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.

Threaded | Flat

From:

annotated_em

Wait, they're doing that? Seriously?

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.

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.

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.

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*)