dw_news | Update: Seed Account Re-sale, Free Users + Custom Styles

"but gave free users a pretty low limit on the number of styles you can create (1 custom style, up to 5 layers)"

Does this mean we're able to use custom styles on communities that are free accounts as well?

Also, the obligatory "you guys rock, thanks for the response, thanks for looking out for the userbase's concerns" comments.

Indeed it does!

Now we must figure out awesome paid community features, 'cause that was one of the only paid features that was actually useful for communities!

Big suggestion (for all paid, but especially comms).

Proper domain mapping (like they've managed with independentminds on LJ), so I can pay for a domain name, map it to a DW comm, and run that comm like a proper blog, with all internal links on it showing as domain/1234.html, etc.

Including allowing for that Google thing where you can define the actual location of a duplicate page in the header text, etc.

I'm working on setting up a new uber group blog within UK politics. We're going with Wordpress because it does everything we want, but domain mapping would make it easier in the future to promote a hosted alternative.

Oh, God, the domain forwarding stuff is totally on my list of stuff I want to fix up next year, once we get some of the major new features we want to add settled. A lot of what I want to do in the medium term is looking at blog hosting and content management platforms like TypePad/Movable Type, Wordpress, etc, to mine them for good ideas and tweak their implementations into something that would fit better into our way of doing things.

This? I like this.

Had a meeting this evening, bunch of prominent party bloggers talking crap. Spent a good ten minutes talking through why LJ (and now DW) is so much better than Blogger and merely different to the other prominent platforms.

Other things I'd like in my "proper blogging" wishlist would be aggregator pinging (maybe a deal with automattic, they ping everywhere for you if you've got a WP install), and sidebar widget embeds for things like Twitter and Delicious. Easy incoming links tracking is good service, not pingbacks, pointless, but technorati/icerocket stuff, etc.

Styled profile/about pages would also be fairly essential—in fact, static pages generally would be good.

But like you said, wishlist for down the line.

Just wanted to point out that pinging everywhere wouldn't require a special deal with Automattic; their Ping-O-Matic is open for public use.

True, but I suspect the terms of use would be different for a personal blogger and a blog hosting service. At the very least, it'd be polite to ask.

Having said that, manually pinging everywhere is better than not pinging at all, that's something I missed existing, danke.

sidebar widget embeds for things like Twitter and Delicious

This would rock like a big rocking thing.

I don't know if someone has already suggested this or not, but what I'd absolutely love is a way to gate a community to a mailing list so that people could subscribe to a mailing list to get all the posts as threaded mail messages. Some people really prefer e-mail to a web board discussion, so being able to present the same content either way is a killer feature.

And the code to do this is essentially already there in the tracking code. The only problem right now is that you have to track the community to get the initial posts, and then for each initial post, you have to track *it* to get all of the comments. And of course each person doing this needs to have a paid account so that they can do post tracking.

A paid community feature that would gate all posts and comments to a mailing list using the same format as track notifications would be great. It should also be cheap, since it's a single global flag for the community as opposed to something that has to be checked in multiple places and that potentially involves multiple trackers, although I don't know the internal structure of the code.

This is an awesome suggestion, marred only by the fact that "mailing list gateway" immediately brings up memories of the year or so where

brad kept threatening to completely rewrite LJ as a POP server. *G*

I just saw this comment looking back at old entries. I had no idea he had planned to do that.

How was it going to work?

I have no idea. I think the idea was that each of your friends' entires were going to be a message, and each of the comments would be a reply.

That is so awesome. Thank you guys so much! I can't wait to see what plans you have in the future to promote paid accounts for communities, but in the mean time I can continue to pay for friend accounts :D

I attempted to create a layer using an imported layout, but it had errors, so I deleted it. Now my journal will not let me choose one of my old layouts but says there is a problem. I have no style at this time. It looks awful.:(

Er, I can tell you how to fix this one!

Go here and delete what's enabled, that should get rid of the "There is a problem." message. :)

Thank you for your help! I also got a message from support telling me to enable another style at that link, and it worked. :) Yay! I'd done this successfully elsewhere, but it no worky here for me. *vows never to mess with style layers again...*

This is awesome. I hope that more users do think about paying if things keep up this way. It would be a shame to lose such a responsive team of people on a site like this for once.

