dw_maintenance | Site back up!

Welcome back! We missed you SO MUCH.

<3 <3 <3

Thank YOU for always being so forthcoming and thorough with information of what you guys are doing.

I've already found one of the new features, and this downtime was so worth it. Thanks for all the hard work!

Thanks for the update!

I'm so excited to learn what these new features are!

Thank you! :D

that was the most enjoyable maintenance downtime it's ever be my pleasure to be a part of.

I'm noticing a lag by about an hour or more on my end with notifications, comments etc I know have been made not showing up for an hour or two in the inbox. Wasn't having this issue before the maintenance.

That, uh, kind of happens every time we post a news post. The notification system is not super efficient and we're only running the workers on one machine, so the "Dreamwidth has posted a new news notification!" emails we send out to tons of people kind of clog up the tubes. Sorry!

Ah! Must have been the first time I've been on that a news post went up. Now I'm having no issues, but good to know the why.

Oops, just realized this probably should be here.

http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=17534

Thanks!

I'm not 100% positive, but if the username of the account you bought icons for started with a "t" and wasn't this account, you were our first purchase :)

I passed this on to the person who coded the thing that's most likely to be the culprit, so hang on tight! In the meanwhile, can you try clearing your browser cache (just in case it's your browser hanging on to a page that didn't load fully) and reload, just to rule out the super obvious?

Oh, I don't have the funds to take advantage of this just yet. I just happened to notice it in the shop. BUT ONE DAY...

Edited (clarifying!!) 2012-07-21 11:06 (UTC)

Your statement sums it up perfectly! I don't think I've ever enjoyed (or looked forward to) a maintenance downtime like this before :)

I wondered why that was happening! I will now know what the heck is going on when I wake up with a dozen emails from DW in my face, and not to panic. But perhaps to get excited.

I suppose I came at a bad time, but yesterday I opened a personal site and started setting up a community. I saw the upcoming maintenance notification, so wasn't bothered or surprised by that, but now I can get into the personal one and to the profile page for the community, but not the page with community posts. I can "post" to the community, or so it seems at least, but when I get to the screen that gives me options to view the post I just made and click the link to go there, I wind up back at the page from last night that says the site is down for maintenance. Are you still working on the communties?

Edited 2012-07-21 15:56 (UTC)

Can you try clearing your browser cache? That sounds like your browser has an old copy of the page stored locally.

Also, welcome to DW!

Well, it's working now, but I haven't cleared the cache yet. I didn't do anything to it except wait and come back later. Thanks for the quick reply, and for the welcome.

Edited 2012-07-21 16:53 (UTC)

First, fixed :)

Second, you only missed me by about half an hour *grin*

Third, I always clear browser cached when starting and before exiting, but didn't think to do it in the middle for this. Thanks for the reminder!

Life is real right now, so I'll have to wait to finish reading your (apparently very fantastic News post), but am in anticipaaaaation.

Don't know if this is new (or I'm just blind), but I really like what I did spot - after adding a 'memory', one of the links on the "Success" page is to go directly to that memories category. Good work, whenever it was done!

*gentle hugs*

Hi, I'm trying to sign up for a new account, and when I put in my age -- which is 25 -- the date generator tells me that I'm under 13 and can't create an account?

Last I checked, 1987 WAS still more than 13 years ago.

Did you accidentally make a typo in your age when you first tried to sign up? If you enter a date under 13, the site sets a "this person is underage" cookie for 24 hours to prevent people under 13 from just hitting the back button and trying again. Clearing cookies from dreamwidth.org and trying again should work if that's the case.

I don't think this code push included anything that touched the date logic, so that explanation is more likely than a bug involving the signup page, but if clearing your cookies doesn't work let me know and I'll look into it a bit more.

Seconded. Just what I wanted to say. :)

This account is having a weird issue that I can't seem to fix with its text in its journal. The font is all bolded. I have a test post up, and the 'bold' is double bolded. I have another account with the same layout, and I don't have the issue at all. I've used all the other abstractia versions with this, and it's the same issue. I don't know why it's bolding, but every entry's text is. It's only this account, and it's only on Chrome - as it shows up normally in Firefox.

Halp?

I'm not seeing the same thing when I look at your journal, which means it could be one of two things: either you have an unclosed bold tag in a locked post that's "overrunning" the other entry and into all your other entries, or you have a browser extension installed that changes how your fonts are displayed or have set your default font in that browser to be bold. Check the post where the bolding starts and see if you have any unclosed tags; if not, try disabling your extensions and make sure your fonts are set to normal, not bold!

I've been away for a while, but I just noticed that comments are not importing. Is this something that the recent maintenance messed with or another problem? I don't see anything posted about it except for a couple of support requests that are still open, so I figured I'd ask here since I don't know where else to ask.

There isn't any known issue with comment importing, no! Check your Inbox; it'll have any errors or the reason for the failure. If it's not a problem that you can fix (wrong password or whatever) open a support request with the text of the error and someone will look into it when they have a chance; single-account problems with importing (problems only your account is having) do often take a very long time to investigate and debug, because they're very often problems with the data that's being sent from the remote site and the contents of your account and they're extremely hard to reproduce and fix, but as long as the request remains open, we will try to identify and resolve the problem if we can.

But that's the thing. It says it was successful. I've tried it on 3 separate accounts to no avail and there's 4 requests in the support requests with the exact same problem (it says it is successful but no comments are being imported).

