Recent Entries

Javascript on Journals: last call ( I mean it this time! )

The last code push included some small and not-so-small fixes to the javascript on journals beta. The biggest visible change is that various items have a completely different look -- this includes dialog boxes on your journal when you try to track comments, and the contextualhover menu. Further details are in my entry to dw-styles (Upcoming changes to contextual hover menu styling (beta) ).

I believe that all the worst bugs for javascript on journals have been reported and fixed. Soon we plan to switch everyone over to the new version, with the ability to opt-out in case any annoying bugs are found once it's had more eyes on it. We'll post about it when that happens.

Please continue to let us know in the comments if you run into any issues, so we can fix them ASAP!

Editing with the new Create Entries page

We pushed out editing of your own entries using the new page with this code push. Please bang on it and let us know if you run into any issues specifically when editing an existing entry.

Known issues:

Admin editing of community entries still goes to the old view (this is deliberate, because we have something else lined up for admins)
Title still says "create entries".

Comment Pages in S2: the old becomes new

One of our long-running projects is to remove the old crufty code written in BML (our old templating system) and replace it with better alternatives throughout the site. And the coding for talkread.bml -- which is what is used any time you load up a site-skinned comment page -- is a particularly painful example.

Add to that, having the site-skinned comment pages be written one way, and custom comment pages another, makes it likely for one to lag behind the other. For example: site-skinned comment pages show the link for entries with screened comments as: "x visible | y screened". But S2 comment pages didn't have that information until this code push!

So I'm really happy to say that we have a new version of the comments page which uses pure S2, so now site-skinned comment pages and journal-styled comment pages are formed the same way on the backend even if they don't look the same. exor674 worked hard on the backend to make this possible, then momijizukamori came through with some spit and polish (with some help from kunzite).

The idea is for the new version to look as much as possible like the old version, though there might be a few discrepancies, because the backend is so different. momijizukamori has done her best to mimic the look and feel of the old comment pages. But the comments page is one of the most used pages here, so we'd like you all to come and give it a good shakedown.

Turn on beta testing for the "New S2 Comment Pages" -- and let us know in comments if you find anything out of the ordinary.

List of known issues.

Call for Volunteers: bug collating

I'm looking for someone willing to comb through the comments for the

dw_beta posts on the new create entries page and put them into zilla for me <3

I'd do it myself, but I keep getting bogged down in trying to *fix* the bugs instead of filing them, and that means that most of the later reports keep getting put off.

Needs: patience, data processing skills, the ability and patience to interact with Bugzilla.

What to do:
Go through the entries tagged "create entries", and look in the comments for everything that should be filed. File a separate bug for each issue encountered, that hasn't been fixed yet.

I've commented to a lot of threads when there's something that's I've fixed, but there are some where I haven't. If you're not sure whether it's been fixed or not, I'd suggest you go ahead and file it! If it looks familiar, we can mark it as DUPLICATE. It's easier to mark something as duplicate, than to go hunting through all the comments again for anything that we might have missed.

If it's a duplicate of an existing, but not fixed, bug, that's also fine, we can also mark it as a DUPLICATE, easy enough.

If it's a feature request rather than a bug, and it's not something that's already been shot down: file it anyway, we can choose to either do it, or WONTFIX it, but either way we'll handle it.

The important thing is to get things organized in a form where we can quickly accept or reject them, and quickly pick them up to fix.

Comment here if you're interested!

New JS on Journals: Last Call

We're planning on taking the "new JavaScript on journals" changes out of beta soon and making the changes the default for the entire site, so we've done a push today that adds the last few (reported) missing features, and fixes the last few (reported) really annoying behaviors.

There's always going to be one thing more though, so please make sure that you turn on beta for the new JS on journals, and tell us how that new JS works for you -- or doesn't work, if that's the case.

I'm interested in hearing about everything that's bothering you, no matter how tiny it seems! The sooner we know, the sooner we can fix it. (Just this code push, we fixed two things that seemed tiny: one was the hover menu fading way too quickly, another was how the attempt to change your poll vote would bring to you to a separate page instead of changing your vote on the page you were on. They were both things we missed at first, but once they were brought to our attention, we couldn't stop seeing them. And now they're fixed!)

