dw_news | Reminder: Beta features are available to test!

Reminder: Beta features are available to test!

It's been a while since we've reminded you of the existence of the Beta Features collection. This is where we make new features and major page redesigns available to people in advance of changing them for the whole site, so people can help find the weird edge case bugs, let us know about usability and accessibility problems, and generally bang on certain changes before we make them the default behavior so the deploy runs more smoothly.

I'm posting about beta test opportunities because 2023 has been the Year Of Finishing That Last 10% On So Many Things, and part of that is us making a real push to get some more things out of beta. In particular, the redesigned Create Entries page has been in beta for an absolutely mortifying length of time by now, and we are absolutely determined to finish up the last few things that are blocking us from releasing it and get it out the door relatively soon.

This is the last call for "I'm having a problem with this page that will keep me from being able to use the site if you make this the only way to update". If you haven't enabled the New Create Entries Page beta to test it, please consider doing so soon! It's a full, ground-up rewrite and redesign of the update page in order to modernize it, make it easier to maintain, significantly improve usability and accessibility, and generally give us a lot more opportunities to improve the posting process. In particular, the page is fully customizable: if you hit the "Settings" link in the upper right corner of the page, just above the "Subject" field, it will let you customize which panels show when you load the page, change some visual settings about how the page behaves, and (if you scroll down) move around the individual panels so they're displayed in a place you find logical for your workflow. We think it's a massive improvement from the old update page, and we're ready to do the last bits of work we need to do in order to switch everyone over.

We will soon be removing the New Create Entries Page beta and making the new, improved version of the page the only option for everyone who uses the site. This is your last chance to let us know if something is very broken for you: checking now, and reporting any problems you might have, will prevent future disruption to your use of the site. Please take a moment and enable the beta so you can help us find any last lingering issues.

The other major beta we have running right now is the New Inbox Page conversion. This is part of our ongoing modernization efforts: Dreamwidth itself was launched in 2009, but because it's based on LiveJournal's open source code, parts of the site date as far back as February of 1999. (If you're as bad at math as I am: that means three months from now will be the 25th anniversary of the code that runs the site existing in some fashion. Please don't tell me if my website's source code is older than you are; I already feel old as hell just thinking about it.) As you can imagine, the technology that runs the internet has changed significantly in the last 25 years, and we've been engaged in a long, slow-motion project of updating the code that generates all of the pages on the site to use more modern technology. Like with the new Create Entries page, this makes it seriously easier to maintain and allows us to benefit from the accessibility, usability, and bugfixing work that other people using the same technologies have done: the old way of doing things was unique to DW, while the new way of doing it uses more widely-used frameworks and modules so we can benefit from many other people's work.

Converting site pages to the new way of doing things involves a complete rewrite from the ground up, though, and while we try to keep the two versions looking as similar as we can, it's not always possible: some changes to how the pages look and feel are inevitable. There's also, of course, the opportunity for new and exciting bugs. So, when we've been converting major pages, we run it through a few rounds of beta first. The inbox is one of the last remaining big user-facing conversion projects, and we wanna get it done and dusted so we can pick off the last outstanding pages to convert and finally be done with this massive albatross of a project we've been working on for-freaking-ever. (We're about 80% done, and this fact is very exciting after having been working on it for so long.)

If you haven't enabled the New Inbox Page beta to test it, please consider doing so soon! (And if you had previously enabled it and found a bug that made you turn it off, please try turning it back on: we've done a lot of bugfixing work.) Because of how old the old Inbox page was, this is one of the more dramatic "things will look different" conversions we've done and the new version may take a little while to get used to, but all the major functionality should match and it includes a number of bugfixes that the old version of the inbox doesn't have.

We will soon be removing the New Inbox Page beta and making the new, improved version of the page the only option for everyone who uses the site. This is your last chance to let us know if something is very broken for you: checking now, and reporting any problems you might have, will prevent future disruption to your use of the site. Please take a moment and enable the beta so you can help us find any last lingering issues.

Finally, a few years ago we converted the journal entry view from the old code to the new code. Despite us aggressively running it through the beta system before making it the default for everyone, a few people experienced some dramatic bugs (including some wetware bugs: it triggered photosensitive migraine in a small number of people). While we worked to fix the problems people reported to us, we enabled a beta flag to let people turn the new code off (as opposed to our usual method of using the beta flag to turn the new code on).

