branchandroot

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Dear AO3 decision makers,

How can you be lying so much? Your noses should be growing. Shame!

No, tag filtering is not down because FF.N had a brief witchhunt for too-porny fic and all-caps summaries, and now everyone is coming to AO3. You might wish that, but no, and a good thing, too, considering the actual reason.

Tag filtering is down because that filtering menu was written so astonishingly thoughtlessly that that menu alone took up almost two thirds of the server load. Not new accounts, not new fic being posted, not too many notification emails being sent. No. That one menu was sucking down so much horsepower that even a modest increase in traffic, as for example from a new movie fandom coming to read on AO3, flatlined the servers even before FF.N had it's latest little round of "no hot porn, we really mean it".

The reason, the real reason, is not an increased load. It's the incredibly poor programming choices initially made for that menu. You put up graphs demonstrating this fact on your own blog, for pity's sake. So, please, stop lying through your teeth about how it's all because of how beautiful and popular you are, and incidentally how evil the competition is. That's really embarrassing to watch.

Also, if you want to convince people of how hard you're working to fix it, try not making experienced programmers jump through one-way-mirror paperwork and "training" hoops to help. Then you might manage to not burn out the few programmers who are still locked in, and possibly even avoid setting yourselves up for yet another clusterfuck down the road. Concept!

Yours in deep exasperation,
Branch

P.S. Repeat after me: "Blacklight", "Solr", "not reinventing the wheel". Honestly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

annotated_em

Wait, they're doing that? Seriously?

From:

branchandroot

The Official word, which is propagating with distressingly uncritical speed, is that it's all because of the increased traffic from the people alienated by FF.N. I'd be kind of gobsmacked by the brass CYA of it all, except then I think about who's in charge of the AO3 branch and it all makes distressing sense.

From:

annotated_em

Oh my freaking god, did you SEE today's links roundup? http://otw-news.dreamwidth.org/145388.html

*hops up and down gesticulating rudely*

From:

branchandroot

*hand over eyes* So, OTW also isn't going to mention it... until a month later when it's useful to push their "not our fault" agenda. Yeah.

From:

helens78

/o\!!!!

I would be really fascinated to see what would happen if the jump-through-hoops process of volunteering to code for AO3 ever went away.

From:

branchandroot

I think it would help make development a much healthier process. Without that gate in place, it couldn't be as black-box as it is now, and it's that black-box that's letting one or two people drive the whole thing. And smothering any open discussion about how this might all be made to work.

From:

helens78

There's also the fact that a lot of things are said to be not on the agenda because other things are more important. It's one thing to say that to someone who just happens to be asking, but when you're telling someone who wants to help code, "No, you can't come work on that because other stuff is more important," it's not like they're necessarily going to just fall in line and code what you tell them! If someone has a choice between "code this small thing that I can do and learn from" or "eat some lasagna while watching Community," and they're told, "Well, you can't code that one small thing, but you can work on this monstrous project that looks intimidating and out of your reach," then pretty much the only people who benefit are lasagna ingredient manufacturers. Certainly the archive isn't benefitting by turning would-be programmers away before they even get to the door, and neither are archive users.

Blah blah blah hey choir how ya doin'. :)

From:

branchandroot

*sings the "amen"*

Exactly that, yes. The heart of an open source project is "here's all the bugs, have at 'em!". And, yeah, some things have to be done before others, but attempting to "prioritize" coding into some kind of utterly linear progression that you then require all coders to follow or they can't code is just... *throws up hands* So wrongheaded I have no words for it. Except possibly "psycho control freak".

From:

synecdochic

And this is precisely the argument to be made for an OSS project having paid employees, even part-time contractors, over and above OSS contributors, and why most large-ish OSS projects have same. It's harder to project-manage (and there is the potential for a weird hierarchy thing that many, many projects have struggled with over the years) but WHEN YOU PAY PEOPLE, EVEN A LITTLE BIT, EVEN AS CONTRACTORS, YOU CAN TELL THEM WHAT TO WORK ON. (And when you run out of paid contractors to order around, that's when you start promising people hand-knit socks. Not that I'm frantically trying to finish this pair before OSCON or anything.)

