Entry tags:
Progress Report: 11 May 2009
Goodness me, it is Monday again, isn't it. I'm distinctly certain that I did not authorize this.
We've got a miscellaney for you this week, so let's jump right in:
This week: a bunch of assorted bugfixes, including miscellaneous display issues, problems with the wrong userpic being displayed on your profile, and updates to the crossposter. We resolved a total of 80 bugs, 65 of which were actual fixes and 15 of which were duplicates/invalid reports in some way. This week also saw us passing another development milestone: over 700 resolved items since development began. Congratulations and welcome to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rat and wyntarvox, and this week's "holy crap!" award goes to kareila with an amazing 17 committed patches.
A reminder to everyone: if you're interested in following along with our development efforts, you can subscribe to![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
changelog for a commit-by-commit list of what changes we're making, or watch the new and unofficial community ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
changelog_digest for a brief summary of what each commit message means.
It's also worth reminding people that just because something's been checked into our code repository doesn't mean that it's live on the site yet -- we maintain a list of code status, which includes a list of what's live on the site and what isn't yet. We generally do code pushes (updating the live code on the site) once a week or so.
If you've been having problems with importing your content from other sites, please try it again now! All of the issues that we know about should now be resolved, including issues with comments not coming over and issues with entries not being able to import if you ever used LiveJournal's (or a LiveJournal system's) mass privacy tool.
If you continue to have problems with importing (other than it taking time -- the queue's very clear right now, but if it gets backed up or if your job is complex, it can take a while for an import to finish; as long as you haven't gotten a failure in your Inbox, the job's still running), you can open a Support request, where our friendly, knowledgeable, and all-around awesomeoperators volunteers are standing by.
Until we can get our new-and-improved statistics page committed -- our existing stats page doesn't break things down closely enough -- have some statistics from a week and a half after open beta launch!
We currently have 23,332 personal accounts and 4925 community accounts. (The remaining accounts in the stats page numbers are syndicated feeds and OpenID identities.) If you count all total payments, 16% of personal or community accounts have paid to upgrade their accounts in some way, while if you remove the people who've paid for one month of service at $3 (which we correct for, since we know that it's likely that many of them will not renew), the percent becomes a still-encouraging 10.6%.
(Meanwhile, two things that cracked me up in this week's mail call: a card from one of my mother's friends, congratulating us on our achievement while sheepishly admitting that she had no real clue what, precisely, we'd built, and one of our neighbors from the north sending me a lucky Loonie. We'll be putting up all of your cards, notes, and postcards on the walls of Dreamwidth HQ and taking pictures soon.)
To celebrate our success so far, we're going to be distributing more invite codes, as soon as we debug a few more glitches in our distribution process. Once we do that, you'll find your invites on the Invite Someone page, and be able to go forth and invite!
We're also regularly checking the requests for more invite codes, and the indefatigablesarah has been staying atop those pretty darn well. A reminder, though: if you're in need of more than a few invite codes, such as to move a whole community or a whole RPG, you can come talk to us about the situation by emailing accounts@dreamwidth.org and we're happy to see what we can do for you.
Right now, before our next distribution, there have been around 46,000 invite codes ever generated, of which about 23,000 are unused, meaning that about half the invite codes that we've issued have been used to set up accounts. (If you're looking for something to do with your unused invite codes, may I suggestdw_codesharing?)
We'd also like to remind people that if you're asking for invites because people would like to read your content, without maintaining a journal of their own, it's actually not necessary for your readers to have a Dreamwidth account (and therefore, you don't need an invite code for them), even if your content is protected. Your friend can log in with his or her OpenID URL, and you can then grant access to that OpenID. You only need to give someone an invite code if they'd like to maintain an actual journal on Dreamwidth itself.
