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roadrunnertwice) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_beta2020-05-06 11:02 pm
The "Updated Miscellany" beta
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! 💖
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An example of what it looks like with the latest update here
How it looks when I turn on the beta for reverting it to the older version here
As you can see, the link for a comment I've clicked on to view vs all the others is correctly colored in both, but while the old version only has one username showing up as visited, in the new one they're both the same color.
It's obviously not a HUGE site-breaking issue, but it's an oddity and a little confusing, especially when I'm scrolling through a very large post looking for comments by specific people. I'm using Tropo Red on Waterfox, no idea if it shows up in other skins/browsers, it's getting late and I'm too tired to test it right now.
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That's a good catch. I'm looking now, and weirdly, it's a third color that's not QUITE the visited or un-visited link color. And it was done on purpose, so I should dig through the strata and see if I can figure out who did that and why.
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(Also, sorry, wrong phone browser, wrong account!)
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EDIT: After thinking about this some more, is there any possibility of having it be a sort of middle ground, where the colors are distinguishable but not so different as to be distracting? Though either way, I admit I'm a little confused by the notion of using the color of a username link as a means to determine whether a journal's been updated since the last visit or not.
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To be honest something I'd love to see, if there's any feasible way to make it possible, would be a lot more user-controlled options for site customization beyond the preset skins without having to delve into CSS and custom styles and such. I use tropo red and have since the start after test driving all the options, but while tolerable it's never been ideal on a number of fronts, so being able to control things like link/header colors under the user panel would be absolutely amazing. I know that's FAR easier said than done, but I know for me at least something like that's typically plenty to keep me perfectly happy!
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remembering when I redid some of my custom infobox codes to be html5 compatible still makes me winceno subject
Same answer as![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise but with a bit more detail: the CSS
var()function in modern browsers makes this very feasible, IF you're building something fresh. I envision showing like three options by default (light/dark mode, big/small text, and an accent color of your choice), and then an optional advanced mode where you can tweak ten to twenty values to meet special needs.However, the SCSS framework used for the current site skins basically takes a smallish number of input colors and then "bakes" a bunch of derived colors based on those, and that's impossible to combine with display-time variable resolution in a reasonable way. (Plus it does some shit with text sizing that I'm not going to get into.)
So we'd need to build a fresh skin without doing all that. And a prerequisite for that is finishing the WIP transition to the "new" site skins.
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