Yay for making the Advanced Customization "public". It certainly is one of the best features and likely will make more people move to DW - and eventually pay for the service. ;)

Thanks so much for this. And now, I have to pull a bank job because I'd like to buy a seed account. xD

Custom style for free accounts? Pretty awesome ... now I just need to remember how that works *lol*

To be honest, for most stuff you shouldn't really need to use it unless you're importing a style from LJ based on core1 or know specifically what in the style you want to change.

In two weeks there's going to be a lot more CSS customized layouts based on a style called Tabula Rasa, which is in the last stages of finalization. In two months there's going to be more themes than you can shake a stick out.

Check out

dreamwidthlayouts for people displaying themes they've already made to share.

You guys are really amazing. I bought a paid premium account yesterday mostly to support you guys, since I'm still largely using LiveJournal, and I'm so glad I did. ♥

(Not that I'm not taking advantage of it. Mm, icons.)

You guys are fantastic! Thank you for your hard work! :)

Thank you in advance for allowing us to purchase an account without PayPal. I'd rather avoid using it if I can as it's been a real bother lately.

I admit that a Seed Account is tempting (I am not at all a fan of monthly payments) but it's beyond my budget at the moment.

I guess I should throw in thanks of my own to you all for allowing us to create our own style. I'd never gotten into that sort of thing on LiveJournal, but since everyone is making such a fuss about it, I'll be sure to try it out.

Just a general "thank you" now to all of you at Dreamwidth - I've been loving this site thus far and I always love seeing developers communicating actively with their customers. I hope that doesn't ever change. <3

This sounds like a very reasonable compromise for the people who complained about it being taken away.

*keeps on waiting (im?)patiently for the payment stuff to get fixed* Why does paying you Americans from here have to be so difficult? :<

Thank you so much, I honestly didn't expect this to happen. You just made a lot of people happy :D

Good to know credit card purchases w/o PayPal are coming up within a week. :)

Offering limited, advanced customisation back to basic users is a really nice gesture of good will on your part, and as such it just makes me happier to support DW by getting a paid account.

Is there somewhere where I can get the default style sheets for the layouts so I try making my own layout?

There's the layer browser, which is where I usually turn.

Oh, wow. I’d thought about getting a temporary paid account, just to get my journal set up. But this—y’all are willing to gamble that treating your users well will pay off in the end. That sounds like a good reason to go all in, once I’m more financially stable. Thank you.

thank you so much, the layers option gives me yet another reason to shift here permanently! ♥

Oh thank you.

Chiming in with my thanks about style layers, even if I do have a paid account - this helps out my communities so much! ♥

I've been searching for the last 20 minutes and I can't find any mention of the price for seed accounts. How much do they cost?

Thanks.

They're US$200.

Thanks for the reply! A bit out of my price range, alas. Right now I can't even afford a lower-tier paid account, but I plan to get one later.

... people use more than one style at a time? (Says the seed account holder, lol.)

I guess people who change their layouts from time to time like to have backups or keep their old ones around or something.

I've got three or four right now haha. I switch often though.

Yeah, I've always liked to keep a few different styles saved.

That is such a great feature to give to free users. I always love to see a site actually care about their free users, and not just the paid users. Thanks for your great work!

Awesome, thanks for the limited style creation! Any chance of maybe limited mood theme creation, as well? You could probably limit us to being able to create one custom mood theme and that work pretty well...I know I've got more than that on my LJ, with my paid account there (although I'm definitely considering paid Dreamwidth when I have the money to do so), but one would be pretty appropriate, even if only during a trial run to see if you guys liked the idea.

And another question I've had is whether or not you'd be implementing the "Schools" feature. That's probably one of my favorite features on LJ, because it helps me find people I go or have gone to school with, and especially now, in the early stages of Dreamwidth, I think that would be a great feature to have because it might help us in finding people we know already.

I think since most people only use one mood theme at a time, making them free wouldn't be a good incentive for paid accounts.

I can see where you could use that reasoning for not having it, even though the same reasoning could be applied to the custom style sheets that they're allowing free users limited access to. It's true for both that most people only use one at a time.

However, speaking from the point of view of a LJ user who has had a paid account virtually without interruption since Christmas of 2003, which puts me at about 5 and a half years of paid time at LJ. In that time, I have set up five different custom mood themes both through the use of the admin console and the Custom Mood Theme editor.

