dw_maintenance | (no subject)

We are planning a code push tonight -- the exact timing will depend on people's availability but it should be sometime between 9:30PM EDT and 11:30PM EDT (ie, anywhere from 10 minutes from now to about two hours from now). The list of changes that are included in this code push can be found in the most recent code tour.

We don't expect any meaningful user impact (there may be 30 seconds of slowness here and there). Two things of note that may cause some problems after the new code is running, however:

* This release includes a number of pages on the site being converted from the Extremely Old way of assembling a page to the newer way. As always, we do our best to keep them looking as visually similar as we can and to test them on multiple browsers/devices/etc before we let the changes out of testing, but if something looks new and weird (as opposed to just new), please let us know and bear with us while we fix it.

* This release also includes, to address our ongoing spam woes, a change that will prevent people who haven't confirmed their email addresses from posting on the site. (Previously, if your email was unconfirmed, you could post but not comment.) If you run into an error when trying to post that references confirming your email address, see How do I confirm my email address? for instructions on how to confirm your email address. You will be unable to post until you confirm your email address.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

When I visit the home site, the columns are off-sized and shifted over with the text in a too-large font, with the result being a page I can't easily use to navigate to get to my own journal or my reading pages. Is there a way to fix this?

+1'ing this to say I'm in the same boat + I'm in that funky minority where having fonts bigger + in a more condensed area messes with my eyes, making it hard for me to even look at the screen sometimes.

It may be worth sharing a screenshot if that's easy for you to do, to make it clearer what the issue is. I still see links to my journal and reading page at the top.

Here we go:

You can see how off-kilter the righthand columns are.

Can you elaborate a little more about what the issue is with this screenshot? We're having trouble figuring out exactly what part you're pointing out as an issue.

The way "search Dreamwidth" and "reading page" are moved closer to the middle of the page away from the righthand side, the font size on those headers, and the spacing between pieces of text - to my eyes, it looks like there's more room between "390 personal journals" and "34 communities" than there was yesterday.

Ah, I see! That's one of those things falling into the "we try to keep it looking as much like the old version, but it's not always possible" bucket: the underlying technology for generating the pages is so radically different that a pixel-for-pixel conversion isn't possible. (Finishing the conversion is necessary in order for us to do pretty much anything with the site at this point; the very very old way of building pages is literally unmaintainable by now because it's almost 25 years old, and in internet terms that's a little like working with vacuum tubes.) We'll take a look at it to see if there are any more changes we can make.

Even without the comparison to the previous appearance, it’s weird that the right columns in that screenshot aren’t anywhere near the right edge of the page!