Code pushed

[mark]

Hi all!

The code has been pushed. As always, please report problems here! We have lots of hands on deck and ready to jump on things that might be awry. Thanks!

Comments

[formermagicalgirl]

I know I'm not the only one out there who uses a userscript and the Stylish add on to make DW be in a color scheme that works for us and this code push broke our scripts again. Can you or someone else let us know what changed in the entry pages and such so we can edit the scripts as needed?

[denise]

In this case, we replaced the old method of generating site-skinned entry pages with the same backend system that's used to generate journal-styled comments. So, much of the underlying structure has changed; we ran the changes through the beta features system ahead of time and did several iterations.

We can't provide support for people who are using extensions or plugins to change the way the site looks, and we do reserve the right to make changes to the underlying HTML structure of the site from time to time -- in this case, the changeover was necessary to reduce code duplication and to make it easier to extend and change things in the future. So, the best thing to do is to contact the script author and let them know they'll need to make edits.

[noone_like_gaston]

Previous functionality allowed links to be clickable and images viewable in the reply-to, but that's not the case anymore. Could you please fix this? This made the site more useable when viewing links from anonymous users on tablets.

[denise]

The site itself doesn't allow images to be visible or links to be clickable in comments from anonymous users -- this is to help prevent a common spam vector, since a nontrivial number of anonymous comments are spam advertising and clickable links and displayable images help to reduce the motivation for spammers to spam.

Best guess over here is that you had a script or extension installed locally that would make those links clickable and make the image display, and the changes to the underlying HTML when we switched from generating entry pages through two separate ways (through the site engine and through the journal layout engine) to a single way (through the journal layout engine). You'll need to contact the script or extension author and let them know that it's stopped working; they'll need to make changes to the script.

[olliesout]

The arrows for the (lj)cuts don't show up (they just show up as boxes), but you can click them and the cut expands. The arrow just shows up when the cut is expanded, though, and you can click it collapse.

[momijizukamori]

There was a small problem with our loadbalancers and mime-type - if you hard-refresh, it should be fixed!

[notanorange]

For anonymous comments, HTML seems to have been disabled in the replyto. It's no longer possible to view images or clink links. I hope this is a bug as a result of the code push rather than something done deliberately.

[denise]

The site itself doesn't allow images to be visible or links to be clickable in comments from anonymous users -- this is to help prevent a common spam vector, since a nontrivial number of anonymous comments are spam advertising and clickable links and displayable images help to reduce the motivation for spammers to spam.

Best guess over here is that you had a script or extension installed locally that would make those links clickable and make the image display, and the changes to the underlying HTML when we switched from generating entry pages through two separate ways (through the site engine and through the journal layout engine) to a single way (through the journal layout engine). You'll need to contact the script or extension author and let them know that it's stopped working; they'll need to make changes to the script.

[anaraine]

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be intended behavior, but the code push definitely changed the colors of my contextual popup, so instead of black/white they now match the colors of the layout. (If it is intended behavior, that's fine, I'll just hack together some custom css - but it was kind of an unpleasant surprise.)

[momijizukamori]

We're looking into it - we made some changes to contextual pop-ups, but it looks like it may have had some unintended behavior. Can't say when we'll get it worked out, so if it's really bugging you, you may want to just do some custom CSS - sorry about that!

[hypospraying]

The icon browser now has a slight bug where if you view the icons in large size with the meta text, the comment section for the icon (where people usually credit the icon maker in a lot of cases) has shifted off center towards the right and gets cut off. Not the biggest deal, but still I thought I'd put it out there so you guys know.

[randomling]

Hi!

Could you let me know which style you're using, please? I'm seeing this bug in the site scheme, but not in the style I use.

Thanks!

[blueskyonwhitecanvas]

This is a small aesthetic change but I really don't like it.

old:


new:

[socktacular]

I have to agree. I know it's only aesthetics, but I really do prefer the other way. It allowed for a bit more space between the subject and the text and made it seem less like it was part of the actual post and more like it was what it was; a subject line.

[socktacular]

The 'reply to this' in the last comment bar seems to be a glitch of some sort? As in, why is the comment bar there if it's not a comment and why is the reply to this so huge and bolded?

Picture. Is this a glitch, or is this some new addition. This and the collapse/uncollapse arrows changing to black on my lj-based layout (which has the dw script fix) are the only differences I've actually noticed.

[momijizukamori]

It appears to be a comment bar, but just with a deliberately empty comment. The bold at the bottom is a known bug with the HTML cleaner on comments, and it's being looked into.

The all-black expand/collapse tag is also a bug and should be fixed tomorrow or Sunday (we switched to a scalable icon, but the border didn't make it into the new scalable one)

[dancing_serpent]

There's something with the arrows to expand cuts - some are tiny now, and I read the code tour that we can scale them, so that's ok - but on some journals on my reading list they have vanished completely.

[jordannamorgan]

My cut-expand arrows are, I *think*, still the same size--but now they're black. And thus, pretty much invisible on my very very dark page background.

