dw_beta | Recent Entries

Hey all! I just finished converting the index/homepage, both logged out and logged in, to Foundation/Template Toolkit. It's live on the canary server (see here for how to access that).

The changes aren't really big enough to warrant a full beta setting, but I wanted to get more more feedback on it before we merge it, and logged in users may be bypassing it, usually (I just have my reading list bookmarked, for instance).

momijizukamori

This is a feedback entry for the new REST API and it's documentation.

Quick note - I am aware that the current API docs do not match the site schemes, and there are probably some accessibility issues - we're using a third-party docs component for now, until we have time to replace it with something better. The focus for now is getting the API going!

karzilla

Greetings, beta testers!

mark has recently added a new "canary" feature to Dreamwidth which will let those who opt in use bleeding-edge site changes before they get pushed out to everyone.

The way it works is this: when you go to https://www.dreamwidth.org/beta and click the "Site-Wide Canary" button, a cookie will be set in your browser which will direct your traffic to the canary server. It's using the same data as the main site, just (sometimes) a slightly newer version of the site code.

• Things are more likely to be broken on the canary! If something goes horribly wrong, you can clear your cookies to go back to using the main site.

• If you lose the canary cookie for any reason, you'll have to opt out and back in on the beta page to go back to using the canary.

Canary users will see a broad ribbon in the lower right corner of their browser window reminding them that they are on the canary. It looks something like this:

Don't feel obligated to rush out and turn this on - it's mostly going to be useful for site developers - but if you do try it, let us know what you think!

Current Music: TMBG - Birdhouse in Your Soul

momijizukamori

This post is for feedback for the redesigned inbox! As this is a redesign rather than a port, 'it's different' isn't useful feedback - please let me know how that difference is impacting you!

In particular, I'd like feedback from phone/tablet users, and from people who regularly get inbox messages in languages that use different character sets than English (languages that use Cyrillic, various East Asian languages, etc) - a lot of the elements of the redesign were meant to address problems with these.

Fixed Issues

'Unread' message filter missing from the navigation sidebar
All entries are showing up collapsed, even unread ones.
Odd word-breaking behavior in subjects and messages
Action/navigation buttons are no longer in the footer as well
Spacing between subject and timestamp
Have to click on the checkbox rather than anywhere on the message to select it
Expand/collapse does not work on read messages
'Delete all for this entry'/'Mark all read for this entry' does not work
Selected messages aren't highlighted
Intermittant weirdness/failures when using the in-message comment moderation tools
The bottom message on one page is duplicated at the top of the next page
Clicking a link in a message also causes that message to get marked as selected.
Missing link to the beta comm in the header
No confirmation dialogue for 'Delete All'
Deleting messages via JS causes expanded/collapsed status to reset on other messages on the page.
Current page button color is incorrect in all site schemes
Not enough space between compose button and manage/refresh links
Following reply link does not mark message as read
Actions doesn't work with JS off
Links in read messages aren't muted in color
Images embedded in inbox notifications overflow badly

Fixed But Not Live

Known Issues

Navigation buttons reflow in a kind of ugly way on some screen sizes
Not enough space between action buttons
Mark All Read button doesn't update text on press
No warning when you've hit the max number of flagged messages (just silent failure)
Left-clicking on message actions is slow and does not always correctly redirect.

Possible Tweaks

Separate filters for comments and entries
Wording for buttons

EDIT: A proposal for alternate button interaction, to cut down on the number of action buttons for people with JS on (no-JS would still get a slightly cluttered view):

if nothing is selected, the two buttons are 'Mark All Read' and 'Delete All'
if anything is selected, 'Delete All' becomes 'Delete Selected'
if anything selected is read, 'Mark All Read' becomes 'Mark Read' (or possibly 'Mark Selected Read') - a mix of read and unread marked would get this
if all selected are read, 'Mark All Read' becomes 'Mark Unread' (or 'Mark Selected Unread'

roadrunnertwice

Hello! As of late April 2020, there are two new beta features available on dreamwidth.org. You can turn them on at the usual place.

The first one is Two-Factor Authentication. 2fa is an optional thing where you log in with your normal password, but then have to confirm the login with an app or security key before you can actually get in. You might have used it for your email or for important work accounts; soon you'll have the option of using it on Dreamwidth.

Important note: currently, we only implement the setup phase. You can configure a 2fa device, but DW won't yet actually use it to enforce access to your account.

The rest of this post isn't about the 2fa beta, because I don't know as much about it! There will probably be a more detailed post about it later, once we start implementing real login protection with it.
The second one is called Updated journal page components, because it's extremely miscellaneous and I needed to call it something. That's the one this post is about.

tl;dr: better comment pages on your telephone. Especially if you use Android and it usually looks like a bomb went off in the reply form.

( What it is, how to help, etc. )

denise

This code push included responsive redesigns of:

* the beta create entries page
* joining/leaving communities
* subscribing or granting access to people
* many of the site admin areas
* everything in the /tools directory
* and many more.

