Entry tags:
Code tour: March 21st - April 21st, 2013
Hi all! This is my first attempt at a code tour. Denise said she needed a hand, so I volunteered... please enjoy, or at least, ... huh, do we not have a word that means unenjoy? I mean, there's unenjoyable, but you can't say "I unenjoy that". Weird language.
Anyway. Instead of rambling on about English, I now present this code tour.
Bug 4987: dmca policy should be explicitly cc-by-sa
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: Dreamwidth likes to share, and our DMCA policy wasn't tagged with the Creative Commons license we use. Fixed up, now people can freely use our DMCA policy if they wish!
Bug 5002: FAQ #246: also mention audio
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
misskat
Description: Fix the FAQ to talk about how to embed audio, which is not dissimilar from video embedding, but should be specified.
Bug 4991: Inbox: Make it clearer that the 'Sent' folder is part of 'All'
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Suggested by:
ninetydegrees
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: This saves people like me from accidentally nuking my entire Sent mailbox. The All mailbox actually includes Sent, unlike most email systems on the planet, so this code change was made to help remind me to think of the poor sent messages I will never see again.
Bug 4950: add "extra large" setting for image placeholders
Category: Journal contents
Suggested by:
montuos
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: As screens have gotten larger, our Image Placeholder setting hasn't really kept up with the times. Now we've added 800x600 for greater flexibility.
Bug 4941: console command documentation wrong
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: The only thing worse than no documentation is wrong documentation. This fixes some wording that inadvertently declared that the email address was being reset when it was, in fact, the password.
Bug 4939: Contextual popups: CSS for 'a' from style/theme applies causing issues
Category: Style System
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: There was a bug where contextual popups were sometimes being affetced by CSS from styles/themes. This could cause links to become really hard to see, so this patch puts in a later style override so that the contextual popups always behave.
Bug 5000: Explicitly display password strength requirements on user creation page
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: Our password requirement text wasn't verbose enough. It specified some of the requirements, but not all. Instead of forcing the users to guess at how strong their password has to be, now we tell them what we expect.
Bug 5004: Not easy to discover what workers are needed for a particular function
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
fu
Description: The arcane world of workers: slightly less arcane, now! This patch documents what some of the workers do, what groups they're part of, and helps with people who run Dreamwidth code and hack on it.
Bug 5007: need traceroute faq
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
misskat
Description: This bug provisions an FAQ entry for how to perform a so-called "traceroute". Sometimes we need them to help diagnose site slowness problems, so it's convenient to have an FAQ to direct the users to.
Bug 5012: Hide/unhide link causes error on reply page
Category: Modernization
Patch by:
fu
Description: Fix a bug that caused server-side errors when the user clicked on show/hide links in the jQuery beta.
Bug 3251: Lost Information list of accounts should have the URL of the OpenID account
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by:
fu
Description: If you've lost your account names and you request them by email, we would previously send OpenID accounts with their internal name (ext_928349234 etc). This was actually pretty useless to the user, so we fixed it up to show the URL of the OpenID account (e.g. foo.dreamwidth.org).
Bug 4423: previewing an entry with a poll in it does not show poll on edit
Category: Journal contents
Patch by:
fu
Description: We have the functionality for previewing polls when you preview a post you're writing, but that didn't carry over to previewing edits to your entry. Now we expand the polls to allow you to view them in the preview window in every case.
Bug 4953: plain text notification of birthday should include link to journal, link to send PM
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Suggested by:
scolaro
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: Awkwardly, the email notifying you about someone's birthday didn't include a link to their journal. That is fixed now.
Bug 4973: Add "view my entries in this community" to post-entry-creation page for communities
Category: Communities
Suggested by:
azurelunatic
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: This code change added a new link in the after-posting-an-entry list of links for when you're posting to a community. Now there's a link to "other posts by me to this community", which helps with locating other posts you might have made.
Bug 5010: extremely bizarre error message when trying to navigate from first/final support req in category
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: Filed because the error message "No Next open request This request is in the same category found" was declared Offensive to Humanity and executed. In other words: this patch fixes a really bad attempt at building a sentence out of parts programmatically that just failed in some cases. Now there are proper error messages like "No biscuits, insert toner." Well, maybe not that last, but you get the idea.
