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

[denise]

That's something support will have to troubleshoot, yeah. I will note that a) replies to your comments in communities or other journals (not your own) won't hit the inbox, because of a long and tedious explanation that would take a long time to explain, which is probably why you're noticing that not every comment reply goes to your inbox, and b) it is very, very, very hard to troubleshoot this kind of thing, because email is an unreliable medium, and once things leave our servers properly (which they are, for everything but Yahoo, but Yahoo is notorious for spam-blocking email at the drop of a hat) it is nearly impossible for us to troubleshoot.

So, basically, if you use Yahoo, or your domain hosting is provided by Yahoo or goes through Yahoo, you're not going to get email from us right now, because Yahoo is refusing all connections from us. (We've tried contacting them multiple times about this, and follow all their recommendations, and they always go back to blocking us in the end.) If you use another email service, I don't know what to tell you, because our logs don't show any other failures to send email. Check with your email provider and see if they're doing spam filtering that they're not telling you about.

[beatrice_otter]

My e-mail goes through my parent's business' website emails, which is hosted through powweb.com, which I don't think has anything to do with Yahoo. I know DW is on the whitelist for my parents' site, because my Dad specifically put it there. He's checking with Powweb to see if there might be any possibility that they're blocking DW.

Thank you for explaining about comments in communities or other journals not showing up. Does that apply to entries I'm tracking, as well, or just replies to comments I've made?

[denise]

Just replies to comments you've made -- if you've chosen to track an entry, the email goes through the notification system (and therefore also hits your inbox). The "replies to your comments elsewhere" function is handled by the legacy system, not the "new" notification system -- we haven't had the chance to integrate/codemerge LJ's redo of the notification system yet, which eliminates that problem.

I looked in the logs again, and there aren't any failures for your domain or for powweb.com, so honestly I'm not sure what's up. If you can identify specific comments in your journal that you aren't getting notifications for, you should add them to the support request -- it will increase the chance that if there is something going on, we can figure it out.

[beatrice_otter]

Would it be helpful to give them comments on entries that I have subscribed to that have shown up in my inbox but not my e-mail, as well as comments in my journal that haven't shown up?