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...

[momijizukamori]

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

[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.

[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?

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.