Dreamwidth Maintenance

As some folks have noticed: we've actually found some time to run the maintenance script that makes deleted usernames available for re-use! We always swear we're going to do this more regularly and it always winds up getting postponed for something more urgent, so it's been a good while since the last time we've done it, and I apologize.

There's a lot of very long and boring reasons why it gets done so rarely, but the extremely quick explanation is that the system is one of the things that most shows its age (and would be hardest to bring into the 21st century) and needs a lot of manual intervention and babysitting that's really hard to automate: it's hard for us to find the time to do it regularly. (There's also the human factor of it being a combination of "it's annoying and manual and can cause a bunch of load issues" and "it's never hair-on-fire-urgent so we don't need to do it right this second"; no matter how hard we try to stop ourselves from procrastinating on 'ugh' tasks, some of it happens anyway and this is very much one of the ones that is most subject to it.)

If you'd like to rename your account to a username that now shows as "deleted and purged" (or to any other name!), check out How do I change my username? The fee for username changes is to cover the extra system load and support issues that renaming causes: again, it's a really old system and deals with a lot of assumptions that are very baked into the architecture of the site and almost impossible to change, which is why it can be a little confusing to people at times. We've tried our best to make it intuitive, but if you've got questions on how it works or something happens that you didn't expect when you rename your account, drop a support request in the Account Payments category and we'll do our best to give you a hand.

Because this always comes up right about now: if there's a username that you're interested in but the account is not deleted, there's no way to rename to it. Once someone registers a username, it's theirs until they choose to delete it, even if it doesn't look like they're using their account: we don't delete accounts for inactivity. Likewise, a reminder: the rename token system is the only secure way to change your username. Please don't trade or sell accounts or accept a traded or sold account from someone else! A traded account can never be made fully secure and the original owner can always take control of it away from you at any time, plus it carries the risk of being caught up in a Terms of Service enforcement action if the original owner does something severe enough to cause us to suspend all of their accounts on the site.

The shop may be temporarily unavailable on and off for the next day or so! We apologize for the hassle.

A few days ago we let you know about spam prevention measures that we were taking to help stem some of the flood of garbage. One of those temporary measures included geoblocking all IPs from several of the countries that are our largest source of spam. This did (as we knew it inevitably would) have some collateral damage for real users, and we're very sorry!

We're continuing to experiment: this time we've slightly expanded the range of countries we're geoblocking to include the ones that we held off on geoblocking because it would affect too much legitimate use, but we've limited the geoblocking only to the account creation page. This should mean that if you were having trouble accessing the site because of geoblocks, you should be able to access 99% of the site without a problem, and the only page you won't be able to access is the account creation page. With luck, this should cut back heavily on our spam account creation without disrupting legitimate use of the site. The current list of countries that are geoblocked from account creation are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, and Vietnam. (If you're an existing user from one of those countries and you'd like to make an additional account, email support@dreamwidth.org with the username you'd like to register and we can register it for you. If the number of requests gets to be enough that it's taking up too much of our time, we may have to pause this until we can build automated exceptions, but we'll start there.)

We will continue to monitor the results of these experiments and adjust as necessary: when we do one of these experiments, we always make sure to define in advance what "too much interference with legitimate use" will look like, and we try very hard to stick to it. I apologize to everyone who's been collateral damage in our efforts to filter out more of the goddamn spammers.

We are planning a code push tonight -- the exact timing will depend on people's availability but it should be sometime between 9:30PM EDT and 11:30PM EDT (ie, anywhere from 10 minutes from now to about two hours from now). The list of changes that are included in this code push can be found in the most recent code tour.

We don't expect any meaningful user impact (there may be 30 seconds of slowness here and there). Two things of note that may cause some problems after the new code is running, however:

* This release includes a number of pages on the site being converted from the Extremely Old way of assembling a page to the newer way. As always, we do our best to keep them looking as visually similar as we can and to test them on multiple browsers/devices/etc before we let the changes out of testing, but if something looks new and weird (as opposed to just new), please let us know and bear with us while we fix it.

* This release also includes, to address our ongoing spam woes, a change that will prevent people who haven't confirmed their email addresses from posting on the site. (Previously, if your email was unconfirmed, you could post but not comment.) If you run into an error when trying to post that references confirming your email address, see How do I confirm my email address? for instructions on how to confirm your email address. You will be unable to post until you confirm your email address.