We've done a significant amount of work on the problems people reported with the new journal entry view, including working with a number of experts on photosensitive migraine and a panel of the users who reported that the new code triggered photosensitive migraines for them. At this point, we're reasonably sure that we've fixed every issue that was reported to us, and we're making preparations to remove the beta flag that allows people to turn the new code off. (Keeping two versions of the code for this long is a lot of maintenance overhead, and we can't keep the old code around forever.)

If your account has the "Temporarily revert updated journal page components" beta flag on -- that is, if you previously experienced a site-breaking bug with the new code and had to disable it while we fixed it -- please go to the beta page and turn that beta flag off. This will switch your account to using the new code that every account created since the conversion has been running and let you verify that the particular issue you were having has been fixed. This is probably the most critical action for people who had problems with the conversion to take, because we really need to close out that beta and stop having to maintain two versions of the code, but we don't want to break things for you again!

We will soon be removing the "Temporarily revert updated journal page components" beta and making the new, improved version of the journal entry view pages the only option for everyone who uses the site. If you previously enabled the beta flag in order to temporarily use the old code while we worked to fix it, it is very important that you turn off that flag now and verify that your issues with the new code have been fixed. Please take a moment and disable that beta if you have it enabled so you can help us confirm that the problem you had is fixed.

(The remaining individual beta flag, two-factor authentication, is a very early test that was released as a beta so people can test out the process of configuring an optional two-factor authentication setup. While you can set your 2FA preferences, none of the site login pathways actually use 2FA yet, so enabling it won't do much. The final flag, "site-wide canary", is a generalized "this is the cutting edge code that we've just committed and will be released in the next site update" setting, and you should only enable it if you like living dangerously and occasionally finding that everything breaks horribly.)

For all of these beta flags, if you enable them and have problems, check the Beta Features page listing for that specific beta flag listing: there's a link to the specific entry in

dw_beta where you can report problems or bugs.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi, beasts.

Can you let us know what browser and what site skin you're using right now?

yes absolutely, though the answer is a little complex.

we're using firefox browser with native accessibility settings that increase font size and change page background & text colours on all websites globally. these settings do not have an option for turning them on/off for specific websites, unfortunately.

our firefox version is 113.0.2 (64-bit) Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0

we have multiple dw accounts since we're plural and people like to have their own accounts/family accounts/etc, but while they often have different journal styles, most use the same site skin, which is "Gradation Horizontal".

one of us has an account that uses the "Tropospherical Purple" skin, but xie hasn't been around in years so xie hasn't tested the beta create entries page on hir account/with hir site skin.

thankyou very much for your help! <3

Edited 2023-11-09 07:05 (UTC)

Okay awesome, Firefox with Gradation Horizontal is where I spend all of my time, too!

... what I know about Ubuntu can be written on the head of a pin, unfortunately, I'll just have to hope that Firefox isn't too different between OSes.

I'm going to go and grab some screenshots, I'll be back in a couple minutes.

So this is how the top portion of my Beta Create Entries looks right now.

Is that even vaguely what you're wanting yours to look like?

thankyou so much for your help!

the screenshot isn't what we're looking for, unfortunately. we want to create a workflow similar to the legacy create entries page, where we choose which icon to display with the post, and see/edit the date of the post, before we reach the post subject line & post body text.

edit: oh wait, we didn't see that you do have a sidebar in the screenshot, it's just on the far right instead of the left! sorry. that might help a little, but it doesn't fix the problem of needing those things to be before the entry text, for us (which would mean above it, ideally).

the rest of this may now be somewhat inappropriate due to our misunderstanding of your screenshot. (we found the screenshot itself very overwhelming as well, which is why it took us a while to be able to parse visually what was going on in it.)

end edit.

we also need the post subject/post body text windows to either have a sidebar or at least shrink down so they're not stretched all the way across the width of our screen. we need them to be narrower so that they're not so overwhelming to us, and we need them to not be the first thing we're dealing with when we start working on our new post.

we need time to think about small, easy things, like picking an icon, and whether the date & time are appropriate, and work our brain up to speed before we try to tackle huge, open-ended concepts like post title and post content.