We're still in the process of gearing up our Terms of Service enforcement team. From the field of candidates who expressed interest, we selected two people to co-manage the Terms of Service team who have considerable customer service and anti-abuse experience, but who don't come to us from LiveJournal's volunteer teams, to give us the right combination of a fresh set of eyes and a customer service background. With them, and with our experience in what sort of situations are likely to arise, we'll be spending the next few months collecting reports of Terms of Service violations, sorting them into what kind of thing crops up most frequently, and posting regularly about answers to policy questions that crop up.
The reason that we've chosen to avoid specifying our content policies more clearly right up front is because we know that any set of guidelines for enforcement would be colored by our experience elsewhere, and we'd like to avoid being overly prescriptive right out of the gate. Our general overview of content philosophies can be found in this section of our business FAQs.
Starting this week, we'll be posting a weekly summary of our Terms of Service inquiries, for those people who are interested in the administrivia of what sort of issues crop up. While still respecting individuals' privacy, we'll summarize major issues and publicly clarify the policy questions people have asked us. We're still not entirely sure what community is the best destination for those weekly reports, butdw_biz is looking like the most likely candidate.
Right now, we're seeing so few reports of Terms of Service violations that the team doesn't need additional members, but when they do, we'll let everyone know.
And speaking of the proliferation of DW official communities, for those of you who don't feel like waiting for the weekly-roundupdw_news post, we're pleased to welcome the unofficial, but still very useful, the_dw_herald. all_official_dreamwidth, that mysterious shadowy figure, has settled in and started cataloging official announcements and other useful bits of information. If you're starting to feel overwhelmed at all of the possible sources of information, the_dw_herald has your back.
With the advent of open beta, meanwhile, we're going to be shortly discontinuing our mailing lists in favor of our official communities. If you're looking to provide us feedback, you can do it privately by opening a support request in the Feedback category, or publicly by commenting to adw_news post; suggestions can go in comments to dw_suggestions until we get a better suggestions process in place.
We've been trying to keep the Known Issues box on the Support page a decent balance between listing user-facing issues and not overwhelming people with so many items that your eyes will just glaze over entirely. If you're curious, we're keeping a more in-depth list of Known Issues on our Wiki, which links to all user-facing Bugzilla items (both actual bugs and things we think could stand some improvement).piranha deserves massive kudos for keeping that list up-to-date.
If you've noticed something that seems to be busted, though, please do report it to Support. We have a number of awesome people who will dig into the problem, try to reproduce it, and file bugs for it if necessary. And if you're interested in doing some of the investigation and bug-filing yourself, Support is standing by to welcome you with open arms. Check outdw_support_training for information and getting-started tips.
(Did I mention that our support volunteers are kicking ass and taking names? A special "thank you, y'all rock" tochemicallace, domtheknight, and zarhooie, who've really charged in and organized the heck out of things.)
We're already seeing that our use of invite codes is doing a lot to prevent prevalent logged-in spam journals created solely to boost search engine page rank, which is awesome. We're also seeing an uptick in anonymous comment spam, which is less awesome.
Until we can put in more resources to identifying and blocking anonymous spam comments on the server end (which is something we're working on), there are steps you can take to minimize the likelihood of getting spam comments. If you wind up getting hit anyway, delete the comment individually and select the "mark as spam" checkbox when you do, and it will wind up in the capable hands of thedw_antispam team.
Remember, spam is unsolicited commercial advertising, which often manifests in nonsense phrases linked to dummy web pages (in an attempt to drive traffic and increase search engine prominence). Harassing or personal comments don't qualify as spam, and the antispam team can't do anything to help you there. If you're getting unwanted harassing comments, there are steps you can take, including blocking anonymous commenting (or requiring anonymous users to complete a human test while commenting), restricting your comments only to people you've granted access to, and making sure that comment IP logging is on.
This week saw a bunch of backend fixes and further refinements to our styles backend in prep for a major push to get additional layouts and themes added. Part of this was us renaming the style formerly known as "Core2 Testing" to "Tabula Rasa", our blank-slate option that people can fully customize using custom CSS and the customization wizard.
