant always and always meant never. This is now fixed.

* If you had a lot (like, thousands) of multilevel tags (of the "category: specific" form), the display of those tags was timing out in some cases when viewing your journal or your tags page. We've optimized the code to display the tags so they won't time out anymore.

* If an entry had over 10 pages of comments, the box that displays the number of pages was behaving weirdly in some browsers, which has been driving me nuts for like, two years now and which I never got around to filing a bug for. Fortunately someone else (namely ninetydegrees) noticed and patched it :)

* When you created a new community, it was accidentally being left out of your Default reading filter if you'd created one. This is now fixed!


Enhancements

* You will no longer receive a success notice for every crosspost you make by default; you'll only be notified in your Inbox if an attempt fails. You can still go to the notifications setting page and choose to receive success notices if you want, though!

* On the interests search page, you can now specify up to three interests to search for at a time. This is an AND search, not an OR search -- if you want to find people who are interested in knitting, cats, and textual deconstruction of Japanese RPGs, you can do it now. (And then introduce me to them, because I think we'd probably get along.)

* A massive new update to the external sites you can use in the <user name=foo site=bar> tag: now you can also refer to people on Blogspot (blogspot.com), Delicious (delicious.com), DeviantArt (deviantart.com), LastFM (last.fm), Ravelry (ravelry.com), Wordpress (wordpress.com), and Plurk (plurk.com) and have the tag pull the correct userhead icon.

* The option for setting who could send you a private message was on the Manage Profile page, which only made sense if you thought of it as a contact method and not as a privacy-related setting. Since it was clear that most people thought of it as a privacy setting, it's now on the Privacy tab of the Manage Settings page.

* Poll enhancement: you can now not only view how everyone answered an individual poll question, but also view how each individual person answered all of the questions in the poll. Hopefully this will make things easier for people using DW to conduct surveys!

* Another poll enhancement: if you use the scale question type in a poll, you can now add labels to the high end and low end of the scale, so people don't have to stare at the question and think "okay, does 1 mean I agree completely or I disagree completely?"


Honorable Mention

In the "things you will hopefully never notice but oh my god, so much work" department, we totally have to say a thank you to kareila for all her work on reorganizing the backend code so things are where you'd expect them to be (instead of where they got put randomly over the years) and to ninetydegrees for not only patching a ton of new themes, but also going through and optimizing over six hundred preview images to make them load faster and display with more reliable color information. Both of y'all deserve cookies, seriously.

Open account creation

Earlier this year, we decided to try out a "no invite codes needed" week to see whether we could do it semi-regularly and still keep the same level of service (and of spam protection) that the invite codes let us stick with. The results were pretty good, so we've decided to try it again, and for a little longer this time!

For the rest of the year, creating a Dreamwidth account will not require an invite code: just visit the Create an Account page.

We do reserve the right to switch invite codes back on if open account creation is causing problems -- invite codes let us carefully balance the site's resources and keep spammers from overrunning the site -- but with luck, that shouldn't be a problem.

Reminder: holiday promotion

Just a reminder: for the remainder of 2011, all orders made in the Dreamwidth Shop will receive a 10% points bonus for future use. For instance, if you buy yourself a 12 month paid account (350 points), we'll give you 35 points to spend later once you complete your order.

This is one way of saying "Thank you!" to everyone who helps to support Dreamwidth -- it's your support that keeps us on the air. We're completely user-supported: we take no venture capital, have no outside investors, and are completely advertising-and-sponsorship-free. Your support is what allows us to keep making Dreamwidth better, and we are super grateful for everyone who's given that support.

Possible import/crosspost problems

Things have mostly calmed down now, but if you've been watching dw_maintenance (and you should be!) you'll have noticed that over the past few weeks there have been some issues with importing from and crossposting to LiveJournal. This is because LiveJournal has been having problems with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks intermittently for the past few weeks, and their DDoS mitigation attempts can make it very hard for Dreamwidth to contact the site.

In general, if you receive errors in your inbox telling you that the job can't connect to LiveJournal, you're running into that problem. Until you receive the error in your inbox, the job is still running. For imports, wait a little while after you get the failure message and then schedule a new import. For crossposts, wait a little while, then edit the entry and check the crosspost box, then save the entry. (You don't have to make any actual edits to the entry.)

LJ's people have been absolutely great about keeping us in the loop about what's going on, and we'd like to thank them for the information and wish them luck in their mitigation efforts.

Deleted accounts purged

A few months ago, we mentioned that we don't regularly run the script that permanently removes deleted accounts from the site, because of the load it can place on the servers and the databases. We realized that we never did run that script after all -- oops! We've fixed that now.

