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

[cesy]

Found an oddity: https://www.flickr.com/photos/97098138@N08/49867817542/in/dateposted-public/

On the top nav, my username seems to have wrapped onto a new row on top of the logo? Chrome on Android.

[roadrunnertwice]

You mean where it says "cesy" on the left and "Menu" on the right? That's by design; it predates this, but you might not have noticed it before since fewer pages used the updated site skins. If you tap the name, it brings up a menu of the stuff that goes in the upper right corner at desktop sizes.

But thank you for drawing my attention there, because!! it looks like Tropo Purple has a display glitch behind the username that doesn't affect any of the other site skins.

[cesy]

Right, that display glitch swirl logo was what made me think it was weird or wrong.

[stealthsystem]

Do you happen to need mobile accessibility testers for this stuff? Most of the time, my mobile doesn't look like a bomb went off because screen reader use, but if you still think it'd be useful info even if I can't see any of the visual components, I'm more than happy to turn on the beta and find out, since I'd meant to anyhow.
-Luke

[roadrunnertwice]

Sure thing, thanks! (With the caveat that the icon browser is a little busted at the moment, per above.) The hope is to turn this on for everyone eventually, so might as well give it a test run now.

My hope is that you won't really notice much difference, tbh; the size of the touch targets might be a little more consistent, but that'd be about it. All the semantic markup is unchanged.

[madfilkentist]

When I create a post with JavaScript turned off, there's no way to set the time. This results in a time zone error that makes my posts appear to be posted several hours later than they were.

Dreamwidth has an excellent record of supporting most functions with JavaScript turned off (the big exception being uploading images), and I hope it will stay that way.

[roadrunnertwice]

Beta create entries page? Or classic?

edit: Tried it on the beta page with no JS -- looks like there's a nasty bug where clicking the "picker" buttons just submits your post instantly, so I'll get on that.

But I tried typing in a date and time (in a format that matches the format of the default values it gave me), and that worked just fine.

[stealthsystem]

All right. I will go turn on on the beta and keep you notified!
Luke

[madfilkentist]

Beta. I checked now, and I'm still not seeing any way to enter the date.

Another oddity is that I'm seeing a checkbox for "Flag as an official community post," even though I'm posting to my personal account. I also saw it when I posted to a community earlier, though I'm not a community admin.

[roadrunnertwice]

OH! I see what you mean! OK, it's just that the "display date" _panel_ is missing.

The beta page is split into multiple panels, so people can hide the ones they don't use. Try clicking the "settings" link at the top, and enabling all of the panels you want.

(I wonder if we should default to showing all panels, for users who haven't gone to the beta page before and configured a preference.)

Thank you for pointing these out, by the way -- now that I'm looking closely, when JS is off, those two links at the top end up too close together; ends up looking like it says "create poll settings" rather than "create poll" / "settings". So there's another thing to fix.

----

With the community admin stuff: that's by design, sorry. With JS, we only show those when they're relevant, but without scripting it's impossible. We'd have to completely reload the page in order to hide the controls when they're not relevant, and you wouldn't want that.

[jeeps]

I know you're not working to fix the larger font on the Tropo skins, but I still think it bears mentioning that I turn mobile beta testing on and off every time I switch between mobile and desktop because the huge font on desktop is such an eyesore.

[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.

[thepnutgallery]

Hey all,
not sure if this is one of the beta things or what, but when I go back to Edit my entries, I can't seem to find where to edit the date anymore. Thanks for any help!

Eric

[roadrunnertwice]

Did you turn on the create entries beta too? If so, you need to configure which panels are shown. See previous comment.

[thepnutgallery]

Thank you so much for getting back to me so quickly! Yeah, I was in both betas, but the Edit Entries page was just missing the Date Entry part.

[falkner]

Something minor about the new Create Entries page that's in beta: it still has the "Spell check" button despite it having been removed from comments at this point.

[roadrunnertwice]

Yup yup.

So far, we’ve only been removing spellcheck when it’s getting in the way of something, and that instance hasn’t gotten in my way yet. I’m sure it will eventually tho.

[spaghettimonster]

One thing I've noticed: I don't see an option for disabling auto formatting in beta. I wouldn't want to write out a complicated html page on mobile, but I do sometimes like to do small revisions (adding a line or two). Doing so with beta seems to default to auto formatting, regardless of the page's previous setting, which can end in things getting spread out badly (so many br spacings).

[roadrunnertwice]

Checkbox is still there in the more options comment form, so you must be talking about the create entries beta instead of the updated misc beta.

Yeah, the new entry form doesn’t have that right now. I’ve been working on evolving that whole feature, and my work just got merged. So next code push, there’ll be a dropdown for choosing your text format, in entries and comments both.

In the meantime, use the <raw-code> tag to disable autoformatting in part of a post. If you're stuck on mobile and need to edit a "no-autoformat" entry, I guess the thing to do is just put the raw-code tag on either end of the whole entry.

[cameoflage]

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

[gardenerofavalon]

Really odd random bug: in the new update, ALL username links turned to to the "visited" link color for me. Other links were unaffected and displayed normally.

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.

Color changes on Comments in Celerity Site Skin

[archangelbeth]

(Reposting my (screened) comment from the other post:)

Normally, I have a sort of beige-yellow sidebar, with darker or lighter beige-yellow for the "comment headers" -- this is Celerity Site Skin, I believe? (https://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display)

The changes make the Commenter headers (where the icon, username, and date posted are) gray and darker gray. It's... kind of clashy with the sidebar, and it's harder to read the Yellow-beige user-names on the dark-gray header. (And moderately upsetting in the "You have moved my cheese" way. If there is a programming reason for the color of the cheese to have changed from beige-yellow to gray, then okay, but if you can make the cheese match the Celerity Site Skin colors again, I would be very happy.)

Apologies if there are already a bunch of "AUGH, MY CHEESE IS THE WRONG COLOR" comments. I wish there was a way to Search This Entry's Comments that was, I dunno, near the number of comments or something. O;>

[laconism]

the new update has broken the formatting for a character stats code that i use for this roleplaying journal. for some reason, the tables have an alternating white and gray background when they're supposed to be transparent (defining a background color only changes the white part) and the borders and margins are all messed up too. however, when i view the entry in preview mode everything looks the way it's supposed to.

here is an example of how it's supposed to look and here is how it looks in the new update. the journal entry itself is here and the full code is here if that helps at all too. i use google chrome and the issue persists on my iphone as well.

i've temporarily reverted the updated components to fix the issue for now, but thought i'd drop this here in case there's any way this can be fixed within the confines of the new update.

New codepush pages

[random_xtras]

Hi, the new site skin pages, with the bigger, darker writing, gives me eyestrain. I have turned them off, but Jen said to let you know about this. I use DW a lot, and have one paid account and several free ones, one of which I use daily. I also read on DW a lot because I like to read my own bad fanfiction. Could there be some way to make the pages look the old way, even after the beta testing's over? Please?