To select Tabula Rasa as a style and begin working to create layouts for it, go to the Select Journal Style page and change the display from "Featured" to "All". Once you've applied the Tabula Rasa theme, you can use the Customize Journal Style page to play with it.
We've designed Tabula Rasa to be fully controllable via CSS, so out-of-the-box, it's completely unstyled. You probably won't want to use this layout unless you're ready to start digging into design. But if you do, and if you come up with something really awesome that you want to share, stay tuned todw_styles for information on how to submit your stylesheet to us. (There's also the unofficial dreamwidthlayouts, which can be a massively useful resource.)
While there still might be a few changes to the backend, we're mostly down to tweaks and refinements from here on out. We know that people are anxiously awaiting more layout options, and we're down to the last pieces of work that need to be done before we can turn our attention from backend cleanup and infrastructure work to building out tons of styles and themes that people can choose from.
Assuming that![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark doesn't get totally eaten by being in the rotation for a week-long 24/7 on-call shift for his day job, our "makeup" Seed (permanent) account sale will be this Thursday, after we're able to finish up the last bits of changes to our payment system to allow people to pay via credit card without having an associated PayPal account.
A Seed Account is a premium paid account that will never expire. They cost $200 USD, and are intended to finance our first year of operations. You can read our reasoning for why seed accounts will not regularly be on sale, if you're curious; this sale is to reflect the fact that we had some issues during our first sale period (on the night of April 30) that prevented people from being able to purchase Seed Accounts.
100 Seed Accounts will go on sale at 9PM EDT Thursday May 14 (1AM GMT Friday May 15), and 100 will go on sale at 9AM EDT Friday May 15 (1PM GMT Friday May 15). The option will be available in the Dreamwidth Shop until all of the available accounts are sold.
That's about it on the big stuff for us this week! We'll be back next Monday with another roundup of weekly news. In the meantime, everyone think good thoughts formark, who not only has the on-call pager this week and has to keep Dreamwidth running, but is getting married (to the fabulous janinedog) in less than two weeks. I think that's the definition of stress.
We've got a miscellaney for you this week, so let's jump right in:
1. Development
This week: a bunch of assorted bugfixes, including miscellaneous display issues, problems with the wrong userpic being displayed on your profile, and updates to the crossposter. We resolved a total of 80 bugs, 65 of which were actual fixes and 15 of which were duplicates/invalid reports in some way. This week also saw us passing another development milestone: over 700 resolved items since development began. Congratulations and welcome to
rat and wyntarvox, and this week's "holy crap!" award goes to kareila with an amazing 17 committed patches.A reminder to everyone: if you're interested in following along with our development efforts, you can subscribe to
changelog for a commit-by-commit list of what changes we're making, or watch the new and unofficial community changelog_digest for a brief summary of what each commit message means. It's also worth reminding people that just because something's been checked into our code repository doesn't mean that it's live on the site yet -- we maintain a list of code status, which includes a list of what's live on the site and what isn't yet. We generally do code pushes (updating the live code on the site) once a week or so.
2. Importer
If you've been having problems with importing your content from other sites, please try it again now! All of the issues that we know about should now be resolved, including issues with comments not coming over and issues with entries not being able to import if you ever used LiveJournal's (or a LiveJournal system's) mass privacy tool.
If you continue to have problems with importing (other than it taking time -- the queue's very clear right now, but if it gets backed up or if your job is complex, it can take a while for an import to finish; as long as you haven't gotten a failure in your Inbox, the job's still running), you can open a Support request, where our friendly, knowledgeable, and all-around awesome
3. Statistics
Until we can get our new-and-improved statistics page committed -- our existing stats page doesn't break things down closely enough -- have some statistics from a week and a half after open beta launch!
We currently have 23,332 personal accounts and 4925 community accounts. (The remaining accounts in the stats page numbers are syndicated feeds and OpenID identities.) If you count all total payments, 16% of personal or community accounts have paid to upgrade their accounts in some way, while if you remove the people who've paid for one month of service at $3 (which we correct for, since we know that it's likely that many of them will not renew), the percent becomes a still-encouraging 10.6%.
