dw_maintenance | Code push imminent!

Code push imminent!

We're about to pull the lever on tonight's code push! Many of the changes we are making to the site are under-the-hood improvements, but these are the ones you are more likely to notice:

New account setting option for RP accounts, for future feature development.
Many more sites upgraded to use HTTPS links instead of relying on our SSL proxy.
Moved the Manage Icons page to /manage/icons and modernized the underlying code.
Increased the size limit for icon descriptions from 120 to 300 characters.
Various requested fixes for the image upload/management pages.
Improved processing of emailed entries for changes to entry security.
Improved processing of emailed comments for removal of quoted text.
Reading page with date filter now has previous / next day links.
Banned users hidden by default on the Manage Circle page.
Most importer failure messages will now include the name of the journal being imported, for the benefit of users running multiple imports.
People who read the RSS/Atom feed of your journal will see correct entry links and embedded content.
Whitelist embeds from: coub.com, airtable.com, mixcloud.com
New <user> tag sites: medium.com, imzy.com, facebook.com, instagram.com
New "other site" fields on user profiles: Imzy, Instagram

Once the code push starts, you may notice that the site is slow to respond, but it should remain available to use unless something goes badly wrong.

I'll update this post when the code push is finished. Stay tuned!

Update: All done! Let us know if anything seems more wrong than usual!

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I see the "identify as RP account" tickybox! COOL! I mean, I'm not one. But COOL! O:D

Sounds great! Thank you for all the info. :)

COOL little detail with adding the ticky for an account being an RP journal (like this one is XD).

Yay, thank you!

Increased the size limit for icon descriptions from 120 to 300 characters.

YAY

Wait, we didn't already have a user tag for facebook? That seems like quite an overlook!

IIRC, the last time we looked at it was before FB had any kind of permanent/reliable identifier that could be linked to.

That makes sense.

Thank you!

Please make possibility repost.

People ask us for this a lot! People also ask us to never do it ever. We may add reposts/reblogs in the future, but we have to design it very carefully to handle both views.

Given your recent rant on how the infrastructure of Tumblr/Twitter encourages performative disagreement, Iam confident that whatever you decide will be considerate and well thought out.

don't get me started on Tumblr's global tag feeds, lol

OH PLEASE, do talk about how evil Tumblr's global tag feeds are, if you had the spoons (I LOATHE them).

Super short version: it's a combination of individual user taxonomy (organizing your account's contents) and global/site-wide discovery ("find people talking about X") and the two functions are very very different (and have very different needs), so the conflation of the two means that it doesn't work well for either purpose and it results in viciously pitched social battles between the two camps of how people use them ("don't tag ur hate", etc).

YES, seriously -- and I've seen friends tag Steve/Bucky with "otp: to the end of the line" or something similar, not "stevexbucky" or "steve/bucky" or any of the global variants, just because they want to stay out of the tag.

I also remember the hijacking of the "Elementary" tag with a lot of racist and sexist hate against Lucy Liu, which was just horrible.

Yup, problems like that! (It was funny: I was idly thinking-out-loud (typing-out-loud) last week about how we could do global tags without it becoming a shitshow, and Mark said "we could just make sitewide tag feeds work for everything and not just the popular tags", and I said "nooooooo" and launched into a 20-minute rant about multiple reasons why that Does Not Work and leads to Bad Community and he let me wind down and then said "I'm so glad you think about these things, because I totally never would have identified any of that", heh.)

Good content discoverability is a double edged sword for community, basically.

Mark said "we could just make sitewide tag feeds work for everything and not just the popular tags"

=8-0

I remember, on LJ, searching by interests, looking at the members of comms, and looking up their interests....I got into a lot of conversations (and made friends) either chatting with people in communities or tracking discussions back from them. I really miss that kind of thing -- it's nowhere on Tumblr. (and I just can't deal with most reddit or AV Club-type discussions, altho friends tell me they've really improved lately)

Yeah. Like, I know discoverability on DW is tuned way lower than it is on many social sites (and that's definitely a problem that I've been thinking about a lot lately), but it has to be done really carefully to not fuck things up. We've got a really wonderful community that has very minimal social problems (like, our ToS volume is less than 1/100th that of LJ's when LJ was at a similar size/activity level) and I'd like to keep it that way!

