Code push happening shortly!

Hi all, I'm about to kick off the latest code push, bringing live updates and tweaks to keep improving Dreamwidth! As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments.

For the information on what's going live, check out: https://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/223659.html

Screening Comments for the night

Hi all!

I need to step away from the computer from the evening so I'm going to turn on comment screening. I think by this point we've gotten more than enough useful feedback and it's mostly just repetition on a theme here.

And, this is your once-in-a-while reminder that discourse in our public communities must remain civil. A number of these comments are getting pretty close to the line of what we consider acceptable, and we will moderate it if we need to.

Please respect that most of the people who work on Dreamwidth are volunteers and we're all well-intentioned. You should definitely assume good faith. We love to hear about your experience, but please do stay away from the invective and brigading.

Until tomorrow! -Mark

A Comment on Font Sizes

Hi all! Since this seems to be the overriding theme of many comments, I'm going to put a response at the top here instead of trying to reply to everybody.

First, the font size changes are generally intentional, and to a large degree, here to stay officially (but there are some userstyle options!) -- but please hang on to the pitchforks and let's talk about why.

Dreamwidth was started over a decade ago, and was based on LiveJournal which is over two decades old at this point. Back then, most people were building web sites for desktop PCs, on 15" CRTs that ran 1024x768 if you were lucky, and we had no idea what it meant to make something accessible. Or, well, most of us didn't.

In the intervening 20 years, a lot of things have changed. The way people access Dreamwidth has gone mobile (50% of our traffic is iOS/Android!), the types of systems people use is very different, the technologies our development staff know are different, and our understanding of how to build accessible web sites is much, much better.

So, as we've been thinking about how to continue developing Dreamwidth, we've been using that knowledge to inform the decisions we make. We want Dreamwidth to hold true to the things that we believe (transparency, no ads, etc), but we have been taking the lessons learned by the broader industry over the intervening bunch of years and applying them when it makes sense.

Specifically when it comes to font size, there are now many studies that show that 16px fonts are the minimum you should use to cover the widest range of visual needs. No, it's not perfect; much like small text has problems for many users, larger text does pose problems for some of you. I definitely am aware of that, and to those who are negatively impacted by this change, I'm sorry.

There are some options, however; you can apply userstyles to Dreamwidth in most browsers, which can adjust the font size back down. momijizukamori has volunteered to create an example that you can use, similar to the Widescreen userstyle, and then that should help anybody who really wants the smaller fonts: quick and dirty userstyle here.

As a second option, you can temporarily disable the changes: navigate to our beta features management page and click Turn ON beta testing for the option Temporarily revert updated journal page components.

As it says in the name, this is temporary, but if you critically need to turn this off for now -- you can do that. We expect to have this temporary disable for the next few months while we fix up any of the issues reported today, particularly the ones that make stuff look really weird (like the mobile half-width situation).

For closing, please do watch this community and the dw_beta community. We posted about these changes and asked people to help us build them two months ago when we released them for beta testing. If you want to be part of the iteration on Dreamwidth, and have a voice in the things we build & what they look like, please join us and be part of the process!

But even if you don't, your feedback here is welcome, we hear it, and we will continue to iterate with it in mind. Our foremost goal here is to make Dreamwidth better for as many people as we can -- and this is part of the process. Bumps and all :)

Known Issues

Some Celerity colors/spacing has changed. I don't think this was expected, so we'll take a look.
<table>, <td>, and <div> tags unintentionally changed in styling -- looks like we're leaking the styling changes we made in the main scheme down. I think we can fix this -- please don't edit all your tables!
Spacing and coloring around the page number sections on many-commented entries no longer is offset in a darker colored box.
Some mobile browsers are reporting a half-width page (half the page width is the comment, the other half is empty). We're looking.

Fixed Issues

Unexpectedly bright colors in Tropo-Purple. We'll take a look, and see if we can tone it back down! (Weirdly, the purple you're seeing now is how it was originally designed to look, but due to a bug, the color was wrong... we fixed the bug, for unrelated reasons, but we can also adjust the color!)
Emailed comments are getting squashed and losing paragraph breaks.
Icon browser sometimes showing keywords even in no text mode. This is intentional for the icon that you have selected, so you can see what the keyword is. What do you think?
The Widescreen user-style is broken. To fix this, please add this to the end of your style:

#content, #content > div:nth-child(2), #content > div:nth-child(1), #masthead > div:nth-child(1), #account-links-wrapper, footer {
   max-width: 100%;
}

In case of the worst, please keep an eye on dreamwidth for updates.

