June 2015 post-codepush stats

[momijizukamori]

...Yeah, we really do need to do these more often *g* Though the file with the fancy pie charts already set up got lost in the cloud, so at least I have an excuse?


Layouts
One new layout, Seamless for a total of 55 of 65 submissions (or 85%)

Themes
2 new themes for Patsy, 13 themes for Crisped, 3 themes for Crossroads, 6 themes for Lefty, 12 new themes for Summertime, and 5 new themes for Ciel, for a total of 1,492 of 1,545 submissions (or 97%)







Non-stats notes: We've made some bugfixes to a few layouts and themes - anything users will see is announced in style_system. We have also not forgotten about old submissions, nor that we owe some people bounty points now that we've made a lot of stuff live!

Comments

[jade_pop]

Not to be a downer, because I love Dreamwidth - but when I keep getting people telling me that all the themes are terrible when there are almost 1500, I feel like there's a problem that needs to be addressed somehow.

[momijizukamori]

Well, I'd argue that while that might have been true in 2011 or so, we've got lots of great themes now, which means people aren't looking or or don't actually want to be satisfied, just to complain. I do realize finding themes can be a bit of a process with so many, but we're working on a new search set-up which should make it easier to find stuff people like.

[dancing_serpent]

Yeah, tastes are different. I still hear the "but DW is so ugly" more often than not, and it's not that I like all styles/themes myself. But when I ask why it's usually the "huge" default font that's the problem. It seems to me people don't even bother to check how they can customize/make it smaller.

[ninetydegrees]

It would help if people knew what's so terrible about them. I've seen some people complain several times but it's hard to figure out what they want -besides the font thing which isn't going to happen because accessibility is more important than taking 30 seconds to change the font size, or using bright ugly colors instead of just shades of gray all the time. The one thing I remember which was useful was asking for more themes with images.

[jade_pop]

Maybe it's the lack of a place to discuss what needs changing - make a discussion post somewhere?

[momijizukamori]

I personally have made a bunch of requests for feedback various places at various times over the last several years, and honestly, I've gotten basically no useful replies ('I want to use the custom theme on LJ' is not useful, because generally we cannot legally support that)

[denise]

Yeah, we've tried that multiple times, and we either get no feedback or feedback that's just "it sucks and I hate it" that doesn't contain anything we can act on. And every time I see somebody complaining about the available themes on DW, I try to probe them for things they dislike about the already-available themes, and the response is so generalized and high-level as to be impossible to act upon, or things that won't be changed because (as ninetydegrees points out) there are very good reasons to do it the way we do it.

I won't sugarcoat it: that kind of "everything sucks, I hate it, you need to change everything" response is not only not something we can act upon, it's intensely demoralizing and has driven away multiple contributors and designers, to the point where we can barely find people who want to do design work or styles-related code work at all. Nearly every theme and style available on the site has been contributed by a user who's made the theme or style and contributed it because they thought it was good work that others might want to use, and when people say "there are no good themes on DW", they're speaking directly to the work of those people. I honestly don't blame people who walk away from contributing because of that: when the prevailing response you get to something you were pretty proud of is that negative, it's frustrating and upsetting and you wind up intensely hurt and thinking you shouldn't have bothered in the first place.

Tastes differ, and the aesthetic we use for many of our system styles and themes -- mostly because of external needs like accessible and mobile compatability -- doesn't match the preferred aesthetic of a bunch of people. Which is fine! But that's why we have multiple system styles to begin with, it's why we built our system to be as flexible and customizable as possible so people can change things to suit their tastes, and it's why we maintain dreamscapes as a venue for people to submit things that they've come up with to suit their own preferences, figuring that what one person likes, others may as well.

Ultimately, though, the kind of feedback we get suggests that the issue is twofold: the prevailing aesthetic among people who have the most problems with our existing offerings is one that doesn't fit our needs for accessibility (tiny fonts, exceptionally low-contrast colors, doesn't scale down to mobile/small-viewport screens very well), and people want to keep using the styles that were developed on LJ because it's what they're familiar with and people have developed a bank of custom themes for them. We won't bend on the former, because accessibility is one of the site's guiding principles, and we can't do the latter, because the LJ styles people have developed themes for are not open source and we can't legally use them. (And even if we could, we've diverged so far from LJ's codebase that it would be more work to convert a LJ core1 S2 style than it would be to write a new one from scratch.)

If you see someone with a custom style (or an existing style that's been themed so heavily that it looks like it could be a new style) that you like, you can encourage them to submit that style here to dreamscapes -- momijizukamori has been doing a ton of work to catch up on the backlog and get submissions to the point where they can be added to the site as a whole. (It's not as simple to add a theme or style system-wide as it is for a user to add one for their own use.) We don't necessarily take every single style that's submitted to us, because sometimes it would be too hard to adapt them to our requirements, but we do take the vast majority of them. If people genuinely do hate every single one of the 50+ styles and 1500-some themes we have, I really do urge them to submit something that's more to their taste! As long as they fit our requirements for accessibility and the like, we'll take them.

[momijizukamori]

We can also accept conversions of custom CSS developed for LJ onto our base with permission of the original author, provided it doesn't use any of the LJ base layer code - I have blanket permission to convert spire's layouts because they've stopped doing design, and Planet Caravan and Tectonic are both their original graphic design that I recoded for our (waaaaaay more modern and flexible) base. And I plan to do more in the future, but I haven't had the time yet.

(We will actually accept low-contrast, because there are a significant subset of people who prefer those for aesthetic reasons or for accessibility reasons, because high-contrast does unpleasant things to their head. Default font size is always the same, though)

[ninetydegrees]

Not going to repeat what's already been said but something really constructive yet really simple is 'hey I would like something like this design because I like this and that about it" or "I like this design but would rather have this and this like that". See what I mean? Give people something to work with yet allow for some flexibility because copying something which already exists isn't legally doable. All of my designs have been inspired by things I've seen, mashed up while giving them my own twist. If people were to submit such ideas, I think it would be really helpful and welcome. Anywhere is good. Here is good. :)

[jade_pop]

Something that makes it obvious that a discussion is happening would be good. :)

[momijizukamori]

Me too! And hopefully by next push, I'll get some more layouts patched, including your's :) Themes are just super-fast so I did a big run-through of backlog before the last codepush

[momijizukamori]

I'll keep that in mind! I may see if I can rewrite some of them as using TR's base, just because it makes mass bug fixing/feature adding so easy, but I've gotten pretty good at that :)

[ninetydegrees]

Forgot to say but yay for patching these and for making the graphs!!

[momijizukamori]

GRAPHS ARE FUN. I am pretty stunned by the numbers myself, frankly.