YES, me too! I'm so glad you guys are being really thoughtful about things like this, with an eye to sustainability and long-term flourishing. (not like freaking TWITTER, oh, my God)

And, I mean, people can spot problems with "discoverability tuned too low" a LOT easier than they can spot problems with "discoverability tuned too high", so it's the sort of thing you can't listen to user feedback as much on. Like, everybody can see the problem with "I can't find people I want to read on DW" (it's a frequent complaint, quite legitimately so in a lot of cases), but very few people are experienced in spotting "this site's community has developed in unpleasant ways because of the choices the site has made about discoverability", especially since most sites out there have discoverability tuned WAY high to increase retention and metrics and the effects are often very subtle.

(In soooo many ways, DW is my Grand Experiment In Proving I Was Right About Those Arguments We Were Loudly Having In 2006 While You Kept Blowing Me Off. heh.)

The option of adding repost buttons to one's own posts on a post-by-post basis?

Yup, it'll definitely be something along those lines, but we also have to figure out the best way to display reblogged posts so you don't get 15 copies of the same thing on your reading page all in a row, etc. It's definitely a solvable problem! We just haven't had the chance to work through all the details yet.

We love you!

Somehow 'justice_rant: This account is a roleplaying account.' is way more amusing than it should be.

You guys are the best, seriously.

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/199133.html

If you've wondered how much file space you've been using with your baby pictures, cat pictures, or shiny tumblr reblogs, you can see that on https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/list and https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/edit now.

Everything is great, but I really appreciate this!

more characters in icon descriptions!! instagram links!!!!

the sauce is awesome

Thank you for the little roleplaying thing, honestly I'm just happy that this part of the userbase is getting acknowledged, it's really refreshing!

aw, we love y'all!

I don't RP on DW/LJ, but I'm really big into LARP and tabletop and I'm running a Storium game, so... definitely A++ love the RPers. :)

Thanks so much for these changes! I'm glad to be able to label my RP accounts as such, and it's very convenient.

Holy crap thank you so much for the RP journal thing, I can't wait to see what you do with it! You're so welcoming to us, it's awesome. You're awesome.

"Increased the size limit for icon descriptions from 120 to 300 characters."

this! this is the BEST thing, thankyou SO MUCH!!

we always described our icons because we want our content to be accessible to everyone, and we want to even more now because these days some of our best friends are blind. we really want to share our lovely icons with them in more detail, especially since we usually make them ourselves and they represent our individual identities.

but using words is very challenging to us, and we always always struggle to fit into the description length. so this is fantastic! just perfect and wonderful. thankyou so, so much. <33333333333333333333 (hearts forever)

also appreciating the image upload/image management fixes (especially if it's now possible to set a custom access filter for images without having to delete them and reupload them via email posting!) and excited about the RP account option even though we don't really RP anymore (no spoons). if nothing else, it might help those of us who can get mistaken for RP accounts when they're a real person just being themself, lol.

everything else sounds awesome too. great job all round, everyone!

Yes, we were trying for a good balance between "enough room to make meaningful descriptions" and "not so much room that screenreader users have to listen to a small novel for every icon, every time", but consensus was that we could add a wee bit more without it getting too annoying. :)

Thanks very much for your hard work. Everyone has been talking about the new RP account options and what future developments might be.

I have no idea what is being looked into, but I thought I might mention some possible suggestions! I have no idea how difficult coding would be for some of this, so obviously how do-able it is would be pretty dependent on that. However, this is what people have been discussing:

For RP communities, we often have several communities for one game. The standard is usually a community for 'network posts', one for 'log posts', and one for 'OOC posts'. And sometimes there are even more. That's three communities to run the average game right off the bat.

