*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

[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.

[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.