Code tour: 5th - 22nd November

[cesy]

This is my first code tour in quite a while. kaberett's contributor weekend got me back into things, as well as featuring amazing macaroni cheese. Hooray for several new and/or returning people! \o/ (Warning: British spelling ahead.)

Issue 1046: (Bug 1046) Converts Popular FAQs Page to TT and Foundation (pull request)
Category: TT conversion
Patch by: hotlevel4
Description: In the olden days, everything was in Brad's Markup Language (BML), because LiveJournal was written in Brad's dorm room. These days we want to use Template Toolkit, which is much better and more modern. This changes the Popular FAQs page to the new standard. As a user, you shouldn't notice anything.

Issue 1306: add quickerreply to other views (lastn, day, etc) (pull request)
Category: Expanded feature
Patch by: sgsabbage
Description: A while ago, we added a fancy new quicker-reply so that you could reply to posts from your reading page without going to a new page and losing your place, if you have JavaScript enabled. This adds that option in several other relevant places where you might be looking at a list of entries and want to reply to one of them. There was an entertaining conversation in the room about the difference between quick reply and quicker reply. Apparently there are two versions of the reply form, the standard one and the quick one. "Quicker" reply means seeing the quick one pop up all AJAX-y and stylish, but it's the same code behind the scenes.

Issue 1333: tracking dialog does not fit on screen in Firefox 33.0 for Android (pull request)
Category: Mobile views bug
Patch by: chrisboyle
Description: When you click on the little bell to track something, you get a pop-up asking if you want to track the whole account or just that entry. On certain phones, the edge fell off the page. This is now fixed to work for more people. And welcome Chris!

Issue 1368: add clearer warning when choosing rename redirecting (pull request)
Category: Text clarification
Patch by: kareila
Description: When you rename an account, there are several options for how you want to handle the old username, and redirect things or not. This adds a clearer warning about consequences, depending on how thoroughly you want to hide or reuse the old name.

Issue 1381: Proxy causes system to run out of file descriptors when left running too long (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: zorkian
Description: A weird bug in the proxy caused embedded images not to display occasionally. After analysis from lots of people including Dre and sgsabbage, Mark found a config limit in the proxy that was set too low in production.

Issue 1387: Cut tag warnings displaying incorrectly on Reading page (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: sgsabbage
Description: On a personal entry flagged NSFW, the cut tag warning listed as expected with "(You're about to view content which the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion.)". But a personal entry flagged 18+ had the cut tag warning as "(You're about to view content that a community administrator has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18.)". It was definitely a journal, not a community. Also, a community flagged NSFW had "(You're about to view content which the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion.)" on its cut tag. Basically, they were all flipped around and wrong. They are now flipped back the right way and clarified.

Issue 1465: #1465 privs listed for console commands (pull request)
Category: Text clarification
Patch by: cesy
Description: My first bug in over 3 years, I think. On the Admin Console Reference page, the list of commands now tells you what privilege you need to run that command.

Issue 1529: tag merging is case-sensitive, tags are not (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: hotlevel4
Description: In the Merge Tags page, strange things happened with comparisons to determine whether two tags can be merged into a tag with the same name if the user-supplied new tag name has capital letters (as iOS keyboards tend to capitalize words on the fly, this is easy to do there). For example, I want to merge "beer" and "stout" and supply "Beer" as the new name. The merge facility tells me that this is not allowed as the new tag already exists but is not one of the tags to be merged — evidently the check against the main list is case-insensitive but the one against the merge list isn't. Now it will be case-insensitive everywhere.

Issue 1550: Text consistency across comment submission buttons (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: ljacob
Description: When prepping a comment for posting, everywhere but the Preview page your options are "Post Comment", "Preview", "More Options" (unless you're already looking at More Options, in which case it's still Post Comment). On the Preview page instead of "Post Comment" there's "Submit". This is now corrected to match the others. Kudos to ljacob for joining the contributor weekend virtually from Australia!

Issue 1562: Entry QuickReply textarea too tall at small resolutions and/or large font sizes (pull request)
Category: Accessibility bug
Patch by: sgsabbage
Description: If you have a big font and a small window or mobile device, and you are using the Quick Reply form on a post, the text box can overlap the rows afterwards. This tells the browser the height of the textbox so it saves enough room.

