LW 2.0 Open Beta starts 9/20
Two years ago, I wrote Lesswrong 2.0. It’s been quite the adventure since then; I took up the mantle of organizing work to improve the site but was missing some of the core skills, and also never quite had the time to make it my top priority. Earlier this year, I talked with Oliver Habryka and he joined the project and has done the lion’s share of the work since then, with help along the way from Eric Rogstad, Harmanas Chopra, Ben Pace, Raymond Arnold, and myself. Dedicated staff has led to serious progress, and we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So what’s next? We’ve been running the closed beta for some time at lesserwrong.com with an import of the old LW database, and are now happy enough with it to show it to you all. On 9/20, next Wednesday, we’ll turn on account creation, making it an open beta. (This will involve making a new password, as the passwords are stored hashed and we’ve changed the hashing function from the old site.) If you don’t have an email address set for your account (see here), I recommend adding it by the end of the open beta so we can merge accounts. For the open beta, just use the Intercom button in the lower right corner if you have any trouble.
Once the open beta concludes, we’ll have a vote of veteran users (over 1k karma as of yesterday) on whether to change the code at lesswrong.com over to the new design or not. It seems important to look into the dark and have an escape valve in case this is the wrong direction for LW. If the vote goes through, we’ll import the new LW activity since the previous import to the new servers, merging the two, and point the url to the new servers. If it doesn’t, we’ll likely turn LW into an archive.
Oliver Habryka will be posting shortly with his views on LW and more details on our plans for how LW 2.0 will further intellectual progress in the community.
To clarify, does this mean that once the open beta conclude either A) we will switch permanently to the LW 2.0 or B) LW as a whole will close down to new posts/comments?
EDIT: From http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/pes/lesswrong_20_strategic_overview/ it is clear that this is in fact the case.
Correct.
Update: Open beta will happen today by 4pm Pacific time. At this point you will be able to sign up / login with your LW 1.0 accounts (if the latter, you should request a password-rest email, as we did not copy over your passwords).
I don’t seem to have received the password reset email either. (Also, you might want to have this information on the website itself somewhere accessible from the login box.)
Hi, I think the comment above was slightly inaccurate earlier—when you’re logging in, hit ‘forgot password’ to get the email.
If you did that and still don’t receive an email, PM me with the email you want to get it sent to, and I’ll do it manually.
I did that yesterday and again today. PMing.
I’ve just sent an email to the new address. Let me know if that works or not (very occasionally it goes into spam btw).
That worked!
Woop!
I attempted to sign up using my LW 1.0 username and a newly generated password. I was told that an account already existed. I then said I’d forgotten my password and was told that a new one was being emailed to me. Some considerable time later, I have not received any such email. I do not believe any such email arrived and was binned as spam.
Is this a known problem? Is there any way to find out whether I did actually get sent a password-reset email, and if so whether it bounced?
[EDITED to add:] Nor did I receive any sort of password-reset email before doing the above.
I apologize!
I noticed a bug with your user account in particular in our logs, though I am not exactly sure what caused it. I fixed it now. Sorry for the inconvenience. Requesting another password reset email now should work well. And if anything else goes wrong, always feel free to ping us on Intercom in the bottom right corner, we are currently on high-alert and so are responding within 5 minutes (and usually respond within the half hour)
I requested another password reset email. Once again, I didn’t get one.
(Replying here rather than via Intercom because I’m currently in one place and will soon be leaving for another, so if I contact you via Intercom then it will be hours before I see your response and can tell you, or try, anything more.)
Hmm, maybe you had a different email registered than the one you are checking? Can you send me a PM with your preferred email? I am happy to change it to that then.
PM sent. Thanks!
(Though I think the email address Lesser Wrong has for me is already the right one...)
It does not seem to be working.
Hmm, is there anything in particular that is not working? We fixed a few bugs over the last few hours, but the page should have been functional since 4PM.
It works now.
Note that the person who is running the LW survey this year (same as last year) has kindly added some questions about LW 2.0, but isn’t directly involved with the project. You can take the survey here.
If you changed the hashing function so it’s harder to invert, you could just hash the old hashes with your new hashing function so people don’t need to make new passwords.
That might not be the only reason. The Reddit code base might very well do hashing in a complex way that they don’t simply want to carry over.
I’m obviously very late to the party, but FWIW I have a different take of what LessWrong 2.0 should look like: https://highpriestessofelua.tumblr.com/post/165334646282/apparently-some-people-are-trying-to-revive
Making friends is not the mission of LW 2.0. However, right now the 2017 survey is investigating what demand there is for a site which does have that as its mission.
As for the largest diaspora community, this is a question which was investigated in the 2016 survey: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nor/2016_lesswrong_diaspora_survey_analysis_part_two/
In general summary:
The largest diaspora community is SSC.
LessWrong was actually still bigger than Tumblr by a smidgen.
My impression reading this is that you mostly just want a better Tumblr. Would that be fair?
I didn’t get the password reset email.
Sorry, there was a miscommunication at an earlier point. We did not send out password-reset emails to everyone, however you can request a password-reset email in the login form on the new LessWrong, which should work well.
I’ve done that. Still haven’t gotten an email. I’ve checked my spam folder.
I think I’ve figured it out. Some email servers have very strict spam requirements, and I hadn’t set up our MX records properly (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MX_record). This caused the emails to go through for a large majority of users, but not some who had custom domain setups with strong spam filters. This should be fixed now.
Really sorry for the trouble.
I’m in!
Thanks very much.