Code push happening shortly!

[mark]

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.

Comments

[prayed]

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?

[denise]

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]).

[prayed]

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.

[denise]

I am firmly convinced that no one hates computers more than the people who program them for a living.

[roadrunnertwice]

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.)