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I am among the few who actually had to zoom DW constantly to be able to read comfortably, so the font change is a blessing to me. No more ugly zoomed icons!! The dramatic chipmunk zoom on mobile being gone is also a very welcome change, and as someone whose wonky android phone never displayed DW right before, it does look much better on mobile now!

The icon selector isn't great on mobile though. I can only see two per row on mobile, which is a nightmare when you have so many. It also feels like a lot of space in the selector itself is being underutilized? Even on mobile (https://i.imgur.com/EX6sREW.png) there's a lot of empty space that's not necessary to make it easier to click things imo. Also not really a fan of the keyword popup -- if I'm on no-text mode, it's because I want no text and don't care about the keywords, so it seems unnecessary to have it thrown in when people can just use the text option. Especially where there's so much blank space (https://i.imgur.com/hdFrC9B.png). It just looks clunky. But I do prefer that that clicking an icon doesn't immediately select it still, which helps a million when it comes to picking Dat Perfect Expression™ in RP thread.

(And yes, I knew the beta existed, which is my bad for never thinking to test it. But looking at DW_Beta always showed what appeared to be a dead community due to lack of recent posts until very recently (2015 was five years ago!). Maybe keeping a sticky post with an actual last-official-comment/update typed in manually will help make it more obvious the comm is still actively seeking beta testers?)

And I don't know if this is a "by design" thing or if there's something weird on my end, but I've noticed that changing the default font size for my browser also affects how wide the pages are, which is a little odd. The Perfect Font Size™ for me forces me to use a code to make the page not display as wide (which is funny because I was previously using one to make it wider).

DW set at Medium/default browser font size: https://i.imgur.com/lEj0mk5.png
DW set at Large font size: https://i.imgur.com/3TK4cFn.png
DW set at MAXIMUM the FONTSIZE for fun: https://i.imgur.com/LAF4gyl.png

I use Chrome (up-to-date) on Windows 7 on a 1366x768 resolution.

Love the new dropdown for Markdown! Awesome idea and simple but efficient implementation. Thanks, team!

Oh and the option to post to a community is back! This is so great!

Edited 2020-07-26 18:10 (UTC)

I don't mind the changes. I haven't had any custom CSS or HTML on my journal for years. I haven't felt I've needed them for the full Dreamwidth experience. I enjoy the updates you've made, and I appreciate that you've been reworking the site. I know everyone has their own feelings on the matter, but, well, those are mine.

Thank you DW team and volunteers--I know a big wave of negative feedback like this can be super rough!

I'm someone who will probably prefer to fiddle with things using userstyles to get the fontsize back down, but I'm toggling things on and off to see the changes and I appreciate that you guys have been--and continue to be--working hard to get the site's foundations into shape!

QUICK CAUTION NOTE: the userstyle solution currently offered in the main post will also cause the font size to change on the custom journal styles... and indeed on all other websites across the web, lol! (It's just cuz 'html' is the selector there.) Anyone else fiddling with userstyles for DW specifically should probably try

darjeeling's solution in their comment here, it seems that only affects DW site skins!

Just commenting to add that the larger font is appreciated on both the desktop and mobile! Thank you for the hard work and wish you all luck with future changes & tweaks. I particularly like the new comment box & preview, I've tried it out in beta, so used to it, but it is useful to read the other person's comment when checking mine!.

Thank you for all your hardwork! The site is much easier to navigate on mobile now! Since you asked...the keyword showing in no text mode for icons is a bit odd to me? Especially since it appears in the middle of the row. I just don't feel like it's necessary. If I chose no text mode I probably don't need the text at all.

Anyway, a big thank you to everyone who worked on this! Much love and appreciation to you all! <3

To add a comment on some specific issues:

1. On the darker layout, the new gradation of color in the comment header is too light and rather defeats the purpose of having a darker layout. And because that header is now bigger, this is emphasized more. Those of us with sensitive eyes who use the dark layout because of this will have more difficulty now.

