Yep

[branchandroot]

The only thing I really have to say about AO3's latest contretemps is: I told you so~

When a platform is so fucked up that the only way to make it run is to take out the navigation, then it's time to think real hard about who's been driving development.

Comments

[tessercat]

...buzzuh? Take out the nav? How? What? okay... obviously I need to go investigate...

[branchandroot]

The tag filtering sidebar is currently turned off, and I can only imagine what the tags table must look like if cutting that out of the loop has more or less fixed the site load issues. You can still navigate among fandoms, but any index you just have to haul through story by story, now.

*dry* At least the 1000 work limit has been removed.

[tessercat]

*head-f'ing-desk*

Wow. Okay. That's painful.

[momijizukamori]

I kind of want to see the load graph of before and after they disabled tags.....

[branchandroot]

*snerks* Yeah, I think that would be diagnostic all right.

This is why Tumblr doesn't actually /index/ tags under a certain threshhold or index back in time indefinitely. When you have that many trash-tags, serving as meta rather than as actual searchables, you really have to make some choices.

[dragonscrawl]

And AO3 thoughtfully provides via their status twitter!

Speaks for itself, really.

[seagull2eagle]

I saw that announcement and head-bonked against the nearest wall-surface a few times. Oy. Idiots. Their system never really worked all that well in the first place for trying to find anything, and to find out that was the major problem in their server load (which yes, you had predicted well in advance)...

I'm also particularly ticked off by the fact that they have *OVER 17,000* users waiting for an invitation and they're only giving out 100 a day! And they took away our own right to give out invites. WTF? Seriously, you're going to make people wait over SIX MONTHS to get accounts, and in most cases, that's just so they can *read* stories? ???? That's some seriously stupid planning and way to alienate a whole ton of people.

Six months? When the site has been up and running for *years*? At this point, the "beta" should be out of it's name altogether! But they keep hiding behind the "beta" saying "work in progress" when it's really such a slapped together effort.

Not to mention the other thing I found and screamed about earlier (at least they responded promptly to my ticket and admitted guilt in the matter).

Argh. Again, love the concept. Love that they've archived stories. Nice to have... but what a really horrible way of implementing it.

yeaaaaaaaaaaah....

[pockynazi]

Because I kept meaning to get a AO3 account and putting it off, I figured I'd take this opportunity to join the never ending queue, and this was the little automated response - You've been added to our queue! Yay! We estimate that you'll receive an invitation around 2012-12-17.

That? That's just absurd.

[branchandroot]

Yep! I told them /that/ too, not too very long ago. And it's not like accounts are what adds load (as has been demonstrated). It's not even like /uploads/ are what adds most of the load. *shakes head* Such a mess.

[kaigou]

In my industry, we talk a lot about "user experience" but... removing the navigation? That's an experience, certainly, but not one I'd ever wish on any users. What are they smoking over at AO3, anyway?

[branchandroot]

The sad part? That sidebar full of tags, with which to filter a fandom full of stories, appears to have been responsible for almost two thirds of the server load.

So now they're back to olde timey FFN sort of navigation, where you just keep paging back through the whole list of a fandom twenty at a time. Because the new and improved way to find stories was just that totally broken.

[sabriel]

/facepalms

Yea, the tagging system's always been rather bloated but I actually USE those tags to try to filter out some stories I'm looking for...

[branchandroot]

Without the tags, it's definitely a lot more of a slog. This should have been addressed a /long time ago/, so as to avoid such a drastic "solution".

[highlander_ii]

The tag filters pull data from the 1000 works themselves, which is what they were assuming the page load/cache issues were stemming from. (I am not in any way a dba, so have NO idea how much else might be part of the issue and wouldn't even attempt to venture a guess.)

Tags and tag wrangling themselves are unaffected. Meaning - if you click on a tag - everything connected to that tag will pull up.

Advanced search, however, doesn't work that way - if you search for 'Coulson' in the tag search, you'll only get works tagged with 'Coulson', but if you then click on 'Coulson', you'll get works tagged as all the variations attached to 'Coulson'. (Unless something's changed dramatically that I've not been told about.)

So it's not the 'tags' themselves causing the issue, it's the db walking through each of the works that pulls up in the 1000 results to populate the filter w/ the top-level/canonical tags. Which, if it's one or two people, not a problem, but when it becomes waaaaaay more than that - yeah, problem.

How to fix that? *shrug* Again - I am not a dba of any fashion. I wouldn't even know where to start.

I do know that there are plans to update the filtering system. I don't know what they are or what the ETA is - though it's possibly going to get bumped up considerably given the recent evidence, but that's not my domain.

As far as invites - I'm with ya'll there - just send 'em out and let people in. Though, I don't think an invite is needed just to read on the archive - only if one wants to comment or bookmark w/in the archive.

