dw_maintenance: code push shortly

Denise (

denise) wrote in

dw_maintenance,
@ 2012-02-22 01:47 am UTC

code push shortly

We'll be beginning a code push in about 15-20 minutes. ~~Please put up your seat backs and return your tray tables to the full and upright locked position.~~ We'll update this entry when we're done!

(2:40AM EST: As always, the prep turns out to be more involved than we predicted. We'll hopefully be starting soon.)

3:10AM EST: And, we're done! Please report any issues here or to Support.

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	no subject karayan 2012-02-24 01:50 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, I'm curious about this too. Because I'd really like it if display names showed up, and I definitely remember the response being that it would be too cumbersome. And making comments and descriptions show up is a lot more text than display names. (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent) (Thread) (Hide 4 comments) (Show 4 comments)

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denise
2012-02-25 10:12 am UTC (link)

Adding description to the title text has been planned for a very long time -- we've been discussing how to handle title text vs alt text for about two years now -- so the question was never "display name or description", it's always been "display name in addition to description". (Hence rejecting the suggestion, because username + display name + description (+ comment) could conceivably be hundreds of characters long, and in most non-RP use cases, people's display name is something that has no relation to the actual journal and it doesn't make any sense to have it as part of the alt or title.)

However! Having the icon's description in the title text (in addition to the alt text) actually does cover about 99% of the reasons people want to have the display name in the title text. The reasons people have been asking for it (or at least, the reasons that have been cited when people have asked about it) is because they want to be able to easily identify who a particular character is when hovering over the icon, and that can be done by judicious composition of the icon description -- if you write the descriptions for your icons to have the character name in it, that not only gets the character name into the tooltip, it helps to tell screenreader users who the icon is of.

Meanwhile, after pushing the code live and seeing examples of different ways people manage their icons, I decided that the comments field doesn't belong in there after all. I opened a bug for it and it'll change next code push.

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karayan
2012-02-25 05:36 pm UTC (link)

Thank you for responding! Buuut I still have some issues with the lack of an inclusion of the display name.

1) "in most non-RP use cases, people's display name is something that has no relation to the actual journal" I don't think that's true at all! I mean, people choose a display name for a REASON. Even if it's something silly, it's something they'd like to show up, right? In my case, my username is different than my online handle, and I know a number for people for whom that is the case. It would be very nice if we could have the names we choose show up, you know?

2) I'm an RPer, most of my friends are RPers, and I don't think I know any RPer who puts their character name into every single description field (or any) -- if they use the description field for accessibility reasons, it's usually as an identification of emotion the icon represents -- if the icons are all of the same character, which they generally are, it seems kind of unnecessary to include the name (especially when if the display name was included in the alt text, it + the description would still be helpful for accessibility). So I actually can't see the inclusion of the description field solving the character name problem at all.

Last edited 2012-02-25 05:41 pm UTC

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deborah
2012-02-25 06:05 pm UTC (link)

Even if it's something silly, it's something they'd like to show up, right?

In the suggestions posts, many people said they don't want their display name to appear. I think it's just use really inconsistently across the user base; for a long time it was exposed pretty much nowhere, so people don't have any particular standard for how it gets used.

(that being said, I think it's available to S2, so a style could be written which would expose display names beneath userpics.)

if they use the description field for accessibility reasons, it's usually as an identification of emotion the icon represents

This is actually not the best way to use the description field. The idea of that field is that many people can see the image, and they have certain information available to them -- so let's use the description field to make that information available to everyone.

For example, I could have an icon of Kermit the frog making a disgruntled face. If I just said "disgruntled" in the description field, then people who can see the images would still get the extra information of knowing that it's Kermit the frog, but people who can't see the images would be missing that information. But if my description is "Kermit the frog, disgruntled face" the people who don't see the image know exactly what the icon is of, and get all of the extra connotations available to people who do see the image.

After all, there are different connotations to Kermit the frog making a disgruntled face, Bruce Springsteen making a disgruntled face, Indira Gandhi making a disgruntled face, or a stick figure of a grumpy person. We'd like to make sure that all of those connotations are available to everyone using the site.

Last edited 2012-02-25 06:07 pm UTC (ugh dictation errors)

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denise
2012-02-25 07:33 pm UTC (link)

I understand that you would prefer it to change! But we currently don't have plans to do so, for reasons that have already been explained. (And yes, the majority of people who fill out the display name at all -- that is, people for whose account it isn't the automatically-generated same-as-the-username value -- use a phrase or group of words that have no connection to their username at all. That might not be true in your circle, but it is true across the service as a whole.) The display name shows in comment notification email and on the "replyto" version of comment reply pages, so it's not like it doesn't show up anywhere, and the description field can be written to include the character name and serve accessibility purposes, which is much better than solving a single problem, especially since displaying long display names that are unrelated to the account in question is an issue for cognitive accessibility as well.

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