Vivisector
Daggers and Spears and Songs => FA Obsession Collection => Topic started by: Conan on January 17, 2012, 02:04:07 am
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Monday was FurAffinity's seventh birthday,
and like previous years, Dragoneer pulled out all the stops while celebrating!
Nope, not this year. This year, FA's birthday came and went with not even a tweet mentioning it. Perhaps Dragonner was busy, and just didn't have the time. Maybe he forgot. Or maybe, it was avoided because of what was said last year (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/90879-Fur-Affinity-Turns-6!) and what has actually been done.
Ah, yes, January 2011. Not even a month after the exciting events of 12/19. Fresh memories of note leaks, hackers, and incompetent sysadmins watching the hackers scrape notes while doing little to stop them before it was too late. Something had to be done to restore faith in FA, so Dragoneer buckled down. It was time to fix things.
The birthday announcement was made. A date was set (May 21st! During FA:U!) for the new UI to be ready for beta. A professional developer would be paid to implement the new UI. And the hosting service would be up and running within 30 days. New coders were promised. "we've come off with a fresh new perspective since December, and we're not wasting that momentum." it said.
The momentum quickly died. May 21st came and went, with only a "preview" of the new UI taking place. The hosting service was never spoken of again. A discussion thread for the new UI was started (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/89770-Discussion-Thread-for-%28preliminary-%29-New-UI), and then left for dead. Not a single change to the technical staff was made throughout the course of the year.
What did happen is quite the lengthy story.
Remaining portion of January:
-Code Leak (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,432.msg4421.html#msg4421): While Dragoneer was talking about how he wanted to improve FA, someone discovers that a directory containing FA's code is wide open for anyone to access. Several parts of the code are obtained, and we get to see things like
return addslashes(stripslashes(stripslashes($value)));
-"Miserable Users" (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,464.0.html): A user discovers the forum accounts of Rossyfox and Accountability have been placed in a "Miserable Users (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93258)" group. It turns out Carenath had set up the plugin without telling anyone, and had done a poor job of doing so. When called out, he responds on twitter with "Also, I am not quitting, FUCK YOU."
-Statistics leaked: Someone forgot to close the door on FA's Cacti server, allowing a bunch of non-sensitive data to spill out (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,455.msg4653.html#msg4653). Take note: their file server is dangerously full, with only 150GB of free space remaining.
February:
February started out with a bang.
-Inactive staff (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,468.0.html): Arshes Nei had apparently been asking for a "Trouble Ticket Policy" to require administrators to answer tickets instead of just taking up space on the a staff page, and threatened to go public with these complaints if it was not implemented. It wasn't, she went public (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/91150-Trouble-Ticket-Policy-for-Site-Admins), and we witnessed some great drama unfold. Information came out that Dragoneer had threatened staff for trying to get him to remove inactive admins.
Eventually most of the inactive admins were removed. One (Silver R. Wolfe) was removed and added back immediately afterwards, but would be removed again later in the year.
-Support Site (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,469.0.html): After mentioning "improving support" as one of the goals for 2011, Dragoneer buys a $60 Knowledgebase software called "KBLance" (Have question? Get answer!") to replace the neglected MediaWiki install they were using for support. It's quickly discovered to be poorly coded, and is quickly removed.
The idea didn't stay dead for long, a few hours later it returned on a software package that costs $50 a month. The new software is "wiki-based" and appears to just be a custom skin on top of a lightly modified wiki.
Although people were invited to submit questions to it, the knowledgebase is quickly abandoned. Only one new article is added after February 14th.
-Commission Information page removed: After being disabled for nearly two years (March 2009) due to XSS exploits, the "commission information" portion of user profiles is quietly removed.
-Rhainor account hack: Someone breaks into the account of administrator Rhainor (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,479.0.html). They did so by hacking into Rhainor's AIM account and then asking one of the other admins to change the password on the account. The other admin happily obliged.
March:
-DDoS: A DDoS attack that stretches multiple (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/93567-FA-outages-on-2011-03-01-and-2011-03-02) days (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/93688-2011-03-03-Connection-timing-out) takes place.
-Passwords Unchanged: Evil hacker trolls (sometimes known as #vivisector) discover that a note leaked in December contains what appears to be Dax's server password. Lo and behold, it is, and the evil hacker trolls get access to Bahamut, FA's "database backup", and worse, "Novastorm", the database server. FA is quickly informed.