Some people are discussing how that could possibly be improved. Maybe somehow a community could be "divided" into different parts, so we could have the "OOC", "network" and "log" sections, but only have to make and upkeep one community for it all.
Basically, it would just need the option to be able to clearly post in a certain section, and to be able to filter which sections you want to show.

Another suggestion people were talking about is possibly making "community clusters" and somehow linking them together. "These three communities are one game". Maybe even a way to edit all of their profiles and such at the same time.

Those were just some ideas being batted around about how to possibly streamline games better. Thanks a lot for being considerate of the RP community. It's really appreciated by everyone who plays.

We're not quite at the "okay, let's brainstorm!" point yet, but once we are, we will totally throw open a post somewhere and point y'all at it! KEEP THINKING OF STUFF

No problem. Thanks a lot for listening.

We're already way ahead of you, Denise. Keep up the good work and thanks so much for thinking of the RP community!

if there is one thing I've learned in my *mumbledy* years of fandom, it's that you can ask fandom what they want out of a product, and they will go away and come back in 48 hours with a collectively-produced, carefully-footnoted, cross-referenced, and indexed design document. It's kind of awesome.

(Watching

pinboard discover this was awesome.)

That is one of my favourite things on the internet.

I know, isn't it great? I was watching that whole thing unfold in realtime and Maciej's reactions were hysterical.

FRIENDLY BALROG, best definition of fandom ever.

Oh man that pinboard thing is both fascinating and hilarious. I love fandom.

I KNOW, right? I was watching the whole thing unfold in realtime and Maciej's "bewildered but totally amazed" reactions were great.

That pinboard story was fascinating!

Isn't it just? Watching Maciej be all confused was SO FUNNY.

*contemplates*

If you were using tags to let one community handle all of that, what would tags have to be able to do?

I think the main thing is that people would want a clear and prominent way to discern them from each other immediately, and would likely want a quick way to filter them.

For example, if I was looking for any "mod announcements", I'd want a quick way to view the "OOC" part. If I was looking for posts to reply to, I'd probably want to filter out the OOC section. Because they're currently using different communities to do this, people usually tell which is which right away by looking at the community name.

Let's say the community was named Peeper Pipers. Probably the most natural way for it to function for RPers would be the ability to label each post as belonging to a certain section somehow, and it appearing as, "Peeper Pipers: OOC", or "Peeper Pipers: Network". Since RPers use the tag system for other things, it would probably get messy to just use the normal tag system, which is why people don't use it now for that. We usually use the tags to keep track of things like which characters have replied to a post.

So, IMO, for RPers it would work best if the community could be 'tagged' in such a way that "Network", "OOC", "Log", etc would show up as part of the community name, because that's how RPers identify them from each other right now.

Of course, that's all based off of the way we currently do things. There could be better ways to do it.

This is pretty awesome all around! I've gone through and marked my roleplay accounts as such through the ticky box. All of them.

But also, I had a thought in regards to rp and how we usually have multiple accounts at once. At the moment, I'm not sure how aware others are of it, but there is ljlogin or lj juggler unofficially that lets you switch between accounts easily. I am not sure if there's anything officially that could be done coding wise in a similar function on dreamwidth's actual side without downloading the add on/extension? I get that depending on coding and priorities this sort of thing might not be high on the list or if you even already have something in mind since you mention future feature development with regards to roleplaying specifically. But just. Putting that out there, even if we already have a work around of sorts!

Tying accounts together/quick-switch between main/alt accounts like that has been On The List for a while, but every time we dig into it to start thinking about how to implement, we run into a bunch of "how should it work" scenarios that people disagree really hard on. It's not impossible, we just gotta have the extensive, exhaustive, knock-down-drag-out argument once and for all first. ;)

(Also, we have to be REALLY CAREFUL that we don't incentivize security risks -- like, if we allow an alt account to have access to certain paid features if the main account is paid, that motivates people to add their account as an alt to a friend's account to share certain features, etc.)

Edited 2017-05-01 05:52 (UTC)

That is a good point. I know with the unofficial jugger/login, you need to type in the username and password initially when adding the account to your list to be able to switch between them. I wasn't even considering the idea of friends etc getting access either, just more per computer or something. I know not all of my accounts are paid and I'd never expect a perk like getting paids for every single account I have just because one or three out of my however many are paid.

...Yeah I can see how this might take some back and forth now. :la

Yep, it'd be super easy on the technical level to make it possible to quick-switch accounts with a drop-down (I mean, it's how people manage communities they're an admin of), but the devil's in the details, as the saying goes. Every time someone sits down to take a stab at a spec, we come up with more weird edge cases that wind up eventually devolving into "argh, we don't have the energy to fight this out right now", heh.

(I like to joke to Mark that he's in charge of spotting technical problems before they happen and I'm in charge of spotting social problems/bad incentives/how people will abuse a thing before it happens)

Edited 2017-05-01 06:07 (UTC)

I was only thinking of quick-switch with drop down, that's all it is for lj login/juggler, honestly.

But even if this takes a while it is good that you are considering potential security measures around it! Even if that might also be frustrating and I'm sure you don't...want to have to sit there and think 'okay but here is how people can abuse this feature, guys!'

Edited 2017-05-01 06:10 (UTC)

Honestly, after 15 years of doing this shit, I don't even have to think about it very hard. When other sites release a new feature (*cough* I'm looking at you, Twitter *cough*) I usually have at least half a dozen "okay, this is how it's going to be a shitshow" things leap to mind immediately.

And, I mean, I say "argument", but it's less "argument" and more like just fifteen billion iterations of nitpicking the hell out of something to harden it against the immediately obvious abuse vectors until everyone's satisfied that we've thought of everything. It's not an unpleasant process! Just a loooooooot of work, heh.

I don't use Twitter but I imagine that and Facebook at least....yeah.

But no, I get it! Really. Things often sound simple on paper and then you go into more detail/security stuff surrounding the idea and I imagine it ends up more than we might anticipate in actually doing it. I'm just glad to hear it is actually something you guys have been considering officially already. It means I'm not totally off the mark on this idea/suggestion even if we have a work around already, unofficially.

It was actually one of the things I had on The List before we even launched DW! ...eight years ago, heh.

Hey, if it has been on the list that long, it's obviously something you still intend to do? You'll get there! I know something like this isn't necessarily as huge a priority with other bugs etc to deal with over time that come up. Honestly, I just like hearing each time on the improvements you guys do and that you take our suggestions into consideration and listen to us and what we think.

Linking to alt accounts of friends could be averted just by requiring the two accounts to have the same email address, but that'd mess up some of our rp gmail+character@gmail.com setups unless there's a way around that :|a

Yeah, our "do these two accounts have the same email" check already deals with +filtering, but the problem with just a plain same-email check is it encourages you (generic you!) to confirm your friend's email address on your account, thus making it horribly insecure (since any confirmed email can receive a password reset link) -- that's what I mean by "perverse incentives"...

On the subject of the user tag, could you update the help page about it?http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=87

Oh yes, that was on my mental list of things to do post-code-push, thanks!

WOW! Thank You for Coub.com))

Wow!
Good news. Thanks, DW!

Thank you for the improvements to the image upload/management page! (Everything else, too, of course :P)

Did any of the fonts change? I use venture and I see a different font now, one that I am rather unhappy with :( (If this helps any: while the site loads, I see the old font for a second or so and then the new takes over. This may also be my mistake because I played with the style a lot without being an expert ...)
OK, I solved it myself while playing with the fonts XD

Edited 2017-05-01 07:56 (UTC)

Well done! Thank you

Thank you for, among all the other things, adding the used up quota to the images page. I'm really bad at estimating numbers, so I had been worrying that I'd was about to blow my allowed 500 MB. But I've only used up about 5 % percent so far. This makes this quinquagenarian quite happy.

Thank you for all your hard work.

You're welcome! This was a "wow really, oops" oversight on our part that @karzilla fixed up. :D

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Code push imminent!

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Code tour: 2017-04-30

Re: Code tour: 2017-04-30

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