red account picker?

Today, the account picker in my web panel turned red and remains expanded. I can't figure out why this is. Did it change for everyone else?

Changed for me too...can't tell that it signifies anything, though. I wonder why they did that?
--rlparker

I must be missing something. I have an "active domain," but I thought I used to have an "active account." Or something like that. I have no panel that's permanently expanded or red, though.

-Scott

sounds like you don't have it... and I do think it used to be called "active account" before, not account picker. For me, it's in the panel's left nav, under active domain.

In reply to:
and I do think it used to be called "active account" before, not account picker. For me, it's in the panel's left nav, under active domain.

I only have one account, so there is no "account picker" for me - just the domain picker ("active domain"). It's in the usual shades of blue.

I noticed this as well. I've added my main web ID to another account of mine and this new coloring is apparently to emphasize the 'switchability' - both accounts show up under the new red picker

jason

We just made changes to the account picker. Now:

If only have one account, you don't see an account picker at all.
If you have multiple accounts, you DO see an account picker, and that account picker is blazing red! Hooray. I don't know why we picked red on an all blue page. It's crazy. Nothing is wrong (despite red being a "problem indication" color... hmm.)

We also removed the active domain picker. None of our panel pages use it anymore (well, one did.. we rewrote it and now it doesn't.)

Can this be made blue like the previous one was?

Also, I used the active domain picker. :/

In reply to:
Also, I used the active domain picker. :/

why? it didn't do anything!

jason

In reply to:
why? it didn't do anything!

Oh, but it did. When I selected a domain, then went to other areas of the panel, they would default to that domain. For example, Mail>Manage Addresses would automatically select the domain I had chosen with the domain picker.

Plus, in the above example, that field on the page is very small and scrolling through them all is very tedious compared to the domain picker.

I have over 40 domains setup.

I understand, and it would have been an excellent useable feature if it had behaved that way in a somewhat global fashion but from my expereinec the selection was next to worthless in almost every area of the panel.

All it ever did for me was to raise my expectations only to crush them :)

I have one account with 30 domains on it and I found that was the place I most *hated* it actually, they were all just mirrors and it was a massive clutter.

It would be nice if it was globally useful, without a doubt.

jason

I agree that in most parts of the panel it was useless. For me, in the parts it wasn't it was very helpful.

But the red account picker... it should at least go back to no staying expanded.

Thank you DH :o)

Way back when we first started on this iteration of our web panel we had planned to make the domain selector work throughout all the different areas. However, fairly early on we started noticing that it was very confusing to a lot of people, many of which didn't even notice the domain picker over there.

We could have tried to improve the picker itself to make it easier to notice and more obvious to use but there was some divergence within our development team about it. Some of us preferred the 'select a domain' then 'select an action' paradigm because you could select the domain once and then click around making changes (I was in that camp), while others preferred the 'select an action' then 'select a domain/user/etc' paradigm. One problem with the former approach (select domain then select action) is it didn't work well in all areas of the web panel so we ended up with some areas supporting it and others not. That led to further user confusion and made things needlessly complex. Additionally, without having separate choosers for users, mysql dbs, etc the whole concept would never work throughout every area of our web panel.

Some of us tried to hold onto it for awhile but over time as parts of the web panel were redesigned fewer and fewer of them used the domain picker at all until we got to this point where only one remaining part of the web panel used it at all.

Anyway, there's a little history...

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

thanks for the info, Dallas! I remember back when the web panel had more "vote for us at [xyz] host info site" buttons than actual functionality. ;o)

The green is much better :-)

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