*hairy eyeball*

[branchandroot]

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.

Comments

[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.

[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.

[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...