(Meanwhile, two things that cracked me up in this week's mail call: a card from one of my mother's friends, congratulating us on our achievement while sheepishly admitting that she had no real clue what, precisely, we'd built, and one of our neighbors from the north sending me a lucky Loonie. We'll be putting up all of your cards, notes, and postcards on the walls of Dreamwidth HQ and taking pictures soon.)
4. Invite Codes
To celebrate our success so far, we're going to be distributing more invite codes, as soon as we debug a few more glitches in our distribution process. Once we do that, you'll find your invites on the Invite Someone page, and be able to go forth and invite!
We're also regularly checking the requests for more invite codes, and the indefatigable
sarah has been staying atop those pretty darn well. A reminder, though: if you're in need of more than a few invite codes, such as to move a whole community or a whole RPG, you can come talk to us about the situation by emailing accounts@dreamwidth.org and we're happy to see what we can do for you.Right now, before our next distribution, there have been around 46,000 invite codes ever generated, of which about 23,000 are unused, meaning that about half the invite codes that we've issued have been used to set up accounts. (If you're looking for something to do with your unused invite codes, may I suggest
dw_codesharing?)We'd also like to remind people that if you're asking for invites because people would like to read your content, without maintaining a journal of their own, it's actually not necessary for your readers to have a Dreamwidth account (and therefore, you don't need an invite code for them), even if your content is protected. Your friend can log in with his or her OpenID URL, and you can then grant access to that OpenID. You only need to give someone an invite code if they'd like to maintain an actual journal on Dreamwidth itself.
4. Policies
We're still in the process of gearing up our Terms of Service enforcement team. From the field of candidates who expressed interest, we selected two people to co-manage the Terms of Service team who have considerable customer service and anti-abuse experience, but who don't come to us from LiveJournal's volunteer teams, to give us the right combination of a fresh set of eyes and a customer service background. With them, and with our experience in what sort of situations are likely to arise, we'll be spending the next few months collecting reports of Terms of Service violations, sorting them into what kind of thing crops up most frequently, and posting regularly about answers to policy questions that crop up.
The reason that we've chosen to avoid specifying our content policies more clearly right up front is because we know that any set of guidelines for enforcement would be colored by our experience elsewhere, and we'd like to avoid being overly prescriptive right out of the gate. Our general overview of content philosophies can be found in this section of our business FAQs.
Starting this week, we'll be posting a weekly summary of our Terms of Service inquiries, for those people who are interested in the administrivia of what sort of issues crop up. While still respecting individuals' privacy, we'll summarize major issues and publicly clarify the policy questions people have asked us. We're still not entirely sure what community is the best destination for those weekly reports, but
dw_biz is looking like the most likely candidate.Right now, we're seeing so few reports of Terms of Service violations that the team doesn't need additional members, but when they do, we'll let everyone know.
5. Newsletter
And speaking of the proliferation of DW official communities, for those of you who don't feel like waiting for the weekly-roundup
dw_news post, we're pleased to welcome the unofficial, but still very useful, the_dw_herald. all_official_dreamwidth, that mysterious shadowy figure, has settled in and started cataloging official announcements and other useful bits of information. If you're starting to feel overwhelmed at all of the possible sources of information, the_dw_herald has your back.With the advent of open beta, meanwhile, we're going to be shortly discontinuing our mailing lists in favor of our official communities. If you're looking to provide us feedback, you can do it privately by opening a support request in the Feedback category, or publicly by commenting to a
dw_news post; suggestions can go in comments to dw_suggestions until we get a better suggestions process in place.6. Known Issues
We've been trying to keep the Known Issues box on the Support page a decent balance between listing user-facing issues and not overwhelming people with so many items that your eyes will just glaze over entirely. If you're curious, we're keeping a more in-depth list of Known Issues on our Wiki, which links to all user-facing Bugzilla items (both actual bugs and things we think could stand some improvement).
