Code push happening tomorrow!

[karzilla]

We are planning to do a code push within the next 24 hours, around 7:30pm PDT / 10:30pm EDT. (timezones)

You can see what's new in the code tour that was posted earlier this week, but here are the highlights:

• Google Analytics v4 support
• adding the legacy RTE to the beta Create Entries page
• adding draft autosave to the beta Create Entries page
• more UI improvements for the beta Inbox
• some more aggressive measures for discouraging SEO spam accounts
• miscellaneous modernization updates for various journal styles
• many newly added sites for content embeds and username styling
• new color picker for the journal style customization page
• new CSS wrappers to allow styling of entry cut links

We'll update here once the new code is live!

Comments

[chemicalcain]

DRAFT AUTOSAVE FOR BETA!! YEAH!!!

[I am always glad to see new developments but I have been looking forward to this specific feature for years. I love the beta editor in so many ways but this is one feature I have missed.]

[denise]

I will caution you that it's the same autosave that exists on the old page, which is very old and very buggy! We were holding off on integrating it into the new page in hopes that we'd have the time to modernize it and make it not a "very old and very buggy" disaster, but obviously it's taken this long for us to get to it so we just said fuck it, we'll put the old one in for now until we can make the actual modernized version.

[havocthecat]

It's a start? For which I am pleased? Hooray!

[chemicalcain]

Old and buggy autosave still autosaves my work more reliably than no autosave at all! I do manually save posts-in-progress by posting to a private drafts tag, but unexpected browser crashes can happen. My laptop likes to live on the edge (of its battery life) so I do sometimes end up completely losing a post. If autosave keeps 50% of those, that's much better than nothing, haha.

[jesse_the_k]

posting to a private drafts tag is brilliant! May I boost this?

[chemicalcain]

Yes absolutely! I use the tag ##drafts (symbol makes it easy to find in an alphabetical list) and post privately until the post is finished, then when I'm ready to publish I update the date/time and make it public under the correct tags.

[cesy]

Though note that means it won't trigger a notification for anyone who has that set up on your posts - for that, you'd need to repost as a new entry. And if someone's reading page is very fast-moving, it will appear further down as when you first posted it rather than at the top.

[chemicalcain]

Hmm, thanks for the warning. My understanding was that updating the date/time when editing a post would move it up the Reading Page unless I select for the post to not appear on the Reading Page at all.

[cesy]

I believe Reading page is by server time to avoid timezone issues, so it won't move.

[denise]

That's correct -- the reading page always goes by server timezone to avoid issues. (Your journal page will show it in the correct order. Communities go by server timezone because they can have multiple people posting.)

[denise]

cesy is correct -- people's reading pages always go by server timestamp at the time the entry was originally posted, and edits don't bump it on people's reading pages. Your individual journal will slot it into the correct time order display-wise, although communities also go by server time (since there can be different people posting from many different timezones).

[grayestofghosts]

*crosses fingers for Mastodon links*

[denise]

We're doing what we can there, but the way Mastodon handles usernames and servers means that it's been very hard for us to retrofit it into the existing format of our username shorthand.

[grayestofghosts]

Thanks for the effort 🙏

[crystalis39]

Ooh, which sites will be added for the profile links? I'm assuming it's probably fediverse stuff like mastodon, lemmy, and kbin.

[denise]

The list is among the things covered in the code tour! We've been looking at how we can handle fediverse usernames, but the "username/server" paradigm the fediverse uses has proven very difficult for us to retrofit into our existing username shorthand.

[pangolin20]

Thanks for the code push, and especially for implementing the RTE in beta!

[goodbyebird]

❤️❤️❤️

[falena]

Seeing people (volunteers!) working on DW makes me so happy. Thank you!

Motivation?

[paserbyp]

I don't know how to motivate volunteers to working more and more on DW? Any ideas?

Re: Motivation?

[denise]

You can send them our way to dw_dev or to our Discord (which is linked somewhere in dw_dev, I don't have the link handy offhand), and our code and open-issues list is on Github!

Re: Motivation?

[paserbyp]

Thank you! I see... but I'm about motivation?

[siliconshaman]

Still not fixed the zero-height entry box bug in the legacy Create Entries page I see.

How does one enable legacy RTE in the beta Create Entries page? I see no option for it in the drop-down menu.

[cesy]

It's not yet live, it will be in the next day or so.

[denise]

The legacy RTE won't be available in the new Create Entries beta until after the code push, after which there'll be a preference pane for it. As a caution, it's the same RTE that's used in the old version of the update page, which is very old and very buggy in modern browsers and we have very, very limited ability to troubleshoot because of its age and the fact it relies on extremely outdated technology. It's the same thing as the draft autosave issue: we've been working on a more modern solution that won't have those limitations, but it's proven a lot more difficult than it looks like on the surface and needs us to finish a ton of modernization work first (which we are getting near the end of, thank God!)

I'm not sure what you mean by "the zero-height entry bug", but we're not prioritizing any fixes for the legacy update page -- our effort is going into getting the beta Create Entries page fit for purpose instead. If you can reproduce the bug after the code push in the beta Create Entries page and it doesn't have to do with the legacy RTE, can you give us steps to reproduce so I can make sure it's logged as an issue?

