Code Tour 8th January - 1st March, part 2

[cxcvi]

72 bugs, in a two-part code tour. Part 1 was done by katieastrophe. This is part 2.


Bug 4773: Strip credentials from feed URLs before creating feeds.
Category: Feeds
Patch by: fu
Description: It was possible to create a feed with the password displayed for all to see in the URL. Now, we strip the sensitive information, and then notify the user.

Bug 4851: HEAD requests redirect to https versions of the page
Category: Routing/TT
Patch by: fu
Description: Because of a missing pair of parentheses, the code was redirecting to the https versions of pages more often than it was intended to. They have now been added to change the redirect logic to what it should be.

Bug 4740: Bases - color tweaks
Category: Style System
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Two unrelated background colour tweaks were necessary in Bases; one because of the quick reply box, the other to make screened comments more obvious.

Bug 4847: Change FF.net and Etsy favicons from .ico to .png
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: swaldman
Description: The favicon that Dreamwidth was using for FanFiction.net was not displaying in some browsers. It has been changed to use a .png version instead. It was intended to make this change for Etsy as well, but that was left unchanged as Etsy does not provide a .png version.

Bug 4830: Site map: betafeatures
Category: Frontend
Patch by: fu
Description: Although the beta features do get mentioned every so often (mostly in the news posts), as there was no link to the page from the site pages, it was hard to find for some people. There is now a link to http://www.dreamwidth.org/beta (note the new URL; the old one still works as well) in the Organize menu on site pages.

While writing this, I was slightly confused as to why there isn't a link in the site map as well. After pointing this out, it will be after the next code push.

Bug 4753: IE8 + S2 comment page beta + logged in user = icons do not display on comments
Category: Browser Issues
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: A rather narrow combination of factors was preventing user icons from showing up in comments for some people using the S2 comment page beta. While IE8 isn't officially supported, adding a fallback did not require a major change.

Bug 4854: Error: claimed_by undefined in importer
Category: Importer
Patch by: fu
Description: Among other things (that azurelunatic described as "more backend shenanigans"), issues were discovered when importing comments and trying to find an OpenID account, that can result in a comment incorrectly being attributed anonymously. So now we abort trying to import if this is about to happen. If this prevents you from being able to import, please file a support request.

Bug 4852: Video embedding: request to allow Kickstarter.com
Category: Journal contents
Suggested by: tryslora
Patch by: fu
Description: By request, you can now display the video at the top of a Kickstarter campaign in your journal.

Bug 105: make ?style=mine non-case-sensitive
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: sophie and fu
Description: Sometimes, websites can be picky about capital letters appearing in URLs. This case was taken care of in two parts. Firstly, sophie made the "=mine" part work, and then 4 years later, fu made the "?style" part and all other keys (the part before the "=") accept capital letters.

While writing this, it was noticed that other values for "style" don't work with capital letters in them, notably "site" and "light". Bug 4989 has been filed, and may appear in a future code tour...

Bug 4645: t/captcha-textcaptcha.t failing on single answers
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: fu
Description: The backend test for textCAPTCHA was failing after the code processing the CAPTCHA was changed. This patch updates the test to match the rest of the code.

Bug 4858: Quick reply sometimes disappears after expanding thread
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: fu
Description: A problem with expanding comments was causing the quick reply object to be clobbered at times, forcing the user to reload the page if this happens. Fixing the expand issue removed the problem, as well as making comment expansion more efficient.

Bug 4862: Account creation doesn't work in current develop branch
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: fu
Description: When you fill out a form on a web page, the website uses a method called POST to find out what you typed in. For a short while, the code was converting the POST data to lower case, which was breaking most of the forms on Dreamwidth (the account creation form was where this was first noticed). Fortunately, this was spotted before the code was pushed to the live site.

Bug 4870: Updated FAQ 86 with info about duplicates
Category: User documentation
Patch by: misskat
Description: There are a few known circumstances where the importer can import some or all of your entries twice. This FAQ update advises you on what to do if this happens to you.

Bug 4860: textcaptcha not always reliable
Category: Unknown
Patch by: fu
Description: Dreamwidth uses a service called textCAPTCHA for its accessible CAPTCHAs. Unfortunately, we seem to be using this service rather a lot at peak times, which means that when a page on Dreamwidth needs one, it has to wait for one to be available, which adds a small (but eventually noticeable) delay before the page can be loaded fully. This patch lets Dreamwidth fetch some when the site is less busy, and use them to make pages that require a CAPTCHA load quicker.

Bug 4869: Strata: options for header and entry background images don't work
Category: Style System
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Some of the background images in Strata weren't displaying correctly, because the images were being set in the wrong place, and were being overridden at a later point. The relevant parts of the style have been moved to the correct places.

Bug 4861: Deleted crossposter account breaks things
Category: Crossposter
Patch by: fu
Description: Previously, when you removed your details from the crossposter, you lost the ability to control any posts that had been sent elsewhere. While this patch doesn't allow you to control crossposted entries that have previously had their settings deleted, it holds onto enough relevant information, so that if you delete your crossposting settings in the future, Dreamwidth will still know what posts were made.

Bug 4859: Administrator status emails use "maintainer"
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: Previously, e-mails sent by Dreamwidth about your newly-found status (or lack thereof) as an administrator of a community referred to the responsibility as "maintainer". Now these e-mails will refer to the role as "administrator" instead.

Bug 4822: Remove extra padding in inline lists (Tags in Entries and Keywords on Icons Page)
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: It was noticed that some styles have extra padding in inline lists (the Tags list in entries and the Keywords list on the icons page, amongst others). This extra padding has been removed from the following styles: Basic Boxes, Boxes and Borders, Brittle, ColorSide, Drifting, Line Up, Modish, Stepping Stones, and Tabula Rasa.

