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

[trueaussiedoc]

I've just turned on the beta testing for the journal page components and it told us to jump over here to report any bugs as to the reason for reverting. I apologise in advance is this sounds stupid (it will) because I have no technical skill whatsoever beyond simple user-friendliness, which is one of the reasons why I use Dreamwidth. I've been using DW for years now, having come over from LJ when they pulled all their crap years back. When I came over, I was recommended a user-developed site skin to allow the pages to have similar colouring and spacing as the old LJ (screenshots here), as it was extremely beneficial to me, someone with chronic illness and sensory processing issues. The white and blue with the text spread across the page just seemed easier to utilise without stirring up sensory issues for me. I've been using it without issue since 2012.

The latest code push seems to have removed the Stylish extension's ability to convert the comments pages to this adjusted layout and was sticking with the light grey/purple and the comments condensed to the middle of the page with large amounts of 'white' space padding of the default style and it was difficult for me visually. My problem is, I have no idea what "bug" to report here or what part of the extension's CSS code was affected to prevent it working. There were no problems when I switched on the beta testing.

I understand changes are inevitable with technological advancements but would really appreciate an option that allows extensions adapting layouts for usability for people like me with medical issues to still be able to use the tools that help their frequent use of DW continue without problems. It's impossible to address everyone's needs but I know those of us with medical visual issues would much appreciate if their usuability could be taken into account when any permanent changes to layout are considered. I didn't realise beta testing for this came out in May but I have now tracked this comm to be alerted of any upcoming changes.

PS. If anyone has any idea what part of this extension's code would've been affected and knows a work-around to keep the site skin adaptations working on the beta version, I'd much appreciate the help!

[denise]

Unfortunately, it's not technically possible for us to prevent third-party skins, extensions, and userscript layouts from breaking occasionally -- like, not "it's something we could do with enough effort but we don't have the capacity to make the effort", literally "computers don't work like that". (It's because we don't control the skins/extensions/add-ons/userscripts/layouts/etc, and therefore any change that we make to the site for any reason has the risk of breaking them, depending on things like how the author created them, how much they thought to future-proof them, and whether they're targeting specific code blocks that we've had to change.) If you know who made the skin, you can point them at dw_dev so that they can be aware of upcoming changes and adjust the CSS of the skin accordingly, and if they're ever stuck on what needs to change, they can ask us.

In this case, I suspect that the problems you're having will improve when we fix the other issues with spacing and padding that were covered in last night's dw_maintenance post, though, because at a quick glance it looks like that skin is primarily just changing the colors.