If it has to do with the legacy RTE, we know there are lots of bugs with it and we can't fix them because it's very old (and very buggy in modern browsers). We were holding off on adding a RTE to the beta Create Entries page until we could integrate a more modern RTE package, but the work has proven a lot more difficult than we could have predicted and needed us to do a lot of modernization work first because the state of the art has changed so much since the original RTE was integrated into the original update page and all the solutions have proven difficult to integrate. We are still working on the process, we just have hit the point where we need to retire the old codepath for the old update page and are trying to get the beta Create Entries up to feature parity as much as we can first.

[siliconshaman]

Yeah.. the RTE addition is *still buggy in exactly the same way as the old RTE was.

screenshot

That's what I mean by a zero-height entry box... the box you enter the body of the post into has zero height, it does not exist, In other words, it is utterly unusable.

This somewhat disruptive since it means any of my work (I'm an author) I share in advance with my readers, has to be forked into markdown for DW and rich text for everywhere else.

[susanreads]

I think I see an ad-blocker icon in that screenshot, with an ads-blocked superscript, but DW doesn't have ads. Have you tried whitelisting *.dreamwidth.org?

[siliconshaman]

THANK YOU!!

That actually fixed the issue!

[denise]

You absolutely get the troubleshooting award for the month. Nice catch!

[juan_gandhi]

What we would probably need is a better images uploads/management.

[denise]

It's on our list! We are short on frontend devs with UI/UX experience who can do that work, and their attentions have mostly been going to the modernization efforts we've been working on (in which we are trying to keep the new, modern versions of the page looking and behaving as much like the old version as possible) because that's a long-outstanding project that we need to finish first in order to accomplish most of our long-term goals for the site, but it is on our list.

[fyreharper]

Thank you for trying to keep the site looking/acting pretty much the same while updating its innards! I appreciate that a lot!

[denise]

I am the person who used a chat client for something like 7 years past when it was announced
"end of life, no more updates" because I viscerally hated everything else, so I absolutely understand the "do NOT make it look different"! We're trying to be as thoughtful as possible in our updates to get the look and feel of the site into this century, heh.

[casumarzu]

Thank you for all of the hard work and the time spent on this!

CSS escaping

[tennoseremel]

I wish CSS didn't die on me when I'm trying to use Unicode (escaped or otherwise) in content property… *cough*

Re: CSS escaping

[denise]

That's a security related restriction -- it was put in place because there's a category of exploits that used to be very common on LiveJournal that can happen if you don't clean certain byte strings out of user-generated CSS classes, and the fix for it has to be a little over-cautious and just clean all Unicode. Theoretically, we could probably look into whether we can step back some of the restrictions given the advances in browser technology, but it hasn't been a priority (and is unlikely to be a priority in the future) because of the risk of re-introducing security attack vectors if we aren't extremely careful and we've prioritized other efforts instead.

EDIT: actually nevermind! our security person did do that analysis while I wasn't paying attention and this next code push should reduce the restrictions on Unicode in CSS a lot. Sorry for the bad info!

Re: CSS escaping

[tennoseremel]

Nice :) Although all of that could probably be less of a problem with BUG #3046: [wish] Consider not inlining custom CSS maybe?

UPD: And, for the record, I meant content: "Unicode string here"; not classes, per se.

Re: CSS escaping

[momijizukamori]

You should be good to go on unicode in content values now! The attack pattern it was meant to mitigate is not a thing in modern browsers (apparently it used to be possible to make CSS run JS, which is one of the most cursed things I've heard).

Re: CSS escaping

[tennoseremel]

momijizukamori, appears to be working (example: link at the end of the text has “identification card” Unicode character), thank you :)

apparently it used to be possible to make CSS run JS, which is one of the most cursed things I've heard

Ouch. Sounds very cursed indeed.

[taz_39]

Yay, really hope this will include the ability to actually embed media!!!

[denise]

For security purposes, we have to limit certain categories of HTML tags that are very commonly used in media embedding. (Allowing all uses of those tags would provide a vector by which someone malicious could gain limited access to your account or, in the worst case scenario, to others' accounts.) Our fix for that is to place certain sites and their embedding HTML on the explicit allow list and deny any use of those HTML tags that aren't specifically pre-allowed. If there's a particular site you'd like to embed media from and it doesn't work, open a support request with some sample embed code provided by the site, and we can add it to the allow list for you. (Hang on until after the code push, though, since this push involves adding a bunch more sites to the allow list!)

[taz_39]

Ok, thanks! So far the only media I’ve ever been able to embed here is YouTube, and it still shows up sized all wrong. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and every other video service does not work on DW for me at all. The next time I use video and it doesn’t work I’ll do as you suggest.

[denise]

Hmm, I know for sure that we have FB, Instagram, and Tiktok on the allow list. Are you using the embed code the site itself gives?

Anyway, if you run into something that doesn't work, report it with an example of the embed code you're using and we'll see what we can do!

[taz_39]

Yep, I use the provided embed codes. The videos either don’t appear or they show as a link instead of a video. I’ll report it next time I post, or will make a post with one of each video type. This has been the case ever since I started blogging here, videos have never worked except sometimes YouTube videos. Thanks for the help!

[atrophymidwife]

Thank you!

[london_fan]

new CSS wrappers to allow styling of entry cut links

That's an awesome change! It might have been something minor in the grand scheme of things, but styling the cut links has given me gray hair in the past, so thank you for making this so much easier! Much appreciated!