An update on where we're at

[mark]

Howdy everybody.

Now that we're entirely off of Cloudflare, I figured I'd give an update on some of the sharp edges and things we're still working on.

First of all, we've had to push a few changes out to update some configurations and this has had the side effect of pushing out some changes (like an overhaul of the Inbox.) Normally we try to give advanced notice of site and code changes, so I apologize that this change is coming as a surprise. We'll keep an eye on feedback here so we can iterate on things as needed. This has been reverted.

Now, on to the other things.

• (TBD) VPN. I know that some of you use VPNs to access Dreamwidth and you're now getting overly familiar with the CAPTCHA solution that AWS offers. It's, well, not a great solution. It solves the robot problem fairly well but it is pretty suboptimal for our users, we hear you. We are investigating other solutions here to see what we can do, but it will not be an immediate fix, unfortunately.

• (Investigating) 403s. Secondly, I'm seeing some reports of 403s on commenting. We're investigating this, but nobody on the volunteer team has reported it / can reproduce it, so we're still trying to figure this one out.

• (Done) RSS feeds. Thirdly, when I set up the CAPTCHA, I did forget to add rules allowing access to RSS and ATOM feeds. alierak fixed these up, so you should be able to access your feeds again via IFTTT and similar services. If not, please let us know in the comments.

• (Done) IP logging. Fourthly, the config change we pushed (that deployed updated code) did fix the issue where IP addresses were showing up as 'via' or not as your own IP. This was a proxy misconfiguration on our end and is resolved now, so you should be able to see real IP addresses again.

• (Done) Inbox. Going to update the default so that messages that are unread are expanded. I rolled it back to how it was. No more unneeded code push!

I think that's the list of things I'm aware of. Please comment if you see other issues -- and again, thank you so much for your patience here. We've tried to keep the disruptions to a minimum, but we have effectively replaced a significant set of technologies that we use (CDN, proxying, WAF/DDoS protection, anti-robot, etc) and it's never apples-to-apples.

Comments

[dehallow]

I find that I get 403 errors when I try to post a comment on a post that hit captcha and when I try to log in from any page that isn't the DW main page!

Thank you guys for all the hard work during this turbulent transition, and good luck going forward!

[dehallow]

... and then I got 403 when posting this comment as well, but it went through upon refresh. An attempted edit did not go through. Here's to hoping someone on the team can catch one of these errors in the wild soon!

[trobadora]

Thank you for being on top of this!

[silverflight8]

+100 Appreciate the communication!

[shortpumpkin]

As someone who lives and works out of the DW inbox, here's some feedback:

- The "view all unread messages" is an important function for those of us juggling comments and messages at different points of waiting for a response. Could this be brought back? Being able to quickly see all of the unread comments and messages together is really useful.

- I currently can't expand read PMs in the inbox, when I click to expand them nothing happens.

- Currently, words are splitting as they hit the end of the text box, making messages and comments hard to read in the inbox.

- Having the default of unread messages as expanded is actually not very helpful as some messages and comments will be very long and full of HTML that might break the UI/inbox (it did this even with the old one). Can this be an optional change?

[mark]

Thank you! I've rolled it back to the old inbox for now, but this will be helpful for us to iterate on the new one for later. :)

[anaraine]

The new inbox is exciting! I look forward to the unread messages being expanded by default again, tyvm. But also:

-the idk, spacing? for words is a little off; instead of pushing a word to a new line, it's splitting arbitrarily in the middle which is kind of distracting

-you used to be able to click on any part of the message to "select" it; now you can only check the tickybox to delete/mark (un)read/etc <--less important, but I appreciated it

-please let the "unread messages" category in the sidebar come back from the war...

[mark]

Thank you! I've rolled it back to the old inbox for now, but I appreciate the feedback and we'll use it to evolve!

[ex_flameandsong751]

Some icons are breaking/not loading and when I click the "open link in new tab" to the icon URL it redirects to an Amazon AWS URL that Firefox says is unsafe. I took care of this by re-uploading some icons, but I thought I would give the heads up.

Thank you very much for staying on top of this and in particular, working on the captcha thing to get it resolved as quickly as possible. You guys rock.

[mark]

That's browser caching. If you clear your browser cache, you shouldn't see this anymore!

[marwood]

i'm a pretty frequent user of the 'view all unread messages' option in my inbox and i'm sad to see it is no longer there - any chance you guys could put that one back? :0

[mark]

Thank you! I've rolled it back to the old inbox for now, but yeah, this seems like a common request so we should be able to do that.

[vanilla_elf]

About the 404 when commenting: looks like it happens when using (default) icon as setting. I can comment without problem when I scroll down my icons and pick one, even the default icon. hth

[anaraine]

*tests that*

Whelp, still ??? on how to make it happen on purpose, because my initial comment posted normally. Are you posting comments from your reading page using the quick reply, or are you posting on the actual entry page?

[thechurbyboxmod]

Saw the new inbox briefly and had a thing to put out there with others. Is it possible to bring the current 'selected items are also highlighted in a different color' that we have at this time? The checkbox alone is often not enough for me when I am going through to select things to delete or mark as read, and the visual cue of color distinction goes a long way to me not accidentally deleting something I didn't mean to or figuring out what I missed.

