The "Updated Miscellany" beta

[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's in the Beta

This beta messes with the following Stuff:

• Site-skinned comment pages.
  • They 🌻 work on mobile 🌻 now.
  • Should look mostly the same, with very minor differences.
• The "more options" reply form.
  • Similar functionality as before, but it now resembles the quick-reply.
• The icon browser (for paid users).
  • It's new and improved. This is an update to the rewritten icon browser that was previously available on the beta new entry page.
  • Does the same stuff as the previous icon browser, but works better on mobile and makes better use of available screen space.
• Icons pages. (https://<USER>.dreamwidth.org/icons)
  • Same thing as comment pages: better on mobile, mostly unchanged.

(You can see why the name of the beta was tricky. These things don't SEEM like they should be related at all, but due to Reasons, they are.)

Known Issues or Non-issues

Stuff we're already working to fix:

• (Fix pending) Minor display glitch in Tropo Purple's header at mobile widths.
• (Fix pending) Page-switching links on multi-page entries or icons lists got smushed together a bit.

Stuff that's intentional, so we're not working to fix it:

• On Tropo skins (red and purple), the comment page font size (13.6px) is a little bigger than it used to be (12px).
  • It's still smaller than the widely-agreed best practice on the web (16px), but it'll be a noticeable change for DW users. We hope you can get used to it in time!
• In "more options," the spellcheck checkbox is gone.
  • That spellchecker is outclassed by the built-in spellcheck in most web browsers, so we're gradually sunsetting it.

Stuff we already fixed:

• Extra "Thread" link in each comment's footer.
• The "in-between" reply page you land on if you need to fix a mistake or do a captcha is now in the beta. (https://www.dreamwidth.org/talkpost_do)
• The comment preview page is now in the beta.
• In the "Drifting" journal styles, the "more options" form got pushed down past the end of the sidebar content.
• style=light (and the Lynx site skin) was Wrong with the beta enabled — too many non-browser-default colors and fonts.
• New icon browser cruelly sent your keyboard tab position to Oz when you were done using it, and couldn't really be navigated with the keyboard anyway.
• On Gradation skins, the comment page font size was smaller than it should be.
• The nav/action box on entries could sometimes get too close to large mood theme icons.
• Code blocks (like <pre><code>...</code></pre> as opposed to plain <code> spans) looked bad.
• The username indicator above quick-reply looked weirdly small.
• On site skin pages, you couldn't resize the reply form to be wider than its starting width.

How to Help

Turn on the beta, use it for a while, and let us know what's not ready yet!

• Please read the "known issues" section above before reporting problems.
• Please include your operating system version and your web browser version when reporting something!

What we most want to know is:

• Is anything unusable or broken in your browser, especially in the site-skin comment pages?
• Does the new icon browser break? When and how? What sucks about it?
• Does the rearranged "more options" reply form break? When and how? What sucks about it?
  • (Please try living with this one for a day or three before declaring it wholly bad. I know moving controls around in the reply form is inherently traumatic, but we're trying to get this right for the long term on both mobile and desktop. Thank you for your patience AND for your feedback.)

Many thanks to the users who have already reported issues! 💖

Comments

[roadrunnertwice]

Yeah, I know... 12px is really untenable as a default for the modern web, buuuuut people like what they like. :/

Ideally, I want some customization for the site skins; I'd rather that we have only one "main" skin (leaving aside the oddball tall-side-nav skins) and let the people choose their:

- Main background color
- Main accent color
- Desktop body font size
- Mobile body font size

...but there are some technical limitations that would need to be overcome first.

In the meantime, you can use a "user CSS" browser extension on desktop to bump that font size down. With the current state of the beta, you ought to be able to just do something like

#page .entry, #page #comments, #page .reply-page-wrapper {
  font-size: 12px;
}

...and target it at all of dreamwidth's subdomains.

[jeeps]

Oh, wow, I really appreciate this. Interestingly I had to change the size to 13px to match what it looked like for me before??? idk.

[cameoflage]

Agreed about the site skins and customization thereof, and thank you for the CSS add-on code!