*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

[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*

[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.

[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 ...

[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.

[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.

[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.