Issue 1564: entry props not having revtime set when entry is edited (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: sgsabbage
Description: Revtime is the date and time an entry was edited ("revision time"), which is one of the things saved in the database and is useful to administrators and support team occasionally. Somehow a bug got introduced which was displaying them all as 1970 (time 0). This is now fixed, so support will have this info visible again, if your entry gets mangled and you ask them for help.

Issue 1571: Cleanup for late August / early September (pull request)
Category: Code cleanup
Patch by: kareila
Description: karzilla fixed lots of warnings and abstracted out some repeated code. Most of these warnings are things that weren't actually causing any bugs, but they're a sign that we did something risky that could trip up an unwary coder in the future. Fixing them and standardising these bits of old code will make it easier for future new features and newbie coders.

Issue 1577: QuickerReply + access-locked post + OpenID = inaccurate error message (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: chrisboyle
Description: OpenID users with unverified email addresses can't comment on entries with anonymous comments disabled. There was a bug in the Quick Reply form that meant all OpenIDs got blocked, even though it worked fine in the main reply form, and the error message also said no OpenIDs could comment. Now OpenIDs with unverified email get told that they need to verify their address (and how) before they comment, and OpenIDs with verified email can comment more quickly.

Issue 1580: Updated wiki location, again (pull request)
Category: Old link
Patch by: azurelunatic
Description: The S2 documentation was pointing at the old wiki location. The wiki got moved, and although the old link redirects okay, that's slower, so now we've updated the link.

Issue 1581: Update CONTRIBUTING.md with current wiki location (pull request)
Category: Old link
Patch by: azurelunatic
Description: Another page (the one telling people how to volunteer) with the same wiki link problem.

Issue 1582: Styles: change credit from ketsu to phidari (pull request)
Category: Old link
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: The style creator changed their username, and requested us to update the credit, so we did.

Issue 1585: Missing link in 'Update security entry' email notif (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: When you use the mass privacy tool, you can get an email notification when your requested changes have been done. The email said: If you want to change the security on more of your entries, you can do so at: There was no link after 'at:'. Just a blank space. Now there is a link.

Issue 1592: Timestamp sticky ticky unset globally if you edit a post (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: chrisboyle
Description: The "use the time this entry was posted" checkbox was turned into a sticky ticky back around June, i.e. the beta Create Entries page remembered whether its last state was checked or unchecked, so you didn't have to tick it every time if you always wanted posts to be stamped with the time of posting. Issue #1480 was opened because that checkbox should not persist as checked when editing entries (otherwise you end up editing entries from six months ago and having them marked as the present).

However, the fix to prevent the checkbox from autofilling when editing entries resulted in the following situation: You create a new entry, and check the "use time at posting". If you create another new entry, the "use time at posting" box is checked. Then edit an entry; "use time at posting" is unchecked. Create a new entry; "use time at posting" is unchecked. That wasn't what you wanted, probably. The sticky ticky for creating new entries should now persist regardless of whether you've edited entries (without checking the box) in the interim.

Issue 1595: Add 'Pattern' style by ninetydegrees (pull request)
Category: Styles
Patch by: ninetyd
Description: A new style! Yay for 90d :) It has lots and lots of different themes with interesting background patterns. If you haven't looked at our styles in a while, do have a browse.

Issue 1602: Clarifying automated test comments (pull request)
Category: Automated tests
Patch by: cesy
Description: Automated tests are awesome. They can lead to trendy things like continuous integration and DevOps, or they can just save the time of your volunteers, which is also pretty cool. In an ideal world, when you fix a bug, you should write an automated test at the same time. I arrived at the contributor weekend all full of newbie enthusiasm, having not touched the code in years. I found a bug to look at. I found the relevant bit of the automated tests. However, we had one bit in the tests where the description said "Make sure you get an email notification" and then the test said "Pass if you don't get an email notification, fail if you do". I spent a while being puzzled, and eventually figured out that when you subscribe to a stranger's entry, then it gets access-locked, then someone comments, you should not get an email, because you cannot see the entry or the comment anymore. So the code was right and the description in the test was wrong. I fixed the description, so the next person will not be as confused as I was. Then I realised we didn't actually have a test for the variant affected by the bug I was first looking at. So I wrote one. Then I realised that the bug was in the content of the email, not just whether or not you get an email, so my test wasn't deep enough. Then I realised it was dinner time and kaberett had cooked delicious food, so I abandoned the original bug. But this test improvement will make it easier for someone else in the future. This kind of thing tends to happen when coding. Sidetracks are fun and frequently useful, even if it wasn't quite what was intended.

