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]

That appears to be sort of by design,* but I'm interested in hearing more about what people want the vertical nav skins to act like.

The vertical nav creates a strong anchor to the left side of viewport, and that has implications for the whole rest of the page. There's a few ways that can shake out:

|n ccccccccccccc|

— No max content width, whole page fills the WHOLE viewport. That's what the old gradation-vertical did, but it's generally considered hostile to people with reading or vision disorders, so the policy is to try and not do that.

|n ccccc        |

— Limit content width, anchor content and sidebar to the left. That's what the new gradation-vertical does. Results in a wonky empty space to the right, sigh.

|n     ccccc    |

— Limit content width, anchor sidebar to left but center the content. That looks more balanced, but it's less usable because the nav is half a mile away from the content.

|    n ccccc    |

— Limit content width, center the nav and content together. Looks more balanced, but it's less usable because the nav isn't on the left anymore, it's in the leftish-off-center.

IDK. Which one would you expect? (Personally I hate them all, which is why I don't use gradation-vertical.)

---

* This is one of those choices that predates the updated comment pages by years, but hasn't been widely noticed because the really important pages weren't using the new site skins yet.

[razorblade_empress]

Fortunately on this account that's easily fixed, and I'm trying the other dark skin for the time being.

As for the potential solutions, I can see your point that none of them are ideal. I'm not sure which I would go with, honestly (I realize I am no help here). Is Celerity also vertically oriented, then? I've got a couple of other rp accounts where I use it, mostly because the Tropospherical skins are hard for me to use due to the small type and everything being scrunched in the middle.

[razorblade_empress]

Actually (and horribly belatedly), is there a way to tinker with the Tropospherical skins so they're more usable? I've avoided them in large part because I get distractingly huge white margins on either side and the text between them is small enough that everything in combination makes them unusable to me. Is there something that can be done on my end to make them not do that?

(As far as the vertical nav skins, on thinking about it the current setup is probably the best of a bad lot.)