Dreamwidth-Specific Jargon

Dreamwidth-Originated

This is largely unofficial slang/jargon, and is intended as a helpful reference for understanding actual conversation, rather than a prescriptive definition. For the official word on phrasing, capitalization, and so forth, in Support answers and the like, see the Manual of Style.

bi-journaltastic

using two platforms, such as both Dreamwidth and LiveJournal (seen in the wild at http://elke-tanzer.dreamwidth.org/1040811.html)

circle, encircle

v. To add someone to your circle (subscription, access, or both).

circle

n. The whole collection of subscription, access, and sometimes readers and those who have granted one access.

colorway

In fiber arts, a specific dye color or combination of colors as applied to a type of yarn, for example, Noro's 'Silk Garden' yarn in blue and green might be the 'Royal' colorway. The combination of the colors and the type of yarn (the combination of fibers, the type of spin, and the number of strands) forms the colorway. The same colors may be available on other types of yarn, and the same types of yarn may be available in other colors.

In journal styling, a theme could be analogous to a yarn colorway -- applying a specific color variation on an existing style.

DevCom

Developer Communicator. The staff liaison with volunteer contributors, aka karzilla. Derived from CapCom: "capsule communicator; a NASA position, the liaison between an in-space crew and mission control."

dlist, dreamlist

Reading page. Sometimes also used to address various circle members.

dlog

Journal, contraction of the portmanteau dream + log, related to blog = web + log.

dreamsheep

The unofficial mascot of Dreamwidth, a small sleeping cartoon sheep with a thought bubble. There are icons. Also see dreamsheep

Dreamwidth

Coined by denise and mark, a portmanteau of "dream" + "bandwidth". Note that it is a single word, with an initial capital and no internal capital. (The font in the logo is fanciful and switches mid-word, but the canonical capitalization is one single capital to start with and lower-case the rest of the way.) Mark shares the history of the naming process.

droll

Reading page. A contraction of the portmanteau "Dreamroll", formed from "blogroll". Compare LiveJournal's "flist". Sometimes also used to address various circle members.

dual siteizenship

Maintaining active accounts (for reasonable definitions of "active", like updating, reading people/comms/feeds, commenting) on (at least) two different journaling sites, such as both Dreamwidth and LiveJournal. (A slightly twee Azz-ism melding "dual citizenship" with "website".)

DW, Deewee, Dth, DWJ, ДримВис

Abbreviations for Dreamwidth.

DW (disambiguation): Also used as an abbreviation for the BBC television show Doctor Who or the Debian Women group, and sometimes even the game Dragon Warrior. Active Doctor Who-Inclusive Communities on Dreamwidth Dreamwidth interests: "doctor who" Dreamwidth interests: "debian"

DWJ = Dreamwidth Journal; has also been used to mean Diana Wynne Jones. Dreamwidth interests: "diana wynne jones"

dweebs, dweeps

Dreamwidth people: members of your circle on Dreamwidth: or Dreamwidth peeps. As you can see, they were words that started with "dw".

dwenizens

A portmanteau of "dw" + "denizens". Used more inclusively than just one person's circle; may mean all of Dreamwidth, or all of the #dreamwidth channel.

dwirkle

smashing "DW" and "circle" together.

dwitch, dwitchers

Glitch players from Dreamwidth.

dwscoalition

Stands for Dreamwidth Studios Coalition. Originally the dwscoalition.org domain was registered as part of the company naming process, with the idea that the service name and the business name did not need to be the same. It ultimately wound up holding the wiki, bugzilla, and a few staff email accounts for a few years before being retired (a date would be nice for this).

References to dwscoalition.org should be replaced with the modern equivalent unless it's clearly in a historical context. Staff email accounts are @dreamwidth.org. Wiki links are wiki.dreamwidth.net. Bugzilla has been succeeded by GitHub; inquire in the usual dev places if you need history on any specific bug (partial caches exist but not the whole thing).

flircle

smashing "flist" (friends list) and "circle" together; seen in the wild used to address readers on some crossposted DW/LJ entries.

Horrible hack

a (obsolete as of 2013 Nov 24) workaround which routed own-journal notifications through the old notification system, rather than through ESN (and therefore the inbox).

The problem with an option that would allow notifications to skip the inbox is that email notifications can be delayed or go missing, both from problems on Dreamwidth's end, problems with third-party services Dreamwidth uses (Amazon S3), or email providers deciding that Dreamwidth is a spammer (because someone clicked the spam button on a notification). Some proposed solutions include a "trash" area and sending opted-out notifications straight to the trash, where they could still be viewed for a number of days in case of email failure.

oopsed, oops'd

Accidentally deleted, especially in the absence of a viable backup.

