Upcoming maintenance (2200 UTC / 1700 EST / 1400 PST)

[mark]

This maintenance has been completed.

And next in the series of maintenances:

Dreamwidth will be offline for about 15 minutes at the above-mentioned times. If all goes well, this is the last maintenance we have to do to ensure our databases are all up to snuff.

As always, please watch dreamwidth for updates and in case something takes longer than expected.

Comments

[mark]

Talkin' to myself, hi.

[dewline]

No worries. Because no drama.

[starfallhaven]

Not sure if it's intentional, but the little calendar that used to show at the bottom of my page isn't showing up anymore. There's also an 'expand cut tags' box that seems to be broken? I am also on mobile so this might just be a mobile browser issue.

Edit: ope, never mind, it seems to be back.

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

Hi. Some of the pages appear to be broken. Instead of showing up in the skin I'm using, or any other skins, it's just white, with everything sort of stacked on top of each other.

Is this part of ongoing maintenance, or did something in the coding go a bit wrong?

Here's a screenshot, if that helps:

[mark]

It looks fine to me, I think this is likely a caching issue. Can you try a shift-refresh (Shift+F5) and see if that helps?

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

No; it didn't do anything.

[denise]

We're looking into this further!

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

Okay; thank you!❤

[denise]

Further update: it's just affecting the Gradation site skins, so if you don't need dark mode for accessibility reasons you can temporarily switch to one of the others while we try to figure out what broke even though we didn't touch it, siiiiigh

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

Okay; thanks for keeping me posted! You guys are terrific. :-) I'll just leave it as-is for a few days, just in case you guys catch something that slipped through the cracks.

[but_can_i_be_trusted]

It's working fine now! :D

Thanks again for all the awesome work you guys do for us.💕

[siliconshaman]

Well, you've broken something... this page is rendering in plain hTML with no style sheet.

[denise]

We're looking into why people are getting this!

[denise]

Further update: it's just affecting the Gradation site skins, so if you don't need dark mode for accessibility reasons you can temporarily switch to one of the others while we try to figure out what broke even though we didn't touch it, siiiiigh

[sweetmeow]

I appreciate dark mode, but glad to know you're on the repair trail. Meantime, I'll switch to something else. Thanks!

[denise]

Just confirming this should be fixed now and you can go back to being a creature of the night!

[sweetmeow]

THANKS!

[bluedreaming]

Thanks for the update. The site seems to be working okay for me?

[denise]

We narrowed it down: it's just affecting the Gradation site skins!

[bluedreaming]

Thank you!

[dickgrayson]

Thank you!

[unnecessaryflourishes]

This is unrelated to the maintenance (though I'm not seeing any problems here!) but has anything recently changed with how DW handles log ins? I normally bounce around between a variety of accounts for which I typically use a third-party addon (which I know is not anything you guys have anything to do with!) and unless I use DW's native log in option I'm either not properly logged in or getting logged off pretty much every time I try to switch pages.

[denise]

We haven't changed anything, but those third party tools are incredibly unreliable, sadly!

[unnecessaryflourishes]

I figured that would probably have been the case but I wanted to double-check just in case! I've got options, and even if nothing works it's not awful to go without. Just more annoying than I'd like. XD

[the_beasts]

not sure if it'll suit your needs (and we have no idea if it works on mobile), but we find that add-ons that function as tab-based account containers/tab-based cookie profiles avoid this issue, because the different cookie-sessions are stored in seperate browser tabs or tab-types, and you actually do use dw's native login interface for each account, it's just that you can leave them all logged in and switch back & forth between tab types instead.

the ones we use are for firefox and found here:

multi-account containers base addon

containers helper (improves container management)

...again, may not work for you, but just in case. <3

[unnecessaryflourishes]

I'm often not mobile anyway - or not in any way that would involve log ins directly. If I'm mobile I'm pretty much exclusively using the reply by email function, since that way if I'm suddenly called away (which is a not infrequent occurrence) I can just let the email autosave hang on to what I've typed up, rather than hope I don't accidentally close/back out of the tab.

But I have heard of those options, yeah! I know some people who use them, and if things get super frustrating, I'll probably check them out.

[the_beasts]

yeah that all makes sense! and agreed - autosave functions are a lifesaver, heh. glad you've got some options available to you! we hope everything smooths out soon, and/or whatever you go with works well for you.

[barda]

hey! i don't know if anyone else is having this issue, but i seem to be unable to buy a paid account. i can buy points, but it won't let me actually apply the points to get a paid. or if i just do the buy paid services option instead of points, it still won't work either.