-Hardware install (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/94741-quot-New-Hardware-quot)A firewall and load balancer are installed. The firewall terminates access to the holding page for the "URL shortener" project "Pss.ms", the load balancer does nothing significant at the moment, because there's nothing to load balance. Following this maintenance, the site has a noticeable slowdown.
-Service outage: "Figment", the box that hosts most of FA's non-mainsite services (i.e. email) goes offline. The staff are aware, but no public announcement is made for 12 hours (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/94311-3-12-11-Partial-Services-Down). Users are unable to register, reset passwords, email the staff, or register for FA: United.
-DDoS 2: Electric Boogaloo: Another DDoS. It's taken care of rather quickly (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/95176-3-24-2011-Unscheduled-Downtime).
April:
-Ratte's forum account hacked (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,501.0.html): Someone obtains access to Ratte's forum account and dumps a number of threads from the administration boards onto Lulz.net. It's revealed that FA asked admins to sign up for "admin-only gmail accounts" to help prevent malicious users from hacking into email accounts and resetting site passwords. Interestingly, this was after Yak claimed all staff would get @furaffinity.net accounts for that purpose.
May:
-Data scraping (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,507.0.html): A Lulz.net user finds a few links in the leaked December notes that point to pages that aggregate and return journals that mention specific keywords. Apparently, FA had provided the staff of Inkbunny and the staff of Antheria with one of these. It's also discovered that one exists to track mentions of Allan.
-FA: United: FA: United takes place. Registration is delayed three hours because the registration computers weren't ready. Panels take place as scheduled without badge requirements. A handful of people attend Silverautomatic's panel on dealing with trolls.
This was the projected date for the debut of the new UI and several new features. Instead, Dragoneer shows off portions of the new UI. No one is able to vouch if these are functioning pages or just static mock up pages.
June:
-Staff drama. During this month, admin Nylak asks for help pirating Adobe Photoshop (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,524.0.html). She is suspended temporarily, and later restored to administrator. Months later, she is suspended from the site, seemingly permanently, for unknown reasons. We also find out that Chase, who resigned in early January, was forced out after embarrassing Dragoneer (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,448.msg5555.html#msg5555) while Chase was at Dragoneer's parent's home.
-"Journal Virus" (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,523.0.html): Someone takes advantage of several XSS holes present in the journal system to post blank journals and submissions to user accounts. These are all problems Eevee had mentioned months earlier, and had gone unfixed until now. There was also a minor incident earlier in the year in which case similar things happened after visiting Arcturus' YiffyLeaks site. The problem is "fixed", and announced as fixed, before it was actually fixed.
-New file server (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,529.0.html): Remember back in January when FA was almost out of storage space. Well, it's the end of June and they've finally noticed. A new server with 12TB worth of drives is ordered. The server does not go online.
July:
-Web cache (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,530.0.html): Someone on FA's tech staff attempts to install a web cache and fails. For hours, users are spontaneously logged into other users accounts. No one pulls the plug on the site, even though all admins have access to a function to do just that.
-File server full (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,529.msg5594.html#msg5594): Less than two weeks after the announcement that a new server was on it's way, FA begins to error out when attempting to upload a submission (A problem that had been increasing as of late). The file server is full. Uploads resume once users voluntarily remove enough submissions. The new file server is currently sitting in pieces on Dax's bedroom floor (http://t.co/OX9V87h). It is installed shortly after, but is not placed in use yet.
-Furocity "Merger" (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,532.0.html): An announcement is made that, following more than a year of planning, FurAffinity and Furocity would combine staff. No other details are available as they're not ready yet. A "Staff Code of Conduct" is also announced, but is quickly retracted and users told the document would remain private. No ETA is available for the new UI that was scheduled for beta in May. At this point, this is an announcement, no Furocity staff have joined FA staff (some haven't even joined FA yet).
August:
-AUP updates and new staff: A day after the AUP is updated with new, bizarre and oddly specific updates (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,543.0.html), several members of Furocity's staff are added to FA staff. The new staff is almost entirely made up of "managers" for the new "department" system. Specific administrators handle a specific "department", like Artwork or Photography. Most of the existing staff have been given the title "ToS Compliance and User Support". Some existing staff is removed without warning. A forum post by Arshes informs users that the staff were not warned in advance of these changes.
