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

[crosspistols]

Adding to the museboxes!

Some people also use them to store information as well as roleplay. Such as, they'll post applications for games, or extra information such as TL:DR's about certain aspects, memes about their characters and other various fun things. It depends on the type of musebox and the person who runs it. For example, I have a private one where I dump information or do private threads with people. Then I share one with a friend and we practice or mess around together o/

[denise]

Nope, the stuff from your personal account will be imported to your personal account!

[stewardess]

Edit for clarityy -- am I getting no drop down because:

a. both maintainer and comm have to be paid accounts
b. only maintainer has to be paid
c. only comm has to be paid
d. some other problem

[denise]

It should be either the community or the maintainer, not both. If you're not getting the dropdown for some reason (I'll check on the logic there), you can visit the page directly:

https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/importer?authas=username

where "username" is the name of the community.

EDIT: okay, yeah, turns out the logic on who to display the drop-down box to was a little busted. Can you try loading https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/importer now and see if you have the option to work as the community?

(edit the third time: okay, the first time I told you that it was fixed, it wasn't really fixed. Now it should be really fixed. Sorry about that!)

[kyosuke]

As one of the many users and RPers who felt affected by the changes in Livejournal and came to Dreamwidth in search of a different community to call home, I just really extend my gratitude to you and your fellow staffers. You've been so incredibly nice and helpful, working so hard to accommodate the massive spike in people while continuing to improve the site with new features that only serve to make the site even better to use. It's admirable, to say the least.

Even though this is a growing community (and exponentially so now!), you continue to interact with the users of this website, addressing their concerns, explaining things to them, or even just engaging in banter. That's just awesome, and it makes me feel really good about being on Dreamwidth, now.

...Not to mention dat customer support. How do you respond so fast? Are you a wizard?

[sarajayechan]

Aah, that's good.

But while it says "aborted" by the Entries, it says "waiting for entries" by Comments. Why is it waiting for entries if that was aborted?

[denise]

Just hang tight for now! When we're able to lift the restriction on larger community import (which we're hoping should be soon), we'll announce it here in dw_news. The changes Mark's made to the importer to optimize it will hopefully minimize the need for us to do any babysitting of large community imports, but we want to test it first...

[skinners_box]

Completely understandable, we'll be nice and quiet till February before we inflict more headaches. Thanks!

[advancing]

Thank you! I thought it was apropos for this post. :D

[denise]

I am secretly a brain in a vat of blue fluid with an internet connection stuck into it. ;)

(Okay, no, I just type really really really fast and like handling replying to people so mark can do the techincal wizardry.)

[noletters]

+1 to everything mentioned above.

Thank you so much you guys, really.

[leca]

Thank you so much for getting this up so quickly! I just ran an import on a (small) RP community, and it worked amazingly!

I just wanted to let everyone here know that I really appreciate your hard work and how well you're dealing with the new users... especially how you're considering what we specifically need for our fandom and RP purposes.

tl;dr you folks are amazing

[februaryfour]

You guys are fantastic. ♥ So happy to be a seed account holder and DW-fanclub member/fellow-proselytizer. ^_^

Happy New Year!

[denise]

This was a temporary glitch that affected a few communities created at precisely the wrong time -- can you open a support request in the Account Payments category (just to make sure it goes to me) with the name of the community and I'll fix it?

[buries]

will do! thank you so much.

[esperchild]

I thank all of you for being so patient. I hope all of you realize just how much us newcomers appreciate all your hard work.

Thank you very much.

[crosspistols]

I told you DW was amazing, what took you so long, dude? WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?

[ladyminya]

I am secretly a brain in a vat of blue fluid with an internet connection stuck into it. ;)

I knew it! :O

;)

[denise]

I know it's confusing -- the 'aborted' is the status for the second job you started, but the 'waiting for entries" is the status for the first one (the one that's still running). We have a bug open to make the messages more clear there to prevent some of this confusion!

[stewardess]

I may be about to exhaust the capability of "comment tech support." :p

Went to that page (substituting life_wo_fanlib for the username), filled everything out, clicked on "start import."

Got the error "Import Journal
Duplicate entry '1324534-lj_verify-1' for key 1"

[lanterne_rouee]

Congratulations and Happy New Year! :)

[kyosuke]

Excuse you, you never said anything.

[denise]

We're hoping it won't be that long -- Mark spent a lot of time earlier this week working on various optimizations, and things are running a heck of a lot faster now, but we wanted to stress test it a bit with smaller imports before we say for sure. Stay tuned!

[sarajayechan]

Aah, okay.

So how long before I should retry my import?

[denise]

Hee, the last thing I need are more of the characters in my head getting mouthy. The ones I write for already get too pushy sometimes. *G*