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Hello all!

With the recent influx of new users from Tumblr, we are also getting many new offers of help in support, which is wonderful!

I want to encourage everyone who has gotten involved with support recently to (1) comment below in order to request an invitation to join this community, where we occasionally discuss support logistics, and especially (2) to consider joining us on Discord, where we do most of our real-time effort coordination these days. Mark has written up an official announcement of our move to Discord, so if you have any questions that are specific to Discord, please ask those there.

Also, if you are regularly answering questions in support and don't have privileges for reading and writing internal comments on support requests, please let me know by commenting here or finding me in #support on Discord, and I can get you set up with those.

Thanks!

Re: users being unhappy with stuff on mobile, we're going to have a code push soon that should fix some of the problems and also give them options to adjust or turn off the mobile view

Re: the navstrip not working on core1, ...it took me too long to realize what was going on but they're being printed at the bottom of the page. we'll have that fixed by the code push too

again thanks all; if there are any other issues, especially if they're patterns that come up that I haven't mentioned above, please again let me know

Hey, I know we've been getting a lot of requests about the mobile style stuff. Thank you to everyone who's been responding to users and gathering info <3

The two biggest issues I'm aware of are that comments are too narrow, so that once you're a few levels in they're unreadable on a phone, and that the sidebar can take up too much space versus the content on more medium sized screens (larger phones / tablets?).

We're trying to get out changes soon for these but it's taking some time because we have to go style by style.

Other stuff I'm aware of concerns navstrip; but I don't have much news on that front except that we're going to try to redesign it away from the current half hearted effort to work better on small screens without stretching out the page.

What other common issues are people reporting?

denise

Occasionally we get people opening support requests in public support to complain that a DW user is linking to a website they control and they want us to remove the link because it's penalizing them in Google search results. Send those to Webmaster, please! I have a stock answer for it.

(Those requests are almost always because they, or some blackhat SEO firm they paid, has been spamming links to that site everywhere and Google has hit them with a hefty search-weight penalty, so now they're spamming the owners of every site that linked to them demanding the link be removed, whether the link is spammy or not; I probably take way too much pleasure in explaining to them that their blackhat SEO practices are not my problem. Sometimes it's a case of the account that's linking to the site being one of the spam accounts they or their blackhat SEO firm created to spam links, in which case I really get to dig out the riot act.)

denise

a reminder to everybody: if somebody opens up a request about Terms of Service violations or about paid accounts and anything to do with 'em, please move the request to Terms of Service or Account Payments, respectively. don't answer them, don't IC on them, if there's multiple requests don't try to figure out which ones should be closed and which ones shouldn't -- just move everything, and we'll figure out what needs to be done on the other end. (any answer you write will never be approved; answer requirements are very different in ToS and Accounts than in public support!)

thanks!

zarhooie

It's live!

Check out Denise's entry in

dw_maintenance here.

Thanks!

Kat

zarhooie

The imported content removal tool (ICoRT) is in a limited-release roll-out. I am looking for a small number of users who would be willing to test it on their journals for bugs before a full roll-out. I've tested it myself a few times, and it does what it says on the label without any issues.

The ICoRT will remove imported content (entries & comments). This will enable you to run another import job, effectively removing duplicates.

Assuming all goes well, the tool should be fully rolled-out a little later this week.

If you are interested in helping to test, please leave a comment here. I will PM you with the link to the tool.

Thanks for your help!

Kat

zarhooie

Hello again, Support!

Very short version: Mark has diagnosed the comment import issue and is working on a tool to fix it.

Slightly longer version: Stuff broke importing entries from LiveJournal. LiveJournal made a change which confused the importer. During the time between when LiveJournal made their change and when Mark fixed the importer, some users ran imports. [These users now have a problem.] In order to do a successful import, the affected users will need to remove all imported content from their journals to prevent duplication. Mark is building a user-facing tool for this so the users won't need to do it manually or wait for Mark to remove the imported content from Dreamwidth's end.

( Even longer version with even more details. Also how people will be able to delete duplicates. )

Thank you for much for your patience through this Exciting Adventure!

Best,
Kat
Dreamwidth Support Admin

(x-posted to

dw_support_training

What it says on the cover!

Just so people know what's going on, the issue was that the RTE code needed to be served from the main site www.dreamwidth.org. We recently switched to serving up our static content (JS/CSS files) from f.dreamwidth.org, which is more efficient for various reasons but was just not working for the RTE -- in very simple terms, it's because browsers can't assume that "f.dreamwidth.org" and "www.dreamwidth.org" are controlled by the same people and should trust one another.

So basically we just fixed that, the RTE is now showing up correctly for the old update page, and people should be able to update -- so we can let them know that!

FYI, just fixed the login issue that was affecting Firefox users who were ending up on https.

This fixes: * unable to login, even with the correct password * warning about connection not being encrypted when logging in/logging out

People should be able to use / login from https://www.dreamwidth.org without any issues. If there continue to be issues, point them out to me please!

We've been pushing out a lot of tweaks and bugfixes as they're reported in dw_beta and dw_maintenance, outside of the usual "big code push" flow we're all used to. This is good for getting things fixed quickly, but it's led to some confusion when investigating support requests.

So I wanted to point everyone to the list of commits to the release tag. Anything there is either live, or will be within a couple of minutes.

I'll also try to keep an eye on the support board and put in ICs, but not everyone can see those, so check the list of commits above. (If you're unsure whether any apply to a specific issue, feel free to ask me)

Thanks all <3

zarhooie

The private support category, Peterstein, gets some pretty funky spam sometimes.