and the way the post content window in particular is the full width of our screen, is very overwhelming to us, because it creates this huge yawning void that feels like it's consuming the whole screen (or almost), and feels like it's demanding things (words & creativity & complex brain-function) from us that we're not able to handle right at the start of our posting process, because words, creativity, etc are things we struggle to be able to do/handle/produce due to our disabilities. so that creates a huge amount of pressure over something that's already difficult for us, and makes us want to just bolt.

sorry, this isn't really relevant to fixing it, we're just hoping that this might help illustrate what the problem is in a way that makes it clearer what we're looking for, because we don't have the image-editing skills to make a mock-up screenshot of what we'd like the page to look like, so we're trying to find another way to illustrate it somehow. and it's probably not working.

maybe the best illustration would be to say we'd like the page to be arranged a similar way to the current/old/legacy create entries page in gradation horizontal, with the icon selection & date info up top, and the post body text window narrower than the screen (if on a wider screen like a laptop).

Edited 2023-11-09 07:24 (UTC)

Oh hell's bells, I am so sorry, I should have shrunk the screenshot, my bad.

Yeah, at least right now, the column can only be on the right hand side of the entry text box, no, I have no idea why.

<3 thankyou

yeah that's what we thought, it seems like the post subject/post text are not among the moveable elements of the page for some reason, meaning moveable elements can only be 'behind' them (to the right or below). which is... not good customisation, in our opinion, and definitely not accessible, at least for us.

we're not sure why it would be that way either, but presumably the devs have a reason. we just hope it's a flexible enough reason for them to change it so that we can actually create the workflow we need, and be able to continue using the site.

thankyou very much for confirming that we're not just missing how to do it, at least! <3

will reply to your other (super helpful) responses separately

This is definitely helpful!

I don't know why your display is not respecting that y'all've checked the 'column alongside entry text', that should be working, 16" is more than wide enough to have it displaying correctly. ...wait, is it technically working, as in, it's on the right side, but that isn't functional for you?

Double checking on that part before I keep sticking my metaphorical foot in my mouth.

thankyou for double-checking! so far, we haven't been able to get the sidebar to appear at all, even on the right.

when we try to drag the icon element up to the right side of the page, the page scrolls to the right and shows a lot of space there. but when we drop the element there, it snaps back to below the entry text window, instead of staying on the right of it.

we've tried dropping the icon element up at the top, midway down, and down beside the bottom of the entry text window, and even way down parallel with the entry security option. none of these have resulted in a sidebar on the right, for us.

but it's also true that what we're looking for is a way to put these metadata elements above the entry subject/entry text window, and ideally also create a sidebar to the left. though things being above it is much more needed, in our case.

it looks like the functionality we need simply isn't available, in this case. we hope it can be added for accessibility's sake. but thankyou very much for taking the time to help us figure this out! we really appreciate it. <3

So ONLY about the width of the text box, there is absolutely a way for you to change that, ignoring everything else.

When you're in the Settings cog, at the bottom right of the text entry box, there are several little white/grey lines across the corner.

If you put your cursor there, it should change to a double-ended cursor, and then you can slide it upwards and leftwards. Once it's a size you like, go back up into the settings panel and click save.

It doesn't look like moving that changes the width of the subject line, or the entry format line, which I hear are going to be difficult for you, but I can at least offer that one bit of advice?

oh, yes! thankyou so much! we missed that because the lines indicating a drag-and-drop grab point across that corner don't display on our screen, probably due to our accessibility settings. but the function itself still works!

(we find that our accesibility settings can cause some visual elements of a page to be invisible sometimes, especially if the element can't be made to conform to the colour scheme we've picked, which honestly is preferable to us. we'd rather work with invisible things that still function once we know where to find them, than things that hurt our eyes.)

we just tested this, and shrinking the entry text window helps a lot! though you're right that the subject line & entry format line are also a problem for us (just less of one), and don't seem to have their own grab-point for resizing.

unfortunately, the resize doesn't seem to save. it seems to be independent of the settings menu, to us? we can resize the window without the settings menu open, and if we resize with the settings menu open and then hit save on the settings menu, the window stays the right size while we're on that page, but if we refresh the page, or navigate away and then generate a new "post entry" page (or even generate a new post entry page while still on that page), the window reverts to its default size.

which... since the issue is that the default size is overwhelming to us and makes it hard for us to even engage with the page at all... it's really not gonna be functional (or useable), to have to deal with that every single time, and re-do our window resizing every single time we make a post (or even refresh the one we're making, or load up a saved draft, or etc).

