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

[denise]

There are many things on the "to be fixed on mobile" list, but in this case, you're using the old update page that we inherited from LJ instead of the beta Create Entries page, which is the one that has all the improvements for mobile and modern browsers. (It's still in beta because there's no rich text editor yet, which is something that people rely on, and no draft saving, but it's otherwise fully featured and it works much better on mobile.)

Keeping two versions of sites for desktop and mobile use is how you get one version that's the "real" version and one version that's the broken version nobody ever tests or fixes things in; it's a pattern that's played out on pretty much every site I've ever used or company I've ever worked for. And, generally speaking, more options are bad UI: we already have far, far above the number of options that usability research shows beginning to cause options fatigue and choice paralysis, and it's an ongoing problem we've had with user education and usability since day one. We do try to make sure that our changes work equally well no matter what device you're using to access the site, though, and this particular change is in line with how UI elements behave on multiple other sites. I do hope you'll get used to it over time.

[bluerosedreams]

Denise this isn't a case of "I can get used to this." This is literally a case of "I cannot, for some brain wiring reason, get this to connect in my brain at all." It's not something I am likely to get used to, like how I have to use specific browsers because DirectWrite gives me a splitting headache and no amount of staring at it will help me "get used to it."

IDK, guess time to see if anyone codes an option for a userscript or just... Move on because this isn't a design choice that, frankly, works for my accessibility needs.

[denise]

I'm very sorry that it doesn't work for you! There is still the dropdown with keywords, though, so you can at least still pick icons that way, or click the More Options button for a comment form that still has all the things we moved.

[bluerosedreams]

Thank you. I'm looking into a third party tool, and hoping I can manage that to keep me going.

+1

[mycenae]

Let us know if you find one. DW tools will fix some of this, but not all of it (and only for free accounts). And it's been a clunky workaround since the last time the comments were heavy edited. IA about the design and have the same issue; it's not super intuitive for some neurodivergent folks and my focus also has a tough time trying to parse where everything is, where it's moved to, what's been condensed/what's missing, etc.