In this community, LiveJournal staff announce upcoming releases, with information about bugfixes and new features. Everyone is welcome to add this community to their Friends list.

If you have questions about how to use LiveJournal, or if you have a problem with something that isn't listed in the most recent release, please open a support request instead.

We are releasing the first stage of a new in-browser messaging feature today. It will be announced in news at a later date.

LiveJournal Messenger

This is a web-based messaging service in partnership with Windows Live ID. You'll be able to add contacts and chat with friends while on the LiveJournal site. Here is how to use it:

• Use your existing Windows LiveID or sign up for one using your LiveJournal username
• Enable LiveJournal Messenger in the Extensions tab on the Account Settings page
• You will receive a confirmation email and will then be able to use your LiveJournal Messenger account
• LiveJournal Messenger will appear in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen
• Add contacts using their existing Live ID handle or their LiveJournal Messenger name (username@livejournal.com)
• Your friends will be sent a notice, then will appear in your "Contacts" list once they have confirmed

Known Issues:

• This feature is not supported in Opera
• Some site copy needs updating

Features and changes:

• Added special 10th anniversary site header
• Added a special vGift for LiveJournal 10th birthday (Paid users and accounts over 5 years old can send some for free)
• New mood theme: full stop

Bugs:

• Fixed Incorrect formatting in paid acc promo in step2a.bml
• Added a link to manage/settings on thanks.bml (account creation)
• Numbered lists will now show numbers when viewed on a journal or friends page using Minimalism
• Fixed an incorrect double line in contextual hover link. Really.
• Deleted the option "Delete thread (all subcomments)" at the page delcomment.bml in the last comment (because there are no subcomments)

Also: Due to the issue causing some users to receive multiple copies of the news posts, today's post will not be sent via email.

Release #48:

Changes:

• New option for mass-action on comments; "delete all comments by this user in this post"
• Added banner ad on FAQ pages for Plus users
• Community maintainers can now cancel outstanding invitations
• "Report as bot" link added to AJAX hover menu on userpic mouse-over
• Users with Cyrillic language preference set or Cyrillic IP will have their default selection set to "Russian Support" when opening a Support Request (no change for all other users)

Bugs:

• Last.fm track and album information should no longer be truncated when the information contains an ampersand (LJSV-436)
• Corrected some non-escaped characters in XML format (atom stream)
• Increased min-width so that the ad would not overlap the text-compose area in IE7 (LJSV-436)
• Added April 1st vgifts
• Supsended users can no longer perform any administrative functions as maintainer of a community
• When renaming a community, the correct "'foo' has been renamed to 'bar'" message will appear upon successful transaction completion
• Added clarification to error message when attemtping to send a vgift to a user who has disabled reciept of all vgifts
• Pingbacks are now disabled between posts made in the same journal.
• Occasional problems with seeing http 500 on a journal error when logged out have been fixed
• Fixed an issue that was causing some users to receive "auth code" errors when using AJAX menus (LJSV-580)

Additional change: We have been testing a new Content Delivery Network. The testing has gone well, so we've signed on with Limelight. This change in includes userpics, images, CSS, and javascript. Anything that was previously p-stat will now be l-stat, userpics will go from p-userpic to l-userpic, etc.

Over the past couple days the following changes have been made:
46.1

• added twenty three new v-gifts
• corrected security issue in Friend Finder, which incorrectly followed the setting "Who can view your contact info" rather than the correct "Do you want users to be able to find you by searching for your primary email address?"

46.2

• changed the format of the v-gift page in the Gift Shop to allow SMS purchase of v-gifts by Cyrillic users
• fixed some Friend Finder issues including an IE7 page error, a JavaScript error, and correct dismissal of the interstitial for Find by Email settings
• fixed an error which would sometimes cause the contextual popup menu to not display upon mouse-hover on non-default userpics
• corrected issue on My Account Settings/Notifications page so that "Someone comments in my journal, on any entry" or "Someone replies to any comment I make" options can be unchecked and settings properly saved
• fixed Scrabook error when uploading images to a New Gallery in IE 6 and 7
• corrected two issues which were causing 100 & 155 errors for commentors on articles from The Independent

And today, we have re-enabled the Friend Finder feature after fixing the Friend Finder related bugs above.