-Yet another DDoS (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,548.0.html): A botnet takes FA down over the course of two days. FA tweets that the Department of Defense and the Post Office is responsible (https://twitter.com/#!/furaffinity/status/107164262757171200). During this time, their router suffers a line card failure. It is swapped for a new one, which also experiences a line card failure days later.
-Viglink (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,549.0.html): FA signs up for a "affiliate link service" site without informing the users, then claims that the feature was "in testing" (on the live site) when it was discovered. Because Viglink's opt-out service is shoddy, users pressure FA to add a feature that allows them to permanently disable it on the site.
September:
-Miscellaneous exploits: Someone discovers shouts can be posted over and over and over by refreshing the "Your shout has been made!" page. Another exploit is discovered, regarding how avatars are sized. Very thin avatars are stretched out vertically to fill the 50px wide avatar image. A combination of a very thin avatar embedded in multiple lines of a shout plus the shout F5 exploit allow malicious users to force pages to be extremely long.
October:
-Migration to new file server (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,558.0.html): FA, abruptly and without warning, places the site in "File Read-Only" mode as the new fileserver (announced in late June) is finally brought online. According to Yak, it was delayed due to "Hardware issues" they encountered. Within two days the file transfer is finished, but the site slows to a crawl due to "thumbnail cache regeneration" that goes on for days. There are frequent issues with uploading, and new accounts cannot upload at all. Trogdor, the Dell server that donators rounded up $16,000 for, is removed from service and replaced with something probably much cheaper.
-Furocity "merger" ends (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,560.0.html): The majority of the admins that came over from Furocity suddenly resign within hours of each other on October 28th. Departing admins cite a "badly broken" administration, ineffective leaders, and "weak, unprofessional, childish original staff". Two Furocity admins and Gavin remain, for now. Within a few weeks, only Gavin remained, and the departmentalized staff was restored to it's classic hierarchy of "a jumbled mess".
The official PR'd reason these admins left had something to do with a poorly-executed "doxing" of administrators that had been posted days earlier. Some of the admins who left had not been doxed any further than an email address, and they did not cite the doxing in their farewell address, so that reasoning is up for debate.
November:
-Bug fixes: Fresh off the failure of what was going to "fix" FA (the merger), FA decided to go into distraction mode and fix numerous problems that have existed on the site for years. "content has been removed by the poster" messages were removed, the "Safe For Work" site was set up to be safe for work everywhere, the species list was updated, and users were given the option of filtering out Adult content but not Mature content.
-User privilege escalation (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,563.0.html): Somehow, a user is able to become an admin, and displays an image on the site for a brief time. A number of admin menu features appear on all users accounts. Dragoneer later claims an admin account was compromised and that "a loophole that affected a subdomain let the person access the admin panel for a brief time." This "subdomain" administration panel is supposed to require FA's version of "secondary authentication" (read: a different password), so it's unclear what kind of exploit was present.
December:
-Technical issues: December saw several technical issues with the site, plagued with slow (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/111950-Is-the-site-going-to-continue-going-down-EVERY-night) loading (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/112055-fixing-things-or-just-slow) times and the database crashing a couple (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/111762-12-13-11-Site-Not-Responding) times (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/111837-12-14-11-504-errors) before finally giving out entirely because the database server ran out of swap space while preforming backups (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/112100-12-19-11-Site-offline).
-Banner Controversy (https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php/topic,570.0.html): It wouldn't be a full year without a banner controversy. During the middle of a winter banner contest (which had simple rules like "Your character can't be a main focus") that was meant to show off unknown talent, a banner featuring user SecreT, drawn by Ifus, appeared in the rotation. It turns out, this had been planned for months, yet it didn't occur to anyone that this pre-planned banner appearing in the middle of a contest with specific rules might look a bit odd.
January:
-Technical issues: December's technical issues dragged over into January, where they continue to this day. Slow loading times were recently blamed on "scrapers" (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/113157-Heavily-degrading-mainsite-response-%28server-processing-%29) (FOUR of them!) downloading content off the site.
A year from hell. And with the way things have been, it's probably not going to get much better. Not a peep about the new UI has been heard. Dragoneer is quieter than ever when it comes to FA things. Gavin appears to be inactive. The coding staff has not changed. The "extended" banner contest has been left for dead (half a month without a new banner being showcased, until the FurAffinityPR twitter mentioned it). According to Alexa's (debatable) statistics, FA is quickly losing it's gap between e621 (http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=p&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=furaffinity.net&&u=inkbunny.net&u=sofurry.com&u=e621.net&). And I have it on good authority ( 8) ) that there is a new site in development that could really rock the boat when it comes to furry art sites.