Bug 3117: Icons cannot have a keyword of "0"
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: purplecat
Description: There are some cases where Perl is great, but its insistence on treating the string "0" as false is not one of them. This lead to some problems where you couldn't, for example, use "0" as a keyword on an icon. This patch fixes that and some other cases where "0"-is-false was a problem.
Bug 4827: Note on /admin/capedit that if you're changing payment status, you should try /admin/pay
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: Our admin tools are strange ducks. It's sometimes really hard to remember exactly where you go to do what, so this patch adds in some documentation for one of the common failure cases. "No, to mark an account paid, you need to use THAT page. Not this one."
Bug 3505: use user-supplied time for suggestions generator admin posts
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
fu
Description: The suggestion submission page posts two posts to the suggestions community. One is an internal, admin post that contains certain information useful to filing a bug. The other is the external, publicly visible post that people see. However, we were using the user's timezone when posting the public entry, sometimes leading to instances where the two posts would be two days apart. This causes confusion and dismay and sanity loss, so it's now fixed to be consistent.
Bug 5003: Remove all public-facing refs to hg.dreamwidth.org
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by:
shadowspar
Description: Back in 2012, we switched our source code control system from Mercurial to Git, and went from using a self-hosted Mercurial repository to using GitHub. However, some pages on the site -- like http://dreamwidth.org/site/opensource and http://dreamwidth.org/site/brand -- still referred to the old Mercurial repositories. Embarassing! This change fixes those links. They now point to our GitHub page: https://github.com/dreamwidth
Bug 5015: FAQ #262: link to support request instead of Google Analytics FAQ
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
misskat
Description: This FAQ entry had a bad link. It has now been disciplined and shown the error of its ways and is properly pointing where it ought. Let this be a lesson to all anchors that might think of floating away!
Bug 5016: Motion: preview pic doesn't load & style doesn't display correctly in Customize
Category: Style System
Patch by:
ninetyd
Description: One of the Motion themes didn't load correctly. It had a bad name in our reference file, so that's now been corrected. The theme should load and work now.
Bug 5021: FAQ #224: doesn't mention that banning a user will also block their PMs
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
denise
Description: We have documentation about banning users, but it doesn't really mention everything that happens. In particular, it doesn't mention that banning a user also blocks them from sending you a private message. It does now!
Anyway. Instead of rambling on about English, I now present this code tour.
Bug 4987: dmca policy should be explicitly cc-by-sa
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Dreamwidth likes to share, and our DMCA policy wasn't tagged with the Creative Commons license we use. Fixed up, now people can freely use our DMCA policy if they wish!
Bug 5002: FAQ #246: also mention audio
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Fix the FAQ to talk about how to embed audio, which is not dissimilar from video embedding, but should be specified.
Bug 4991: Inbox: Make it clearer that the 'Sent' folder is part of 'All'
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Suggested by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: This saves people like me from accidentally nuking my entire Sent mailbox. The All mailbox actually includes Sent, unlike most email systems on the planet, so this code change was made to help remind me to think of the poor sent messages I will never see again.
Bug 4950: add "extra large" setting for image placeholders
Category: Journal contents
Suggested by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: As screens have gotten larger, our Image Placeholder setting hasn't really kept up with the times. Now we've added 800x600 for greater flexibility.
Bug 4941: console command documentation wrong
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: The only thing worse than no documentation is wrong documentation. This fixes some wording that inadvertently declared that the email address was being reset when it was, in fact, the password.
Bug 4939: Contextual popups: CSS for 'a' from style/theme applies causing issues
Category: Style System
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: There was a bug where contextual popups were sometimes being affetced by CSS from styles/themes. This could cause links to become really hard to see, so this patch puts in a later style override so that the contextual popups always behave.
Bug 5000: Explicitly display password strength requirements on user creation page
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Our password requirement text wasn't verbose enough. It specified some of the requirements, but not all. Instead of forcing the users to guess at how strong their password has to be, now we tell them what we expect.
Bug 5004: Not easy to discover what workers are needed for a particular function
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: The arcane world of workers: slightly less arcane, now! This patch documents what some of the workers do, what groups they're part of, and helps with people who run Dreamwidth code and hack on it.
Bug 5007: need traceroute faq
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: This bug provisions an FAQ entry for how to perform a so-called "traceroute". Sometimes we need them to help diagnose site slowness problems, so it's convenient to have an FAQ to direct the users to.