My reasoning here is that just because we use one at a time doesn't mean that allowing limited use (i.e., one custom mood theme) to a free account would detract from the paid accounts incentives, simply because over time, the paid accounts are likely to have more than that because of various reasons, such as changing interests, or changing the mood theme to fit the look and feel of their journal.

At the very least, though, I would like to see a more varied set of options of mood themes for free users, perhaps with a chance for the free users to create mood themes and submit them for consideration to then be voted upon by all, maybe with some sort of incentive like 1 or 2 months of regular paid time or a Dreamwidth t-shirt or something like that.

At the very least, though, I would like to see a more varied set of options of mood themes for free users, perhaps with a chance for the free users to create mood themes and submit them for consideration to then be voted upon by all

I imagine there will be more mood themes available for free users at some point. The site's still in beta so there's only a minimum amount of customization available at the moment. However, they're actively working on rolling out more layout options and I'd be surprised if the same wasn't true for mood themes.

I quite like the idea of design opportunities for users, as well.

I absolutely agree that more mood themes should be (and likely will be) available in the future.

I think the difference here is that the free single style is a direct response to the error of giving it away for free initially. As

mark said, it's a strong incentive for paid accounts, but not so strong as to be worth the sense of screwing over your users.

Other people have mentioned why mood theme creation for free users wouldn't be a good idea -- much, much fewer people use multiple custom mood themes than multiple custom styles, so it would essentially be completely removing a paid account incentive, as opposed to giving free accounts limited access to advanced customization but reserving the bulk of what people are doing for paid accounts. I will point out, though, that if you've got a mood theme that meets our basic guidelines -- the copyright to all images owned by you and not a derivative work, no bigger than about 30px by 30px, separate images for as many individual moods as possible, and keeping to our Diversity Statement (such as by not assuming that the 'default' color for human skin is white) -- that you're willing to license to us, we'd love to have it :)

We definitely want to bring back the Schools directory -- we had it for a while, but had to turn it off, actually; the code support is still there -- but the problem is that the administrative backend is so labor-intensive, and the dataset that came with the LJ install we forked from was so dirty, that to clean it up and make it usable would've taken hundreds of person-hours. We've got a bug open to re-spec it so that it won't have so much administrative overhead, but it's going to be tough enough that it definitely won't be in the next few months.

I understand, ultimately, and it's definitely one of the things that helps me make the decision that when I have the money for a paid account, I'll definitely get one (actually, the dilemma I'm having in my mind at the moment is with whether or not I'll go just Paid or Premium Paid...), and I'll definitely keep those guidelines in mind if I ever get the inkling to truly get creative with a mood theme of my own, or if I see one that fits those that someone else made I'll surely let them know.

And I can see how the schools feature would be labor intensive...if you guys need any volunteers for that, I'd be more than willing to offer any help that I'm capable of giving. I wouldn't be surprised if there are others that would do the same, because it truly is a handy feature - though I reckon while we don't have it, the location thing might serve in a similar capacity. :)

You say that now, before you know what the administrative backend looks like. ;) Does it communicate anything if I tell you that the nickname the schools directory administrative team gave themselves on LJ was "Team Leaky Canoe"? (As in: no matter how fast you bail it out, it keeps sinking anyway...)

The problem was never a lack of person-hours, really -- there are always people willing to pick up the task if you crowdsource it -- but the amount of research it entails, to verify that schools exist/figure out the real name of the school/etc. (Things like having twenty entries for the same school, with something like, "St Mark's", "Saint Mark's", "Saint Mark's Academy", "St. Marks", etc, etc, ad nauseam.) Not to mention having to become an expert in the geography and regional subdivisions (states/territories/regions/etc) of pretty much every country the site has users from, in order to standardize names and locations. It's pretty gnarly. The idea we have to fix it up involves removing a lot of the need for oversight.

So pretty much a sheer logistical nightmare, then.

Well, I'll be happy to have the feature whenever you guys get it to us, no matter how long it takes for that to happen. (And if you ever run into a problem with any schools in Alabama, I might be able to help you verify their existence if need be.)

Thanks for all you guys do!

We've turned it back on, but gave free users a pretty low limit on the number of styles you can create (1 custom style, up to 5 layers). Short story: you can once again go back to customizing and importing styles from other sites. Sorry for the trouble!