Who knows what 2012 will bring, but I'm sure we'll find the time (between talking about cocks and dongs in IRC) to post about anything that does happen.
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I think it bares mentioning that shortly after the Furocity merger fell apart, Furocity was hacked and taken offline for a whole two weeks before coming back online.
Also, in December, Dragoneer randomly started enforcing a ban on animated photo gifs, after a photo gif is linked on a banned user's account in a joking manner. Dragoneer claims the "Video" part of the AUP has always claimed they're not allowed, since he insists animated photo gifs are videos. This was very clearly done without any thought at all, since there's no evidence it was written with gifs in mind.
Instead of apologizing and admitting fault, he's presented with a couple dozen gifs found through the search engine, and challenged to delete all of them. Most of them end up deleted, including one from PRGuitarman, creator of Nyancat. PRGuitarman then notes Dragoneer to complain, and 'Neer swiftly apologizes to him, claiming the AUP needs to be cleared up to make this supposed intention more clear. A month and a half later, this has not happened, only further proving that Dragoneer is not fit to be in charge of anything. But what else is new.
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Any single one of these things on their own might not be that huge a deal, even to FA.
Taken together, however...it's amazing how utterly incompetent the FA administration is, when it's laid out in full. FurryLeaks and the Furocity merger situation debacle were especially awful.
What amazes me, more than anything else, is how no other site has risen up to challenge FA's "alpha" status (oh, the irony in that terminology) in regards to furry artdump sites. InkBunny could be a good contender, as it has some features that are particularly nice in comparison to FA, but the nauseating site design and the "this site supports cub porn" reputation all but nixed its chances of challenging FA.
At this rate, it would likely take a complete "non-furry"/outsider coming in and giving furries a better-coded, better-administrated artdump site to dethrone FA -- and even then, the community would probably shun the site at the start because it was made by a "non-furry".
Happy seventh birthday, FA! Here's to seven more...minutes of decent uptime.
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Any single one of these things on their own might not be that huge a deal, even to FA.
Taken together, however...it's amazing how utterly incompetent the FA administration is, when it's laid out in full. FurryLeaks and the Furocity merger situation debacle were especially awful.
What amazes me, more than anything else, is how no other site has risen up to challenge FA's "alpha" status (oh, the irony in that terminology) in regards to furry artdump sites. InkBunny could be a good contender, as it has some features that are particularly nice in comparison to FA, but the nauseating site design and the "this site supports cub porn" reputation all but nixed its chances of challenging FA.
At this rate, it would likely take a complete "non-furry"/outsider coming in and giving furries a better-coded, better-administrated artdump site to dethrone FA -- and even then, the community would probably shun the site at the start because it was made by a "non-furry".
Happy seventh birthday, FA! Here's to seven more...minutes of decent uptime.
Another reason Inkbunny can't really be an FA killer is because of how they essentially go "yeah, this is a porn site" by being 18+, which the "furry isn't about porn!" crowd obviously doesn't like. I'm pretty sure IB isn't trying to position itself as an FA killer though anyway. And SoFurry is almost great, but the userbase holds it back by being so veherently anti-human, despite there being a tag filtering system there that works perfectly fine. It's as if Toumal made a great site for people who don't even want it at all.
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What amazes me, more than anything else, is how no other site has risen up to challenge FA's "alpha" status (oh, the irony in that terminology) in regards to furry artdump sites.
FA thrives on sheer numbers of users, and that alone. More users = more potential asspats, e-blowjobs, and words of praise for any art posted, regardless of quality. If it appeals to a fetish, there'll be plenty of people out there willing to say how great it is if only because they're starved for things to drool over.
The problem is, you need vast amounts of people to not only move to another site, but to stay there, and this preferably happens within a short time frame. I expect an untold number of people have tried other sites, but moved back to FA quickly after finding they only get a fraction of the attention and a fraction of new art that they receive on FA. Or that they're just plain awful (I'm looking at you, SoFurry).
As for the year itself... wow. I forgot just how much shit there was. Not a single month gone by without something going wrong.
