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

[denise]

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).

[kore]

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.

[denise]

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.

[kore]

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)

[denise]

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!

[kore]

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)

[denise]

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.)