What are Dreamwidth's new features?

Although we've based Dreamwidth Studios on the Open Source LiveJournal software, we've also added a lot of new features of our own. If you're already familiar with LiveJournal, this list will give you a quick glimpse of some of the things we've added and has links you can follow if you're looking for more information.

• We've split the idea of "friends" into two new concepts. You now give Access to people to share your locked content and Subscribe to journals you want to see on your Reading Page.
• You can import your personal journal including entries and comments from LiveJournal and some other sites based on LiveJournal code.
• We've increased length-limits on usernames to 25 characters.
• We've increased the length limits for entries to 300,000 characters.
• We've increased the length limits for comments to 16,000 characters.
• We've removed the word count limit for interests.
• We've increased the size limits for polls made through the poll creator.
• We've added another option on the "gender" field. Instead of "female, male, unspecified", the choices are now "female, male, other, unspecified".
• We've renamed "Adult concepts" and "graphic adult material" to "NSFW" (short for "Not Safe For Work") and "18+" so it's clear what they are and what they do. Users under the age of 18 will not be permitted to view 18+ material under any circumstances. Users over 18 can select whether they want to view 18+ posts in their account settings.
• We've completely reworked the system of "Adult Concepts". You can still optionally mark your posts as "18+" or "Not safe For Work", but other people can no longer flag up your content for review.
• We now allow people to describe why they chose the particular adult-content setting they chose, so you can (for instance) say "NSFW for image of naked people" or "18+ for violent content", etc. This works for both individual entries and for your whole journal, so if you set your entire journal to 18+, you can make the click-through say "this journal contains frequent nude images", or whatever else you want.
• We've added the ability to upload more than one user icon at a time.
• We've worked extensively on OpenID accounts so they're easier to use and can do more.
• The RSS and Atom feeds of your journal will now treat cuts appropriately
• We've changed the name "maintainer" for a community to "administrator" to make it clearer as to what the position is.
• If you're the administrator of a community, you'll now get a warning if you try to delete your journal, reminding you to pick a new administrator.
• We've changed the logic of when the Navigation Strip is shown to you. It's now a viewing preference and not a style preference — you choose when and where you want to see it and no one can override that for you.
• We've added a "description" field to user icons. This is used to add a text description of the content of the icon, which shows as "alt" text for blind users and some other forms of assistive technology.
• We've added a new account type for staff accounts, to only be used for staff business. These are clearly marked with a unique icon so people will always be able to know when someone they're talking to is site staff and acting as such.
• We've renamed all the LiveJournal tags to more general forms. The lj user tag format is now <user name="username">, and the lj-cut tag is now simply <cut> or <cut text="Cut Text Here">. The old tags will still work, for those who don't want to memorise new versions.
• We've made it easier to refer to people on other services by using <user name="username" site="livejournal.com">.
• We've upgraded the spellcheck option and added support for custom dictionaries. This will let us add commonly-used terms that aren't in the dictionary already and new words that come from the community.
• We've added some extra links to the navigation strip. You'll now find a link to reload the page you're looking at with ?style=mine and ?format=light options, a 'Track User' link, and a 'Confirm Email' link for accounts with unconfirmed email addresses.
• We've streamlined process for creating new accounts.
• The Lynx site skin now displays whether you're logged in, and the name of the logged in account. We've also added a search option to the Lynx skin.
• We've added bad password checking to increase account security.
• We've added a Preview button to comment Quick Replies.
• We've made it easier for a journal owner to tell the difference between visible and screened comments.
• Added "random community" page, as well as the existing "random user" page, to help you find interesting active communities.
• You can now list your Twitter and Delicious accounts on your profile.
• We've fixed a lot of minor bugs that have always annoyed us. for instance: comment notification emails no longer strip single returns, and the entry preview will now respect the "don't use custom comment pages" option if the journal owner has it set.
• As part of our commitment to Open Source, we've explicitly license our FAQs under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license so other sites can use the documentation we write, and updated the LICENSE file in dw-free, by adding the dual-licensing option (GPL and Artistic) for code we wrote entirely ourselves and updating the copyright information for the files we forked from LJ.
• We've added a selective screening option, to make it easier to control comments in your journal or communities.