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And I have it on good authority ( 8) ) that there is a new site in development that could really rock the boat when it comes to furry art sites.
I keep thinking 'I should get back to work on mine one of these days. Real Life has this habit of intruding on Stupid Furry Shit...' and then i realize that furries don't deserve nice things and that i'd rather spend my time on fixing (e.g.) my email infrastructure.
What amazes me, more than anything else, is how no other site has risen up to challenge FA's "alpha" status (oh, the irony in that terminology) in regards to furry artdump sites.
The problem is, you need vast amounts of people to not only move to another site, but to stay there, and this preferably happens within a short time frame.
Yeah, I have a few ideas on how to deal with this, but I'd rather just implement them instead of describe them. It's not like I'm trying to race anyone to the finish line here, though, so you'll all have to wait and see. (this is assuming i ever end up satisfied with my email infrastructure, because i really do care more about that than Stupid Furry Shit.)
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The coding inability of the staff drives me nuts as a programmer myself. Anyone who's used the messaging system can tell you that the staff can't even implement/integrate a proper bbCode (a.k.a. XML with square parens) parser. Nested quotes in messages do not work. And it's been that way for months, years.
Are you fucking kidding me? The whole site is basically riding the lazy wave of inertia. I notice in this list no mention of the whole "commission information unavailable to to XSS exploit" debacle. I can barely believe that it even happened. Not just the fact that they had an XSS exploit in their code--because sometimes you don't test for everything, even if XSS is widely known (sigh)--but that they could not produce a fix at all. They just took down the page for everyone after months and months of just leaving a notice at the top of everyone's userpage that said the commission information page was unavailable due to an XSS attack. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
The programming staff should be ashamed. If they have CS degrees, they should be giving them back to the universities where they wasted their money. It's obvious to all that they already returned their brains back to God, since he gave them halves of brains to begin with.
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Anyone who's used the messaging system can tell you that the staff can't even implement/integrate a proper bbCode (a.k.a. XML with square parens) parser. Nested quotes in messages do not work. And it's been that way for months, years.
Don't worry, it'll only take maybe a week (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/441426/) to rewrite the parser.
February 16th, 2011 09:21 AM
I'm rewriting the current bbcode parser, it's just.. too broken right now. The new parser will allow proper tag nesting, quotes including. It will take maybe a week for it.
February 16th, 2011 02:30 PM
[progress=75]Replacing FA's bbcode parser[/progress]
March 6th, 2011 09:40 PM
At the moment, yes. But I am rewriting the bbcode parser and the new version will include a size tag.
July 18th, 2011 10:26 AM
With current BBCode parser - you can't. I've written a new one, but it hasn't been integrated into FA yet, soon will be.
August 24th, 2011 01:04 PM
[snip]
I'm working on a new bbcode parser which will allow that, as well as other improvements.
October 13th, 2011 11:00 AM
The video tag does not exist in the current bbcode parser, it's something I'm working on for the new parser [snip]
Or not
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What gift did FA give itself to celebrate it's seventh birthday?
It made Sciggles an administrator.
Gee, wonder how that happened.
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What gift did FA give itself to celebrate it's seventh birthday?
It made Sciggles an administrator.
Gee, wonder how that happened.
Not to mention how everyone remembers a time when she claimed she could "never be an administrator" because Dragoneer knew the drama it'd cause.
Looks like he forgot.
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Not to mention how everyone remembers a time when she claimed she could "never be an administrator" because Dragoneer knew the drama it'd cause.
Looks like he forgot.
Not only that, he apparently also forgot when he claimed FA will never put as an admin someone who has been suspended/banned in the past or caused drama. Which is all whar Sciggles did-bait people into arguing and then whined to her dear Neer to "ban those mean people".
I sense Pinkuh 2.0 incoming....
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Anyone who's used the messaging system can tell you that the staff can't even implement/integrate a proper bbCode (a.k.a. XML with square parens) parser. Nested quotes in messages do not work. And it's been that way for months, years.
Don't worry, it'll only take maybe a week (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/441426/) to rewrite the parser.
February 16th, 2011 09:21 AM
I'm rewriting the current bbcode parser, it's just.. too broken right now. The new parser will allow proper tag nesting, quotes including. It will take maybe a week for it.
February 16th, 2011 02:30 PM
[progress=75]Replacing FA's bbcode parser[/progress]
March 6th, 2011 09:40 PM
At the moment, yes. But I am rewriting the bbcode parser and the new version will include a size tag.
