Reminder: Beta features are available to test!

[denise]

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.

Comments

[grayswandir]

I see that a majority of people seem to actually prefer the new Create Entries page, so I don't know that this is going to be helpful at all, but to me everything on that page seems HUGE and leaves me basically no white space at all except the margin between elements. The text is bigger than on the rest of the site, and it's all in boxes that make each element take up a ton of space so that together they fill the whole screen. For me, the old version of the Create Entry page left lots of white space all around the text box and everything else. Now everything is packed together into one solid square of buttons and boxes.

I don't know if any solution to this is possible, especially since other people don't seem to see this as a negative. One thing that would work for me is if I were able to resize (or just change the zoom for) the Create Entries page as a whole. I just tried using my browser to zoom out the page to 80%, and it actually looks great to me that way, and really highlights for me that the lack of white space is what's making the new page feel so unpleasant to look at, because as soon as I shrink it down it feels completely fine. But unfortunately, if I set that page at 80% zoom, the setting persists all over the rest of Dreamwidth, making the text very tiny on all the other pages, like this one.

Basically, all the elements in the new Create Entries page seem disproportionately large compared to the rest of the website, and leave way less white space around elements than other places like the profile pages and comment pages. I'd love it if there were a way for me to zoom out just the Create Entries page, where everything is so big, but leave the zoom at 100% for the rest of the site.

(It probably matters that I'm using one of the Tropospherical site skins, which I prefer specifically because it leaves more white space than the other options. I'd love to use DW in dark mode -- I use every other site that allows it in dark mode -- but I can't use either of the Gradation options because of the lack of white space.)

Like others have said in their questions/complaints, I don't mean to be completely negative! I understand that there are reasons why changes are necessary. It's hard for me to say anything definitely positive about it from a user standpoint, because all the changes on the new page are at best neutral for me. I'd far rather have the icon and date at the top, but it sounds like that's already been determined as impossible to change. I'd also love to be able to switch the text box to the right instead of the left. But for me really the biggest thing is the lack of white space -- I could deal with the other changes if I could fix that -- so if there's any way that could be adjusted, I'd be very grateful!

(ETA: here's a pair of screenshots to show the difference in white space and font sizes between the versions -- since I realize all of this may vary by site skin. These are both at the same zoom, 100%.)

[denise]

Your screenshots are displaying super tiny (like, 10 pixels wide) in my browser and I can't actually see any of the details in them; I'm sorry!

For the font issues, I'm going to have to refer you to the second half of an answer I already typed up because I'm really, really pushing the edges of my physical capacity this week.

For the rest of it -- I am very, very sorry that the updated version of the Create Entries page doesn't work for you from a UX standpoint, but at this point, it's been in beta for twelve years, and it's been through multiple rounds of feedback, adjustment, compromises, and balancing solutions for multiple use cases, access needs, and preferences. The sort of feedback that would necessitate scrapping most of that work and starting over isn't feasible for us to act on, and we really, really need to get it out of beta because it's holding up a ridiculous number of increasingly-urgent projects. I know this isn't an answer that people want to hear, but we really are at the point where we have to limit the feedback we can act upon to "this specific thing does not function at all in my browser/OS" and revisit the other questions sometime in the future once we've been able to finish the rest of the code conversions that will allow us to solve some of our other long-standing UX problems.

[grayswandir]

Thanks very much for the reply and the link to your other reply -- that's all very helpful to know, and I can understand that some changes aren't possible and not everything will work for everyone. I really appreciate you guys taking feedback and responding to comments! Your explanation about how the Tropo site skins render text smaller than the other skins makes a lot of sense and explains why the new pages look crowded to me and like all the elements are too large. Hopefully once more parts of the site get updated, I'll be able to just us my browser's zoom feature to scale everything down, so actually that will probably solve the biggest problem for me, even if not right away.

(Sorry about the image, that was my fault! It was a DW upload and I forgot to change it from Access List to Public. It's not important now anyway; what you said about the Tropo skins in your other reply explains everything I was trying to illustrate with the screenshots.)

Again, thank you very much for the reply, and honestly apologies for making a big deal of this when it wasn't actually a bug. I do really appreciate knowing why other people are having a very different reaction to the new page! I had no idea the Tropo site skins were scaling everything down.

[denise]

The good news is that once we're finished with converting everything, there will be so much more we can do with site skins to make the overall look and feel of the site a lot more flexible for different preferences, usage patterns, and access needs: there's so much we've wanted to do for ages that this albatross of a project has been holding up for years. (The bad news is that then we all get to argue about what the base version of the new site skins will look like, lol, but at least we will be able to keep the old skins around for people who don't want to switch!) But that's definitely more of a long-term project.

[pangolin20]

Very nice to hear this!