Bug 4782: Layout styling for contextual hover menu may need looking at
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: The contextual hover menu that appears when hovering over a user icon or a userhead was changed, which affected a number of styles and themes that modify the way that it appears. These have now all been made consistent.

Bug 4874: Strata: 'keywords' label isn't bold on Icons page
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: And now it is. Not sure how much more I can say about this.

Bug 4840: Librarian's Dream: header overlaps nav strip
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: The overlap was caused by a negative margin that was included to offset some padding that was added because Firefox does something interesting if the padding isn't there. It was decided that the padding existing is worth keeping in the name of browsers being sensible, so the negative margin was removed.

Bug 4813: View import history tool for support admins
Category: Site Administration
Patch by: fu
Description: Somewhat related to Bug 4870, this change adds a tool that allows the support admins to work out what the best course of action is when importing creates duplicate entries, as well as the necessary code to ensure that only support admins have access to this tool.

Bug 4876: Importer continues firing failure notifications after import is completed.
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Patch by: fu
Description: The importer was treating an inability to create a log of the import job as an error that wasn't important enough to stop for, which resulted in the job happening but no log being created of the job, and then when the job was completed, the user would get a notification along the lines of "Error: Success!". Log creation fail will now stop the import attempt.

The other part of the problem was that due to a filesystem limitation, no further logs could be created. mark took care of this by removing some of the older logs.

Bug 4873: Replace 'maintainer' with 'administrator'
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: Bug 4859, part 2. The remaining uses of the word "maintainer" have been chased down and told to make the relevant users feel more important.

Bug 4875: Can't locate object method "FIRSTKEY" via package "BML::ML"
Category: Modernization
Patch by: fu
Description: Aaaah, our old friend BML. This time, it was holding onto text strings long after they were relevant, resulting in it running out of space. So now we clear it after we're done every time we use it.

Bug 4871: propedit gives sphinx error
Category: Search
Patch by: mark and alierak
Description: When search was updated a while ago, some of the database tables were moved around. Most of the code was updated to the new table locations, but a couple of spots were missed. These patches catch the parts that were missed before.

Bug 4855: InsaneJournal imports don't work correctly when there's a DOOO entry
Category: Importer
Patch by: fu
Description: So, before the ability to make a particular entry sticky, some users would give a particular entry a far in the future date to make it always appear at the top (some users still do this, partcularly if they want more than one entry to always be at the top). These DOOO (date out of order) entries were causing import issues. So now we check for the existence of DOOO entries, and don't use them to detect the range of entries that need to be imported.

Bug 3523: jQuerify journals
Category: Style System
Patch by: Various people
Description: This was the meta-bug that was about converting the code for displaying journals (a custom library that Six Apart had created) into jQuery, with the intent of being more maintainable and easier to work with. All of the major things blocking this have been dealt with for a while, and using jQuery has been available as an opt-in for a while now. This patch by fu turns the opt-in switch into an opt-out switch, in case any problems arise.

Bug 4880: jbackup.pl should point to dreamwidth.org, not livejournal.com
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: foxfirefey
Description: One of the code files was not updated with the new site address when we copied the code over from LJ. This updates that file to point to our servers, now.

Bug 2687: Update JSON library
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: fu
Description: Dreamwidth has been using a rather old version of JSON for some time. Switching to a more modern version required re-writing all of the function calls, which this patch takes care of.

Bug 4879: Clicking to profile when contextual menu is still loading gives error message (jquery beta)
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: fu
Description: Clicking to a user's profile before the contextual hover menu (the same one as mentioned earlier) had loaded was resulting in a confusing error that was not relevant to the page that you were trying to move to. So now we check for this occurence and suppress the error message.

Bug 4647: t/use-strict.t failing: no more cvsreport.pl
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: fu
Description: One of the backend testing scripts that checks parts of the code to make sure that they are syntactically correct was failing because the list of files for it to check was missing; a file was removed as part of the switch to git. So now the list of files to check is grabbed directly from git.

Bug 4878: Importer returns "Client error: Subject too long" when username in subject line
Category: Importer
and
Bug 4882: long subject lines blocking feed entries from being posted?
Category: Feeds
Patch by: fu
Description: Dreamwidth has a limit (100 characters or 255 bytes, whichever is smaller) for the length of subject lines. When posting a new entry, it will warn you that the subject is too long. However, when dealing with entries on other sites (either by importing them or displaying them in a feed), it's possible that this limit may be exceeded. Now, instead of reporting an error when a long subject line is encountered this way, it truncates the subject line instead of failing.

Bug 4881: Core1: move userpic_listing_url from User to UserLite
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: Core1 (which we are still encouraging you not to use) has two objects that pertain to users, one of which can act like the other (but not the other way around). A variable was specified in one but not the other, and after much consideration, the line specifying it was moved to the correct place.

Bug 4895: jquery beta + talkread + free user = delete not working
Category: Modernization
Patch by: fu
Description: A necessary component of the jQuery system was not being read in certain code paths, resulting in some rather obscure errors and breaks. This patch makes the component be included in the rest of the files that need it.


I believe that all of these fixes are now live, having been included in the recent code push.

Until next time, when... oh dear. INCOMING!!!

Comments

[cesy]

Ooh, bug 105 is useful - one of those little tweaks that just makes things easier. 4861 is also neat.

4855 also makes me happy, because it makes it easier for more people to move over from IJ.

Also hooray for jQuery switchover! \o/ JSON update is also good. There's so much going on :)

[denise]

we have had a very busy two months or so!