July 18th, 2011 10:26 AM
With current BBCode parser - you can't. I've written a new one, but it hasn't been integrated into FA yet, soon will be.
August 24th, 2011 01:04 PM
[snip]
I'm working on a new bbcode parser which will allow that, as well as other improvements.
October 13th, 2011 11:00 AM
The video tag does not exist in the current bbcode parser, it's something I'm working on for the new parser [snip]
Or not
I am speechless. Also, ironically, this post contains nested quotes.
I just wanted to chime in with another oddity of FA: symbols allowed in usernames. Underscores are allowed in usernames, but the pages of users with these usernames strip the underscores from the URLs. Da fuq. Even more bizarre, non-alphanum symbols can be used. For instance, check out this innocent user I found: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/drake%5E%5E/
This username has carets in it. Carets. WHY. Even more surprising is that the technical staff does not seem to have a problem with this, because the carets in the profile above are properly encoded for a URL. This is not so much a problem (as far as I can tell) as it is an example of an insane mind at work.
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I just wanted to chime in with another oddity of FA: symbols allowed in usernames. Underscores are allowed in usernames, but the pages of users with these usernames strip the underscores from the URLs. Da fuq. Even more bizarre, non-alphanum symbols can be used. For instance, check out this innocent user I found: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/drake%5E%5E/
This username has carets in it. Carets. WHY. Even more surprising is that the technical staff does not seem to have a problem with this, because the carets in the profile above are properly encoded for a URL. This is not so much a problem (as far as I can tell) as it is an example of an insane mind at work.
One of the first things I do for any entity in my domain logic is write code to normalize, e.g., user names and submission titles and things when the domain objects in question are marshaled/unmarshaled from disk.
As someone who's actually seen the code in the flesh (drunkenly at AC 2010, might I add), it's as if everyone has tossed out any sort of remotely sane engineering principles. Domain logic? What's that? Separation of concerns? What's that? Error handling? What's that? And I'm not asking for gigantic ass UML or entity-relationship diagrams either since, for the most part, they're useless since they're also obsolete the instant someone goes through the hassle of creating them.
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I don't expect everything 'neer does or everything he says publicly -has- to pertain to FA in some way, but only a day after Sciggles becomes an admin, he posts a journal about... bacon. It doesn't even have any real content: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3105539/ (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3105539/). You'd think he might have something to say about the matter or maybe want to say something about the site, what's going on, what's new and improved. The last thing mentioned about the site was back in mid-November. Nope. Distraction Journal™, go! I don't suppose there's any other figurehead for the site that everyone keeps up with, is there?
Oh, and in looking through journals, I've stumbled across a "database error" that occurs if you append a non-existent name to http://furaffinity.net/journals/, but apparently it's sensitive information and won't be displayed! Maybe it's verbose, since it takes about 5-6 seconds to actually load the error page.
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zed, hate to tell you, but Dragoneer has an associate degree in animation and...that's it. Oh, and he probably makes more money, has better job security, and better benefits than you working for a Federal computer security contractor. Because his mom is the CEO's secretary or some shit. As to his actual job, it appears to be a standard Microsoft server jockey thing, but seems like, based on his own goddamn Twitter feed, he spends a lot of time on Yahoo messenger and playing video games. And no, he will not be fired.
Sorry if you thought life was fair or some shit, this probably ruined your day.
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zed, hate to tell you, but Dragoneer has an associate degree in animation and...that's it. Oh, and he probably makes more money, has better job security, and better benefits than you working for a Federal computer security contractor. Because his mom is the CEO's secretary or some shit. As to his actual job, it appears to be a standard Microsoft server jockey thing, but seems like, based on his own goddamn Twitter feed, he spends a lot of time on Yahoo messenger and playing video games. And no, he will not be fired.
Sorry if you thought life was fair or some shit, this probably ruined your day.
I might be mad, if it were not for the fact that Dragoneer has to deal with furries as part of running FA. It's like he has to put his mouth straight under the faucet that delivers a steady flow of fresh furry drama straight from the assholes of furry-porn-hungry assholes. It's hard to be jealous of that.
Also, I'm too busy doing other shit, like getting on with my life and coding.
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Over in the Sciggles thread on FAF, someone unearthed some ancient forum threads from 2006 introducing new staff. Of course, they show that absolutely nothing has changed in the past seven years. Not a thing.