Bug 5012: Hide/unhide link causes error on reply page
Category: Modernization
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Fix a bug that caused server-side errors when the user clicked on show/hide links in the jQuery beta.
Bug 3251: Lost Information list of accounts should have the URL of the OpenID account
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: If you've lost your account names and you request them by email, we would previously send OpenID accounts with their internal name (ext_928349234 etc). This was actually pretty useless to the user, so we fixed it up to show the URL of the OpenID account (e.g. foo.dreamwidth.org).
Bug 4423: previewing an entry with a poll in it does not show poll on edit
Category: Journal contents
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: We have the functionality for previewing polls when you preview a post you're writing, but that didn't carry over to previewing edits to your entry. Now we expand the polls to allow you to view them in the preview window in every case.
Bug 4953: plain text notification of birthday should include link to journal, link to send PM
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Suggested by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Awkwardly, the email notifying you about someone's birthday didn't include a link to their journal. That is fixed now.
Bug 4973: Add "view my entries in this community" to post-entry-creation page for communities
Category: Communities
Suggested by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: This code change added a new link in the after-posting-an-entry list of links for when you're posting to a community. Now there's a link to "other posts by me to this community", which helps with locating other posts you might have made.
Bug 5010: extremely bizarre error message when trying to navigate from first/final support req in category
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Filed because the error message "No Next open request This request is in the same category found" was declared Offensive to Humanity and executed. In other words: this patch fixes a really bad attempt at building a sentence out of parts programmatically that just failed in some cases. Now there are proper error messages like "No biscuits, insert toner." Well, maybe not that last, but you get the idea.
Bug 3117: Icons cannot have a keyword of "0"
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: purplecat
Description: There are some cases where Perl is great, but its insistence on treating the string "0" as false is not one of them. This lead to some problems where you couldn't, for example, use "0" as a keyword on an icon. This patch fixes that and some other cases where "0"-is-false was a problem.
Bug 4827: Note on /admin/capedit that if you're changing payment status, you should try /admin/pay
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Our admin tools are strange ducks. It's sometimes really hard to remember exactly where you go to do what, so this patch adds in some documentation for one of the common failure cases. "No, to mark an account paid, you need to use THAT page. Not this one."
Bug 3505: use user-supplied time for suggestions generator admin posts
Category: Site Administration
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: The suggestion submission page posts two posts to the suggestions community. One is an internal, admin post that contains certain information useful to filing a bug. The other is the external, publicly visible post that people see. However, we were using the user's timezone when posting the public entry, sometimes leading to instances where the two posts would be two days apart. This causes confusion and dismay and sanity loss, so it's now fixed to be consistent.
Bug 5003: Remove all public-facing refs to hg.dreamwidth.org
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: Back in 2012, we switched our source code control system from Mercurial to Git, and went from using a self-hosted Mercurial repository to using GitHub. However, some pages on the site -- like http://dreamwidth.org/site/opensource and http://dreamwidth.org/site/brand -- still referred to the old Mercurial repositories. Embarassing! This change fixes those links. They now point to our GitHub page: https://github.com/dreamwidth
Bug 5015: FAQ #262: link to support request instead of Google Analytics FAQ
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: This FAQ entry had a bad link. It has now been disciplined and shown the error of its ways and is properly pointing where it ought. Let this be a lesson to all anchors that might think of floating away!
Bug 5016: Motion: preview pic doesn't load & style doesn't display correctly in Customize
Category: Style System
Patch by:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Description: One of the Motion themes didn't load correctly. It had a bad name in our reference file, so that's now been corrected. The theme should load and work now.
Bug 5021: FAQ #224: doesn't mention that banning a user will also block their PMs
Category: User documentation
Patch by:
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
Description: We have documentation about banning users, but it doesn't really mention everything that happens. In particular, it doesn't mention that banning a user also blocks them from sending you a private message. It does now!
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Thank you for the code tour. Great job. :D
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BIG SPARKLY EYES!!! That's wonderful.
Bug 4973: Add "view my entries in this community" to post-entry-creation page for communities
I noticed this one a couple of days ago and LOVED it. What a great tweak. It really is the little things that make this site such a pleasure to use.