Just ... the complete ignorance of *every single modern open source project that went before* is staggering. I don't expect you to know the history of modern open source all the way back to the Linux kernel release and the development of the first GPL in order to start a new OSS project and I'm certainly not saying you have to emulate them in all things -- I'm the first to admit that contemporary OSS projects are kind of dysfunctional at times -- but for gods' sake, when you are a more dysfunctional OSS project than aforementioned Linux kernel, HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

BEST PRACTICES, PEOPLE. BEST PRACTICES. TWO DECADES OF WORK HAVE GONE INTO THEM. IF YOU ARE IGNORANT OF THEM, YOU WILL REINVENT THE THINGS THAT FAILED AND RESULTED IN THEM. BADLY.

*breathes deeply*

From:

branchandroot

*hands you a cup of soothing tea*

I mean, so much of a successful open source project is... like throwing a bag of catnip mice on the floor in a roomful of cats. You hope they'll like them, and play with them, but you know some of them will get bored, and some will just shred their mice, and others will think this is their cue to go get some dead mice to add to the pile. So you hire a few people who are more like trained service animals, to keep the whole thing from devolving into a mess. But thinking you can get those cats to act like the service dogs? Not happening. You need to hire those. And also make the pile of mice really accessible. Hell, just hacking around the edges of freaking /Wordpress/, I know this.

*considers her metaphor* Possibly that glass of wine went faster than I thought it had.

From:

synecdochic

AND YET IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE.

And, I mean, there are ways to make the mice more appealing! and there are always volunteers who want the project to succeed and will ask "okay what should I work on next?" but there needs to be someone with the AUTHORITY TO ANSWER THOSE QUESTIONS.

the lack of a product manager shows more and more and more ...

From:

vom_marlowe

The whole situation makes my stomach hurt. It does not have to be this hard! And there are reasons why people-managing and project-managing are discrete skills. They could buy a book or hire someone or even just listen to advice from people who have done things! ARRRRGH.

...maybe I need more tea. No, even tea will not help.

From:

synecdochic

And I know there are people who have been trying to change things, Jenny in particular has had a bunch of conversations with me about the things that could be improved, but nothing ever gets fixed even once the flaws are identified. Which, you know, means there's something majorly, majorly wrong in there.

From:

cyprinella

Now I understand better why it looked like you were biting the hell out of your tongue during certain parts of that con.txt panel.

From:

niqaeli

So, hey, storytime.

Once upon a time I planned to start a rare fandom exchange that would take place in summer as a more convenient time for many people for such a thing.

I contacted shalott to see if she would be willing to share her matching script and the modifications she had made to Automated Archive to host Yuletide. I said it was fine if they were a technical mess, I am pretty savvy and had a husband to volunteer into helping me get everything up and running.

She declined, saying she was too busy to package it up. In fact, she indicated she was busy coding the replacement archive! And really the fastest way to solve the problem would just be tothe send my helpful tech savvy coder over to help code on the OTWarchive software. One presumes precisely to her specifications of the road map.

I did not pass on that offer to my husband, no.

From:

jennyst

It already has! Experienced coders can submit pull requests directly on Github now, and our bug tracker has always been open. I know there's a lot of work still to be done - particularly in publicising those, in improving documentation, and in making the whole thing more welcoming - but the hoops have been greatly reduced over the past year or so.

From:

branchandroot

That's an excellent step, yes. The otwcode wiki at github, however, says that you still need to go through the form and the Volunteers and Recruiting gateway to get a development environment. Without a dev environment, what good is open permission to make pull requests? Without that environment, how can a patch be developed in the first place? The only way I can see is to attempt to install a complete instance of the archive code on one's own webspace or computer and do all the upkeep oneself since the wiki specifically disclaims any willingness to support people with local installations. If the github wiki is accurate, open pull requests is kind of a bullet without a gun.

From:

jennyst

Installing a complete instance of the code is not nearly as difficult for the AO3 as it is for Dreamwidth.

exor674 managed it in about an hour from a standing start. I agree it's not as easy as getting a Dreamhack or AO3 webdev - that's why we have support for junior coders available within the org, and have streamlined the Volunteers gateway hugely. But for an experienced coder who's going to submit more than one pull request, it's something they'll almost certainly do anyway, and would do on any other open source project apart from Dreamwidth, so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect as an alternative to filling in their name and email address on a form.

From:

branchandroot

That form is a /lot/ more than name and email address. It's downright demanding, which isn't going to appeal to anyone who's used to Open Source forums of any kind. And yes, anyone wanting to muck around in the code will certainly download a local copy. But putting the burden on the coder of keeping the local copy updated when there's such an unpredictable and relatively fast rate of updating to the master branch is an extra layer of trouble that OTW would be wise to reduce as much as possible. Even Wordpress and Mozilla created automatic update notifications and functions for local installations before they switched over to rapid deploys. So far, I'm not seeing anything like that in the Archive code or app docs.