The absolute best one (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/799-New-Admin-Scooter!) is introducing someone called "Scooter". All of Scooter's quoted posts are now posts that Dax posted, so I guess Dax used to be Scooter.
Anyway, it seems that at the time FA was trying to find staff through an old-fashioned application process. That thread disappeared, and Scooter/Dax (Just going to call him Dax from now on) was appointed to the admin team while the application thread was memoryholed and no one was brought on. This lead to a couple users accusing Dragoneer of only bringing on friends as admins (gee sounds familiar!) and explicitly mentioning Dax's inflation and fat fetishes and how a number of other admins (including Dragoneer) shared them. Interestingly, one of the users that was quite vocal in that thread was made admin (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/807-New-Admin-Auroran-Dragon) days later.
While there are some great quotes from Dragoneer and Dax (He was added because of his unspecified "skills" and being able to run TWO webservers!!!)about why everyone's opinion is wrong, one quote about a different matter sticks out and is highly relevant to the conversations going on today.
I'll go out on record saying that Glaide was made admin because he's a friend AND because I've known him for years. I know more than most I can trust him and his judgemnts, and that he's damn level headed.
He's also the only person I know who's completely uninterested in A) drama and B) my bullshit. He's told me to fuck off on more than one occassion. He's proven himself to me in the past as a friend and trustee.
Admins are selected now because they have skill or we believe that they can truly assist the site. I don't care what fetishes people have. I know it looks a like like FA 1.0, where it's Fetish > Quality, but that's anything but the case.
Yes. Glaide. That Glaide. The Glaide who had posted a emo-filled journal (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1741/) literally months earlier. The Glaide who...
Did absolutely nothing at all (even more so than everyone else) so astonishingly, preyfar let him go. However, Glaide had purchased Preyfar's old Laptop from him in an auction on Furbid and this had nothing to do with the fact that Glaide was, after giving his solemn word to do stuff, soon back in the saddle. He promptly broke his word and went back to doing nothing. Preyfar let him get away with it. Appeared to be only semi-literate.
and
Glaide was actually de-adminned in 2007. He had done nothing for months and was difficult to reach for admin duties, and in response Dragoneer revoked his admin rights. However, Glaide has severe emotional problems, and he plays on these to get favors. Immediately after his rights were stripped, he cried to Dragoneer and claimed that that it was making him terribly depressed to not be admin, and so Dragoneer conceded and gave his admin status back. Over two years have passed, and since then it's hard to say if Glaide has really done anything at all on the site. Few people know he's admin. He never joins the admin IRC, he rarely checks the admin forums, and he's a clear security risk. Dragoneer has hired him twice so far.
and the Glaide who, I believe, was removed during last year's inactive staff drama only to be added back on again. He was finally kicked to the curb for good when the Furocity staff "merger" happened, when he changed his site profile to "Constantly being reminded that I am nobody..... I dont know what to put here... Im but a worthless hasbeen that apparently had no use.." and posted some drama-filled journals about being let go (now deleted).
Level headed, all right.
EDIT: Also, we get to chalk up another thing to the "List of things that took forever to get done": In late March 2006, Dragoneer claimed something sounding much like the department system that was used for the Furocity staff was being worked on:
That's because roles are not currently assigned. We're currently re-working official duties and titles (such as 'trouble ticket' monitoring, harassment, etc.).
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The absolute best one (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/799-New-Admin-Scooter!) is introducing someone called "Scooter". All of Scooter's quoted posts are now posts that Dax posted, so I guess Dax used to be Scooter.
Yes, he did.
And pretty much everyone defending him in that thread is also an inflation/fat-fetishist, plus! Dragoneer and Dax/Scooter live probably within spitting distance of each other, or did, in the D.C. metro area, so he had double qualifications- he was a friend and a fellow fetishist.
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So, it seems Sciggles has now been promoted to Forum Admin on the Furaffinity Forums. This is different from being listed as site staff on the forum staff page, as having that rank only gives someone global mod powers. So basically, after just two weeks of being an admin, Sciggles has received a promotion.
Color me surprised. I haven't seen anyone on FA getting promoted so fast. Says a lot about privileges of being fiancee of furry's king of manchildren.
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Color me surprised. I haven't seen anyone on FA getting promoted so fast. Says a lot about privileges of being fiancee of furry's king of manchildren.
