*hairy eyeball*
Jun. 25th, 2012 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootDear 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 05:19 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 10:41 pm (UTC)