...none of that is anything you have any say in, obviously, so we'll stop talking about it now. but the resizing option is helpful, and we wouldn't have found it on our own! thankyou very very much for teaching us how to use it! <3

we really appreciate all your time & patience with us, thankyou so much.

You are very, very welcome.

I love this place, and I want it to be accessible for everyone. But I very much do not do the technical side, so there may be something I am missing.

And I will flag up to the devs that something is going wrong with resizing the text box, because it should be saving if you resize it while you have the settings open and hit 'save' in the settings menu after you resize. It should stay the size y'all chose, and that it's not means something is being Weird.

thankyou very much! it's good to hear that the resize should save, and we really appreciate you flagging that up with the devs for us (we're very low on spoons at the moment due to housing issues, so we'd struggle to report it ourselves).

we love dreamwidth too! it's been our online home for over 10 years now, and we've never felt this level of trust in a website's dev team, their values and integrity and transparency, anywhere else. the internet is a scary, hostile, inaccessible place for the most part, and dreamwidth has always been an island of safety in that mess. we really hope a solution can be found.

but yes, that's not your area, and we're just really grateful for your time and effort today! thankyou again, and it's always lovely to interact with the wonderful supportive folks who inhabit this digital landscape. <3

I'm really, really sorry that this is so difficult for you.

I don't want to load you down with explanations for why things have to be the way they are here with the design unless you want me to. There are a lot of really good reasons for all the decisions that we made, but explaining them will involve a lot of wall-of-text, and I don't want to add to your overwhelm. Let me try to keep it as simple as possible and still cover what I think are the important things:

* It's not possible to put modules above the text box or to the left of the text box. To the right or underneath are the only options. This is because in order to do above or to the left, we would have to violate the accessibility rules for screenreaders, plus it would cause a lot of other little tiny problems that are very, very hard to solve. This is one of those extremely frustrating cases of competing access needs, where what makes something more accessible for one group of people makes it less accessible for others. We had to make a lot of very difficult choices with this redesign, and I am extremely sorry the choices we had to make are the ones that are making you struggle so hard with this.

* It might help with the problem of feeling overwhelmed if you turn off all the modules that you don't use. Under "Settings", and just underneath the text "Show panels", you can uncheck the box for any module that you don't need. For instance, if you don't ever change the age restriction on individual posts, uncheck the box for "Age restriction" and that module will go away and stop taking up space on the screen. If you take out all the modules you will never use, that may make the page feel less Too Much for you.

* Unfortunately, the native browser-based "resize this window" drag and pull doesn't persist from refresh to refresh: when you refresh the page it will return to the old size. I think there are browser extensions that will let you resize the window and have it stick that way all the time, but I don't remember the names of them. I will try to remember to go looking for one for you.

* There is also a way for you to install an extension on your computer that will let you change a lot about the way the site looks in just your browser. The upside is it gives you a lot of very personal control over how the site looks, and you can make it work a lot better for you. The downsides are that it will only work on your computer and your browser, and it isn't something you can just install and have it work without configuring: you (or a friend who knows CSS, if you don't have the capacity right now) would need to experiment a lot to find the right CSS rules to get it working exactly the way you want it to. The name of the extension is Stylus and its purpose is to let you write a custom CSS stylesheet for individual websites. We can't do it for you because we don't have the resources to support individual CSS for everyone, but if you ask around, someone may be able to help.

* If you don't have the capacity to figure out Stylus and custom CSS right now, and you don't know anyone who can help you out with it, you can still update your journal without having to use the update page. We have a system where you can send an email to a special email address and the text of the email will be posted as an entry to your journal. The FAQ: How can I email entries into my journal? explains how to set this up. You can set icon, tags, mood, music, and location, disable comments, and set security by putting special lines into the email when you write it. This would at least still let you update your journal without having to use the update page.