[Unknown site tag], That is an awesome and totally cool decision. Thank you for that. I've already made one of my accounts paid and plan on making this one paid in the autumn... staggering the outlay helps and I'm really happy to be able to support Dreamwidth now and in future.

Right, so far, I like DW. I wasn't too sure at first, because I have 4 years of posts up on LJ and although I stopped giving them my money when they started going wonky, there was no other site I looked at that had the features I wanted (i.e. be able to simultaneously post to LJ so as to keep up with the friends I've made there over the years whilst I entice them to come elsewhere).

I'm not giving you guys my money yet (wonkey LJ has made me a bit wary of sites making promises and then not keeping them), but so far, if you keep going the way you've started, then you have a supporter in me.

I have friends clamoring for invite codes at the moment, most of them with the same idea I have: check this site out first before giving it money. Many of them used to have paid accounts on LJ and let them lapse when all the promises started being broken. So I'd be happy with some more invite codes so I can lure them all here :)

If you're out of invite codes, the proper method by which to request codes is http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/circle/invite.bml

Also, your friends should check out dw-codesharing.dreamwidth.org to see if someone else might give them a code.

I've done the invite request thing :) Just waiting on a reply.

Thanks for the link, I'll pass it around generously!

Yeah, invite code grants are totally manual, so we handle those requests on an as-we-have-time basis. I'll point out, though, that the number of invite codes we can give out to people depends entirely on our paid account percentage, so the best way to make sure that we can generate more invite codes is to encourage your friends to buy a paid account! If you make a payment of even one month for $3 USD, you bypass the need for an invite code, and since we do our invite code calculations based on what percentage of the userbase has paid accounts, it will mean more invite codes for everyone.

(I know that this can come off as sounding like a hard sell, and we totally respect, and even encourage, the idea of waiting until you're sure that you want to support us before making a payment. We'd much rather earn your trust over time than have you regretting that you supported us. But the reason we're using invite codes is to make sure that we keep the 5% paid account rate that we calculated would be necessary to support the site -- you can read

dw_biz for more details -- and we do have to be hardasses about that, because if we don't hit that 5% paid account rate over time, we start to be in trouble. We built a lot of padding into our estimations, and the seed account sale did give us at least our first year's operating expenses in the bank, but we calculated it out: each active account costs us about $1.40 a year to support, so we need to hit and sustain a 5% paid account rate at our current paid account costs in order to stay sustainable.)

(Oi, pardon my tl;dr. It's a perpetual problem.)

Oh, don't worry about the tl;dr, I'm 43 (halp, 44 tomorrow!), I'm used to reading more than 10 words in a single piece of writing ;p

I fully understand your reasoning. For me and those of my friends who are indicating an interest, it's a matter of having been burned by LJ (joining when Brad was still saying "no ads ever" and paying on that basis), so we want to check you out for a bit first.

If you live up to what you've been saying, you're certainly going to get my money. So far, I've been very pleased with what I've found here.

Oh, absolutely! And conditions can change, things might be different in five or six years, etc, etc. But I can say that right now, neither

mark nor I have any intent to ever add advertising in any way, shape, or form. Not only are we both philosophically opposed to advertising on social media, the plain and simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't make sense.

But either way, I hope that we can be a good home for you and your friends no matter what. :)

We've turned it back on, but gave free users a pretty low limit on the number of styles you can create (1 custom style, up to 5 layers). Short story: you can once again go back to customizing and importing styles from other sites. Sorry for the trouble!

mark, That is an awesome and totally cool decision. Thank you for that. I've already made one of my accounts paid and plan on making this one paid in the autumn... staggering the outlay helps and I'm really happy to be able to support Dreamwidth now and in future.

Oh wow. Thank you so much!

Not related to this post, but this is as good a place to post it as anywhere: thank you for making the Expand Comments feature actually work in Safari. I'm sure I'm not the only Mac user who appreciates it.

That was one of the first bugs that I demanded we fix, and now that we've had a week of not getting bitten by the bug, it looks like our fix (which was kind of a shot in the dark) actually did resolve the problem! (I've actually even requested that the patch be taken upstream at LJ, because I run into that problem on LJ about ten times a week.)

Update: Seed Account Re-sale, Free Users + Custom Styles

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Late to party: Price?

Re: Late to party: Price?

Re: Late to party: Price?

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