Greetings, Cranky Users! I don't know when I've had a more interesting week without leaving home! Today we have some information about things that are reportedly fixed, and some ideas about where you can ask questions and find more information. Let's paddle past the big squiggle and get going!
First of all, if you want straight-from-the-horse's-mouth information about bug fixes and enhancements, you should probably be following both elfling and the beta-testing group KosBusters. Elfling's helpful diary yesterday gave us the news that auto-refresh is back on! Note that auto-refresh is not yet certified free of problems, but is being enabled by huge popular demand. Also: it was turned off in everyone's profile, so if you have not done so (and you want it on), you must edit your profile and turn it on. Holler if you don't know how to do that!
Yesterday, you may have found yourself logged out of Daily Kos, possibly in the middle of something, like diary editing, where that would be bad ::raises hand::. The good news here is, this was the result of a deliberate reset by developers that they do not anticipate will need to be repeated. So it wasn't anything you did, nor is it a bug.
There was some discussion in elfling's thread about Facebook and Twitter. Oh, wait -- let's start by saying that the confusing blue Facebook "recommend" button at the top of a diary has been changed today so it says "like", hopefully to make it clear that's not the DKos recommend button. So anyway, some users who were logged into Facebook while using Daily Kos were alarmed by seeing a link to Facebook, with their photo and real name on it, pop up next to a diary they were reading. They were concerned that others could also see this. We learned in the discussion that no one else can see it. It appears only to the user him/herself, only when logged on to Facebook, and is intended to make it convenient to share a story you may like. Much more information about Facebook and Twitter and their relationship to DK4 can be found in Will Rockafellow's diary on that subject.
(Update: per this comment below, it appears that the claim that no one but you can see your Facebook identity connected with your Daily Kos identity may be inaccurate. Apparently if your Facebook friend who is also on Daily Kos shares a DK diary on Facebook, you will be notified of this by the person's name on Facebook. An issue with this might be, someone may not wish to disclose their presence on DK to their friends who might happen also to be on Daily Kos. I am no authority on this and will listen with interest for a resolution. I apologize for passing along misleading information.)
We learned also that some improvements we've wanted are coming. My favorite is, your My Recent Replies list, the best tool we have here for following replies to our comments in various diaries, is soon to be sorted by the date/time OF THE REPLY, instead of the date/time of your original comment as it is now, so you'll no longer have to hunt down the list to see if someone answered a relatively old comment.
We also learned that group features like blogroll, tags, and following are confirmed not operational yet, and in fact, kos had intended them to be hidden before DK4 went live, but this got overlooked. They will be coming, but not until more urgent bugs have been taken care of.
While we're on the topic of groups, it was confirmed beyond a doubt in the same thread that being a member or editor of a group does not cause the group's output to show up in your stream. The view of kos and the developers is that, if you're part of the group's management, you would be going to the group's page regularly and would not want that stuff cluttering up your stream, so they have deliberately made being a member NOT stream the group's content. If your view is different and you want to stream the output of a group you belong to, you MUST also follow it.
If you would like to un-follow a person, group, or tag, you can go to the Following tab on your My Page. You'll see a second row of tabs listing People, Groups, and Tags, and you should be able to click the REMOVE button for them. Caution: you'll need to refresh the page to see the change. If the remove just isn't working, you can always use the link on the list to go to the entity's page and un-click the little heart (this doesn't work for tags, as they have no page) (yes it does; Clem Yeobright is right and I am mistaken).
This is distinct from un-joining a group, which you need to do from your My Groups tab. Your groups are listed there in much the same way, except the big X-ey button at the right is for leaving.
I have but two more items for today. One is, if you're using Search to look for a string of more than one word, and you're getting nothing, try removing the spaces between the words. Some search categories choke on spaces; others demand spaces. Rather than try to remember which is which, try the other if one doesn't work!
And last, if you're annoyed because some links here occur only at the top of the page, not the bottom, be aware that CTRL-HOME takes you to the top of the page. Yes, it's a workaround, but it's something. (Laptops/netbooks may have HOME hidden away on another key -- mine is CTRL-Fn-left arrow).
That's it, kids. Go forth and write your comments, share your answers, and be excellent to each other. I'll be around until about 5:30 ET, then out for a few hours.