2. On that note, the new comment header is just too big and takes up too much space.

3. In a journal, the new location of an entry's date and time of posting is less visible, and the lack of dividers between entries is a negative.

4. Everything seems bigger, and not in a way that makes things more legible and visible but in fact does the opposite. It is now harder to read.

Thank you so much for increasing the default text size. There are so many journals that I simply can’t read without a struggle, and often give up on, because the design overrides my browser text size preferences. I know that there still will be some custom journal skins that will be difficult, but I am excited about clicking through to read comments and actually seeing them!

I just wanted to say thank you for all the hard work you guys put in. While the site changes caught me off guard, you've always been great about being responsive to user feedback and keeping things running, and I trust that there aren't any changes that haven't been considered carefully beforehand. I'm already really liking the way the mobile site looks and feels, and I hope you're able to work out any outstanding issues.

I haven't read through every comment to see if this has been mentioned, but there is a strange formatting misalignment happening in comment threads for me. Posting a new top-level comment to a post seems aligned properly, but after a few nested comments, this is how it ends up looking.

It's not a huge deal and it doesn't hinder my commenting at all, but I wanted to let you know just in case it isn't a known issue as of yet.

Thank you! I'm actually working on that right now. We fixed some of the purples and we fixed some of the alignments in comments, but it had a cascading impact on the quick-reply form.

Working on fixing it atm!

This should be fixed!

Looks like it worked to me. Thanks!

Thanks for the update, and for the detailed explanations given in the comments! I'm glad to see Dreamwidth is continuing to modernize. I've been in the camp of getting increased eyestrain from the spacing, but overall I think this was a good change. It's made mobile functionality infinitely better, and the site is starting to get more of a modern look to it.

Being able to see the post you're replying to is a huge QOL upgrade too. I constantly have to check things. The read more/less is nice with long posts. And though it's an older change, I'm fond of the buttons.

For the keywords: I like the change of having the "select" button conveniently under the icon! However, having the keyword floating in space looks rather awkward, and it winds up being distracting.

It's unnecessary clutter for me, but for people who depend on keywords it might be helpful? I think it'd benefit from a different placement though. Maybe move it next to the select icon, or something? Because this looks a bit messy:

But! I think it could work if it was a little bit cleaner. Maybe like this?

Or you could do something like this:

In the case of the latter, I think it might be better just to have the single icon "centered" in the row or something though, idk. I'm just spitballing! But I think there's way to make it work.

Finally, I had a question/request/suggestion:

With the site being upgraded, would you consider adding a few more color schemes? I like the overall look of troposphere, but honestly, they're a little too vibrant for me just in general! Would you guys consider adding more neutral or soft/pastel themes?

Long term goal is to let people define their own color choices fora site skin the way they can for their journal, but we have a lot to do before we can get there (and it's probably going to have to involve a brand new skin, not Tropo, because [insert 2 hours of technobabble here]).

Hahaha! Because coding is just an absolute a nightmare that breaks in twenty different random places when you so much as think about looking at it a little bit funny, right? ;) I did juuuust enough of it to know it's some painful stuff.

Thanks for the update! That's really great to hear, so I'll look forward to that + all the other updates you guys have in store! ♥ I really appreciate all that you guys do, and how communicative you are.

(no subject)

denise - 2020-07-27 19:21 (UTC) - Expand

Bah, I wrestled a bunch with those keywords in the middle and I don't think that design is totally finished yet. The constraints I was fighting with went something like this:

You can use multiple keywords for an icon, and if so, the icon isn't just the icon; it's a multi-level decision tree, where you click the icon, then click which keyword you want. Older version of this same browser (which didn't see much public use, bc you had to be in a different beta) put this in a persistent slot at the top of the browser, but that sucked for mobile and wasted a bunch of space and was also kind of confusing tbh.

So that's why I moved them below the icon -- easier to use on mobile, easier to see what control it was associated with, waste less space up top.
Yeah, I wanted the keywords to align with the icon you had selected, but:
- If you constrain it to just within that same grid cell, it makes a huge mess. IMO.
- I haven't come up with a good solution for making it START aligned with the selected icon, but still allowing it to flow out beyond the one grid cell.

