Code push scheduled for Sunday night

[karzilla]

We are planning to do a code push late this weekend, at approximately 8pm PDT / 11pm EDT / 3am UTC on Sunday, Apr 30 (or May 1 for you transatlantic types.).

I don't have a list of changes for you yet, but most will fall into the following categories: things users have complained about to support volunteers, things support volunteers have complained about to developers, things denise has complained about not working the way she expects them to (and as we all know, The Boss is Always Right), and things that were printing warnings over and over in the production server logs, making it hard to spot when less frequent, more urgent errors were being printed. Oh, and also all the unused code I ripped out at the roots, which if you notice that, I did it wrong.

To sum up: we are rolling out a bunch of requested changes, so thank you all for your feedback!

If you're new to Dreamwidth and interested in tracking our development process, our commit logs are published to changelog and changelog_digest, and every month or so, one of our volunteers will translate those often-cryptic entries into witty, informative code tours! The most recent one was published on April 1, so we're about due for a new one. Hint, hint.

We'll update here again to let you know when the code push is imminent!

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

We love you.

Hall-an-tow!

[siderea]

♬ "Oh, we've reinstalléd all the night,
and the best part of the day-a!
And now rebooteth once again
to bring you the branch of May-a!" ♬

Re: Hall-an-tow!

[denise]

Bugfixes are icumen in, lhude sing cuccu!

[alexseanchai]

Cool :)

[jurgen_svoloch]

keep it goin'
thanks

[deanshot1]

Thanks for letting us know.

[beasts_of_homeworld]

thank you for the update!

also thanks for mentioning changelog and changelog_digest, we hadn't heard of them yet and they sound awesome!

we've been meaning to mention an accessibility issue for a while now and haven't had the spoons. should we put that here, if we can? or try to drop it into dw_accessibility before the code push? or something else? it's just wording-related so not really much of a thing on your end, we'd imagine.

thanks so much for all you folks do, and for keeping us in the loop! <3

[azurelunatic]

Here's likely good, but if you'd prefer to do it in a more private venue, you can submit a Support request (Site Interface) here: http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/submit (or email support @ dreamwidth . org if that's easier for you folks).


(Hmm. Maybe time to update my icons so they're a little less LJ-y...)

[killerweasel]

This has nothing to do with the code push (yay for code pushes), but maybe someone can answer it.

I'm subscribed to my own journal. I import the majority of my posts from LJ. The only time my own posts seem to appear in my reading page is when I post them on dreamwidth and the LJ imports don't seem to be anywhere but my own journal.

Is there something I need to do to fix this?

[denise]

Personal journal posts that originated elsewhere and were imported to DW don't show on reading pages. (It has to do with how the reading page is constructed -- if we let imported personal-journal posts show on a reading page, when someone did a first import, they'd be flooding their subscribers' reading pages with everything the import contained all at once.)

If you want your entries to show on both your LJ friends' friends pages and your DW subscribers' reading pages, the best thing to do is post them on DW and use the built-in DW crossposter to automatically crosspost to LJ. (That has the benefit that when you import your LJ again, the importer will put the LJ and DW versions of the comments on the same entry instead of you winding up with duplicates.)

[quietpathos]

I can't fault denise for her high standards. It's endearing. It can also be exhausting, for her and those around her. Godspeed, guys.

[denise]

I'M NOT THAT BAD, I SWEAR, JEN JUST LIKES TO MOCK ME IN PUBLIC

Looking forward to this. I will actually have a good deal of time to myself starting next week and g

[jazzyjj]

I'm so looking forward to this. I'll actually have a good deal of time to myself next week going into the following week. My neighbor across the hall is going on vacation so I can get my geek on without him bothering me, lol! Actually he's a great guy and I do feel sorry for him because he's lonely and doesn't do much outside of his apartment. But enough about him for now. Thanks as always for being so transparent with these things; it's one reason I chose Dreamwidth in the first place. Best of luck with this code push.

[kore]

Thank you for the transparency and up-to-date information! It's really appreciated.

[makamu]

Once again, thank you for being so open with your user base :)

[firstchimera]

I read the code tour and I'm intrigued in what happened to that roleplay tag. I can't seem to find it on my settings page.

[kareila]

It will appear after the code push on Sunday!

[elrhiarhodan]

I actually look forward to DW Code Pushes (as opposed to the updates on that other place) because I know that denise and her band of mighty warriors are trying to make things better for everyone, not to please advertisers or nowadays, suppress political speech.

Thank you to everyone involved in keeping DW moving forward and upward.

[denise]

Aw, thanks! karzilla and mark are more the mighty warriors in charge of code changes -- I just explain things about them to y'all later. :)

[ninetydegrees]

Yay! Code push! *stars*

[jean_kirstein]

Thank you! <3

[merrycalliope]

Thanks for working hard for us~!

[deanshot1]

I forgot to ask to something. During the code push am I right in guessing that we won't be able to access our Dreamwidth accounts while its being carried out.