[ruriair]

I'd like to mention that ever since the code push before this one or so, icon/userhead hover menus that should have the new CSS still display without any styling - the links display as an unordered list. They only honor the page's link color or journal custom CSS. The only ones that display properly are the ones with the old CSS (i.e. on profiles). This is true for multiple accounts I use, and every browser, even on my phone. I was waiting to see if the next code push would fix it, but it hasn't. Doesn't make a difference if beta is off.

[denise]

Just to let you know, we're looking into what can be done with this -- I'm not entirely certain what's going on here, but fu told me she's going to take a look :)

[aguacatillo]

I'm suddenly no longer seeing 'Thread from start' links in flat-view, only threaded view - I miss them! (I suppose it's possible that I only ever saw them anyway when viewing DW with a Stylish script applied - I have the impression I used to also see them when viewing in DW's plain site schemes but my memory's not perfect, and if that's the case then I understand it's on the script-writers and not you to get them visible again - but in any case I now certainly don't see these wonderfully useful links either with or without the userscript active, and I'd love to have them.)

[momijizukamori]

I'm half-awake after last night's late push, but if they were there and vanished, it'd be my fault, and I will look into it for you when I get a sec :)

[captain_jtkirk]

For some reason, when I go to view entries in this journal, all of the time stamps are in 24 hour time, even though I have am/pm selected on the display options. Even stranger, when I go to other entries, including this one, the time is displayed correctly in am/pm. It only happens when I'm logged into this account too.

[ninetydegrees]

Hi captain_jtkirk,

When you say you have am/pm selected, do you mean the option which is at http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display or the option which is at http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options or both? Also, do you see entries in the original style, your own style or the site skin? Same question for journals. This is also an option at http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display.

[runpunkrun]

The expand/collapse arrows aren't showing up for me, even after I cleared my cache and restarted my browser. Instead of arrows I have a text link that says "Expand" or "Collapse." They function the same, but look annoying. Is this because I'm using Firefox 3.6? *wince*

[misskat]

Unfortunately, that is really, really likely. We only support the latest few major releases for the major browsers, and 3.6 is.... not that. :( so sorry to be the bearer of bad news! Try upgrading, if you can, or use another browser.

[caput_mortuum]

Yay, I like! \o/
I have no clue what is going on in the comments here but I am grateful for DW's anti spam measures successfully preventing spam since I can't even track any LJ communities anymore - I'm very aware of how bad it can get. And no mod wants 'delete 50 spam comments' added to their daily duties.

formatting error when tags are not closed

[femdomedotnet]

you might already know about this - sounds like what was reported here:
http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=22556

for example, if you enter this code with the table tag unclosed

[font face="comic sans" color="red"][table][/font]

...the font formatting affects the rest of the page

thanks

Re: formatting error when tags are not closed

[mark]

This should be fixed now, thanks!

[zvi]

Have an issue w/ cut tags relating to a specific entry. If http://girlgay.dreamwidth.org/185676.html is on my reading list, no other cut tags are working properly, and the cut tag expander module reports that there are no cut tags. If it is not, then the cut tags work fine.

My style is Early Edition for Five AM, with CSS addons. The only line that relates to cut tags is

.cuttag-open {
border-left: 1px solid #cc3333;
margin: 0.5em;
padding: 0.5em;
}

My browser is Chromium Version 25.0.1364.160 Ubuntu 13.04 (25.0.1364.160-0ubuntu3).

---

On further investigation, this is not a problem with the code push, it's a problem with a fake cut which includes class info it shouldn't have. Shall I go report this through the help system? It's a bug, but it's not related to the code push, probably.

[denise]

No, we're aware of it, thanks!

[shiromadoushi]

Just noticed that entry tags aren't clickable until after they're past the subject line on the dark site skin.

For example, on this page you can't click on the first two tags, just the ones that are after the subject line finishes. I'm gussing the subject line is in the way somehow with how everything got condensed?

[denise]

that ... is incredibly weird.

opening a bug for that, thanks!

[rainbowrumpuspartytown]

did you guys intentionally disable anonymous users from posting tables just now?

is there a reason for that?

[mark]

Yes -- it has been an open ticket for a while, but it became a priority today due to rampant abuse of certain quirks of the HTML cleaner that involved tables.

[monstermod]

i'm not sure that this is the place to ask, but since it relates to recent code changes, i'll throw it here

i understand that you're concerned about spam comments, but it would be nice if community owners would be able to make the decision themselves about allowing anonymous embedding

is there a particular reason why it would be an issue to allow us to make that choice?

[denise]

Yes, there is.

I explained it in comments above: the short version is, spamfighting features are not something we can allow anyone to opt out of, because once we make them optional and people start disabling them, the site as a whole will suffer for it. When a site gets a reputation for hosting spammers, the entire site is penalized: search engines downweight results for that site, for instance, making it harder to find things, and email from that site is more likely to be greylisted (delayed for a while before delivery) or blacklisted (completely refused).

Changes that are necessary for the safety, security, or long-term health of the site will never be optional, whether opt-in or opt-out.

