Code push has happened!

[mark]

Hi all, I'm preparing to do a code push. You can see the latest code tour here: https://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/214638.html

Hang on to your hats!

Edit: The code has pushed! As always, please let us know if you see anything wonky or broken and we'll get on it!

Known Issues - Fixed 'em Maybe?

* Font size was way too small. We've tweaked them to be larger, but would welcome more feedback!
* Lack of ability to horizontally resize comment area. This has been fixed, you can drag the box horizontally again like you should be able to!
* A couple of style issues have been found and fixed.
* An issue affecting some Navigation strips has been fixed.
* An issue affecting syndicated accounts, proxied images, and a couple other worker related tasks were broken. They're better now.
* We've made some updates to the design of the comment reply form, we brought back the browse button, made the subject line full-width, and some other tweaks. Please let us know what you think!
* The RTE on the old create entry form is returned to service. A few more months, that's all we ask of you old friend...
* OpenID was broken, it's back.
* Button sizes are reset to default, we are no longer trying to make things line up. Let the ziggurat design pattern live on.
* Polls should show properly sized bars again.
* Lots more Android issues, we had to murder the unused spellcheck button to make it work out. Some weird interactions with differently sized elements and our ancient HTML.

Known Issues - Pending

* Related, some fields seem to have gone emo and are putting on heavy eyeliner (have bold, dark outlines). We're aware.

All known issues are being investigated and will be fixed! Please hang tight while we work on it :)

If you are reporting something visual, please let us know what browser/device you're on!

Comments

[odasaku]

My biggest issue here isn’t so much the font or the hecked up buttons as it is the lack of a dev environment. Many of these problems wouldn’t have happened if the team had counted with a testing site/localhost server to actually see wtf their code is doing. I really appreciate the job you guys do, but please try to fix this for the future as this was a totally unenjoyable experience.

[denise]

Thanks! We do test things repeatedly (both using automated tests and manual/visual tests) while we're working on them, and these particular changes were tested by multiple people with different systems/devices/browsers. It's not feasable for us to visually test every style and theme on the site, though -- there's a lot of them, well over a thousand last time I checked -- so the sort of issues that don't get caught by automated testing will always sneak through. And although we aim for as wide a variety of systems/devices/browsers in testing as we can, everyone who visits the site has a slightly different setup due to browser version, browser settings, extensions installed, etc, so any design or CSS changes inevitably need a bunch of after-the-fact fixes when they meet the real world (much wider) set of configurations.

I'm sorry for the hassle! Ultimately these changes are to modernize a bit of the code that was really, really old and janky so that we can support mobile browsers better, since usability on mobile (and other small-viewport devices) is people's #1 most-cited issue right now. But, because the code in question is literally 20 years old and had layers and layers of "wtf" lurking in it, we had to strip it down pretty far to make any progress and then rebuild on the new bones, so it'll take us a few rounds of fixes to shake out all the issues that only show up once changes hit the real-world panopoly of people's configs. We will get it all fixed!

[odasaku]

Thank you so much for your response, and I appreciate it a lot. I totally understand what you're talking about and I apologize if I was rude in my last comment because boy oh boy legacy code is....something, alright.

Good luck, team!

[denise]

THE CODE SURE IS SPECIAL, ALL RIGHT

But yeah, we've sort of hit the point where we've done what we can do to achieve better mobile usability just with minor tweaks, so now we've gotta get our fingers into things and really dig. It's like how if you're trying to tidy up a room that's full of unorganized stuff: sometimes you have to pile everything on the floor first in order to organize the shelves. And then skip through the piles of stuff figuring out which of the things truly spark joy need to be there. ...I may have been listening to too many people talk about KonMari lately.

Anyway, these particular changes didn't show any of these issues in testing! But we have so many styles and people use the site in so many ways and on so many devices that any major frontend change is inevitably going to produce a Giant Problem when the code meets real-world conditions. We'll get it fixed as soon as we can!