We had one asking if we wanted to buy a lot of urns. There was another one about purchasing Russian uniforms.

And then there was the one with the title SPECTACULAR LOVE, SHIPPED IN A PILL. The body of the spam was about a hippogriff getting caught in myrtle and damaging the leaves or something.

Seriously, I am dying over here.

-Kat

mark

I made some big changes to the importer with how it handles entry imports. Please try to pay some special attention to the importer requests and flag me down if something comes in that you can't handle.

Thanks!

zarhooie

Hello all,

I am writing this missive to let you know that the email address support @ dreamwidth.org is now functioning as expected. If you have submitted any Support requests via that method, please resend, as your previous email was eaten by a grue.

Thanks!

Kat
Dreamwidth Support

jennifer

I've read through the comments to the brainstorming post and these are the most popular requests I'm seeing:

- ability to preview and/or edit screened responses
- adjustment of point assignments
- approval links on a given answer instead of having to use the drop-down
- better tracking of when a request was last touched and in what way (screened answers, ICs)
- responding directly to other responses (threaded comments)
- improved filtering/sorting/tagging
- view of all requests a given user has sent in
- view of all requests a given user has answered
- per-request notifications
- better wording for support email notifications
- linking of support requests to Zilla bugs with access to relevant stats
- ability to reference multiple FAQs

That sounds like a pretty heavy overhaul, but I think if we work on a chunk at a time, it'll get done!

If there's no objection I can open a Bugzilla item for each of the bullet points I've listed above. Any additional discussion about implementation details can go in comments to this post for now.

denise

One of the things we really want to prioritize is a total overhaul of the support system's code, to make it easier for people to Get Shit Done without having to struggle with the tools available or try to bend them in ways that they were never meant to be bent. So, this is the brainstorming thread: if we were to be rewriting the support system from scratch (and assume that we will be, more or less), what would you like to see new/different/changed?

mark

I have asked

domtheknight to, in effect, just poke through open requests and approve answers that look good. This is temporary for closed beta. She won't be doing this long term, but she was conveniently located when I was in the mood to get support trundling along.

So -- we've got three of us now watching the board for answers at various times, feel free to go poking and answering.

I know most of the things are importer related. They should be collated into groups, people reporting the same issues, and Bugzilla bugs created for them so they can be investigated. Get as much information as possible: what service, what actually worked, what didn't. Especially if they've done anything unique or special: did they use the mass privacy tool on LJ? Did... oh I don't know, other stuff.

This is going to be a lot of feeling things out. If you have questions, you can bug me on IRC or here in comments, and I'll be happy to answer.

mark

Just braindump, but this is how we've taken to answering requests, and it'd be useful to follow the same form for everybody.

Hi $user,

Blah blah answer to your question, blah blah. See the wiki for more information about how to write this section. It's pretty much what you expect.

Best,
$signoff

If they sign their request, then the $user section should be whatever they sign with. First name is fine. If they don't have a name, you can greet them by their account name.

The $signoff is something you pick. You're welcome to use your name (First + Initial, aka Mark S.) and you're welcome to use your account name (e.g., xb95). Whatever you're comfortable with. Denise and I have taken to including our email address, but you shouldn't do that.

That's about it for now.

denise

This is eventually going to be the community for Dreamwidth's technical support volunteers. It isn't intended to be "user-facing" -- in other words, this won't be the place to go for technical support, but it will be the place to go to learn about how to provide technical support for others at the Support board.

Community membership is currently moderated, and until we figure out how we're going to structure the ranks of Support volunteers and how we're going to give people access to the administrative elements of the Support board, I'm not going to approve any community membership requests. (You're more than welcome to watch the community if you're interested in volunteering for the Support team, though!)

Obviously, the first step to getting people volunteering in Support is to write up a basic guide to what a support answer should look like.

azurelunatic (bless her) went through a year's worth of my emails to the dw-discuss mailing list to distill some basic principles that apply to both Support answering guidelines and all official Dreamwidth communication. I've gone through her list and taken a first stab at pulling out the Support-specific elements, and collated them on the Wiki as a (very, very) basic support guide:

Support guide (first pass)

It's obviously going to take us a while to get it to cover everything, and some things will never quite be documentable; there will always be an exception to every rule. But if you're interested in volunteering for Support, take a look over that list, and then:

* What other questions do you have about how you should be writing your Support answers that aren't covered in that guide?

* Is there anything in there that you don't think should be in there?

* Is there anything in there that needs to be covered in more detail?

(Meanwhile, if anyone who's done LJ support and is familiar with the mechanics of the system (how screening works, what the various priv levels are and what they do, etc, etc) wants to write up a basic "this is how the system currently works" sometime over the next day or so -- just the technical bits of how the system works, not how LJ support grants privs and does training, since we'll be doing it differently -- that would be awesome, since I am overextended like whoa right now.)

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Dreamwidth Support Volunteers

Recent Entries

It's December 2018, do you know where your volunteers are?

Mobile Styles

Mobile Styles stuff

What Goes Where

reminder: please move stuff that needs to be moved!

ICoRT Roll-out!

The Imported Content Removal Tool

What is going on

RTE / unable to post from old update page - resolved

Login Issues from https (Firefox 15) - resolved

Things going live

Spam in Peterstein

Some importer changes just went out

Update on Support @ dreamwidth

Brainstorming redux

Brainstorming

temporary deputization

Formatting Responses

Community intro & Support Guide RFC

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December 2018

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