Besides, if you want a healthy lot of contributors, you need to have a lot of them, and not just count on a few really experienced developers to appear in the Archive's hour of (self-inflicted) need. Getting a big lot means making development, even little bits of it, easy and accessible. But I've already mentioned that on the other entry.

From:

foxinthestars

Oh, good grief. And seriously, even without the gobsmacking graph, anybody who accesses the site regularly (<--Tagwrangler, phoning it in but still conscientious enough to check daily) could tell when it magically became accessible and has stayed that way since. Plus, how would the FF.net refugees even get *in* en-disruptive-masse with the queue the way it is? (Okay, as readers they could, but not as new accounts.) Suddenly I understand the protests about transparency so much better if the userbase is being flat-out lied to --- and/or addressed from some twisted unaccountable viewpoint where the sidebar itself cannot possibly be the problem...

I remain convinced that they need a message board. And right now some good ol' fashioned message board drama.

From:

branchandroot

Yeah, there's a kind of confusion over causes in the official blog that makes me think more than one person is posting, and one of them constantly tries to blame the higher traffic on ff.n explicitly while the other admits that it's the menu that's the trouble. But the "omg, dramatic and unexpected load increase from ff.n users!" line keeps getting repeated, so people are taking that version and spreading it. Despite, as you point out, the clear contradiction when the queue was five months long even /before/ ff.n's latest alienate-the-writers round.

*snorts* I think some message board drama might be healthy about now, yes.

From:

foxinthestars

That might be why they don't have one, if they're not willing to have it get trolled and explode at random intervals, but sometimes that might be what the ecosystem needs...

From:

lacey

I really like the idea of the OTW as a whole and wished to support them in general and AO3 in particular, but the more and more I find out about them the less and less I want to have anything to do with them. It makes me sad to read about all the good people ground down by this organization and its incomprehensible structure+processes and its seemingly clueless leaders, and I don't even know these people.

From:

branchandroot

I know! There's so much potential, even now, if a few of the people in charge would just get off their personal power trips and admit they're /really bad/ at running this project. But no, and reading between the lines it looks like the navigation redesign is being carried by one person, because there are no other coders willing to vanish behind the OTW curtain. With justice, I'd say.

From:

lacey

Do they not understand that they have a userbase comprised of really smart women who are able to look at the numbers and read their rhetoric and understand that they don't match? Serious question. I can barely code a little HTML and that isn't even coding but even I can look a their little graphs and see it's bullshit.

From:

branchandroot

I honestly don't know. I suppose the chorus of yes-women may be sufficiently loud for someone who isn't very into self-awareness in the first place to no realize that it isn't very /big/. And that silence may not be approval.

From:

niqaeli

Oh for the love of little green apples. Really? Really?! No, I'm sorry that shit ain't gonna fly, some of us have been PAYING ATTENTION. Cute, though, thanks for playing.

(No but seriously this whole mess is what has finally caused me to write off the AO3 and the OTW with it. And there'd been some doozies before now, but I kept hoping. Not anymore... *sigh*)

From:

branchandroot

Yeah, I'm just looking at this repeated insistence that it's all because of increased traffic from ff.n. Which, just, no. It's really, really not. Especially when earlier posts /also/ say things like "traffic doubled since January". Six months is not a "sudden" increase in traffic, and ff.n sure wasn't mucking up six (or even two) months ago.

From:

anehan

Nnngh. Nnnnnnnnnnngh. ARGH!

From:

branchandroot

A lot of that. Yes.

From:

elizabeth_rice

May I ask-- have you communicated any of this to AO3 or is it for your journal only?

From:

branchandroot

I have not yet communicated this particular item directly, because I have not calmed down enough to do it without swearing. And Sam doesn't deserve that, it isn't his fault.

Of course, part of the urge to scream comes from the fact that, when I /have/ communicated about actually changing some opaque or disingenuous bit of presentation or behavior in the past it's been waved off in the most patronizing way imaginable. I have been trying to get /someone/ to listen about the need to associate tags with sources, in the database, both for wrangling front-end and for menu creation for freaking /years/. I have gotten brushed off every time. This is not a singular experience, to put it mildly.

That kind of persistent BS doesn't make me very willing to "contribute to the dialogue" or any of that crap. It's not a dialogue, and I'm done putting up with listening to someone smile while they completely ignore me.