piranha deserves massive kudos for keeping that list up-to-date.If you've noticed something that seems to be busted, though, please do report it to Support. We have a number of awesome people who will dig into the problem, try to reproduce it, and file bugs for it if necessary. And if you're interested in doing some of the investigation and bug-filing yourself, Support is standing by to welcome you with open arms. Check out
dw_support_training for information and getting-started tips.(Did I mention that our support volunteers are kicking ass and taking names? A special "thank you, y'all rock" to
chemicallace, domtheknight, and zarhooie, who've really charged in and organized the heck out of things.)7. Antispam
We're already seeing that our use of invite codes is doing a lot to prevent prevalent logged-in spam journals created solely to boost search engine page rank, which is awesome. We're also seeing an uptick in anonymous comment spam, which is less awesome.
Until we can put in more resources to identifying and blocking anonymous spam comments on the server end (which is something we're working on), there are steps you can take to minimize the likelihood of getting spam comments. If you wind up getting hit anyway, delete the comment individually and select the "mark as spam" checkbox when you do, and it will wind up in the capable hands of the
dw_antispam team.Remember, spam is unsolicited commercial advertising, which often manifests in nonsense phrases linked to dummy web pages (in an attempt to drive traffic and increase search engine prominence). Harassing or personal comments don't qualify as spam, and the antispam team can't do anything to help you there. If you're getting unwanted harassing comments, there are steps you can take, including blocking anonymous commenting (or requiring anonymous users to complete a human test while commenting), restricting your comments only to people you've granted access to, and making sure that comment IP logging is on.
8. Styles
This week saw a bunch of backend fixes and further refinements to our styles backend in prep for a major push to get additional layouts and themes added. Part of this was us renaming the style formerly known as "Core2 Testing" to "Tabula Rasa", our blank-slate option that people can fully customize using custom CSS and the customization wizard.
To select Tabula Rasa as a style and begin working to create layouts for it, go to the Select Journal Style page and change the display from "Featured" to "All". Once you've applied the Tabula Rasa theme, you can use the Customize Journal Style page to play with it.
We've designed Tabula Rasa to be fully controllable via CSS, so out-of-the-box, it's completely unstyled. You probably won't want to use this layout unless you're ready to start digging into design. But if you do, and if you come up with something really awesome that you want to share, stay tuned to
dw_styles for information on how to submit your stylesheet to us. (There's also the unofficial dreamwidthlayouts, which can be a massively useful resource.)While there still might be a few changes to the backend, we're mostly down to tweaks and refinements from here on out. We know that people are anxiously awaiting more layout options, and we're down to the last pieces of work that need to be done before we can turn our attention from backend cleanup and infrastructure work to building out tons of styles and themes that people can choose from.
9. Seed Accounts
Assuming that
mark doesn't get totally eaten by being in the rotation for a week-long 24/7 on-call shift for his day job, our "makeup" Seed (permanent) account sale will be this Thursday, after we're able to finish up the last bits of changes to our payment system to allow people to pay via credit card without having an associated PayPal account.A Seed Account is a premium paid account that will never expire. They cost $200 USD, and are intended to finance our first year of operations. You can read our reasoning for why seed accounts will not regularly be on sale, if you're curious; this sale is to reflect the fact that we had some issues during our first sale period (on the night of April 30) that prevented people from being able to purchase Seed Accounts.
100 Seed Accounts will go on sale at 9PM EDT Thursday May 14 (1AM GMT Friday May 15), and 100 will go on sale at 9AM EDT Friday May 15 (1PM GMT Friday May 15). The option will be available in the Dreamwidth Shop until all of the available accounts are sold.
That's about it on the big stuff for us this week! We'll be back next Monday with another roundup of weekly news. In the meantime, everyone think good thoughts for
mark, who not only has the on-call pager this week and has to keep Dreamwidth running, but is getting married (to the fabulous janinedog) in less than two weeks. I think that's the definition of stress.
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