[sushicat]

is it possible to bring tables, marquees and embedded videos back for anonymous users?

update: found my answer above, you posted it the same time i asked

[denise]

No. Too many people were using those methods to a) post commercial spam, b) break the display of comments for everyone reading the page, or c) attempt to exploit details of the HTML cleaner to circumvent prohibitions on what can and can't appear in anonymous comments.

[subluxate]

I don't know what it is--if I have an extension that's causing it (though I don't think so) or what--but when I hover over a userhead on site style comment pages, the contextual popup comes up in the upper lefthand corner. It doesn't do this on my reading page. I'm using the most recent Chrome on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.

Edit: this does not happen in Firefox 21.0.

[denise]

Belatedly: I'm not reproducing in Chrome-for-Mac; can you try trying it in incognito mode or with a new Chrome profile and see if it still happens?

[denise]

To answer the questions of the people who are wondering why comments are being screened: it's because a) feedback on business and product decisions that have been explained multiple times already don't belong in dw_maintenance, which is for reports of bugs; b) many of those comments have been extremely aggressive and rude, the team is traveling this weekend, and we aren't willing to leave the comments unscreened without someone to sit on top of them.

[sophie]

At some zoom levels, the cut-tag SVG triangle is still blurry. I'm using Firefox 21 on Windows 7. An example screenshot: http://neo.theblob.org/fuzzy-svg.png .

I did some Googling and found a potential solution. Apparently Firefox and Opera render SVGs before resizing them rather than the other way round, and you can get around this by setting the width and height in the SVG (which are both set to 11 right now) to the *maximum* size they might be displayed at rather than the optimum size. I'd suggest 55 for each.

[denise]

Open a bug for that?

[gone_fishing]

Quick report re: the style selection pages:

-The thumbnail for my theme Cocoa for Abstractia isn't loading all the way and is only half of a thumbnail, and I checked from another OS to see if this was my computer/browser having loading issues and it's not.

-For the Librarian's Dream theme preview thumbnails, what I think is supposed to be Moss is the thumbnail for Pumpkin Pie, and the thumbnail for Deep Seas shows up twice, as Deep Seas and then listed again as Moss. :3


Otherwise, thank you for the code push! You guys put in a lot of hard work and I appreciate it; thank you. <3

[denise]

Belatedly, thanks for the report, we fixed those!

why anon links have to be defanged -- from someone in SEO (search engine optimization) bizarro world

[sepdet]

Let me reiterate what I said above.

I work in the sordid world of online blogging and writing, and I see black hat SEO every day, which gives the rest of us a bad name by association.

Unfortunately, at the dawn of the web, the best way to get your site to rise to the top of Google and Yahoo and ANY search engine was to have lots of different links pointing to your site. Search engines have gotten more sophisticated, but that outdated "build backlinks!" advice still gets handed out all to every budding mommy blogger and internet marketer, and EVERY professional SEO company promises its clients it will build backlinks, because backlinks are something they can count and quantify and show that "progress is being made."

The number one place that newbies and black hat SEOs target is unsecured forums, guestbooks, and comment reply boxes. They don't care that it's nofollow. They don't care that it's noindex. And they don't care that it's not welcome. I do, because I believe in community and in keeping the web from being overrun by garbage. But for every one of me, there's four internet marketers and bloggers who will do anything to get more traffic -- it's their livelihood, earning enough to pay the bills in a tough economy -- and four big companies like JCPenny that are throwing money at SEO consultants to build links for them, and two black hat spammers who actually take malicious pleasure in spamming the net and/or using any unethical means they can to get ahead. The latter two groups employ industrial strength bots to spew links wherever they find an opening.

Search engines have really cracked down on linkspam; they try to discount those links. But they DO count links on sites where lots of people talk and share opinions, on the theory that those links are genuine recommendations. So the spammers have the incentive to target Dreamwidth, more than ever as more and more of their backlinks get blacklisted and downranked by search engines wising up to their usual linkdropping targets. The more this happens, the more search engines start downranking sites where spam is found, even if the host site is an innocent victim. It's slash and burn, with new websites being targeted by link spammers once the sites where they used to post have been downranked by Google as spam havens.

That downranking could indeed hurt Dreamwidth. It's hurt me. Two of the sites where I publish educational and hobby related articles -- Squidoo and Hubpages -- have gotten downranked by Google, because they weren't proactive enough about keeping the spam and junk out. Go to Quantcast.com and enter Squidoo.com or Hubpages.com, then look at the Squidoo traffic drops of last November or the Hubpages traffic drops of Feb 2011, if you want to see what happens to a site that Google's downranking for spam. It's not pretty.

If that happened to Dreamwidth, then dreamwidth posts would probably appear somewhere below livejournal posts and insanejournal and blogger and hentai and ff.net and geocities mirror sites in Google searches, or just not appear at all in Google search results. And yes, Gmail would toss email from dreamwidth into its spam folder, and I assume that Yahoo mail and anything connected to Microsoft would do the same, since they're linked up with their own search engine algorithms.

For dreamwidth, a slight downrank isn't as crucial, since we're not depending on site traffic for revenue, but it could still hurt.