So poke around, and let us know what you find. If you're looking for something to focus on, here's a short list of things we recently added or fixed:

added same-page comment tracking

fixed same-page changing of poll votes

added displaying errors when comment expansion fails to work

fixed hover menu fading away even when you didn't move your mouse

fixed the .cuttag-open CSS class so it applies to the contents of the opened cut tag (the way the old JS did), for people who want to customize this in their styles

made the bottom arrow jump you to the top of the cut tag, without affecting page forward/back

Assuming there are no major issues, we'll turn on the "new JS on journals" beta flag for everyone with our next code push for one last round of testing with the whole site, not just the people who've turned on the beta version. We'll keep it as a beta option at that point, so if anyone has serious problems, they can disable the beta and go back to the old JS while we fix the problem. After that, we'll take this code out of beta and make it the standard option for everyone, removing the old (existing) JavaScript entirely. So, if something's wrong, speak up now!

Entry tags:

create entries

New Create Entries beta, round two

The next code push will update the new Create Entries page in beta with a number of fixes for previously-reported bugs and enhancements. To make it easier to keep track, we're therefore opening up a new bug-reporting post (to avoid confusing things with bugs reported in the previous post).

When reporting bugs, please include:

* The browser name, browser version number, and operating system you're using
* The steps you took to reproduce the problem
* Whether or not you've tested the same steps in another browser (and if so, which)
* Whether you get the same result every time you try the same steps, or if it only happens sometimes

If we can't reproduce the problem under the same browser and operating system, we may also ask you for a list of any browser extensions you have installed.

Things that are still not yet implemented:

* the "don't autoformat" button
* the rich text editor
* editing existing entries (it will display the old form)
* draft posts of any type, including autosaving of entries

There are also still some issues with IE, especially in "privacy mode". Anything that requires Javascript is currently not working in IE in privacy mode, and we're trying to figure out if there's something we can do to fix that or if the settings of the browser override anything we can do.

Entry tags:

create entries

New Create Entries management page

This post is to report bugs in the new Create Entries page. This is a complete rewrite of the old Update page, in order to allow for future expansion and new features such as draft posts, scheduled posts, recurring posts, expanding the range of what can be posted to your journal, and a whole host of other awesome things.

When reporting bugs, please include:

* The browser name, browser version number, and operating system you're using
* The steps you took to reproduce the problem
* Whether or not you've tested the same steps in another browser (and if so, which)
* Whether you get the same result every time you try the same steps, or if it only happens sometimes

If we can't reproduce the problem under the same browser and operating system, we may also ask you for a list of any browser extensions you have installed.

Not all features are completely implemented in the new Create Entries page yet. The biggest thing currently missing is the Rich Text editor -- the only option is the plain-old-HTML option. The design of the page is geared towards changing concepts and visual/workflow metaphors around what it means to "post an entry", too -- because of the forthcoming draft and scheduled posts, we needed to adapt some of the language and some of the ways we present concepts -- even though the draft and scheduled post functionality isn't ready to be released yet. So, if something looks awkward or like it doesn't quite fit, it's probably there to allow for something we'll be releasing in the future. (You can still mention it, though!)

Things we also consider to be bugs that should be reported, in addition to something not working right:

* if you can't figure out what to do at any step of the update process
* if you have accessibility-related problems (with your screenreader, with the tab order of the page, with the workflow, etc)
* if something about the new workflow completely breaks the way you use your journal, and you can't figure out any way to work around it (there may be a way to do what you're used to doing, but if you can't figure it out, that's something we might change or might want to document, etc)

You can enable or disable beta testing at any point.

( Not yet enabled + known bugs lists )

Entry tags:

jquery

New changes live

New with this code push, including fixes so that the JS always works even when expanding multiple layers, e.g., even after viewing answers, or after expanding a cut:

polls

media placeholders

contextual hover

expand all cut tags module

And a couple of tweaks, chiefly:

fix quick reply overlapping content in some layouts

make screened/delete/etc work for expanded comments

Entry tags:

jquery

JS Conversion Beta: Report issues here!

If you're participating in the JQuery conversion beta test, report any issues you find here!

Currently, here are the things that have been implemented (and not implemented):

Implemented

Cut expand and collapse
Logging in
Screen/freeze/delete
Control strip injection for non-supporting journals
Quick reply
Thread expander

Not implemented

Contextual hover
Media embed placeholder expansion
Same-page poll submission
Icon browser
Same-page comment tracking

(This means that if you try to do something on the "not implemented" list while you have the beta features turned on, you'll be routed to the non-Javascript/non-inline version. That isn't a bug and you don't have to report it, but you should report anything else that's weird or that doesn't behave the way it used to!)

Entry tags:

jquery

hello beta testers!

At long last there are specific things that need doing!