"I oopsed the FAQ; does anyone still have that page open or am I making a field trip to archive.org?"

Quick*Reply

There are two types of reply (comment) forms, standard (separate page) and Quick* (inline, does not lose your place when reading). The standard reply form is accessed via the ?mode=reply link from any entry or comment, and does not require scripts. The Quick*Reply forms appear inline and require scripts. All the Quick* family are actually the same thing under the hood, but for Historical Reasons "QuickReply" typically refers to inline commenting on journal entry pages and QuickerReply refers to inline commenting on the reading page. It is hoped that the meanings will collapse into one another. The clever suffix conventions of Quick{,er,est,ish,ly,ening,sand,...}Reply originate with #1622.

Standard reply form: The standard reply form includes the entry and its various metadata, a count of comments, and the full comment form. Opening the comment link in a new tab or copying and pasting the link will result in the standard form. The standard reply form is also the fallback if there is any problem with the Quick*Reply scripts (such as Quick*Reply not being available in the style, a browser extension preventing the scripts from loading, brief internet malfunction due to sharks eating packets, or other issues). In Support issues where standard reply happens where Quick*Reply was expected, an investigation to make sure that the scripts can load properly can sometimes prove fruitful.

History: In the beginning, there were no comments. Legend has it that comments were hacked together quickly one evening when someone was Wrong On LiveJournal and Brad didn't feel like hunting down the email address of that friend to admonish them. Instead, he hacked together a method to reply to any given journal entry. Thus ?mode=reply was born. At some point after that, a less-option-filled inline version was written, called QuickReply and using a separate code path. QuickReply allowed leaving comments without leaving the comment thread. After Dreamwidth forked from LiveJournal, Dreamwidth implemented an inline reply from the reading page.

rlist, reading list

Reading page. Sometimes also used to address various circle members.

stickyticky

A tickybox that remembers your preferences without being part of a dedicated settings page, a la the time preference and disable auto-formatting tickyboxes on the Update Entries page. (Note: neither of these remembers the state they were put into as a result of doing something on the Edit page.)

unlock

Common: "unlock [an entry]": to change the security of an entry from a more restrictive to less restrictive security setting, most often from Access to Public. Rare: "unlock to [a person]": To grant access to a person.

Old Terms from LiveJournal

This is not intended to collect all of the terms in current common use at LJ, but to collect the terms still in use on DW and their application on DW, particularly for those who are unfamiliar with the original LJ terms and environment. (Some of the items listed here originated on LJ, but not with the LJ Support/volunteer crowd.) For a more complete list of terms likely to be in use at LJ, try the LJ Support wiki list archive (often LJ volunteer specific).

For a developer-centric view of some of these (and more), see Explanations.

"bankrupt my pants"

Short for "been away, not catching up on the flist, point me at it if there's anything you need me to see" -- and yes, in the original discussion, these are UK pants. Variations include "my pants are bankrupt" or declarations of friends-list bankruptcy.

blinkie, Blinkie the Ponie

Creative, colorful, and not infrequently eye-searing adventures in journal styling, and related topics. Used mostly by people who were there on LJ.

collapsing

When 50 or more comments are made to one entry, comment threads "collapse", showing only the comment's metadata, to fit a large number of comments on the page more neatly, to reduce server strain, and to reduce load time.

ctsc (commenting to see comments)

see "empty comment (phenomenon)".

deleted

When used by a member of the general public, this tends to mean "went away" or "isn't there anymore".

It's also a term of art for the user-initiated and user-recoverable process of deleting a journal, in the timespan before it is purged (permanently deleted, called expunged in the code). The non-user-initiated and non-user-recoverable one (done on LiveJournal by the Abuse Prevention Team, on Dreamwidth by the Terms of Service team) is called 'suspended'.

empty comment (phenomenon)

Less a term and more a cultural use of comments, sometimes a comment is left that has no text (a non-breaking space or other non-displaying character) or null-content text (an X, or similar). There are several possible meanings.