IDK. Needs mulling still. Part of the problem is I have no idea what the overlap is of people who want to use no-text mode, but DO want to select different keywords. (Or just preview the keyword of the one they selected, so they know what's going on. I do that.)

Hi, I don't know why but many times when I go to upload a new icon using the Turn ON beta testing style, it closes my Chrome browser. The entire thing. I've attempted restarting my computer so I'm not sure if this is something DW is doing to me or if other people are experiencing it but figured I should let you know and see if others are having issues with this as well.

It has done this on two different accounts and always when I go to open upload an icon from a file. It will open up and then suddenly my whole Chrome is gone. I will try clearing my cookies but decided to reach out to the DW community as well.

That is hellaciously weird. Does it happen with all files or just with a specific file you're trying to upload?

(no subject)

brandedpenance - 2020-07-27 21:33 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

denise - 2020-07-29 16:30 (UTC) - Expand

First off, I would like to say thank you for ALL y'all do.

Secondly, I seem to be having a more unique issue since the code push. Dreamwidth won't stay logged in. I have tried the following:

Checked the box for Remember Me.
Checked off the box for Bind cookie to IP address, and saved.
Cleared my browser cache. [Firefox 68.10.0esr(64bit)]
Double checked that all of Dreamwidth's cookies are on my whitelist.

Each time I visit Dreamwidth in a new tab, even seconds apart, I need to log in again.

When I tried to post this comment the first time, I got logged out in between pages.

We think we've figured out the underlying cause of this problem -- there are actually two of them, and to figure out which one you're having, can you double-check that the URLs you're visiting have "https://" at the front and not "http://"?

(no subject)

dreamtigress - 2020-07-29 17:58 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

denise - 2020-07-29 18:00 (UTC) - Expand

Hey! I've noticed a possible bug with the markdown setting on comments?

Like when I use a tag like the < small > tag or change the font face but have it over multiple paragraphs it only follows the first paragraph.

E.g:

[Writing out a tag like you do, do do, do de do.

Keep writing cos I'm really extra, bo do boop de boop.]

This may be expected/intentional behaviour, but I'm not sure so I thought I'd bring it up. I really like using markdown when I can, it's quicker than writing out italics, bold, etc but I'll continue as I was before if this is intended or can't be fixed - no harm, no foul. Thanks for all the hard work. :)

Sorry, small edit to clarify - I only continued to use HTML tags in markdown setting posts when they don't have a comparable markdown version and the markdown did process perfectly! but the HTML tags end on their own on any natural paragraph break made by double entering. I've tried it several times as well as in this comment. If I've done something wonky, please feel free to tell me. I use markdown a lot but I'm hardly a genius. In normal HTML the tags only end when you end them manually or the comment finishes, which is as one would expect.

Again, thank you!

Edited (I'm eating and I don't know if I was being clear enough.) 2020-08-01 10:01 (UTC)

Yeah, this is one of the differences between the two text processing types: Markdown automatically wraps anything separated by 2 linebreaks in paragraphs in paragraph tags, which cut off any currently open tags. (Casual HTML aka the HTML parser we've been using for ages treats all linebreaks as br tags, which don't.) With Markdown you'll need to finish any open tags before hitting enter twice and then restart them in the next paragraph, or if that's too much of a pain, just keep using Casual HTML.

(no subject)

witchka - 2020-08-01 16:44 (UTC) - Expand

Good information about fonts. I just recently took a course about building online course and they were using 11 point as standard with some smaller. I thought that was too small so increased it to 14 point for some of my online material in case someone had vision issues. From what I am reading 16 px = 12 point, so now I can use that as a guideline.

Glad to see that you are continually working to improve things. Normally I have my browser at 110% or more; now I may be able to drop that.

My comment never got unscreened, which is ok. But I wanted to make sure to thank you for being aware of and working to avoid photo-sensitive vertigo. That was presumably what gave me the blinding headaches on another, non-social media site that I will now not name, and now I know what it's called and that some web developers, at least, care.

Also, thanks for the increase in font size, although I continue to only really see it when responding to this post. I do have increasing problems seeing small print and online, small stuff in general (such as emojis, why so freakin tiny???) so I appreciate the effort. I'm just not very graphically aware, I guess.

M

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