[denise]

Nine times out of ten, you'll only notice that a code push is happening because suddenly there's new stuff! 9% or so of the remaining time, you'll be the lucky person who hit a webserver in the tiny tiny tiny window where a server is having traffic directed to it but can't serve a response: in that case you'll get a "the site is down" error from Cloudflare, but refreshing it in a minute will work. The last 1% is when we need to take the site fully down for a brief window or put it into read-only mode (you can load pages but can't post new entries or make comments) for a few minutes -- we only do that when we're doing database updates that need to be 100% positive that the update script is the only thing writing to the database, and we always try to remember to tell you in advance (although sometimes we get to that part of the code push and go "...oh fuck, right, we need to take the site down for this", heh).

I think this push may need to involve like five minutes of downtime, but don't quote me on that. We'll try to remember to mention it here before the push if it does!

(Most of the time we only tell y'all we're doing a code push because we want people to know why things just changed/want them to report bugs they spot -- for an 18 year old legacy web app it's pretty awesome that we can push to production without disruption as much as we are able to ...)

[greenfoxy]

Hi!
I feel worried about DW. When I log in Firefox tells me this login is not safe. I have FF 53.0 32 bits. But I still can log in. But in Live Journal Firefox blocked me to log in. FF told the certificate is out of date since April 30. I'm afraid someday FF also will block DW if the certificate there will be out of date. Please help!

[kareila]

Hi there!

Yes, SSL certificates do expire from time to time - they must be renewed at regular intervals. If that should ever happen here, we would certainly fix it as soon as possible!

More generally, if you ever have a problem that prevents you from logging in, the quickest and most effective way to get help is to open a support request, or if you can't reach the site at all, you can email support@dreamwidth.org.

accessibility feedback (does this go here?)

[beasts_of_homeworld]

thanks again for this post and the code push!

we're not sure where to say this, if there was an announcement that included this change we can't find it (we do wish we'd seen one ahead of time or when the change happened, that would have made it less jarring, but we may just not be following the right places or have missed a mention among other topics), and it's much harder for us to post a topic in a community (like dw_accessibility) than comment in a thread. in our previous comment here some lovely helpful volunteers suggested this might be a good place for it, so we'll try offering this here. hope it's okay.

accessibility feedback of beasts:

we much preferred (aka found useable/accessible) when in the posting security drop-down menu - the one that when posting an entry says "show this entry to" - the menu option "custom access filter" was shortened to "custom" rather than to "access filter". "custom" is a more widely-known concept and the word itself is easier to read and far better differentiated from the other items on the list, and therefore easier to find and to comprehend for those of us who may have any or all of:

- vision difficulties

- using a second language

- language-processing or language-recognition difficulties

- some other kinds of cognitive difficulties

- visual input processing problems

- dyslexia

- other similar struggles.

in contrast, "access filter" is far too similar to "access list" and for us at least just gets lost in the fog of letters. (we experience all of the above struggles.)

"custom" stands out from all the other options because it's markedly shorter and has a completely different shaped upper-case starting letter as well as other letters that don't appear in similar places anywhere else on the list of options, and with its ending letter being completely unique. this makes it much easier to find.

and to us at least, "custom" has a much clearer meaning, because the term "access filter" is site-specific and complex, while the term "custom" is universal and simple. our brain can locate the meaning of the term "custom" at times when it cannot locate the meaning of the term "access filter".

we're currently able to find the correct option in that dropdown list only because of spatial memory, it's still located in the same place on the list. but that wouldn't help us if we were new to the site, and it's stressful and exhausting not to know for sure what we're picking. makes us disinclined to make posts as we need to save those spoons for necessary survival tasks.

end feedback.

in other news, you guys are all awesome and we appreciate you and all your hard work very much. <3 <3 <3

Re: accessibility feedback (does this go here?)

[denise]

Thanks for the feedback! This was a Duelling Access Needs™ change -- somebody else found "custom" alone really hard to understand. ("Custom what?") I've changed it again to make it a little clearer ("custom filter" instead of just "custom" -- the issue was not specifying 'filter' or 'access filter' as the noun going with the adjective 'custom'.)

(Sorry about the unexpected change, too -- changing what the site text says is a different process than changing how the site behaves, so it doesn't fall into the usual "changes only at a code push". We tweak the site text occasionally based on suggestions and feedback.)

The change does only apply to the original update page -- the beta update page handles choosing security levels differently, and (IMO) in a way that's much easier to understand and distinguish.

List of changes, 4/2 to 4/29

[azurelunatic]

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/198660.html

List of changes, 2/12 to 4/1

[azurelunatic]

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/197617.html

[levkonoe]

Many thanks to the team for what you are doing, for everything that works, for a friendly attitude towards the members, and most thanks for the NO REPOST BUTTON!!

[denise]

I love that any post containing someone asking for a repost button must also contain someone thanking us for not having a repost button. :)

(We know some people really really want it and some people really really don't! If we ever do it, we'll think really carefully about it first, I swear.)