The development team is continuing to monitor issues as they come up and to apply fixes for problems. We have a Top Ten Most Annoying list that we are turning over every 36 hours or so, fixing what's there and promoting new issues to Most Annoying. Kind of like a Bug Rescue. Continuing my practice from the beta period, I will diary the latest changes we've made so that you can let us know if these issues still have, well, issues. In addition, this is a great place to leave any new candidates for Top Ten Most Annoying.
It is our expectation that we'll be sending up little changes every day for a while. Some of the changes are bugs, and we will also be making changes that better adapt the site to the way people are using it.
We've sent up some changes during the last two days that were not announced, so this list includes all those.
Issues we've marked as solved
- On launch, group invitees and members without PM permissions were getting alerts to messages that they could not read. This is fixed. Those alerts will now only go to people with permission to read them.
- The issue with Publish Now from the group queue on a republished diary giving an unauthorized error should be fixed, assuming you have Editor or Admin perms for that group.
- Group profile page now has a functional followers list.
- Problems with autoformat creating extra lines and other unexpected behavior should be addressed. This is a challenging area to get right with all the human possibilities, so let us know what else is still not floating your boat. The good news, for those who haven't noticed, is that the DK4 allowed diary formatting is much more extensive in terms of allowing css and other controls. We're using a more sophisticated filter that allows more innocuous but useful html to come through, while still forbidding forms of input that can be used for malicious intent.
Other Changes
- You probably noticed that the body font on diaries changed, and that the headline text got slightly smaller.
- The Feature Box rotation has been slowed so that it changes to a new pane every 25 seconds instead of every 9. BTW, if you want to stop the pane from rotating to the next one, put your mouse over it, and it will stay on that item.
- RSS links have been scattered in the appropriate footers for the home page, the Diaries page, the tag pages, the user diary pages, and the group blog pages.
Search
- Tag, User, and Group searches have been working since launch. Use the "Search" box at the upper right corner of every page, and then use the italic headers to switch to the one you want.
- Diary search works on all elements except where they restrict to front page, rescued, or recommended diaries. You can, though, search all diaries by date, by keyword in title or text, by author, and by tag accurately.
- Comment search is working except for restricting a search to a comment title. But, you can search a keyword, author, date range, and on recommended, hidden, or hide-rated.
- The search changes have needed to be iterative, because the data on the development and live servers were not in sync. Another round of fixes are staged for tonight. The changes remaining are small, but we're excited about the additional functionality we've gained in the search overall.
Finally
Obviously our top priority is monitoring stability and server response, and we are working at that as well as the various UI tweaks and fixes. We are monitoring this closely and the issues are getting fewer and less annoying every day. Let me know how we're doing. For now, you'll get my attention most effectively if you (a) restrict requests to things that are Highly Annoying instead of Merely Annoying or wish lists and (b) if you're clear in describing the issue and how to reproduce it. It can also help if (c) you are clear about what task it is it prevents you from doing and/or what workaround you have to do to deal with it, if it is not immediately obvious. Prioritize your needs and we'll address them as quickly as we can in between the occasional sleeping and eating.
I promise that once the Top Ten List stops accumulating obviously annoying issues and bugs, that we'll open up the questions to wish lists and more general suggestions.
Thanks everyone for your patience and your helpful suggestions.Updated by elfling at Wed Feb 16, 2011, 08:22:34 PM
A fresh set of changes up:
- Search against front page diaries is working
- video embed fixes
- Facebook "recommend" is now "like"
- Autorefresh is back, but turned off by default
- People without javascript should find it easier to log in