reddragdiva | Return to Vermillion Sands.

"It's not a detail I think should be part of my identity," neither he nor she said. MAJOR WIN.
Catholics! YOUR DONATIONS AT WORK. You paid for this, you share responsibility.
Remember the kangaroo beer sign from The Last Continent? The original.
Ubuntu tries really hard to screw the pooch for 10.04. The visual design team apparently have a bit of a habit of checking their stuff in just before freeze — you think they know people hate their idiot shit?
Rocknerd: My heart bleeds. You can hear it, it’s that guffawing noise.
NewsTechnica: Mark Owen of Take That gets drunk and laid a lot.

LiveJournal: I have been alerted that DreamWidth's OpenID login for LiveJournal users is crappy, annoying and frequently just doesn't fucking work. I'm seeking more info for a proper bug report. If you're an LJ user, please try to comment on the DW version of this post, and if it's a goddamn pain in the arse and/or doesn't work then comment anon with how. Feel free to be vituperative, just be detailed!

Basically, DW needs an option especially for LiveJournal users, as (a) the overwhelming majority of the OpenID commenters are coming from LJ, (b) "OpenID", "identity URL" and so on are technical jargon terms no-one should need to know just to comment and (c) this is actually breaking people's social networks for real. So far the OpenID system is a DW fail.

The thing about the LiveJournal engine is it's ridiculously easy to use. People who can't work computers can participate with huge success, and geeks don't get annoyed. The OpenID requirement is a Linux 1998 solution: tell the user to hand-dig a latrine, then hand them a toilet seat to prop on top, and honestly think you've done something user-friendly.

The obvious provider-neutral solution: if someone is automatically crossposting to another site, people will be coming from there — so include said sites as express options for commenting. A box something like "LiveJournal™ user: [_______] LiveJournal will confirm your identity." Accept a username, a username with hyphens, a URL, anything unambiguous. IT HAS TO BE RIDICULOUSLY EASY.

Can any of the DW developers reading this see any problems with this idea? Because the problem is real and it's breaking my network, and I'm really unhappy about that. Inadvertent lockin is just as damaging as deliberate lockin.

Perth: Plane ticket booked through Expedia, £789 return. (cheapflights.co.uk is a nightmare of bullshit and their £480 fares are all £850 when you try to actually buy one. Buggre thatte.) I am arriving in Perth at 1:15am Wednesday and staying at my sister's in Buttfuck, Nowhere. (Jandakot, to be precise.) THEY ONLY HAVE DIALUP! I'll post a phone number locked when I have it.

Just in time to visit, I've discovered The Worst Of Perth. It is 100% accurate and aesthetically perfect in its subtle horror. As Midnight Oil so eloquently put it: "Too much of sunshine too much of sky, but just enough to make you want to cry." I can hardly believe J. G. Ballard never actually visited the place.

Work: I spent the last two days on CruiseControl again. (It's a continuous-build system — every time a developer checks something in, it does a complete build. Resource-intensive, but oh so convenient.) The process of moving from one build server to another is like building a 1:1 scale duplicate of a full-size Titanic built from toothpicks and spit, using toothpicks and spit. And moving the build for apps that date back to "hmm, how do we build an app on this thing? Let's try this really bad idea" and have not changed because they're really popular and quite lucrative. And not only finding where the bodies are buried but producing a full audit report before reinterring them.

Builds are only slightly faster on the T5120 than on the old V210 (CPUs are about the same speed, 8GB memory instead of 2GB), but 32 THREADS NO WAITING makes everything ridiculously more convenient. It's also fun starting all the builds at once and watching the load average go through the roof while actual CPU load is about 20%. The developers are also enormously happy about the possibility of parallelising unit tests, which means the most heavily test-suited builds (the ones that are also most important because the apps make us a ton o' cash) might take less than fifteen minutes to turn around.

So us sysadmins are looking like stars to everyone and boss's boss is happy with having spent £10k on the box in question, and that's what really counts.

Party! I am sitting here with dye on my hair. Tonight I am going to Reptile. See me there before I go away for two weeks! Not that I've been out in, uh, four months. Pose for the camera, darlings!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

megabitch.livejournal.com

test comment as requested

From:

reddragdiva

Simple enough? Anything about the process even slightly confusing or annoying?

From:

pseudomonas

Thinking about cross-posting and OpenID, there's no reason that links to the DW posts shouldn't have a ?remote-site=livejournal.com parameter, such that people following the link are explicitly given the option of entering their LJ (or whichever remote site it is) username.