Because we've been so irregular about running it, we changed the time an account has been deleted to make it eligible for complete removal from 30 days to 90 days to give a little more wiggle room. The script has finished running, so if there's a username you've had your eye on for renaming, check to see if it's available now.

We'll try to be a little more regular about purging deleted accounts in the upcoming year. Also, remember: this does not affect inactive accounts, only accounts that the owner has chosen to set to 'deleted' status. Once you register a personal DW account, that username is yours until you choose to delete it.

The Ada Initiative

One of the things Dreamwidth has received a lot of press about is the gender balance of our contributors -- while most open source projects struggle to have just a few contributors who identify as female, our volunteer base is well over half female-identified. We're just one small fish in a very big pond, though, and there's been a lot of discussion in the open source world about how to address the gender imbalance problem: while women make up slightly over 20% of the IT world as a whole, statistics show that they make up about 2% of open source contributors.

I've been volunteering on the board of directors for the Ada Initiative, an organization dedicated to concrete, active efforts to improve women's participation in open technology and culture communities and projects. The experience of being a board member has been awesome (and exhausting!) and although the heavy lifting is being done by the two employees of the Initiative, it's been great to have an opportunity to pitch in and contribute.

Diversity, opportunity, and equality of all kinds are incredibly important to me and mark, and in the spirit of furthering that goal, we'd like to invite you all to consider contributing to the Ada Initiative fundraising drive. Meanwhile, in the spirit of putting our money where our mouths are, we'll be donating 10% of our gross revenues for the month of December (with a minimum donation of $1000) to the organization ourselves.

Version 2.0

No, not Dreamwidth version 2.0. We're pleased to announce the arrival of mark and aposiopetic's version 2.0, Oliver Graham Smith.

Oliver has already mastered serious face and is a champion sleeper. Mom, Dad, and baby (and older brother!) are doing wonderfully, and we're looking forward to getting Oliver's first Dreamwidth patch in another 13 years or so. :)

Congratulations to Mark and Ari, and welcome to Oliver!

*

That's it for us for another update! 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 in a few weeks for our next update.

Comments

[rainne]

I WOULD RAMBLE SIMILARLY IF YOU ASKED ME ABOUT MEDIEVAL EUROPE SO THERE. :D

And while some might say that DW's low usage (compared to LJ) is a bad thing, I say at least it means you aren't getting DDoS'ed by the Russian government. Personally, I prefer shopping at the neighborhood corner store. I haven't been in a Wal-Mart in ages.

What you said about the decision fatigue - I think I read about that somewhere else, in a different context - they were talking about how people get super-stressed doing things like grocery shopping a lot more than they used to, because say you want a box of Hamburger Helper or something - where maybe 10 years ago there were two or three kinds, now there's 150 kinds and you stand there staring at the shelf like I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM GOING TO WANT ON FRIDAY until you just say "oh, fuck it" and blow your whole shopping budget in the chocolate-and-potato-chip aisle.

Isn't there some way for the changes they make to be optional? Like, you have S1 and S2, right? So make an S3 that's designed for the low-engagement users, and make that the default, and then people who don't want it can opt out of it. Is that kind of thing even possible?

Also, what you said about resources reminds me that I need to contribute. I always forget, since I have a seed account and don't have to pay every year. XD

[denise]

Possible, yes -- just about anything is possible -- but introducing another choice is a bad idea, plus it would increase the support necessary. (Like, now all of a sudden you'd have to test changes in even more settings and configurations. It's already bad enough. There's a reason one of the first things we did was kill S1.)

(Also, it wouldn't be "S3", since S1 vs S2 are actually journal customization systems. The fact that the new design only applies to S1 right now is a very long explanation and only partially relevant, but essentially: they probably started with S1 because the S1 concept of "journal entry page" was ridiculously old and needed an update desperately: S2 handles journal entry pages through the journal customization system, not through the site templating system that S1 uses. Way back when Brad started work on S2, he intended for all entry display pages to be handled through the journal customization system someday, because the old code was really really old and inefficient, even back then. On DW, every entry page is displayed through S2, believe it or not, even if it's site-styled comment pages: that way we only have one code pathway to maintain.)

But, yeah, offering an opt-out for a full redesign is very, very rarely a smart choice. If you scroll down to "Will new features be opt-in or opt-out?" in our pre-open-beta business FAQs I go into it in more detail, but essentially, it's easy to do an opt out for a new feature (if the opt out isn't just "okay, so don't use it then!") but it's often counterproductive to do an opt out for a new design. We're back to the decision fatigue again.

(frozen comment)

[rainne]

OK, that mostly makes sense.

But you did manage to scare me. Are you saying the reason I (and others) still have the old style comments page on my LJ is because I'm using S2, and that eventually they're going to do this to S2? Because if that happens I might just have to cut a bitch.

