Dreamwidth Q&A Session

[denise]

I realized this morning that it has been quite some time, so I figured it would be a good time for another Dreamwidth Q&A session!

Got a question on how the business end of DW works? Curious about the progress on a particular feature? (Although I can probably answer that for you by saying: we're working on paying down our technical debt so that we can move forward on a lot of the planned features; it got to the point where we couldn't progress further without making some aggressive modernization of the existing codebase.) Wondering what an average day in the life of a DW employee is? Got that one question that you've been vaguely wondering about for ages, but never felt like it was "important" enough to make a support request to get the answer on? Want to know if it really is that cool being able to work from home without wearing any pants? (Answer: yes, especially when it's 85 degrees F in my office and the air conditioners won't be delivered and installed for at least another day or two.)

Comment here, and we will answer!

(Just a reminder: you may receive comments or replies from people who know the answer to your question, but aren't officially DW staff. If the person who answers you doesn't have the official "staff" userhead -- -- they are not DW staff. They may be correct -- if they aren't, I will be sure to answer and clear up any misconceptions -- but they are not speaking ex cathedra Dreamwidth, so to speak!)

No question too big, no question too small. There's also previous Q&A sessions and the Business FAQs to browse through!

(Answers may be a bit slow depending on computer woes and additional stuff going on, but we will answer!)

Comments

[chris]

I think you (both singular and plural) are generally pretty awesome, and occasions like this, when you follow up on your commitment to radical transparency, show you at your most awesome.

Is there anything in the Business FAQs that has dramatically changed since when you wrote it? By "dramatically" I refer to deliberate changes in direction of policy, rather than as a result of changes imposed on you against your will by matter of practicalities.

Specifically, now you've been running for two years, is your answer to What if you get tired of running the company? the same now as it was then, and how close are you to the goal that you identified when answering What steps are you taking to ensure continuity of administration?

[denise]

This is a placeholder comment for when I wake up, since this is not the kind of question one should answer at the tail end of a 24-hour day whilst one is taking the sort of drugs one really should not operate heavy machinery under the influence of!

[chris]

I get the impression that - hopefully without being too personal here - your awesome doctor would approve. :-D

[denise]

Alas, not those drugs. Would that they were *G*

Having read back over the business FAQs, the biggest things that are different now is that I thought we'd have to define our anti-abuse policies a lot sooner -- we've been blessed (*knock wood*) with a very, very low volume of ToS complaints, and most of the things that come up are very common-sense and intuitive. (See previous ToS updates in dw_biz.) It's been so low-volume and laid-back that I haven't really felt the need to write clarifications of how we interpret the ToS, since nothing truly counter-intuitive has come up yet. (Thank goodness!)

Obviously, also the question of what to do with profits hasn't come up yet -- we won't get to that point for a while.

We're doing pretty well on cross-training people -- the technical-type stuff is all triple-redundant for the most part (there are a few things Mark is still the only one who knows how to do, mostly because they haven't come up yet, but as we identify them, we cross-train), and at least one other person knows how to do most of the businessy stuff, even though it's generally a good idea to have one person handling all that as much as possible to avoid things falling through the cracks. (When one person knows they're responsible for it, it gets done. If two people are responsible for it, it's possible for each of them to think the other is doing it.)

We do still have the same provisions in place for what to do if one of us doesn't want to be doing DW anymore, and we have in fact exercised them (although in Mark's case it wasn't "doesn't want to be doing DW anymore", it was "DW couldn't pay him enough to keep him working full-time") -- Mark's still half owner of Dreamwidth Studios, LLC, but he only handles emergency sysadmin type stuff for dreamwidth.org these days. I don't see me being fed up with DW anytime soon (I take frequent enough breaks that I don't feel overwhelmed). If either of us decided to divest our share of the company, I suspect fu would be the first candidate to sell to, even if it would complicate tax matters considerably, just becuase she has the strongest investment in the company's success right now!

[chris]

Thank you for your response.

It's been almost a year since the last ToS update, which is testament to just how low-volume ToS complaints have been. How does Dreamwidth's current volume compare with that of LJ in your earlier days in LJ's abuse team, if it is known? Is it possible to say that the Dreamwidth client base causes far fewer ToS complaints relative to its volume than LJ did - or, perhaps, relative to LJ at different points in LJ's history? If so, are there specific policy reasons why this might be the case or is it just that DW users have been around the block more often?

[denise]

There weren't stats on volume for the first two years of LJ abuse -- it was handled in private email and nothing was written up in the LJ abuse community -- so comparison isn't really possible. I know that volume is far lower than I'd predict it to be for an active userbase of this size -- we have about 2% of LJ's active usage, and way way way way way below 2% of LJ's abuse volume. (Well, LJ's abuse volume at the last point I had active knowledge of same, but I seriously doubt volume has gone down.) Part of the difference is that the invite code system seriously curtails spam, which was always a reasonable chunk of LJ's abuse complaints (and i'm sure has only gone up as LJ's spam problem has worsened), but I really do think part of it is just that DW's userbase is just that awesome.

[azurelunatic]

And we already have a functioning antispam system, and antispam has been mostly separated from ToS, such that most of the spam volume can be handled without bothering ToS. Which I think would count as a specific policy reason why things are lower -- I'm in antispam, and we have a reasonable volume, but it's still small enough that the first round of recruiting plus one more later-added person is reasonably on top of it. (Spam volume has increased since the beginning, but there have been improvements to the system so that it is no longer *quite* the same "Brad, in his dorm room, with BML" system that we inherited. (It's due a revamp, but we can sail on for a while as-is. My counterpart and I are going over antispam applications, but there's low enough volume that it's not been our first priority.) The vast majority of spam is anonymous comment spam, mostly from a few rotating specific recognizable campaigns or methodologies, with a handful of one-offs, some non-spam (mostly obnoxiousness in a few specific anonymous comment communities), and some OpenID spammers.

There have been a very few registered users reported: a mix of legitimate content reported accidentally, legitimate content reported maliciously, legitimate content reported after an apparent loss of friendship, legitimate but mean/dodgy content reported indignantly, legitimate actual users making poor outreach choices, and a handful of gen-u-ine registered-user spammers.

The real spammers are reported to ToS for termination. The poor outreach choices are also referred to ToS in case there are associated complaints, or so that someone can tell them to make better choices in the future. Isolated meanness and other forms for legitimate content are closed without action. There has so far been one case (albeit multipart) of Assorted Dodginess, which was referred to ToS. ToS has courtesy access to the antispam reports in case they need it for any of the things reported to them.

I have previously described LJ's spam problem as "enterprise-level"; I think that a single person could probably handle DW's spam by themselves at this point, if not for the burnout.

[lovingboth]

One of the things that's changed is that /pipermail/dw-discuss/2008-August/000514.html etc links are broken.

[pauamma]

Because the mailing lists were inactive, Mark didn't move them with the rest of the *.dwscoalition.org services, but he still has the archives around, and I'm going to try generating a minimal set of HTML pages from them (just enough to unbreak the links and allow minimal browsing) if and when I get access to them.

[denise]

In addition to what pauamma said, web.archive.org has indexed all of them (last I checked) and so they can at least still be read.