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

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.

Re: accessibility feedback (does this go here?)

[beasts_of_homeworld]

thankyou very much for the reply, Denise! (or denise? we just realised we don't know your case preference, if you have one. most of us prefer our names all in lower-case, but we know that's not the usual custom on Earth.)

we wondered if that might've been it! we almost added that to the original comment when we were writing it, we were thinking of saying something like we know that someone's accessible can be someone else's inaccessible and you can't fix it all. the lack of noun issue makes a lot of sense to us, we can identify with that person's confusion.

we think you came up with a really good solution to the conflict of needs, too! "custom filter" specifies the noun without repeating any of the other options on the list, and still keeps both the more easily distinguishable starting shape of the upper-case C and the more universally-known concept of something being custom-made. it'll still be a little harder to find for us than the original just because it's so much longer and closer to the length of the other options, but we are very happy with that compromise if it helps someone else be able to use it too. excellent job, and thankyou very much.

we really appreciate so much how willing you and the others are here to listen and make changes for accessibility. it's funny in that not-funny way because this shouldn't feel like such an amazing treat, but in western Earth society, it does. this is why dreamwidth is our home - it's a place where our needs actually matter, for once. it's a place where it's worth us paying the spoons to speak, because people will listen instead of telling us to shut up. it's the only space we've found on Earth that we didn't create, where we are not second-class citizens or the unwanted pile of junk in the corner. thankyou for being the island of safety in this world. <3 <3 <3

thanks for explaining about how text changes are handled and why they don't go in the announcements, too! that makes a lot of sense, we thought it would probably be a much easier thing to change, and we can see why there wouldn't be announcements for this sort of thing, with them being odd tweaks on an as-needed basis outside of other updates. it was a little alarming to us to go into what usually feels like a private space for us and find someone had moved the furniture around unexpectedly, but we know that realistically we are just using a private iteration of a shared common space that needs to match everyone's requirements and the landlord needs to move things sometimes to make that work.

to put it differently: unexpected text changes are jarring and scary especially in places that are familiar and/or personal, but we understand the need for it and can handle it okay. if announcements weren't extra effort we'd appreciate them, but the hassle of making a post each time a text change is made seems like it'd be more prohibitive to getting text changes made in a timely manner than anything.

the beta update page does sound really good, with all its customisation options. customisation helps lower the "landlord needs to move the furniture to suit everyone" quota quite a bit! we're really looking forward to trying that. and a different, easier to distinguish way of selecting security levels sounds very attractive, too! we won't use it though until it has support for draft saving, because we rely on that very heavily and it can make the difference between us posting and having a good day and being okay, and a failure to post completely wrecking our health for the rest of the day because it burned spoons we needed in order to eat.

we've tried using text files to save post drafts in, but it's really not something we're capable of usually. our brain can't reliably produce a "copy and paste into a text file before hitting post!" cue without prompting because it's an external action not part of using the site and following the site's cues. and likewise we can't manage a "remember to go write the post in a text file instead" cue when we want to start a post. plus if we try to write the whole post in a text file it doesn't feel like a post and we often can't do it.

that's okay though. we're content using the original update page until draft-saving can be added to the new one, and if it can't be added, then so long as you never force everyone to change over to the new version we'll be fine. ^_^ (easygoing smile)

(it's also entirely possible our browsers wouldn't be able to load the beta update page at all, or it would be full of errors. that's happening with many dynamic-content pages now, and just newer site design in general, because we're trapped in an old OS that lacks dependencies for newer versions of browsers. it's a long and complex explanation as to why we can't change that yet, that involves a lot of shit most people don't have to deal with and often can't even understand. we don't feel like trying to explain. all readers need to know is that we're aware of the security problems and other such things, and we're already making the maximum progress speed possible towards updating our system. we'll get there sometime in the next few years.)

apologies for our verbosity, though we know you likely won't mind much, being of a somewhat similar ilk. *friendly grin* it eases our social anxiety to acknowledge/apologise for and explain it, though. we have two main modes: silent and textwall, haha. using words and translating into english is extremely challenging, and we're naturally inclined to infodumping and otherwise just communicating a lot of things, and struggling to find concise and accurate translations. so trying to then edit down what we said on top of that often puts us back into 'silent'.

again great job on finding a good compromise with "custom filter"; and thankyou so so much for all you do here. for listening and caring and for making changes when you can and for dreamwidth being the place that it is. thankyou for providing us this space where we can exist, express ourselves, be heard, and have friends in a world that would rather drop us in a hole and forget about us. this is why we keep a paid account whenever we can. dreamwidth is Doin It Rite.

we love you folks. <3

Re: accessibility feedback (does this go here?)

[denise]

I am not at all fussy about case, but technically Denise is uppercase (as it is my Wallet Name) while all my other usernames are lowercase. :)

I'm glad that the access compromise works for you! Please do always feel free to let us know if you notice an accessibility need not being met; I can't promise we'll always be able to make a specific change (between dueling access needs, "is it technically impossible", "is it technically possible but would require a lot of work that we don't have the time/resources to do right now", etc) but we'll always give it a good hard think and see what we can come up with, and we are Very Cross if people are rude in comments to official journals to someone just for asking about access needs. (And I'm always happy to explain the reasoning behind a particular decision or the reason why we can't make a specific change, if the answer is "sorry, can't do that right now", to see if we can get something that will work after a few back-and-forth tries.)

Totally understood about the draft saving thing, yes! Just to be absolutely on the safe side: I will caution that the autosave on the old update page is a "best effort" thing, done in your own browser and not on the server side, that works in 95% of cases but breaks terribly in the other 5%. (It's why we haven't just implemented that version of autosave in the new update page yet, since when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong.) If your current browser supports extensions, you may want to install an extension like Lazarus that will autosave the information that you put in forms like the update page so it can be restored in case of a crash, just for more peace of mind.