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

[momijizukamori]

The first pic is what it should look like - the giant line is not intentional, lol. I think when we rolled back the inbox changes we may have ended up in a weird inbetween spot - thanks for this info, it's very handy!

[memester]

I'm not a coder or know code in any fashion, but the way it lines up with the end line of the above page box (that light grey line at the bottom above the purple box) makes me think it's some kind of limitation/containment error. That and the parenthesis gaps. Not sure if that's also intentional or not (they're in every instance barring the line for threaded/top-level comments, so I wonder about the implementation on that as well)

I just thought I'd bring it up since it happened immediately after the inbox 'reroll' and not before, and it doesn't have a numerical value (first box has page numbers in 10s, second has it in 21s)

Edit: Testing something here since I notice a large gap in the username/userhead graphic used in the post, so I'm doing it to mine memester to see if that's an issue or just a one off in the post.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah, rows of ten items was the intention (and we spent a LOT of time tweaking to get that CSS good) - I think when Mark rolled back the inbox changes we didn't get back to quite the right point, and landed where some of the HTML for the page is changed, but the CSS isn't changed yet to match or something.

[memester]

The problem with roll backs. Too soon or too far. Either way, I'm glad that helped and I hope that it's one of the minor problems that needs to be fixed. You guys have a hard job ahead of you with trying to keep everyone happy and I know that's an impossibility.