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

[amorality]

The new layout causes me quite a bit of eye strain, so I have turned it back to the old one. It makes reading on old devices (I have an old laptop) very difficult. I have rolled the update back for now, but I would appreciate if you allowed "classic" mode to remain for the foreseeable future. In addition to all its other problems, one of the things that caused roleplayers to migrate en masse was the updates that LJ refused to rollback that gave users migraines. I have chronic migraines, and seeing these concerns be screened and essentially dismissed is incredibly disheartening.

Please listen to your users. It costs nothing but a bruised ego to allow us to decide on our own if we want to keep these changes or not. If I might make a suggestion, I think handling it like reddit did would be nice. They listened to their users and implemented old.reddit.com to allow people to CHOOSE how to browse their site.

[alexseanchai]

The problem as I understand it is that the cost of keeping the old version is the ability to add a bunch of features that people have been asking for for years.

The secondary problems as I understand them are, one, the set of "people whom these changes hurt" and the set of "people who helped beta-test these changes" did not overlap. (One of the less vicious of the angry comments on the dw_maintenance post demands to know why the changes weren't beta-tested first; I've been beta-testing them since May.) It is difficult to listen to any particular subset of Dreamwidth users—for example, people who get eyestrain or headaches or other such issues from the just-implemented changes—if none of them say anything. Relatedly, if you are able to identify specific ways the format could be changed to reduce your eyestrain and avoid setting off or worsening your migraines, the Dreamwidth coders and the coders of custom site styles would love to hear from you.

And two, when a hundred people descend on the Dreamwidth coders in full vengeful Furies mode, complete with talons, both current and potential future Dreamwidth coders get discouraged. As you would do and may have done upon a hundred furious messages about major problems with something you worked hard on for years, that you thought you'd fixed all the problems with because you'd fixed all the problems you found yourself or were told about. If the intent is for Dreamwidth to do better in future, instead of for Dreamwidth to do nothing in future, it is counterproductive both for users to do this and for coders to listen.

Seriously, if you have thoughts on how to alter the new version to keep it from hurting you, please share.

[amorality]

I'm not sure I understand how keeping a separate "old version" site prevents new features from being rolled out.

I plan on going through the site changes as best I can after I get my next round of botox in a few weeks, but until then, using the site with the changes causes me physical pain. In the meantime, knowing that the suggestions of the migraine community will be taken seriously and not screened and brushed aside like we were back on LJ would be very much appreciated.

[denise]

I apologize for the delay in responding to your specific concern. It has been less than 18 hours since the code push. Please believe that when we say that we are working on the problems, we are working on the problems. If you want to trade physical pain stories, I am currently entirely missing one lumbar disc and have two others severely degraded in my spine, sitting up for more than 20 minutes at a time or for over two hours a day is agony and I'm approximately 12 hours overdrawn on that sitting-up time right now, I'm unable to get it anything surgically repaired until this pandemic is over, I've been awake for about 36 hours, and I haven't been able to get half my meds refilled properly in months. I am extremely sympathetic to the issues that people are having. Please extend some of that sympathy in return.

[amorality]

None of this was meant as an attack on you guys. I was explaining why I used the rollback as was requested on the beta page where doing so is possible, but I can see that you're currently feeling sensitive due to the number of complaints. I didn't come here to argue with anyone, I was just leaving the requested feedback. I understand that you're under a lot of stress right now, so please get some rest and don't feel obligated to respond to me for the moment. I will try to have more useful feedback at a later date.

[denise]

Yeah, I apologize for being snappish. I've had 400 people screaming epithets at me nonstop for 18 hours and calling me a moron, it makes me a little touchy.

[bemused_writer]

I just want to say "ditto." The main reason keeping two versions of any site is difficult is because it's frankly expensive and, in Dreamwidth's case, the original site is suffering from being outdated code-wise and will only continue to be so as things continue on. So, something has to change somewhere. Large Web sites can pull it off multiple versions (sometimes) because they have a much larger income/ad revenue. Dreamwidth isn't a giant like Tumblr or Reddit, or other sites of that nature.

And yes, the sheer fury people are responding with isn't helping. There was plenty of time to beta test this for everyone and coming in now with this much fury is just disheartening and only makes it more difficult to get to the difficulties the user is having.

[of_sablier]

Hi! I also suffer from chronic migraines and I too have been having some major issues with the new design. For me it primarily boils down to the spacing-- there is way too much space between words and that makes my eyes struggle to focus properly on the text. I should note that I have 20/20 vision (just had an eye exam about six months back) so it's not an issue with my vision, it's something about the way the words are spaced out that makes it very hard for me to parse and causes eyestrain, which then causes headaches.

The font size itself is not a problem for me, as I can spend hours reading things on AO3, which uses a similar font size. In my case it's very specifically the spacing that is causing me problems, but I can't speak for anyone else.