• Presence-marker: A signal that the commenter was present and read what you wrote, even if they have nothing to say.
• Icon says it all: A comment must have text in order to post, but their icon is sufficient to convey their feelings. This is when they have selected a non-default icon.
• Comment emoticon says it all: One can select from a small range of comment emoticons when creating a comment. Again, a comment must have text in order to post.
• +1/-1, plus or minus a larger number: This is not meant as null text, but as a signifier of agreement or disagreement. Threading matters. When the comment is directly in reply to the original entry, it indicates agreement with the entry. If it is in reply to a comment, it indicates agreement with the comment. This has a long history in FLOSS consensus culture.
• On LiveJournal, often seen as "." or "ctsc" ("commenting to see comments") -- during periods of high site load or DDoS mitigation, the caching system will delay updates by up to 5-10 minutes for logged-out users, and comments may appear and disappear depending on which webserver answers your request. Commenting will update the URL to a new URL (with the just-posted comment's number as an argument) and force an update of the cache.
• On Tumblr, an x may not be null; it may be the text of a discreet link to a source.

expunge, expunged

Back-end terminology for deleted-and-purged journals.

On LiveJournal, accounts which have been suspended by their Abuse Prevention Team will also be expunged after a few years of continuous suspension. Unfortunately this process has re-exposed spam comments from spammers who were previously suspended. Unfortunately, those spam comments can then be imported to Dreamwidth.

filter

1) the use of custom security groups to further restrict access to certain entries. When such entries are created, the author often indicates in the entry that access has been restricted using a custom group.

2) the use of a custom reading group to filter one's reading page

flist

Friends list. (Used, variously, of one's reading page, the members of one's access list, everyone who has you on their reading pages, and the intersection between one's access list and everyone who has you on their reading pages.)

flock

Friends-lock. To lock to one's access list.

friend

(verb) To add to one's circle. (Unknown whether this is used more for adding to read, granting access, or both at once.)

(noun) 1) Someone who one maintains a friendship with. 2) A member of various unspecified parts of one's circle. (Unknown what exact circle relationship this is used most often with.)

Paid Account Fairy, PAF

On LiveJournal, the practice of giving volunteers putting in a notable amount and quality of labor a complementary paid account. The "paid account fairy" delivered the upgrade. On Dreamwidth, the account paidaccountfairy connects people who can't afford (or can't justify) the cost of a paid account, with people who are willing to support Dreamwidth by buying paid accounts for relative strangers. On both services, paid accounts can be sent as an anonymous gift. Dreamwidth has a feature which suggests a random free user who might appreciate the gift of a paid account (active and not opted out), making the matchmaking offered up at paidaccountfairy less relevant. This can be found under the "Shop" menu, as "Gift a Random User".

rename plague

has renamed their journal. From LJ volunteers, when a bunch of people renamed their journal in a contagious-looking cluster.

S1

the (possibly original) style language, which is/was used to build journal views and friends page views. S1 has been officially retired, but long-time LJ users may still make use of it. S1 is not supported on Dreamwidth.

S2

the successor to S1. Dreamwidth uses S2, or at least a version thereof. There are many popular styles on LJ written in S2 which cannot be directly ported over to Dreamwidth to be used officially for the simple reason that LiveJournal owns them (or the artwork around which they are based) and DW can't go grabbyhands it as an official action without getting in trouble.

S3

this has nothing to do with style languages, and is a recent change on Dreamwidth.

spr0t

Support. Usually, things pertaining to technical support, and/or the greater community of technical support volunteers and staff, and assorted ancillary folks.

In Dreamwidth, this is usually #dreamwidth-support in IRC (also called #dw-support or # -support) and the Dreamwidth Support board. Also spelled "sprot", but less often.

On LiveJournal, this was #lj_support in IRC (also called #lj_s) and the LiveJournal support board. PauAmma recalls that this abbreviation may have originated from kamara.

tag, tagging

In the context of roleplaying, to "tag" is to leave a (generally quick) comment. This may derive from the turn-based game. If a roleplayer mentions technical problems with "tagging" in a way that does not sound related to entry tags, it may involve commenting to a roleplaying game. Feel free to ask clarifying questions.

Short fics set immediately after canon events (for example, after a particular episode of television) can be called an "episode tag". (Episode Tag on fanlore.)

More typically in the technical context of LJ and Dreamwidth, labels called tags can be applied to entries, both in personal journals and in communities.

unimportant fires

Generally this references a particularly unimportant shrubbery fire which made it to metaquotes.

zhzh, zhe zhe, ЖЖ

From the Russian translation of LiveJournal: Живой журнал (Zhivoĭ zhurnal). LJ is ЖЖ in Russian, and this is transliterated as zhzh or zhe zhe. English-speaking LJ volunteers were using this as an affectionate nickname for LiveJournal well before the SUP purchase. This always refers to LiveJournal, and in English-language Dreamwidth volunteer culture is mostly used by current and former LJ volunteers and staff.

zhezhenophobia

Xenophobia/Russophobia as appearing in, or specific to, discussions of LiveJournal.