If you have problems with any of these pages, this is the place to report the problems!

( Further detail )

denise

This code push introduced a few pages as a "test drive" of our first draft of a responsive-design overhaul of the site.

As I said in the

dw_news post announcing the test-drive, there are several purposes of this redesign. Aside from the boring technical ones (making it easier for us to maintain and troubleshoot the code, reducing browser incompatability, giving us more options in terms of designing, etc), the two big ones are:

* Improve the way the site looks and feels on small screens (such as on tablets and mobile devices) without worsening the experience for people using large screens (desktops and laptops).

* Improve the accessibility of the site: make it easier to access the site with screenreaders, interact with the site using alternate input devices, interact with the site using only the mouse or only the keyboard, etc.

This is a "first draft"-type implementation, and we're sure that people are going to have a lot of feedback! Usually we would have run this through a

dw_beta-style beta test that you could activate for your account, but Boring Technical Reasons means that doing a beta-style test for this would have been difficult if not impossible. So, we've converted the community admin area, including the site skins as displayed on those pages, as a working example. This will let you get a sense of what the site skins will look like, and the sort of "visual vocabulary" we'll be using.

This entry is for two things: reporting any actual display bugs or glitches with the pages (in your browser, whether on your computer or on your mobile device), and providing aesthetic feedback about the look and feel of the design.

If you're reporting display bugs or glitches: Please describe the glitch in as much detail as possible. Screenshots would be really helpful, especially if you're only seeing the glitch in one browser but not another, or only on your phone but not on your laptop. (You don't have to check for the glitch on multiple devices, but if you do, let us know which devices have the problem and which don't.)

If you have feedback specifically about the aesthetics or the look of the redesign (you think something needs more padding, want to suggest a different font/color/color combination/background/what-have-you, think something is in the wrong place, that kind of thing): Please be as specific as possible about what you think needs to be changed, or what's bugging you about the way things look. For instance, instead of saying "the header is so ugly and squished now, change it back", say "On my computer, the links in the header don't have enough space between them, so they look like they're running into each other."

(We know that people definitely have strong opinions about the way things should look -- that's why we're doing this incrementally -- but the most helpful feedback is the kind that's specific, concrete, and actionable.)

With all feedback, include the following:

* Which site skin you're using (you can find this on the Display tab of Manage Settings if you don't know)
* What browser and browser version you're seeing the problem in
* What operating system you're using
* What type of device you're using: laptop, desktop, phone, tablet, e-reader, etc. (And if phone/tablet/e-reader, what make and model.)
* What your display resolution is, and what your current browser size is. To check this if you aren't sure: go to whatismy.browsersize.com and report the following numbers: Browser window width, browser window height, screen width, screen height.

If you're specifically reporting an issue with how the redesign works (or doesn't!) in your assistive technology setup, please also include:

* What assistive technology you're using (name of program, description of setup, etc)
* If it's software, the software version
* If it's workflow related (you find it difficult to navigate using keyboard-only navigation, for instance), a brief description of your workflow and what about the page is making it difficult

A note about font size: if you use Tropospherical Red (the default site skin) or Tropospherical Purple, and your first reaction when you look at the page is that the font size is too big, that's because it actually is larger than it was, and that's deliberate. The existing versions of the Tropo site skins set the font size on the page to be .75em (75% of your browser default size). That's actually an accessibility problem, and we shouldn't have done it way back when we were creating the site. (But we weren't thinking as much about accessibility then as we are now!)

We've tried several times since then to change the Tropo skins so they use your browser's default font size, to fix our mistake, but the way the Tropo skins were coded made it difficult if not impossible. This redesign is making it possible for us to fix that mistake now. So, if you think the font size is too large: it's using your browser's default font size, and you can change that yourself. In many browsers, you can specify a particular zoom level for a specific site, too. (In fact, you may have already changed it to be larger on Dreamwidth, to counterbalance the smaller font size that the site skin was setting; if so, changing it back will help.)

denise

We had the old "new JS on journals" beta reporting entry as the topmost entry in this comm, which was causing some confusion! So, a fresh post for people to report problems they're having with the new Create Entries beta.

Things not yet implemented:

* a WYSIWYG/rich text editor to allow people to post formatted entries

* the ability to save draft entries, both so you can deliberately postpone entries for posting later and so that an unexpected browser crash or problem during the posting process won't cause you to lose work

* admin editing of community entries

* the "don't autoformat" checkbox (we can't quite figure out which pane to stick it in!)

Things that will be documented once it comes out of beta, but some people have missed:

* if you don't like the placement of panels or don't want to see certain panels, you can customize the placement and which panels appear by using the "

Settings" link in the main toolbar at the beginning of the form.

If you have anything else to report, please let us know here!

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!

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".

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.

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!

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!

denise

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.

denise

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 )

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

denise

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!)

domtheknight

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.

domtheknight

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.

domtheknight

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.