Pingbacks - For those Paid Accounts who have not been able to send or receive Pingbacks, you may resolve the issue by going to the Privacy tab on the My Account Settings page, scroll to the bottom and click "Save".  Although the default setting is "LiveJournal.com only", this setting is not recognized until settings are changed or saved.  A fix for this issue is anticipated in r47.

Features:


Pingbacks:

• Pingbacks are here. Read more in the Pingback FAQ.
• We have received some reports of failure to receive pingbacks. We are working on the problem and hope to have it resolved within the next 24 hours.

Find your Friends

• Added new Find your Friends feature.

Changes:

• Featured v-gifts for the season: St. Patrick's Day, Easter, and allergy season (tissues)
• Add "Current music" parameter to RSS-feeds
• In comment notification email, a link to the parent thread has been added
• New tool for reporting of bot accounts: http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/bots.bml
• You can now change the text of a displayed username in the HTML editor using <lj user="exampleusername" title="example" />

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed overlap of ad in compose area when viewing in Horozon with IE7
• Contextual hover pop-ups on expanded comments should now work properly
• Fixed javascript error on v-gift page in gift shop
• Corrected behavior when tabbing fields in the S2 layer editor
• Fixed calculation for the ability to remove old emails and added date the email was validated for use to Email Management page for user reference
• Added link to Account Settings in Lynx
• Fixed issue in Nebula style where style collapsed in comment view
• The "quote" button for comments now works in Safari
• Removed javascript from Lost Info page which was incorrectly disabling buttons
• Mass actions taken on comments now work in Opera
• Fixed bug in community renames, so it is now possible to rename a community under your control to a journal name under your control
• Fixed bug in HTML and Rich Text editors which was converting '&' into '&amp'
• The link in the new-user email to the mobile features page now correctly leads to mobile.bml
• 'View FAQ' link should no longer use the 'view=full' arg. Really.
• After adding a v-gift to a shopping cart, the 'send v-gift' window is now closed
• After attempting to add invalid usernames in the Ban and Unban page, an error is now returned specifying which usernames were invalid
• Fixed a translation string on the Abuse Report form which was preventing certain selections from showing in the viewing language
• Standardized expansion of FAQ variables in FAQ titles (thank you, pauamma!)
• Corrected typo in text of secret-message-change email
• The ban/unban selections on banusers.bml now works correctly in Lynx
• The subscriptions page will display an error message if there is a problem with an entry subscribed to, allowing the page to display even if some subscriptions have problems

In a break from recent tradition, I'm going to start posting release announcements for any patch release that has user visible changes. I will not be posting entries for patches that only impact internal things (infrastructure improvements, debugging code, etc.), so there will sometimes be gaps in post numbers.

Anyway, we have fixed a handful of problems that were introduced by release #44:

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a JavaScript bug in Shades of Grey Theme
• Fixed a bug where S2 would occasionally print an error when trying to display a screened comment
• Fixed a bug that prevented posting of entries to Custom Friends Groups
• Fixed a bug that prevented comment text from showing up on the portal page
• Reverted a buggy change in R44 that changed the behavior of replying to screened comments.

Finally, one correction:
In R44, a new feature was introduced to allow for the viewing of Friends pages by date. What we failed to mention is that this feature is only available when viewing using an S2 style. We are currently evaluating whether it is feasible to make this feature available for S1 users.
Edit: Correction to the correction. Even if you are viewing a journal in an S2 style (by using style=mine), the Friends pages by date feature doesn't work as long as the journal itself is using an S1 style.