I think that covers most of what you're having trouble with. If I missed anything, or if you want the more detailed explanations about why things need to be the way we changed them, let me know: I'm very happy to explain them, but I don't want to bury you in details you won't find immediately relevant when that's essentially the core of the problem you're having! Again, I am really sorry for the overwhelmingness, and that the change is coming at a bad time for you.

thankyou for your time & consideration. (and we want to acknowledge up top that our life-situation is not your fault but we still appreciate you being sympathetic to the timing.)

so, the basic summary of what we're hearing here is, we're the wrong kind of disabled (as usual in this society), and that means we have to either:

- do a ton of work that our disabilities make us incapable of (CSS - like, does it not occur that asking intensive cognitive labour of cognitively disabled people because of their cognitive disability is illogical),

- do a ton of different work that our disabilities make us largely incapable of, and that we're already overspending our spoons/knives for in other areas right now (finding someone to do the CSS for us), or

- lose our online home at the same time as losing our physical home.

yay.

sorry, we know that's not fair to you and our problems are not your responsibility, and you don't get a say in whatever's happening in our life. we're just breaking down right now and we don't have the filters we'd usually have, socially speaking.

thankyou very much for taking the time to respond to us, and putting in effort into explaining, being considerate of our overwhelm, and trying to find solutions to help us. we genuinely do appreciate that and we know your spoons are limited too, so we want to be sure to express that we value them. we'd like to give a better, more appreciative & friendly & overall more reasonable response, we're just so deep into our knives at this point that we don't have anything to offer. we apologise for that.

we're familiar with email posting. we've tried it a few times. it's not accessible to us either.

...is there really no way for the legacy create entries page to remain available as an alternative option for those who need it, even if in a reduced capacity? please?

we love this place so much, and as bedbound people, so much of our life is online, and it's so heartbreaking to think we might not be able to stay here. we're sorry we're making such a mess of this conversation, you don't deserve the pressure this is probably putting on you, we just... *ineffectual flailing* <3

I am deeply sorry that I can't give you the answer that you want to hear. I really, really am. It is not possible to keep the old version of the update page available any longer. It is not possible to keep the old version of any of the code we need to modernize. Because of how dramatically browsers, operating systems, and technology in general have changed since the site was first written in 1999, if we do not finish the work to modernize the code that runs the site sometime within the next few years, and the sooner the better, Dreamwidth will no longer be able to exist. We are already spending more time and effort than we can afford to spend to keep the old code working. The only thing I can do is what I've done, which is list the various workarounds I can think of that might bypass the things you've identified as issues for you in the hopes that one of them might be possible for you to adapt to your needs.

welp. that sucks.

thankyou very much for your time and efforts.

For what it's worth, the issue with resizing the text box is the same for me, on Windows in Chrome. I can resize the text box regardless of whether I've opened Settings, and even if I do it with Settings open and save it, it reverts to the default size the next time I refresh or return to the page. (The default size is probably fine for me, so I wouldn't have identified this as an issue for me personally, but if it's supposed to save the size, that function doesn't seem to be working!)

Yes, unfortunately the browser-based native "drag this window to resize it" option doesn't persist from reload to reload. I am pretty sure there are extensions that will remember your resized settings for individual pages, but I don't actually remember the names of any of them.

Got it, thanks! That part isn't an issue for me personally, I just wasn't sure if it was the expected behavior.

edit: whoops, you'd already replied. feel free to disregard this comment!

end edit.

sorry, we're very overwhelmed right now (and it's a bad pain day), so we're not the best at communicating.

trying to make a more coherent & accurate response.

we haven't yet been able to reproduce the sidebar you have on the right in your screenshot, but in the screenshot at least, it doesn't fix our issues, though it does help a little with one of them.

our issues are:

- needing smaller metadata above the entry subject/entry text windows, to work on before getting to the big, open-ended stuff,

- needing a familiar workflow, with icon selection first, and

- needing the entry subject/entry text windows to not be so overwhelming and not be the first (top, left) thing we're greeted with on the body of the page.

this last issue is reduced a little by the sidebar on the right, in that it makes the subject/entry text windows narrower, which helps slightly. but it doesn't stop them being overwhelming and stressful to us, or make them not be the first thing we're greeted with when engaging with the main body of the page. it also doesn't make them as narrow as on the legacy create entries page, which is ideally what we'd need, to make them a more approachable size for our brain to handle, parse and engage with.

we hope that makes a bit more sense and is more coherent than our previous reply. thankyou again so much <3

Edited 2023-11-09 07:39 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Reminder: Beta features are available to test!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject