Code push imminent!

[karzilla]

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!

Comments

[credoimprobus]

Yay, very happy about the Mixcloud add! I'd been meaning to ask for it myself, but hadn't gotten around to it. :D

[wolfpurplemoon]

Thanks for adding Imzy! They don't currently have you guys as a field on user profiles so I've given them a little nudge to change that :)

[upanddisappear]

Seconding the thanks!

This is fragile_ferocious :)

[samuraiter]

*nods*

Look at all these positive changes! Thank you.

[sylsdarkplace]

A couple of things I would love to see in the future would be the ability to schedule posts to go live at a future date and time as well as a "save as draft" option.

Also, if there's a way to keep the tag from moving whenever I revise a post that would be awesome.

Many of us are trying to convince friends to move here from LJ and fixes like these would really help.

Thanks for all your hard work!

[cesy]

The first two are planned.

What do you mean about the tag moving when you edit a post?

[mourningdove333]

I have tried, numerous times, to post an image in a journal entry, but either i could not see it and a little square was in its place or else i could see it but my friends couldn't. What are the exact steps for posting a picture in a journal entry? I uploaded one photograph and it is here in my account, but i'm not sure how to actually insert it in a journal entry so that it is visible.

[frith]

After you have uploaded a picture to DreamWidth's image hosting thingy, if you want to go back and post it on Dreamwidth in a post or comment, go to View all your images link. There you will find a menu listing the available embed sizes you can use, choose one. That will change the HTML script written in the "Embed:" field, copy that script and paste it into your post where you want a picture to appear. That's in the "Grid View" of your gallery. In the "List View" of your gallery, you will find that the HTML that gets changed to fit the image size you've chosen is written in the "Thumbnail embed", not in the "Image embed". For clarity, I think "Image embed" should be renamed Embed full size and "Thumbnail embed" should be called Embed at selected size.

I played a bit with posting images using Dreamwidth's image hosting over here.

[songwrite]

This code push appears to have broken all of the batch uploading options that I know of (the Dreamwidth Tools extension and journalwatcher.com.) Is there any way to go back on that or do you have any idea what change specifically could have caused the sudden break? Uploading several hundred icons at a time by selecting them one by one by one by one from a file folder is unbelievably tedious. :(

[kareila]

Hi there!

We can't support third party tools, but one thing we did change is we moved /editicons to /manage/icons. See if changing the destination URL fixes the problem?

If it's not that, we are going to be limited in our ability to help, but we're happy to answer any specific questions about how things work on our end! And we do have better uploading of multiple icons on our project list, it just hasn't been implemented yet!

Aesthetic

[frith]

Since the code push, the journal title for my journal and for my MLP community has become a link. That has changed the colour of the text and underlined it in my browser (Firefox 41). Any idea why?

Re: Aesthetic

[kareila]

Yes, changing the journal title to be a link was a requested feature! We realize that some styles need to be updated as a result, and I'm working on those this morning.

[ebenbrooks]

I read this title as "CODE PUNISHMENT". o.O

[karzilla]

My next job title is totally going to be Code Punisher.

[zimena]

Sounds great! Thanks for a lovely and informative post!

One question, though - is there a reason why Youtube videos only show a placeholder when embedded? They work if I click in the placeholder, though, but the video doesn't load until it's clicked. This leaves a lot of "open" space in entries where the video should be, and it doesn't look nice.

I don't think it's a layout issue, because I recently changed my layout, and it's still the same.

Could you have a look at this some time, maybe?

EDIT: I'm sorry. I suddenly found a setting for this, under display options. Don't know why that had not registered in my brain until now.

[denise]

Hee, no worries. (Video placeholders are useful for people who are on limited-bandwidth connections or people with strict data usage limits.)

[thesisko]

THANK YOU DW this is a wonderful update <3

[attackpatternbattista]

:O THE SISKO

i think i love you.

[fancifulplots]

Hi there

I'm looking for people who'd RP with me and I just got to this website. Can I have some guidance as to where I should be posting?
Sorry if this isn't in the right place.

Thanks.

[thebioticwoman]

Try enablemeplz and dwrpmasterlist. There are also dedicated threads for finding games/RP partners in rpanons, but the discussions in that community can get very toxic, so buyer beware.

DW RP has an idiosyncratic subculture that's been developing since the early 00's on LJ, which is good in some ways and bad in others. It's just something to be aware of if you're coming from forum RP/MU*/what have you. We're also very canon-focused, meaning people generally play characters from existing works (like Commander Shepard here.) OCs are in the minority, but most games allow them. I don't know if this suits what you're looking for. If not, you could also try over at Insanejounal, which tends to have more OCs.

[jazzyjj]

I'll be brief here because I've been rather busy again and haven't checked out everything here. However, something I did just now check out is the link for showing/hiding banned accounts. I'm proud to report that it works flawlessly with VoiceOver on my mid-2013 MacBook Air in Safari. I have yet to test this in Google Chrome using their screen-reader extension, but I'm *very* optimistic about this. So Dreamwidth you've done it again. You've earned an A plus thus far in my books with this code push. Thank you so much for what you do and please keep it up.

[denise]

Glad it works well for you! We try to keep screenreaders in mind when working on stuff constantly, yeah. (But we're happy to hear when we screwed up and fix it.)

[pronker]

I appreciate your maintenance, usually unsung. So here is a song: lalallalalallaheynonnynonnyyaymayday!

[denise]

This comment cracked me up, just FYI. <3

[jo02]

I'm looking forward to any upgrades on uploading images - thank you :)

HTTPS

[brainwane]

Congrats and thanks for the changes, and in particular:

Many more sites upgraded to use HTTPS links instead of relying on our SSL proxy.

Yay!

Re: HTTPS

[denise]

SO CLOSE TO BEING ABLE TO FLIP THE SWITCH OMG

[marthastewart]

I'm intrigued by "future feature development" for RP journals XD XD Tickybox checked!

[deanshot1]

On the https part, what happens to your images if you use Photobucket for hosting your photos and then putting them on your posts here or profile page since they're not using https.

I've noticed that the Dreamwidth home page is https but when I go into my journal or reading page it still has https but it also has an exclamation mark beside it. Do you know why this happens or is something I haven't clicked yet or something?

[denise]

Images referenced via HTTP in posts go through our HTTPS image proxy (basically grabbing the image and temporarily serving it from our servers using HTTPS) to avoid mixed-content warnings (the exclamation marks). For your journal and reading page, it's your background/header image throwing the warnings; those don't go through the image proxy yet. You can get rid of the warning by uploading your header image to your DW image hosting and using that as the URL instead of Photobucket.

[ihatetemporalmechanics]

Hi!

Are you going to reinstate the batch uploading options? Uploading each individual file is a time-consuming process.

[mysockstotoro]

Batch uploading is a part of Dreamwidth Tools, which is a third party app that they can't do anything about.

[jon_stewart]

Hi there, RP account and LJ refugee here... is there anyway to get it so when you grant access to your journal, you don't have to also click subscribe to the journal you're adding as well? While it's cool to be able to mute an account and still keep them having access, I feel like the defaults are backwards on this. Most people WANT to also read who they grant access to, with it being less likely to want it the other way around. Please? Or at least make a bulk add code possible?

[kareila]

Hi there! Welcome to Dreamwidth!

When suggesting changes to core site functionality such as this, we encourage you to go through the process of making a submission to dw_suggestions, which gives us the opportunity to gain wider feedback on the proposed change. To submit a suggestion, visit http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/suggest. Thanks!

[gatheringrivers]

Just wanted to say, <3 <3 <3 the new picture management page!

[idolpire]

I'm not entirely sure if the code push is to blame for this or the influx of a lot of new accounts, but I've been getting an increasing amount of 504s lately, paired with severely overlong loading times for pages. Tonight's been basically 2 hours straight of 504s to the point I'm not bothering to try to rp because I keep getting errors, partially loaded pages, or timeouts.

[denise]

Neither, actually -- it's an inadvertent DDoS from somebody's badly programmed bot. We're trying to stay on top of it and block it; sorry!

[valo]

The RP option makes me so happy.

[jericho1]

I love the ticky box that lets people click when they're a RP journal. Also, thank you so much for providing an LGBTQ friendly server in light of what's happening elsewhere.

I do have a question/request. At Insanejournal, there's a code that allows community moderators to make "friend all" buttons. Sometimes you enter your own journal name into the blank space and click the button and it friends everyone in the community. Sometimes you don't even have to do that. I've tried this code on DW and it doesn't work, I'm guessing because of the two-step adding process.

Has anyone ever successfully made a button like this? Do any of the DW powers that be have any suggestions? I moderate a RP community on here and it would be super helpful. Right now, we just provide the long list of commands for people to copy and paste into the admin console.

[denise]

Console commands to copy/paste is your best bet for now -- letting admins make a "click here to add everyone in this comm" button the way IJ does it could technically be a security issue in some scenarios. In the future, the ability to tie your access/subscription lists to a community's membership may be one of those RP-specific features that will now be possible, though!