Issue 1608: Page title "ext_1 in your circle" when circling an OpenID user (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: me-and
Description: When you add an OpenID to your circle, by giving them access (or by subscribing, but that's a bit pointless), the content of the page says "joebloggs.example.com in your circle" but the title in your browser bar says "ext_1 in your circle". This fixes it so you don't see the ugly backend ext_1 bit and it names joebloggs.example.com properly.

Issue 1612: http://www.dreamwidth.org/editjournal uses old Edit Entries page even if opted into the Beta (pull request)
Category: Bugs
Patch by: kareila
Description: The page to editmultiple entries is useful. But it sent you to the wrong version of the editing page. Also HTML entities e.g. <3 are over-escaped and appear with the ampersand lt semicolon 3 instead of a heart in the subject line of entries on this page. Now both are fixed.

Issue 1613: Entries deleted via http://www.dreamwidth.org/editjournal offer the option to "Edit this entry again" on Success page (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: kaberett
Description: If you delete an entry, you can't really edit it again, now, can you? It no longer exists. Silly code, don't worry, kaberett fixed it.

Issue 1614: Removing redundant colon from mobile post page (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: azurelunatic
Description: The mobile page to post an entry had an unnecessary colon, which had been getting up Azz's nose. So they started to tackle it, and encountered the eldritch horror. I quote, "Tonight's Storytime with Azz in -dev was explaining to @sgsabbage Why We Change The Code String Via Patch. It was all very baffling ("Because the steam-radiator still sits there angrily waiting for us to bark our shins on it in the middle of the night.") up until the moment he beheld the Translation UI, at which point he achieved enlightenment." There is a community translation_die_die_die for those who would like more details. It took a while, but with help from denise, they defeated the evil colon despite the best efforts of the translation system.

Issue 1628: Last N Hours reports do not do the right thing with IPv6 addresses (pull request)
Category: Bug
Patch by: kareila
Description: Our dedicated team of spamwhackers have some fancy tools. One of them is a page that lists all the spam reports in the last 6/24 hours. That page was confusing IPv6 addresses of anonymous spammers with OpenID usernames, because they both have extra dots in. This is now fixed, and we apologise again to the OpenID people who got accidentally spamwhacked before the team figured out what was going on. (Don't worry, we tracked them all down and sorted it out.)

25 total issues resolved
Contributors: azurelunatic, cesy, chrisboyle, hotlevel4, kaberett, kareila, ljacob, me-and, ninetyd, sgsabbage

Thanks to our new contributor chrisboyle.

Comments

[kaberett]

Thank you :D

[denise]

These are some excellent fix descriptions! Thank you for doing this. :)

[cesy]

A lot of them are straight from good descriptions in the issues, too, which is great to see - it makes everyone's job easier.

[denise]

HOORAY TEAMWORK.

[brainwane]

Thank you very much, contributors, for the fixes, and thank you cesy for the code tour!

Issue 1602: Clarifying automated test comments

I loved this story, with its sidetracks and realizations. Thank you.

[musyc]

Eeeeeeee, a bug I reported got patched! Warm fuzzy feels. :)

So many kudos to the devs. I love reading about the great work y'all do.

[azurelunatic]

Fortunately, I realized that there was A Problem before spamwhacking the OpenIDs. Then I started swearing and dove for the bug form...

[ninetydegrees]

I had a blast reading your descriptions! Thank you!

[ninetydegrees]

And congrats on the commit!

[azurelunatic]

and oh *gods* the translation system. ;_;

[marahmarie]

Issue 1602 was my favorite, as well, because This Is How I Code. I mean, every second spent staring at something I need to edit is spent trying not to get sidetracked by a) something to do with the edit but not immediate to it, more like "adjacent" or b) just getting completely sidetracked.

I ought to say This Is Why I Code as I have to admit I enjoy the sidetracks and jumping down of rabbit holes more than just the straight-up editing/changing of A to B.

Also, excellent explainers throughout...well done.

[jewelfox]

Yay, many thanks ^^ I love seeing DW get these little fixes and stuff.

(Also Pattern looks like a neat style.)