Open Beta hits!

[foxfirefey]

Dreamwidth has been in open beta for about a week now! This post is for discussing any aspects of open beta you'd like to note: what was your experience?

Another active user graph has been made by sophie; there was quite the influx. Seed accounts sold very well. The first batch of 200 sold in under half an hour, despite glitches that prevented anybody who did not already have an DW or Paypal account from purchasing one. The second batch of 200 sold in under seven hours. Because of the glitches, there's a seed account extension sale next week in two batches of 100. There was a slight bit of downtime the first day, about five minutes, which was quickly solved. Otherwise, performance seemed fairly solid. Building up all those servers paid off.

Namesquatting led to community account creation throttling. After a config file missed restrictions on advanced customization, DW ended up giving free users limited access to custom styles.

Comments

[velocitygrass]

The second batch of 200 sold in under four hours.
I was wondering where you got this information from. I refreshed like crazy the whole day out of curiosity and according to my refreshes it was just over 6.5 hours, which matches this twitter, which I noticed because I also kept refreshing the search for "dreamwidth" on twitter. (That Friday was my Dreamwidth day :)

[nisrin]

The seed account option disappeared for me around 13:30 MST. Assuming the sale started at 7:00 MST as scheduled, that matches your timeframe.

[foxfirefey]

You're right--I was calculating from 9AM my time to when it stopped my time, which shaved off hours from when it should have started, which is at 6AM my time. Thank you for the correction!

[princessofgeeks]

thank you for this, i was very curious about the seed account stats, and i'm looking forward to the splitting out of open id activity versus individual accounts versus communities. just a curious person.

FWIW, my experience has been wonderfu.

i did get caught in the paypal glitch, even tho I HAD an existing PayPal account AND was a closed beta account holder.

I've noticed how fast everything loads and how i did not notice the increased load at all.

i'm eagerly awaiting more off the shelf layout choices, because I DO NOT CODE LOL, and other than that I'm happy.

[foxfirefey]

Yeah, there were several PayPal glitches, and I think everything except the one that doesn't let you just use a card have been fixed by now.

Some people are already making varieties of the current layouts at dreamwidthlayouts, if you want to nose around there or just keep watching it in hopes that one you like will show up.

Me, I'm curious about the seed account sale next week. Will it go slowly, because only a few more people are really willing to invest that much money in an unproven service? Or will it go fast, because there has been more buzz in the time since the last sale? I could see either case.

[princessofgeeks]

thanks for the linkage!

I figured the seed accounts would sell out. It will be interesting to see if the extra batch does as well. Because I have no idea how many people were actually shut out by the paypal bug.