(frozen comment)

[denise]

The reason you still have old style comments is because you're set to S2 with custom comment pages enabled, yeah. (S2 with no custom comment pages uses the new system.) I believe I saw them saying that they were planning to roll out the new changes to S2 custom comment pages over time, but I'm not 100% sure and I absolutely don't want to answer for LJ, especially when I know nothing about their future plans! (Answering about general social media management principles, sure; answering about technical details shared between the sites, sure, but I don't work for LJ anymore and I don't know anything more about their plans/decisions/etc than any other user, especially since it makes me very sad when people use DW news comments as a venue for bashing LJ.)

(frozen comment)

[rainne]

Good point, and I dunno why I asked you that - I wouldn't ask someone at Target about Walmart. *facepalm*

One more question and then I'm going to go away and quit pestering you (LOL). Is there any way to set up my DW reading page to also read my LJ friends page? Or would I need, like, an RSS reader or something? (Because I don't know anything about RSS readers; never used one.)

(frozen comment)

[denise]

There isn't a way to read locked entries from LJ. You can set up RSS feeds for each journal's public entries at the Feeds page -- anybody can make a feed.

(frozen comment)

[foxfirefey]

Actually, if you want to read your friends page using RSS, you can, but you'll need to use a desktop RSS reader, like Owl. (Publicly pulling feed readers like DW and GReader do not do them.) If that's something that interests you, let me know, I can tell you how to get the auth digest feed, assuming it still works.

(frozen comment)

[abe]

Hi, that was a nice discussion on social media theories. I'll step in here because I don't want to break your cohesive thread with a random comment, but your line here:

And there are a lot of different use cases for LJ. Historically speaking, LJ was designed to be very flexible and the userbase responded by using it very flexibly, and because of the network effect everybody only sees their own use case and that of their friends/communities -- and they think everyone uses LJ like that

Made me think of something my friend linked me this a couple of hours ago, and that's become my theory on why LJ is ignoring the users (fandom side) on this. LJ has a direction it's going, and sadly, I don't think they're particularly keen on allocating space in the car for fandom.

[jeshyr]

Thanks for all this discussion about social media theory and how it applies to LJ and especially to Dreamwidth and such. It's really interesting and the stuff about engagement ladders and decision fatigue makes a lot of sense!!

[denise]

WIND ME UP AND WATCH ME GOOOOOOOO

[jeshyr]

You make me learn stuff and it is good!! And then I know it and it makes me understand other sites - like archiveofourown.org which added the "Kudos" button for their fics as well as comments and now I know why and I feel all smart and educated :)

[appearifywords]

As an AO3 user myself, I can honestly say I abuse the shit out of the Kudos button. It takes way less time than adding a comment, and I often don't even know what to say after reading a great fic!

[radiantsoul]

Like or thank buttons are pretty interesting.

Often when people blog complex emotional posts I struggle to know what to say, I want to say I have read what the person said. But it is hard to know without patronising or missing a big issue, etc. So it is nice to have a way of saying I have actually read what they have written.

[schwertlilie]

Seconding rb - thanks for this crash course in social media. :) It's made some things online make more sense, and not just in blogging-service-land.

Thanks too for staying classy about what's going on with LiveJournal right now, and (as a company & a representative) not dragging their name through the mud to win points with disgruntled LJ users. It means a lot. ♥

[denise]

Both Mark and I worked at LJ for many, many years (him from '04-'07; me from '03 to '07) and both of us volunteered for a long time before (I think we both started volunteering in '01), and let's be honest: DW wouldn't exist without LJ. Not only did we begin the DW codebase with forking the open source LJ server code, we literally learned most of what we know about both online community and technical management of a web app like this at LJ. Both of us still have very close friends who work or volunteer for LJ (like, I performed the wedding of the lady who handles all their billing inquires, that kind of close) because the friendships we all formed back then stick. I get very sadface when people excoriate my friends! Especially when it's over things they don't have any control over.

I know the reason people are getting so emotional about LJ's changes is because they really, really care about the site and the community they built with it, and when people feel like their community is being threatened, they get very very emotional about things. But I really do wish people would remember that we've said from the very beginning that "LiveJournal or Dreamwidth" is not an either-or choice, and we've done our best to make sure that people can seamlessly use both sites as much as they want. We knew from the beginning that LJ and DW would grow in different directions -- that's a lot of the reason why we started DW, so we could grow in a different direction than we saw LJ starting to head in, in order to give people a choice -- but it just makes me so, so sad when people concentrate less on the awesome things that we've done with DW and try to just make it all about how LJ is sucking.

