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

[jae]

I did know about that. :) It isn't useful to me, though, because everybody on my LJ friends list posts friends-only. But thanks anyway!

-J

[bookfanatic]

You're welcome! It took me way too long and too much time wading through the LJ FAQ to figure that out, so I want to make sure as many people know as possible!

[pne]

The thing about public entries is that you can fetch the syndicated content once and display it to everyone, so that's less of a resource load on LiveJournal.

With protected entries, even if Dreamwidth could send authentication info, it would have to do so once per reader so that LiveJournal can check properly whether the entry is visible to *that* person (after all, it could be filtered to only a subgroup of people).

So if LiveJournal person has fifty Dreamwidth readers, then just fetching the public feed would be one request (with no credentials required), while fetching protected entries would require fifty requests, each with different credentials.

A hypothetical alternative would be for Dreamwidth to fetch the entry once and then do the security filtering on its end - but that would require DW to have some kind of "super-user" access that lets it read anything at all anywhere, no matter how protected it is, which I'm sure would give lots of people the heebie-jeebies if such a thing existed. (Plus DW would have to know which filters include which people, and I'm not sure whether it's possible to find that out.)

[pauamma]

It's only possible to the account itself.

[pne]

Sorry, I couldn't understand your comment due to lack of context.

Could you be a bit more verbose, please?

[pauamma]

Sorry. I meant that to list members of a journal's friends groups, you need to be authenticated as the account. (Or as a community maintainer, if the journal is a community.)

[jae]

That was an incredibly useful explanation! Thank you. :)

-J