For some background, check out

denise's explanation of technical debt. One of the things she mentions near the end is that we need to mingle JQuery with the existing Javascript the site uses.

This is a big change for how the site works, and it means that things could go wrong when it goes live. We now have a way you can turn on beta testing so that we can see how the new code will operate on a day-to-day basis.

If you want to check it out, you can! If you notice any weird behavior, please let us know - you can comment here.

A couple things to note: not all the features you might enjoy right now will be available in beta testing, because not everything has been rewritten yet. There's a list available on that same page, and you don't need to report those things because our excellent devs are already working on them.

At any point in time if you want to switch back, you can just go to the same page and turn beta features off.

Entry tags:

closed beta

#1134: certain parameters on crossposting to insanejournal

If you edit your adult content flags on an individual entry when attempting to crosspost to Insanejournal, the crosspost will fail. It doesn't seem to matter what the original default adult content setting was, and it doesn't matter how many accounts you crosspost to at the time.

Entry tags:

closed beta

#1067: paid account status

If you upgrade to a paid account, some of the features are not properly upgrading right away. (Some of you might have noticed that you can't use all of your icons, for example. You can fix that particular issue by going to edit icons and saving - no need to make any changes.)

There's a patch out for this already, so it'll hopefully get fixed pretty quickly.

ETA: this has been fixed! You might still need to do the icon fix mentioned above, but any future upgrades will work properly.

Entry tags:

closed beta

#984: comment subscriptions tied together

If you want to subscribe to comments in your own journal, you also have to subscribe to replies to comments in other journal (and vice versa). If you try to only subscribe to one of those, the changes won't save.

Entry tags:

closed beta

#976: uploading multiple icons in Internet Explorer

In Internet Explorer (version 7, perhaps previous versions as well), the "add another" buttons to upload multiple icons at a time don't work.

ETA: I've received additional data that the button doesn't work in IE6 or IE8, either.

Entry tags:

closed beta

#938: crossposter strips LJ code

The crossposter currently strips LJ-specific html (such as the lj user tags or the lj-cut).

ETA: this is fixed!

Entry tags:

closed beta

#750: location problems

FYI for saving your location on profiles: there's a bug where some countries will pull in "(states/regions/territories)" and then, when you try to save, give an error message of:

"You specified the United States as your country, but typed a non-US state in the "other state" field."

In some cases this bug might appear even if no location was picked at all.

(And perhaps relatedly, if no location is set, profiles are displaying "(states/regions/territories)" instead of hiding the location field altogether - that's bug 751.)

ETA 4/25: 750 has been fixed but 751 has not. So, you should be able to save, but the display might show up incorrectly still.

Entry tags:

closed beta

#732: membership in moderated comms

There's a bug with moderated membership for communities. Users are able to request to join and the notification is sent to the admin, who approves the membership and gets a 'success' message. But those new members don't show up in the membership list on the profile or on /community/members.bml.

Admins are able to send invites to users, and users are able to accept the invitation, at which point in time they receive "you are now a member of $comm" message, and the invitgation shows up as accepted. But just like in the first case, users don't show up on the profile or /community/members.bml.

We also tested for functionality - people in this situation can't post entries.

(Incidentally, this affects

dw_beta; if you requested membership sometime after mid-March, I approved you, but you can't see that.)

ETA: moderated membership is working correctly, but if you approved people during the downtime, you have to re-approve them all.

Entry tags:

closed beta

testing needed!

I need a couple of specific things tested:

1. If any of you ported a style from LJ (etc) prior to core2's release, and have not since upgraded your style to core2 (so you're still on a customized core1 style), we need to do some specific testing in that circumstance to try to reproduce a reported bug.

2. If any of you also have openIDs, we need to look at something with comments and comment notifications.

3. I need people to look at the menus in multiple browsers to see if anyone can reproduce this issue: picture of problem (what looks like tiny chunks of menu missing). That specific photo is from Safari 4.

If you can do any or all of those things, please comment here or PM or email me and I'll give you more details.

ETA: all of these tests should be done now, thanks!

[cross-posted to beta-testing listserv]

Entry tags:

closed beta

#681: html in comment previews

If you use the 'check spelling and preview' option when posting comments, the html shows up in raw form. If you just preview without checking spelling, the html shows up correctly.

Entry tags:

closed beta

#623: logging in on ?mode=reply

If you're viewing an entry at ?mode=reply, and try to log in using the comment submission form, you instead are sent to a page with an error, "Your login cookie seems to have disappeared?".