From:

reddragdiva

Yeah. There's a zillion ways to make it easier than it is.

From:

rasilon-x.livejournal.com

OpenID: Technogibberish, but so are a lot of things. People should only need told once, but telling them would be useful.

Ubuntu changes: Meh. Hadn't even noticed...

From:

reddragdiva

Avoidable technogibberish must be avoided, however.

From:

damned_colonial

Adding an option so it says:

* Anon
* Livejournal user
* OpenID
* DW user

... when you comment seems pretty damn sensible to me. You should suggest it in

dw_suggestions. I bet it'd get implemented pretty promptly.

Wrt whether the existing OpenID implementation works -- about a year ago I went through it myself to understand how it worked, and it appeared to work fine for me. I've also started using it in the reverse direction (logging into DW with my LJ openid to comment) which I believe is the same codebase, and that worked fine too.

From:

reddragdiva

I shall. Keying it to "if you're crossposting automatically to a site, then that site should get its own reply option" strikes me as the way to go.

From:

reddragdiva

Suggested!

Still trying to extract usable bug reports from the pissed-off nongeeks.

From:

reddragdiva

Still waiting. So how often do they actually clear the mod queue on

dw_suggestions and do rejectees get notified?

From:

trixieleitz

You're on!

From:

damned-colonial.livejournal.com

And here's a test comment using openid.

What I did:

Click "Reply"
Click "More options" (since I'm already logged in -- a logged out user wouldn't need to)
Click the radio button next to "OpenID"
Type in "damned-colonial.livejournal.com"
Click "Post comment"

From:

reddragdiva

I'm seeing non-geeks say they tried for three hours and couldn't work out WTF to do. That's an epic failure on DW's part, not the non-geek's.

From: (Anonymous)

People have enough trouble remembering their USER IDS, much less an "Identity URL". People have further had five years of being indoctrinated "NEVER EVER PUT YOUR PASSWORD INTO ANOTHER SITE", and for good reason, and this smells the same even if it technically isn't. Someone needs to invent kerberos for browsers.

From:

reddragdiva

Yeah. Exposing the technogibberish that makes it work is completely unnecessary.

From:

sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com

Right. This is my test post from OpenID.

Seems straight-forward enough so far, but I guess I won't really know until I hit Post Comment...

From:

trixieleitz

Clicked the reply link on your LJ entry footer
Entered the URL of my LJ where it says Identity URL, left the Log in? tickybox unchecked
Typed some stuff
Clicking Post Comment nnnnnnnnnnnow

From:

sloot

I've tried crossposting from DW to LJ, removing comments on my LJ, and encouraging people to login to DW with the following footer on my LJ posts...

[comment count image] comments on the [a ref="http://sloot.dreamwidth.org/1519482.html"]original Dreamwidth post[/a]. [a href="http://sloot.dreamwidth.org/1519482.html?mode=reply"]Comment there[/a] after [a href="http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/"]logging in[/a] via [a href="http://openid.net/"]OpenID[/a].

I think it's as much help as I can give in one line. I have the added challenge that all my posts are friendlocked, but I imported my friends from DW to LJ. I've had techie and non-techie friends complain about the process.

Maybe the problem is that we expect DW to properly integrate with LJ.

From:

reddragdiva

"Maybe the problem is that we expect DW to properly integrate with LJ."

Well, yes. It basically has to, in as far as that is achievable.

From:

trixieleitz

following up my screened OpenID comment:
After clicking Post Comment:
Got the verify identity screen - clicked Yes, just this time
Got an error message due to NoScript blocking XSS - allowed an unsafe reload
Got a confirmation message that the comment had been posted screened

Thoughts:
"Identity URL" - well I know what that is, but one simple improvement would be to change that string so that it is more intuitive what to put there. Can't think what, though.

Maybe some of the problems people are having are due to XSS blocks - I don't know enough to see if there's any DW-side way around that.

Are OpenID users getting confused because of the screening? Is this just one of those user-ed things?

In the meantime, can the cross-posting DW user make life easier for their network by editing their cross-posting footer with more detailed instructions? Not saying you should - I agree that this process should be as easy as commenting on LJ - just thinking that it might apply some duct-tape to your network in the meantime.

(OK to unscreen both of these)

From:

trixieleitz

(OK to unscreen both of these)

haha, I originally tried to post a reply to my OpenID comment with my OpenID, and of course it wouldn't let me. But I forgot to edit that last line :P

From:

jld

In the meantime, can the cross-posting DW user make life easier for their network by editing their cross-posting footer with more detailed instructions?