The links to the other support problems:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=17935
http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=17861
http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=17832
http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=17828

It's also not a wrong password as everything else imports just fine.

That definitely sounds like a problem with the data in your account or the data being sent from the other site, then -- open a support request as well, and someone will look into it when they have a chance. Again, though, those are very, very hard problems to debug and can only be looked at by a very small subset of people (since it involves direct database access to look over the import logs and results), so I'm afraid it will likely be a while before anyone's able to get back to you.

OK. I will. Thanks for getting back so quicly. Could it be possible that it would only affect a certain cluster? (I'm pretending like I know what that means, haha).

Also, a question I've always wanted to know but have never seemed to find: What made you and Mark call this place dreamwidth?

No, what database cluster your account is on is almost certainly unrelated -- as I said, it's very likely the data being sent to us from the remote site being formatted in a way that the importer isn't expecting or some corrupt content in one of the comments attached to your account. Hence why it takes so long to debug those problems, since they're very, very dependent on the data in question: if only a handful of accounts are having the problem because only that handful of accounts have comments that contain whatever the importer isn't expecting, it's *incredibly* hard to troubleshoot. By now, after three years, the importer has been extremely well "hardened" against bad data, so the remaining problems that show up are a) extremely rare and b) extremely hard to track down.

As for the name, meanwhile, if bandwidth is a measure of how much data can be transfered across a connection, we decided 'dreamwidth' was a measure of how much creativity can be transfered across a connection. :) (Also, it was the first thing we came up with where we could register the .com, .net, and .org versions of the URL without having to negotiate for them.)

Ah. That makes sense. I like the name more now, haha. :)

And oh boy, sounds like someone's gonna have fun debugging this then. I feel sorry for them.

Thanks again for your help and quick response! I appreciate it.

The annoying thing is that it's only this account. If I log into any account and look this account over, I see it. And I did a test line in the first entry which wound up bolding as well. What I don't get is how it looks perfectly fine to me on FF.

All other accounts are completely fine, and this account can go look at other accounts and not have them show up bolded. There's only one post with bolding in it, and I've given it a look over. No open bold tags. (Which wouldn't explain why my first post with nothing in it would bold things as well)

I don't have any browser extensions for fonts on here. In fact, there's a lot of fonts that just show up as boxes to me, but that's not here or there.

The weird, confusing part is that it's limited to this one account. I just don't get it.

No, don't check the entry where the bolding begins -- check the entry that was posted just after that one (the one that appears just before it). That's the entry that should have the runaway bold tag.

(If that's what it is, it doesn't show on Firefox because Firefox autocloses open tags differently.)

I only have a few posts up, and only two that have any bolding tags. The test post has no open tags, and neither does the other post with text. The two posts prior to it are for links, and in those posts, the text still shows up bold when I put in random text to test it. There's no bolding in either of them, so this is where the confusion comes in.

I should also mention that when I use the preview button to preview my post, it shows up how it should be; not bolded where it's not supposed to be and bolded where it should be. Every post I post with that account shows up fine in the preview, but when it's posted, it shows up all bolded. And as I said, it's ONLY on this account that that's an issue. I can view this account through other accounts, and it all shows up bolded. I have another account with the same layout, and there's no problems there.

It's not like it's detrimental to the account or anything, but it's just weird.

Hello!

Since last night, I'm not getting ANY email notifications anymore; I was wondering if I'm the only one/this is a known problem? I'm not using gmail btw (gmx).

GMX is one of the providers who tends to block us pretty frequently (usually it's due to the amount of mail we send out) -- I'm not currently seeing any failures in the logs, but the version of the logs I can get at easily only display an excerpt of the most recent log messages, and right now it's only stretching back 3 hours, so I can't be completely sure.

If you're not getting any email notifications at all, do two things: first, check your spam folder to see if notifs are being sent but flagged as spam, and second, send yourself an email @dreamwidth.org to see if your mail server is blocking email from us entirely?

Ah, yeah, they ended up in the spam folder (apparently because of the mail header?) However I checked my spam settings and I've always had dw_null@dreamwidth.org on the Whitelist... I'm not sure what's wrong :(

Sadly, even if you have a particular sender whitelisted, your ISP can still sometimes decide that something about the traffic looks suspicious. Because we send so much mail (and because of the @dreamwidth.org forwarding emails -- if someone spams you @dreamwidth.org, your mail provider is likely to think it was sent by or through us because of the forward and downgrade us because of that) providers can sometimes decide that we are evil spammers of evil who spam with evilness, even though we're totally legit. If that happens, mail from *any* sender at dreamwidth.org can find its way into the spam filter, mail-server-wide, whether whitelisted in a particular user's individual settings or not

You can sometimes make it stop by marking things as not-spam if you are persistent about it -- it took me about six months to teach my mail client that all notification email was not-spam, legit mail sent to me @dreamwidth.org was not-spam, while spam forwarded to me @dreamwidth.org was spam. You might have to be *really* persistent about it, though. Or, you may want to try writing your ISP's support department and explain that legit mail is regularly being flagged as spam, explain that we offer a forwarding email service so any spam that might look like it's coming from us isn't really from us, and ask them to accept all mail.

Thanks for the elaborate advice! :) It seems to work for now because I've disabled a certain spam prevention measure, but if someting like this happens again in the future I'll try out your suggestions.

Glad to be of service!

Site back up!

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