[tactlesstantei]

Me too. Other notes:
-I tried on several accounts (this one, orangesmith, and rolltoavoidpossession). Of the three, only this one was able to put a paid account in the cart, but I wasn't able to use this account to buy a paid for the others.
-I was able to buy points on one of the others, but I can't use the points to get a paid.
-I can get to the screen where you pick the number of months you want just fine on all accounts, but the paid never shows up in my cart when I go to hit 'Add to Order'.
-I tried on both computer and mobile, via Firefox on both.

[denise]

Thanks for letting us know! There's definitely something very weird going on here but I'm having trouble narrowing down exactly what's broken. Can you let me know exactly what options you're picking in the shop (ie, "buy paid services, random user, premium paid account for 6 months") and what happens when you do it? (ie, "I hit 'add to cart' and it doesn't actually add the item to the cart") Right now I can only identify one pathway that's definitely busted (buy paid time, for random user, any item, add to cart: item gets discarded and doesn't go into the cart) -- I've tested "for yourself" and "for another user" and they work for me, but if you let me know the exact steps you're taking it will help us figure out the problem.

EDIT: okay, we narrowed down what we thought was causing the problem and reverted the change until we can figure out what the issue is and why it didn't show up in testing. I have verified that you should be able to buy paid time now and I'm sorry for the inconvenience!

[tactlesstantei]

Thank you for taking the time to figure this out!

[morrow]

I’m experiencing this too!

[denise]

Thanks for letting us know! We've reverted the change that was causing this problem and are digging into figuring out what was wrong with it that didn't show up in testing.

[denise]

Thanks for letting us know! There's definitely something very weird going on here but I'm having trouble narrowing down exactly what's broken. Can you let me know exactly what options you're picking in the shop (ie, "buy paid services, random user, premium paid account for 6 months") and what happens when you do it? (ie, "I hit 'add to cart' and it doesn't actually add the item to the cart") Right now I can only identify one pathway that's definitely busted (buy paid time, for random user, any item, add to cart: item gets discarded and doesn't go into the cart) and I've tried a number of others that are working for me at least, so if you could let me know exactly what steps you're using and what the actual failure looks like, it will help us figure out what's causing it.

[barda]

i tried everything that tactlesstantei did above, and my results have been basically!

- basically, when you try to add something to your cart, everything looks fine when you're on the page but after you click 'add to order' you do not see anything in your cart.
- buying points works, but when i try to apply the points into an actual paid account nothing appears in the cart.
- it looks like it does not affect every account. i've logged into a few different ones for mine, and for some it works (like i just tried on this one and it did) and others it did not (i tried on my account dribbler just now and it did not).
- on dribbler, i was able to buy 30 points. but when i try to convert those points into an actual paid is where it does not show up in the cart. basically no matter how many times i try it just looks like this.
- trying to buy any kind of paid isn't working for dribbler, for example, however i was able to buy a rename token on that account. that said, when i got the rename token i didn't check to see if i could buy a paid at the same time so i have no idea if that issue was occurring at the time, but it was all done yesterday after maintenance.

[denise]

thank you very much! This narrows it down a bunch for us, and we've reverted the change that caused the problem (and verified that it's working now) until we can figure out what's going on and wtf it didn't show up in testing. Sorry for the inconvenience, and you should be able to apply your points now!

[barda]

thank you!!

[jazzyjj]

My journal seems to be loading faster, so thank you for fixing what needed to be fixed. You're the best! I do have one question though. Are users supposed to sign up for individual accounts with H-CAPTCHA, or are you just going to convert everyone all at once?

[denise]

You should only be getting the captcha if you're logged out and your IP address is from a range that has a lot of bad traffic. If you do keep getting them, though, you will have to sign up for the hCaptcha account yourself!

[joseph_teller]

Thank You for keeping the site running smoothly.

[digitalangels]

It seems something broke regarding how Dreamwidth is indexed by Google.

I saw someone mention on one forum I go that they can't find the https://sims2defaults.dreamwidth.org on google by searching "Sims 2 default database" and I tested it too and it was only bringing up few posts linking to the page but never the actual page on Dreamwidth. Then I tested with other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ecosia and Yahoo) DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Yahoo could find it immediately without issues but Startpage uses Google engine and was unable to find it. Of course this could be issue from Google's side too but I thought I'd report it anyway just in case.

[danabren]

Hi there, as of this morning my Inbox read unread messages are no longer available. Will they be made available again? They contained links and references and other useful information I was keeping.

[allegorie]

Just wondering if the Error 503 Backend fetch failed page error is going to be addressed? it's been every night for the past 3 nights, making the site unusable. took me more than half an hour of reloading just to be able to post this comment.