Yes, they can — the footer template is completely editable by the user.

From:

pseudomonas

It used to have an bug where it'd be truncated when saved between uses. Is that fixed now?

From:

the_axel

Let's see if this works.

From:

the_axel

But of course, I have a DW account, and wouldn't have logged out of it. Let's try again.

From:

the_axel

Test

From:

the_axel

1) Having an example by the login prompt would be immensely helpful:
OpenID (will be screened if not on Access List)
Identity URL:
e.g. username.livejournal.com
2) NoScript hates the idea of validating the OpenID because it sees it a a potential cross-site scripting attempt. It creates a little bar at the top of the screen that is easily missed, and the override command is very non-intuitive. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a significant contributer to folks giving up.

From:

vampwillow

I see nothing wrong with moving the buttons around on the next Ubuntu release. I already use KDE, Gnome, OSX, Windows, Solaris and each have their own idiosyncrasies.

From:

rbarclay

Hmm, Perth.

I missed that on my .au-trip a couple years ago, due to the sheer distance to Everything Else.

But in the various descriptions I read it's always depicted as a smallish town, I'd have guesstimated 40-80k inhabitants - and now I read 1.6m, which's nearly as much as Vienna. WTF?

From:

reddragdiva

It's a Clean City Of A Million. (The sort of city that visitors say, "Oh, it's so clean!) The main thing is it's really isolated. It's 2500km from anything else, and the "anything else" in question is Adelaide, which is of comparable size. Also, we whine a lot.

From:

tetsab

Doot

From: (Anonymous)

not logged into DW but am logged in to LJ
clicked on reply
chose second option 'OpenID'. This option does not show how to log in. i.e. what user-name or the syntax of the user-name so being a 'dumb' user I enter my normal LJ user-name only i.e. 'mr_e_cat'
The message I receive is "No claimed id: no_identity_server: The provided URL doesn't declare its OpenID identity server."
This is not a helpful message.
I now try 'mr_e_cat@livejournal.com'
Same error "No claimed id: no_identity_server: The provided URL doesn't declare its OpenID identity server." Again this doesn't explain the problem.
I now try 'mr-e-cat@livejournal.com' and get the same message again.
I give up in disgust.

From:

reddragdiva

Perfect bug report. Thank you!

The thing you're supposed to know to put in is "mr-e-cat.livejournal.com". You're supposed to know this somehow, because of course you're a geek. EPIC USER INTERFACE FAIL.

From:

trixieleitz

Assumption number one: that the DW translation system is still broadly similar to the LJ translation system.
Assumption number two: that I actually understand the LJ translation system well enough to be right about this.

With the above in mind, it seems to me that, on a technical level, it would be very straightforward for anyone with the appropriate site text translation privilege to edit the error message strings to something helpful. And edit the IdentityURL prompt string similarly. It wouldn't even need a code push. (viz LJ's recent genderfail, which appeared to be created via the same mechanism.)

From:

mr_e_cat

This is what makes this so very annoying. It's not difficult to just inform the user how to log in using openid. A simple example is all that is needed.

From:

reddragdiva

Yep.

From:

frou-frou.livejournal.com

I haven't succeeded in commenting on DW but thought I'd try again.

From:

reddragdiva

Success!

So how was its faff score, on a scale of 0 to 10?

From:

frou-frou.livejournal.com

It was pretty straightforward but of course, I have no way of knowing if you've responded to me unless I come back and check here - which luckily I did. It's a big improvement though. Not sure why it wouldn't let me comment (or even see) other posts for other users.

From:

reddragdiva

Yes, that's weird. I can see a lot of forthcoming work on interoperability.

From:

cesy

You can turn on email comment notifications if you validate your email address at http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/

From:

zvi

You want to confirm your e-mail address. That way, you get e-mails when someone replies to you. Also, you will be able to comment on entries which don't allow anonymous commenters.

From:

emarkienna.livejournal.com

Openid works fine for me, but i agree it has user friendliness issues. Another unobvious thing about openid is access / handling friends only posts - i.e., that dw ppl have to add your openid 'profile' to their access list. A particular gotcha is when someone crossposts FO, which one of their lj friends can read on lj, but then that lj user clicks the dw link to comment and doesn't have permission to see that entry. Maybe dw needs an option for ppl to easily import their lj flist to dw, adding the openids?