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

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:

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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

Re: DW update (random button)