Edit: I forgot to mention that there is a new location for our SVN repositories and Trac interface.
The main SVN repositories are here:
http://code.livejournal.org/svn/livejournal/
http://code.livejournal.org/svn/ljcom/
And a Trac frontend to all of them is here:
http://code.livejournal.org/trac

Features:

• User will now be sent an email when any of their security-related attributes change (Account status, Username, Email - sent to previously validated email, Password, Secret question)
• The dialog box requesting feedback on the User Profile page can now be closed
• Paid users can now view entries from those on your friendslist for a particular day by appending the date to the URL (/friends/?date=YYYY-MM-DD )
  
• Post-to-LiveJournal bookmarklet (http://www.livejournal.com/bookmarklet.bml)
• New post feature "syndicate my content" added for Cyrillic users only
• More user-feedback driven updates to the profile page. Details will be provided in a post in lj_design 

Bugs fixed:

• Fixed the positioning of the "Delete Comment" pop-up in some layouts
• Fixed the behavior of the autocomplete function when entering tags containing only numbers
• Fixed problems relating to the linked titles of posts in some styles (Magazine, Tranquility, Sturdygesture, Boxer) and in S1
  
• Fixed some bugs in the Minimalism layout (display of userpics, tags in sidebar, rendering in Opera Mini and IE6) 
• Fixed rendering of titles of posts which already contained a link

Features/Changes:

• Permanent account sale started
• Added 50 additional userpics to Permanent Accounts (so all Perm Accounts should have 195 userpics as of today)
• Created mechanism for lj-embed expansion in RSS/ATOM feeds
• New journal layout added (Minimalism) plus 25 themes
• Eliminated Peanuts Labs survey page
• Added the ability to select the preferred language when opening a Support Request
• Added "Ban/Unban user" as options in AJAX friend option pop-up
• Users who have already friended you no longer count against the daily limit for adding friends
• Title of post in Last Post, Friends Pages, Calendar view (every page where displayed multiple entries) now links to entry.
• Added updated links to Friends Tools page (on"Friends" drop-down on site header)

Changes to beta settings page:

• Security question on Account tab: changed to "question is set" instead of the actual question.
• JS alert on any action that would leave the page, instead of only when switching tabs. (if user makes a change to the page but doesn't save)
• Site Scheme options now include short descriptions in parenthesis after names: Horizon (site default), Vertigo (vertical navigation), Lynx (light/text-only?)
• Hide PIN for mobile posting on the set up page, but not in the instructions. (It's hidden for voice posting, but not mobile)
• Changed [Save] to [Save Changes] and added a [Reset to Default] button next to it (wording to match /customize/options.bml). Reset would give the user whatever the site defaults are at the time of reset.
• Changed gray description text to black
• Line at the top (after title, before tabs) that says something like "Edit your account settings here. You can also edit your profile [link] and your journal style [link]."
• Added "Find by Email" choices to "Privacy" tab (this will be redundant and linked to same setting-selection on "Edit Profile" page.

Bug fixes:

• We reworked the backend code which displays ads on the site in release #40. Due to an oversight, they incorrectly showed on some system-type journal pages for Paid accounts.  Bug has been fixed for the following pages:  memories, allpics, todo.index, todo.item.
• Added commas to numbers in stats on profile page where they were missing.
• Collapsing and then re-expanding v-gift section on new profile no longer introduces huge whitespace
• Fixed bug on profile page which added an extra </div> if Posting Access list is empty (viewable on your own profile or that of a community you maintain)
• Borders on images placed into the "Bio" section of the profile will now show up
• Fixed bug on add to memories page so it never shows 2 ADV blocks
• Fixed bug relating to cursor behavior when adding comma-list of tags on update.bml page in Opera

The biggest release of all. We have been preparing for this ever since I joined LiveJournal back in April. As I write this, we have just brought up the entire LiveJournal system in Billings, Montana. There should be no functional changes, for obvious reasons, but after our database and memcache servers finish catching up, performance should be at least as good, if not better, than it was in San Francisco.

Major thanks and kudos to the LJ and 6A Ops staff who worked tirelessly to get us to this point, and a special thanks to burr86 and dormando of 6A who went above and beyond to make this gigantic transition possible.