If there's one fundamental truth about software, it's that nothing is ever set in stone. Developers are always tweaking, modifying, and re-writing their code, with the never-ending goal of making it more efficient, easier to use, and just plain better.
And that's exactly what we've been doing with DK5, the latest version of the software that powers Daily Kos, ever since we rolled it out over the weekend. As important as our beta test was, there's nothing like having tens of thousands of people banging your software at once to flush out the bugs.
Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us identify immediate problems, and the teach team has been hard at work squashing bugs. Here's a partial list of the changes we've already made to the site, in response to things the community has pointed out:
New comment alert popups: gone (for now). These were driving a lot of folks batty, especially in busy threads. We've turned this feature off. At some point in the future, we'll revamp it so that it's less intrusive. A few small changes should make the popup less annoying, and bring its utility. Killed automatic superscripts. Automatically rendering "2nd" as "2nd" was not helpful and was mostly driving people nuts and causing errors. Fixed poll layout issues. If your story polls (one of our favorite features here at Daily Kos) were looking askew, they should be right as rain now. Back-end and browser efficiency improvements. These are pretty technical in nature, but we've made some tweaks that should make loading the site faster. Stable image attributions. Some image metadata added by users wasn't staying put. Now it will. Daily Kos Elections updates fixed. Are you a junkie who has a tab open with the Elections Live Digest every day? Now updates will appear properly, and you shouldn't have to refresh your browser to see them (but please file a ticket with the helpdesk if you do). Anchor tags ahoy! If you'd like to create links to specific parts of your stories—especially useful if you have a long piece—you can now use the "create link" button to add anchor tags. No more needless whitespace at the end of stories. The story editor made it all too easy for extra line breaks to pile up at the end of stories, creating big empty gaps on publication. Now the system will detect those and tighten things up. Other stuffThere are many more things we're working on, such as direct links to comments (which, as you likely know if you're reading this, currently require an entire story's worth of comments to load). And while right now our attention is occupied by bugs, we are also very focused on improving the site's functionality, efficiency, and readability. So please, keep the feedback coming.