I mean, I like that people really love Dreamwidth! I'm really glad people love DW, and it's awesome to see people saying how much they love our features or the way we try to roll. Hearing stuff like that can totally brighten my day. I just wish sometimes that I saw fewer compliments to DW that are really disguised digs at LJ, you know? LJ is our mommy and our daddy rolled into one, even though we've diverged so far, and I dunno about you, but I get a little :( when somebody insults my mommy. *g*

(And I really hope you don't think I'm lecturing! I just ... sort of needed a place to say it, and your comment provided a good starting point. Thank you for your compliment; it was definitely not one of the ones that make me :(.)

[arie]

<3

[schwertlilie]

Actually, I agree with pretty much everything you've said, so no worries. :)

There's a difference between being angry at a company for a decision & blaming every staff member for that decision, and I wish more people understood that. :( Personally, I'm pissed that the update broke the way I use Livejournal and at the public comments of a few particular staffers, but I feel horrible for the staff & volunteers who are getting crap thrown at them simply because they're associated with LJ. (astronewt deserves a medal for braving the comment threads - it's not like sie was the one who decided to push a buggy release, and sie's working off limited information hirself.)

There are more options than just LJ and DW (journalfen and insanejournal, off the top of my head) and the whole "DW's not LJ, let's go!" attitude makes me sadface too. Yes, DW's wonderful, but shouldn't people pick their service of choice based on what it is, not what it isn't?

And to be quite honest, one of my favourite things about Dreamwidth has always been that you don't make us choose one service over another. :) (I'm nearly seven years at LJ and almost two years here.) The cross-posting feature is glorious, and it's meant that parts of my friends list have been able to move their base of operations without breaking up the social group. It's made my transfer easier, and it's a big part of why I have a DW.

(It's kind of unfortunate for you guys that your open account creation coincided with this drama - over 50 000 new accounts in 48 hours, yikes!)

Anyway. ♥ for you and the other DW staff & volunteers, and cookies to the LJ staff getting caught in the backlash about things they didn't do/had no choice about.

(frozen comment)

[darkrose]

I've been trying not to gratuitously bash LJ, but it's hard, because I'm angry. I feel like a restaurant I ate at all the time, where I knew all the waitresses and always overtipped changed management and did a complete redesign and became a trendy hipster club where I always feel like the staff are sneering at me because I'm old and fat--though they're still happy to take my money.

For me, it's not the redesign itself that upsets me. It's the response to it, or in some cases, the lack of response. I understand the impulse to mock users. I've been doing it a lot today, but always off the phone. I've been making a conscious effort not to take my frustrations with the idiots in other departments out on the poor applicants. Unfortunately, the official response to this was all from igrick initially, and he made no attempt to conceal the fact that he views a significant chunk of the userbase with contempt. I never wanted LJ or DW to be an either-or-choice, but since LJ keeps kicking me in the face, my instinct is to snuggle even harder with DW.

[appearifywords]

As a shiny new Dreamwidth, let me just say I love you guys already!

You've put so much work into being welcoming to those migrating over after all the heartbreak over LJ, and I'm very happy with my experience thus far! I absolutely adore the Import function - it made it very easy to bring over all my writing from LJ.

And the fact that 100 icons is the base for paid accounts made me a very very happy roleplayer. I know I'll definitely be investing in more than just a one month paid on one journal when my next check comes in!

So consider this a very very grateful "thank you" from one user who was positively heartbroken over LJ's redesign. I actually can't use LJ at all as it is. The redesign hurts my eyes. :'C

[aesopian]

I truly appreciate you taking the time explain this. I want to think that I'm a half-way intelligent person so it's nice to have someone who will explain the ins and outs behind the system changes and offer a reasonable explanation for a site's actions and decisions. It doesn't make me entirely happy with the changes on LJ still, but at least I can start to look at it a little more objectively.

My love to you and yours. <3

[jer]

Seconded. If only people over there were willing to explain things like this the way it's been done here... well, people would still complain. But it's much better than "THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING. END OF DISCUSSION."

[phenylalanine]

Seconding everyone else, denise, thank you for taking the time to explain all of that! It was very interesting and stuff I hadn't heard before. And it really does help explain some of LJ's reasons for removing features, which previously made NO sense to me. :)

[exor674]

On DW, every entry page is displayed through S2, believe it or not, even if it's site-styled comment pages: that way we only have one code pathway to maintain.)

Not true yet <333 -- we still use talkread for site-styled comment pages sadly ( now, ?style=light/site on [most] other views goes through S2 ) -- haven't gotten that converted over yet.

( Not that it really matters, *g* I am just being pedantic )

[marahmarie]

Incidentally, isn't Core 1 essentially LiveJournal's original, untouched S2, and Core2 something like a more Dreamwidth-specific (and perhaps unofficial) form of S3 as it's used on on DW? That was my take on our core style systems (but also me just taking a wild guess).

[denise]

No, the changes aren't anywhere near severe enough to qualify as a second version.