Community importing is live.

[mark]

Hi all -- I wanted to post a quick news post to let you know that community imports are now live. There's also some other content inside... down past the cut!

Community Imports

There are a few things you should be aware of before you go ahead and start importing your communities. Most of this has been mentioned in the last news post, but just to reiterate the salient details:

* You must be a maintainer of the community on both sites.

* The imported content will be owned by an OpenID account for the original author. This means that the content is still under the control of the author -- LJ/IJ/etc users can come to DW, log in with their remote account, and manage their content.

* This is temporarily restricted to paid accounts. We will undo this restriction as soon as the import queue has died down -- probably in a week or two?

* We have also temporarily limited comment imports to 100,000 comments. If your community has more than that, the comment import will fail. We will lift this restriction as soon as we're sure that we can handle the additional load. (Better safe than overloaded and slow!)

To initiate an import, you should head on over to the Import Content tool. At the top of the page will be a dropdown showing communities you control. Pick where you would like to import to, and the rest of the process should be pretty simple.

Please let us know if you have any trouble. We'll be watching this news post and the support queue and doing our best to make sure that this is an easy, pleasant experience.

Traffic and Growth

I also want to take a moment and say thank you to all of you for being really patient with us over the past few weeks. We've been really hammered by all of the new traffic and have been rolling out new servers to serve the additional capacity.

We've already added two extra web servers and we currently have an order in for two more database servers with extra RAM and disk space. This is a lot of extra capacity and will help to make sure that we continue to be responsive and grow as our userbase grows.

Some people have expressed concern over our ability to scale with the demand. I'm pretty comfortable saying that we've weathered the increased usage in the past few weeks rather well and I don't see that changing. While there are always unexpected bumps along the way, I can promise to keep everybody informed about exactly what is going on. If you haven't yet, you might want to bookmark our dreamwidth Twitter account. We use it pretty regularly and it's the first place we will go if Dreamwidth is down and we need to let you know what's up.

Farewell 2011!

The end of the year (according to the calendar I use, anyway) is here. In a few days it will be 2012. I don't know what the future holds, but I'm really excited to see it.

Thank you for being a part of Dreamwidth. We look forward to making this place even better for you!

Comments

[ardath_rekha]

Most of those elements are issues of communication between mod and user, though, and not really the kind of thing that anyone on Dreamwidth can oversee. I'm part of an RP that moved here, and once they made the decision to do so, they immediately put up a "Dreamwidth 101" page in the game wiki, but on the other end of the spectrum you have the sorts of mods who never ask their members what they think and do all kinds of things (including abruptly deleting the whole community they maintain) without any kind of notice or consensus. Even if someone wrote a huge "OpenID For Dummies" guideline that answered every possible question people could have, they'd still never mention it to their members and those members would have to find it on their own.

A guidelines page would be great, but give how much the DW staff currently has on their plates, I think the onus needs to be on the DW community to create it rather than them. Bearing in mind, of course, that no matter how well and thoroughly it's written, people are still going to jump to conclusions and/or refuse to even look at it.

[the]

love you guys! i feel so genuinely regretless giving money to you.

[oconel]

Great news!!

[blackmare]

I'd be all for the DW community coming up with something; we'd only need the staff to post said thing (pending approval) in a place it's likely to get seen by as many people as reasonably possible.

Because, as you say, many people will miss it, ignore it, outright refuse to read it, etc.; such is the nature of humans. Still wouldn't be a bad thing to have.

And on that note, I am off to my job!

[gigglingkat]

There's also the time-honored tactic of "stuff gets slow, throw more hardware at it". *G*

This reminds me of when I first got access to the IT ticketing system at work - I kept seeing laptop response tickets closed as "DCAR'd it"

Delete Cookies
Add RAM

[denise]

heeeeee

In one tech support job I've had that shall remain nameless, the litany was "clear cache, delete cookies, wave dead chicken over keyboard", and particularly weird/difficult-to-solve problems would be known as "dead chicken problems". :)

[d_r_a_c_o]

Yes. I am from Spain, I speak Catalan, Spanish and mutitlate English. Oh don't worry too much, there will be time in the future, I'm sure ♥

Re: Error message

[musyc]

*snerk* That was the first thing I thought of.

Re: To Community Mods & Owners Porting Over Here from LJ:

[intermezzo]

Do your members know that they can edit their entries here if they want to? The way I understand it -and if I got it wrong, I'm sure someone will chip in and correct me- original posters have TOTAL access to the content they've written and that was imported here. They just have to log in using their Open-id and do whatever they want to their entries.

It's possible your members were angry cos you didn't warn them about the migration before going through with it, but it's also possible that they reacted the way they did just because they didn't know they still retain control over their content.

[intermezzo]

Awesome! :)

Re: To Community Mods & Owners Porting Over Here from LJ:

[fannyfae]

Thanks for that. I had no idea, myself. So that input is helpful. Hopefully you are right.I know that this person was very (!!) adamant that they wanted no Dreamwidth account in order to do that. I offered to help where I could and your post in turn helps me. When I looked, however, the person who wrote me had left the comm, so I am not sure that even matters at this point.

Yes, I should have posted a warning. The community had been inactive for a bit, and I had announced my intention to post the prompts over there, which again, was my main intent. I will be certain to let folks know that they retain control over their content.

Re: To Community Mods & Owners Porting Over Here from LJ:

[intermezzo]

You're welcome. I'm pretty sure I read a comment about this by denise on this post so you might want to check the previous comments. BUT if you're in a hurry, read this in the faqs. Seems I was right. ;)

[bankai]

Awesome site, glad to be back and using it. Think the way you're handling all of this new traffic is very cool. :)

[gorramwolf]

Thank you for the quick answer!!

[rosesablaze]

Fluffy owl! *_* Hehe, I love birds. <3

[peppervl]

But if I don't want my entries/comments/whatever imported to DW from LJ, that's not me flouncing and taking all my toys with me. It's the community maintainer flouncing and deciding that all my toys are hers to do with as she pleases.

[peppervl]

This. Absolutely this.

[briar_pipe]

Apparently there have been several already! Cesy, Stormy, and Cesy again. I'm not sure what I could add that those folks haven't already come up with.

[biodamped]

Awesome news! :D Thanks so much for the update. I think you guys have done a pretty brilliant job with all the new traffic. And, in fact, a pretty brilliant job with everything over the past two years I've been here. Now all my life needs is a cross-site reading page (I'll keep dreaming) and it'll be set!

Have a brilliant new year and best wishes to all the DW team for 2012. It's officially eve here, so I'm off to celebrate!

[azurelunatic]

OpenID accounts that have not confirmed email addresses are treated like anonymous comments.

Anonymous comments, I think, have image placeholders forced on as an antispam/etc. measure.

[ayngelcat]

Hi - can you tell me why my import only brought in my tags and a couple of icons, my profile and a few other useless items - no journal entries as requested. I gather this can't be changed and I'm afraid now to try anything else! I got no 'failed import' email. Can you help? Cheers :D

[mark]

It's probably still in the queue -- icons, tags, and bio stuff comes over fast, but the entries/comments may take 12-24 hours. There's a lot of people importing right now!

[ayngelcat]

Ah, I see. Thank you :-)

[eumelkeks]

This is a fantastic end-of-the-year present. Thank you so much for making this possible!

[naye]

AWESOME! What an amazing gift for the new year - being able to move a community is going to make it so much easier to relocate to DW. Thank you, guys! ♥