I hadn't seen that mentioned yet (as of when I started typing this comment at least) and I expect that there will be others like me who find that current tool helpful to retain if it wasn't already on the books to keep.

[kwithay]

Thanks guys for all the work you're doing with this, particularly in the hiccups that have come with the move! It's all worth it in the end, and your dedication to keeping this community safe is always appreciated. ♥

[memester]

On RPA and noticing the stretch of the bottom and wondering if it's intentional/miscode.

What it used to look like just before you reverted the DW inbox issue

What it looks like now

Intentional or not, just wanted to be sure it was known.

[nophicascounsel]

since it's about RPA anyway i'm not gonna switch off my rp journal just for this- Just checked and the default red site skin is doing it too.

[luckyzukky]

thanks to the dw team for all of your hard work <3 this is all much appreciated!!

[solarbird]

Thanks for doing/being on top of this. Never knew Cloudflare was such a steaming pile, but, well, live and learn.

It may be psychosomatic but honestly the site feels like it's loading more quickly at the moment lol xD

[dewline]

Thanks for the news, however it ends up affecting me!

[gwenhwyfar]

Thank you so much, guys!!

[nverland]

Icon's are disappearing. Started during your changeover but hasn't fixed itself yet

[karzilla]

If you're still seeing any broken icons, clearing your browser cache should fix it!

[profrobert]

I'm getting multiple captcha demands, one to open the DW site, another to open this thread. Shouldn't there be a session cookie that knows I'm real? It seems to be able to remember I'm logged in, and that's across sessions.

[ilyena_sylph]

Hi, just another user and sometimes volunteer, but apparently AWS's current setup challenges every time we change domains.

It's really exasperating, I feel you! But they're trying to work out something better!

[thebratqueen]

Adding my voice to those saying that they're still getting errors with icons not showing up. It's not every icon or even consistent on which icon as far as I can tell. But it's often enough that I'd say something's still having a problem on that end.

Thank you again for all your hard work and communication!

[karzilla]

If you're still seeing any broken icons, clearing your browser cache should fix it!

[mrshamill]

I was getting a constant 403 while using my VPN but it suddenly stopped yesterday afternoon. Not sure what (if anything) changed, but I'm glad for it!

[glocka]

I wonder, how soon are we going to see another fork of the livejournal codebase, which would return this community to CloudFlare, as a matter of principle? Or is it a dead end, and the time is ripe for Distributed Web Hosting?

[azurelunatic]

It would almost have to be a labor of love if someone did that; while the code base is in significantly better shape than LiveJournal left it, the setup has a lot of ways to trip up. Assuming it's stood up successfully, the next major problems are funding and imports. I'm sure some people would want to start fresh but for a number of people in the jump from LJ the deciding factor was ease of import plus a critical mass of their friend group. To jumpstart funding, Dreamwidth offered a purchase of highest-tier paid accounts for a large lump sum. The tradeoff there is that your most dedicated users may go for that and then no longer be a reliable source for monthly or yearly payments. Many of the people hesitant to jump from LJ to DW wanted a guarantee or at least good odds to have the site survive at least as long as LJ had to date. There are still surviving forks like InsaneJournal but a lot of less well known forks only lasted a few years if that. My friend Kit really believed in Inksome but at the end of the line he couldn't keep paying for it out of pocket. It was a lovely little site and that was a sad end.

[skytintedwater]

Thanks for all of your hard work!

[jazzyjj]

I already posted a comment just a bit ago in another comm on here, and it seems to have gone through just fine. I've not yet checked out other things as I've been a bit busy again, but so far so good. Thank you as always for staying on top of things, and for your top-notch communication. Hopefully sooner rather than later there will be light at the end of the tunnel. All righty then, I'm going to post this and then back-track to see if it goes through and then it's off to the Land of Sleepy.

[libitina]

Thank you for all of the updates!

I don't know what the problem is, but bonibaru is having difficulty reaching the site - https://twitter.com/Bonibaru/status/1567699067836284931

[kareila]

Thanks for flagging that up, I replied to her with a resource that I thought might help.

[em_kellesvig]

Thanks for doing this and all your hard work.

[disaster_rat]

hi, firstly, thanks so much for making this move and for everything you are all doing to keep dreamwidth the wonderful place we all love.

second, i think this might be resolved now but just in case: on the 6th i tried to edit a post i'd just made in a community i moderate, and was taken to a visual-based captcha about aligning shapes in an image. it would've been completely inaccessible for any blind users, but the issue i had was when i completed the captcha, it said i was successful and would now be redirected, but i was redirected back to the start of the captcha, being asked to do it again. i completed the captcha about 10 times or so, and never got the chance to edit my post.

i gave up and came back the next day, and was able to edit my post without even seeing the captcha page at all. so either i got lucky on the second day, or whatever the issue was got fixed in between.

so yes, i'm guessing maybe you fixed that already, in which case, thankyou!! i'm only sharing it just in case the info is helpful in some way.

thanks again, and much love! you folks are all doing an amazing job and me & my family are so grateful. keep being awesome!

~ rox

Style=light

[teuthida42]

As of today, there's something odd going on with style=light - if there are multiple pages of comments, the page numbers are in a single, vertical line. Which obviously isn't great if there's more than a couple of pages.

Re: Style=light

[mark]

I think this may be fixed. Can you check now (and do a force refresh, Shift+F5, or clear your browser cache and load the page)?