Code push - tomorrow (April 26th, 2020) at ~1PM Pacific / 2000 UTC

[mark]

This is a codepush announcement.

Tomorrow around 1PM Pacific / 2000 UTC, we will be updating Dreamwidth to the latest committed code. The short summary of the main changes:

• We continue to iterate on the Quick Reply form, improving its usability/consistency across all platforms and cleaning up the hideously bad code that used to live under it. This particular update includes the feedback from the last update, so many of your thoughts/suggestions have been incorporated!

• A number of improvements in how we render things for mobile devices. Not all of these will be immediately live, but stay tuned to dw_beta if you'd like to turn them on and give us feedback.

• Improvements to Markdown rendering (in particular, the code that turns \@mark into mark should do it more correctly/in fewer places).

• Finally, major changes to how we store passwords in our database (we won't anymore). This will break Semagic and other clients, but there is a workaround: Please see the workaround at the bottom of this post.

For more details, see the relevant posts in dw_dev:

• Code Tour 2020-04-20
• Code Tour 2019-12-14
• Deep dive on authentication changes

We'll update this community and our dreamwidth as we push code out, as per usual. See you then!

Comments

[turlough]

Good luck!

[kengr]

I'm one of those folks using Semagic and I look forward to the instruction on what I need to do.

I will note that semgaic is already somewhat broken with regards to DW. It can't fetch user and community info the way it can on LJ. Alas, I'm not enough of a programmer to figure out what needs fixing.

[tetsab]

In case you missed it since it's tucked under a link:

Ok, so to use Semagic (and other clients), you will need to:

1. Navigate to the Mobile Post Settings page.
2. Click the Generate New API Key button in the Manage API Keys section.
3. Copy the API key that was generated.
4. Change your Semagic password to the API key you copied.
5. That's it, have fun!

[tozka]

Updated code is always exciting! I look forward to the Markdown improvements in particular.

[madfilkentist]

Not storing passwords in the database is an excellent idea!

[torylltales]

Good news!

Will the Quick Reply updates include formatting buttons?

[zhiva]

> Finally, major changes to how we store passwords in our database (we won't anymore).

This sounds like you stored them in plain text previously.

[mark]

Yes, that's correct.

For historical context, this is how LiveJournal (which we're a fork of) stored passwords (and presumably still does, since they still support MD5 hash based logins, which would require them to have the raw password I imagine).

We are now modernizing this part of the codebase to be in line with modern best practices, which of course results in breaking some things (hence needing migration steps for Semagic users).

[darjeeling]

Do you know if the new password protocols will affect LJLogin/LJJuggler? (Which, despite their names, are the login switching extensions most of us use for switching between accounts on DW.)

+1

[mycenae]

Not the biggest deal in the world, but that is a looming inconvenience I'm also worried about.

[momijizukamori]

It will - you'll either have to update your account configurations with an API key in place of a password, as explained, or wait for the LJ Juggler dev to accept the pull request I made with a fix or publish a new version.

(users of LJLogin will have to switch to API key, as to my knowledge development has been dead for close to ten years now)

[hudebnik]

"Code Tour 2020-12-14"
I think you mean 2019-12-14...

[sisterofbloomerjunior]

Mark and Denise are Time Lords.

ljArchive stopped working

[akatsija]

Looks like ljArchive stopped working after the last change. Was there any change in the way how login credentials are presented to the server?

--
А.Кац и Я

[bluerosedreams]

Is there any way to get back the browse button as an actual button? I understand this is sleek and cool, but my eyes pass over it way too easy when it's the icon. :/

[mistojen]

+1 or at least if there was a way to override it with Stylebot, or something, but the way it's set up, I can't seem to get it to move. Maybe I'm just rusty with my css-fu, IDK, but I do not like it this way, especially since it's only affecting my paid accounts. My free accounts using DW Tools still have the button where it used to be so the inconsistency is making me twitchy lol

+1

[mycenae]

+1

[solerika]

I was just coming here to say this. Unless there's an underlying reason to remove it, I really wish they wouldn't.

Function over form, please.

[denise]

All of the changes to the comment form are part of our ongoing project to make the site work better on mobile browsers (which is the #1 requested thing that people bring up to us!) It isn't change for looking "sleek and cool", it's change because the old layout just flat out failed on mobile: too big, too much space used for comment metadata and not enough available for entering the actual text, and too hard to find the thing you were looking for because of all the scrolling.

We're juggling a number of different considerations of usability, accessibility, and screen space, but the #1 issue is streamlining the amount of vertical and horizontal space being used by the various elements, and this latest round is part of that ongoing project. Taking out the "browse" button and moving the behavior to being "click the icon to select the icon" recovers us a great deal of space when the elements overflow on mobile, and it's also in line with how similar selectors work on other sites so in the future people don't have to relearn the behavior they've learned elsewhere.

[quipsandthwips]

Thanks for the updates! The profile pages for accounts seem to have been made a bit topsy turvey by the push, unfortunately...! I tried to fiddle with it but it just seems to mash everything together. Just wanted to give the heads up, hope that's something that can be adjusted to function a bit more smoothly.