[branchandroot]

*hollowly* An individual query. For every tag. On every story. In the whole set.

*puts her head down and just cries*

Oh my /god/, who thought that was a good idea?! How did the fact that the query had to be capped not suggest instantly that the basic concept was flawed, and it would only get worse?

How they fix it is to only put the canonical character and relationship tags associated with a given fandom source in that sidebar. Those to be retrieved with a /single/ query to a new table which uses the fandom source id as the primary key to associate canonicals with the source(s). Faceted filtering by freeform needs to wait until they have got a competent project manager and admin, and probably be a totally separate page in the Tags area.

Oh my unholy fuck. I think I need to go get my smelling salts. No wonder it was such a hideous drain.

[seagull2eagle]

There's a bunch of locked stories on the archives now - you have to be a member of the archive and logged in to read them.

[krait]

I. Wow. I'd wondered when the load times suddenly dropped -- despite the last update I'd seen reading, in essence, 'we can't do anything for a few weeks, sorry' -- what they'd figured out.

That, though? I did not expect that, and am a little amazed that I didn't notice. (I guess I mostly use in-fic tags, not sidebar tags? Huh.)

Mostly, though? I just want to give a hearty shout of "I SECOND THE MOTION!" to your past statement of tag wrangling on AO3 should be a function that creators and viewers have immediate, front-end access to, because. YES. Yes, yes, and YES IMMEDIATELY.

Seriously, I can *promise* that, when I tag a fic, I am well aware of terms that my tags should overlap with! (And ones they shouldn't.) For that matter, I sometimes find fics when reading whose tags need adjustment/linkage in ways I recognise! Do you even know how many times I have wished for tag-wrangling powers, or even a flippin' SUGGESTION BOX FOR TAGWRANGLING?! I can't even. That. ARGH.

[arduinna]

a flippin' SUGGESTION BOX FOR TAGWRANGLING?!

Support and Feedback, choose "Tags" in the first dropdown box.

[branchandroot]

*snorts* Yeah. The concept and current system behind tags is such a bizarre mashup of "we have to let everyone do anything they want" and "we have to be in complete control". Certainly non-author wrangling should have to go through review/approval, otherwise... oh god, the potential for vandalism. *winces at the thought* But let the /author/ have an "approve it/trash it" button! I mean, if she doesn't want to use it, fine, leave it for the wranglers (poor sods), but give her one! This could go so much faster and smoother with a tiny bit of forethought and automation. And someone in charge who's less of a flaming control freak.

[ldybastet]

This is so stupid and annoying that I don't even know what to say about it. So, instead I'll comment on the fact that apparently an alphabetical list of writers/accounts was not at aaaaaall helpful for finding ppl I was wondering if they had an account there (Oh, I recognise that name! I wonder what stories they've uploaded? *click*), but a list of 10 random accounts is. Yeah.

[branchandroot]

*laughs* Okay, that's funny. Yeah, there are so many accounts that going alphabetically takes forever, and the search was pretty useless last time I used it. Way too limited, couldn't even handle "same name with or without spaces". I think, to start with, it was even case sensitive. But the random button likes you! *giggling*

[synecdochic]

The more I look into this, the more tempted I am to go read the code and figure out just how fucked it is.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU ARE CARGO CULT PROGRAMMERS.

[branchandroot]

That is a distressingly accurate name for it, yes. I honestly don't think the sidebar can be fixed without re-doing it from scratch.

[mitsuhachi]

This is probably a stupid question, because I know jack all about site programming, and also the answer is probably "bullshit politics", but...Why can't they just do the tags like delicious? That's super useful and user-friendly, and they don't seem to have the site problems AO3's current model is giving them.

[branchandroot]

Not that I can give an authoritative answer, because the real answer is buried in black-box meetings. But I think there's a horrible confluence of "the interface must be simple and uncluttered!" and "it will only upset people if we show them how we scramble around and hack at things trying to make this all work" and "/obviously/ we can do it /better/ (despite being totally inexperienced and having an apparent aversion to asking or looking up how to do shit)".

So most of the tag tree is utterly invisible to the users and the wranglers have to bust their asses trying to make users' (forcibly ignorant) choices work sensibly, and never mind the right and left hands, the freaking thumb doesn't know what the first finger is doing. A lot of the essential infrastructure that delicious employed is probably in place--it's just invisible and being manually shoe-horned by an artificial extra layer of labor because no one can see what they're doing and all the users are driving blind. One reason that crowdsourced databases work is that people can see what other people have done, and a general consensus emerges about how we label things. AO3 deliberately shut that off.

Ideally, this particular issue is vast and bad enough that it may prompt some re-evaluation of that rat's nest, but personally I doubt it.