Already rolling!
Welcome, Cranky Users! I know you're out there! Well, some of you are over at the
newly-opened DK5 beta site, and others of you are at the Help Desk.
I myself will be in and out of this diary during the evening, but it seemed to me as though the time had come again to start posting these as open threads every few days. If you'd all rather harass elfling, that is fine (perhaps not with elfling), but from time to time, people like to gather and commiserate. Sometimes this even results in one person getting a question answered by another who's figured it out already, or been told.
Here is the DK5 beta-testing site, now open to all kossacks.
Here is the diary announcing the beta release.
Here are the specific Help Desk pages for DK5:
More below the now-beloved-but-departing orange squiggle.
So, if you have not taken a look yet, please take a deep breath and do not panic. Maybe you were not here then or don't remember, but when DK4 was released, several years ago, we were almost all horrified by it. Some people actually did walk away and not come back, but most of us eventually made peace with it. And it did improve, once it had been in use for a while and it became more obvious what worked and what didn't. Now, it's what we're used to and DK5... is not.
Here's the deal: Markos is primarily interested in luring in new people. Tons of new people, who will thereby become more politically aware and thus more politically active. It's not that he doesn't love us -- it's just that he already has our votes, already has our activism, in whatever form it might take. He wants to make the site easy and appealing to new people, especially younger ones. It's fine for us to argue for what we think we need to use the site ourselves, but it's also true that recruiting lots of new lefty activists wouldn't be a bad idea. (Naturally, we all think we know better what would attract more users, but in the end, landlord gets to pick the paint color.)
So! The biggest change over at the beta site is to the editor for diaries (now called stories!) and comments. If you have been listening to me for the last not quite five years, I am afraid I'll have to ask you to forget everything I've said, because html, that thing where you type "tags" in pointy brackets, is out of the picture. Oh, it's under there somewhere, but it is completely invisible to you. The editor looks much more like what you'd use in Gmail, or in Microsoft Word. You type text, and then there are buttons, sort of like the buttons you see in the editor now except when you click them, they don't insert <tags>, they just make the text you highlight look like that. Highlight text, click bold, your text is now bold. Or italics, strikethrough, underlined, centered, blockquoted, and so on.
The loudest complaints are because, if there is NOT a button, you can't do that. The way an editor like this can work is that it just doesn't deal with a lot of complications -- there is a very limited list of things it knows how to do, and it ignores everything else. Science writers have already sounded off about no subscripts/superscripts, and that is likely to be addressed. But there is a lot of aesthetic stuff that we're accustomed to doing here that is just not available any more. Colored boxes, different text styles, extreme size changes, coded "html entities" like ♥ ♥.
One complaint we've often seen so far is that you can't resize pictures by adjusting the "width" attribute. You can still use pictures from outside hosts like Flickr or Photobucket, but as soon as you paste the embed code for them, it magically turns into the picture itself. And it wouldn't matter if you did see the code -- if you were to paste your code into some interim place and change the width, tough noogies, because the editor is ignoring the width and just displaying the picture at its native size. Your only control over this is to create a lower-resolution version that displays at a smaller size of its own free will. (Flickr does this for you, for instance.)
I have had very limited time to mess with the beta up to now. There's a lot there to consider. I'm sure you all have comments, good and bad, so I will stop whining now and turn the floor over to you. What do you love or hate about DK5? What's your question? Can you answer one posed by someone else?
As always, we are Cranky but not mean. Please. xoxo