[mark]

Can you say more/link to a profile and let us know what it's doing and what you expected it to do?

[chardismastic]

Question - is the "random icon" button meant to be nixed from anything other than the "more options" screen?

[denise]

It's actually also in the icon picker dropdown -- second option down the list, just under "Default". When you pick it, the button does come up for you to roll again if you want a new pick.

(The changes we're making to the comment form are to improve the mobile experience -- we're trying to get the comment form down to one screen both horizontally and vertically, and that involves a lot of space-juggling. The random button isn't incredibly frequently used, but it is something the people who use really love, so we didn't want to lose it completely -- but we needed to steal its space!)

[aome]

Thank you for your code push. But, uh. Did cross-posting to LJ break?

[denise]

LJ banned us from crossposting again (to their system we can look like we're spammers and every time they whitelist us, the whitelisting goes away again after a while) but we made some changes that fixed it a little while ago. You may need to edit posts that were crossposted before we did the fix, check the crosspost box again, and save.

div presentation on posts

[mycenae]

I'm having an issue with journal posts using the default site layout and how < div > functionality has been changed. < raw-code > or something like it seems to be broken, and it's now messing up spacing, alignment, etc.

The post will show correctly when I hit "preview post" in the pop-up window, but the post itself will be all sorts of messed up.

I don't know what changes were made to the site presentation itself, but it's broken hours of design/coding that I'm not even sure how to fix :( which is exhausting and a little upsetting with the amount of time that's gone into various posts.

I can PM screenshots to whatever account you think is most salient.

DW update (random button)

[elderwitty]

I'm another user who only accesses the site via laptop. (I cannot read on a tiny phone screen. CANNOT.)

I know y'all are trying to accommodate everybody, but from my perspective it feels like non-mobile users are being thrown to the wayside. It seems like EVERY change degrades our experience.

Why is there room for the Random button onscreen once you hit it in the dropdown menu, but not before? Does something disappear to make room for it? If not, then there's room for it.


(Also, despite my whining hatred of change, I do appreciate all of you for running the site.)

Re: DW update (random button)

[denise]

There isn't room for the random button once you hit it in the dropdown menu by how we're defining 'room'; people picking random is just an infrequent enough action (less than 1% of comments made) that overflowing the target space to add the button is acceptable both because a) it's a necessary fallback for the "reroll the random pick" option in case someone's browser doesn't support the workarounds we use to fire off the random-choice event multiple times in a row from the drop-down and b) someone has to take a specific action to trigger it so we can assume they're okay with the extra space being taken up.

I know it's frustrating to see changes happening to make things better for a use case that you don't personally use, but over half of our site visits are on mobile devices, and that's with our less-than-optimal mobile experience! Updating the visual layout, the workflow/UI, and the underlying code that generates both is an ongoing problem that isn't just for mobile access: ultimately, the code that generates the comment form is at heart 20 years old, and that's ancient. We've been bolting new bits and pieces to it for the 11 years DW has existed, but the landscape of browser and device support for the various forms of bolts we've used over time has changed massively just in that decade, and the expectations of users have changed in that time as well. We will always need to keep making changes so that people can use the site in their current browsers, but the landscape of how people access the web and how they expect the sites they visit to behave has also shifted.

Ultimately, we aren't making changes because they're cool or trendy -- we're a niche site, we're always going to be a niche site, and we're fine with that because we like the niche we have. But things have changed massively in how people access even the niche sites, and that means even a niche site has to make changes to accomodate. Sometimes that means we have to offload the stuff that a small minority of people are using to an alternate workflow in order to accomodate the ways the majority of people are accessing the site. We have been doing, and will continue to do, our very best to make sure that the changes to the workflows that are in frequent use are seamless to both desktop and mobile -- people on desktop haven't noticed a lot of the changes we've made to improve mobile experience -- but for something that's as frequently used as the abridged comment form, sometimes it does mean we have to add a few clicks here and there for people using the features that only 1% of our users use in order to make things better for everyone else.

We love having a lot of features because it means people can be massively creative in how they use the site, but running a site like this involves a lot of hard choices like that. I know it sucks when you're in the 1% often, and I'm sorry -- you can ask the guy who's on point for this project, I whine at him a lot when I'm the lucky 1% on a particular issue -- but there are good reasons for the changes we make, I swear.

[arethinn]

Is whatever password foo that broke Semagic possibly also breaking crossposting? My last two posts have both generated failure messages that tell me LJ has temporarily banned the IP for failing login too many times. I haven't changed my LJ password lately (I think ... 2018? probably I should change it, but anyway not in the past few days).

Although, the dates don't check out, since this post is April and on May 2 I was still successfully crossposting. Maybe I should open a support ticket?

[denise]

Crossposting to LJ will continue to fail intermittently because they've changed how sensitive their spam-and-malicious-actor detection is, and they keep blocking us because of it; they're also now saying that they can't whitelist us specifically the way they used to. We will continue to work around it when we are blocked, but we're limited in what we can do since the block is on their end.