SHE'S TOTALLY QUALIFIED, GUYS. SERIOUSLY THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THEIR RELATIONSHIP.
INCIDENTALLY ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE OUR NEW ADMIN 'YIFFCOON271' WHO SUCKED ME OFF ONCE AT A CON
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So, it seems Sciggles has now been promoted to Forum Admin on the Furaffinity Forums. This is different from being listed as site staff on the forum staff page, as having that rank only gives someone global mod powers. So basically, after just two weeks of being an admin, Sciggles has received a promotion.
Color me surprised. I haven't seen anyone on FA getting promoted so fast. Says a lot about privileges of being fiancee of furry's king of manchildren.
That was (yet another) "mistake" that's been fixed.
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So the staff page was updated.
http://www.furaffinity.net/staff/
Again you assume that the only addition to the staff will be Sciggles.
Work is being done to bring other people into the team
We are bringing some people who fit that bill in. Sciggles isn't the only addition and as I have asked before and I will ask again please people give her a chance.
Can anyone else find the other new people in the staff list? I can't. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, the previous version of the page had the same amount of staff as they do now (I remember someone saying Sciggles would upset the nice, even rows), so someone seems to have left.
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http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3200584/
Despite rumors, FA's actually maintained a very high uptime over the past two years...
Despite multiple DDOS attacks, outages for upgrades, planned maintenance or more... we've been holding up rather well. We'd still like to be better, and are working towards that...
We know a lot of work still needs to be done on the site, as we've got a long way to go. Still... we like progress all the same.
Sure thing Neer, if you count refusing any kind of professional help from competent people while sticking fingers in your ears as "progress" then yes it is just that. Also since when is the "FA is offline" page counted as uptime? Doesn't it mean site is inaccessible, and by that, it means it's DOWN?!
Logic and Neer: they don't seem to be getting along so well.
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See, at this point he's gotta know that whatever good intentions he may have nothing is gonna "improve". So is he just robotically mouthing these words for old times' sake? I mean, even if you choose to ignore the naysayers on this site and their very valid points about the site, just the fact that he's been saying literally those exact words for years now and literally nothing has come of them, will make you realize that his words have no meaning.
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http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3200584/
Despite rumors, FA's actually maintained a very high uptime over the past two years...
Despite multiple DDOS attacks, outages for upgrades, planned maintenance or more... we've been holding up rather well. We'd still like to be better, and are working towards that...
We know a lot of work still needs to be done on the site, as we've got a long way to go. Still... we like progress all the same.
Sure thing Neer, if you count refusing any kind of professional help from competent people while sticking fingers in your ears as "progress" then yes it is just that. Also since when is the "FA is offline" page counted as uptime? Doesn't it mean site is inaccessible, and by that, it means it's DOWN?!
Logic and Neer: they don't seem to be getting along so well.
This isn't the first time this has been mentioned, with the actual site uptime ignored in favor of server uptime, which seems to be their favorite number to throw around when they need one.
Someone mentioned their Cloudflare setup on Twitter, which got me thinking. If they're tracking "furaffinity.net", they're actually tracking Cloudflare, which would serve that "Site is offline" page which would further skew the uptime numbers.
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Protip for Dragoneer: Trying to get better at making PR speeches to make everybody feel better about the complete and utter mismanagement of FA won't actually improve the site itself. You have to make a genuine effort to do that.
What amazes me isn't that Sean hasn't made a genuine effort to improve the site, it's that it seems so much like he's doing everything in his power to ensure that the site doesn't improve.
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If it turned out that he was actually using all these donations for personal crap and the PR blitz was all just to cover it up I would probably give him a trophy.
It would be the 'Yerf dot com Dingo memorial trophy'
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So the staff page was updated.
http://www.furaffinity.net/staff/
Again you assume that the only addition to the staff will be Sciggles.
Work is being done to bring other people into the team
We are bringing some people who fit that bill in. Sciggles isn't the only addition and as I have asked before and I will ask again please people give her a chance.
Can anyone else find the other new people in the staff list? I can't. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, the previous version of the page had the same amount of staff as they do now (I remember someone saying Sciggles would upset the nice, even rows), so someone seems to have left.
Qoph was removed and replaced with Sciggles. Qoph still has all the "trouble ticket faq" stuff on their page but it doesn't look like they were very active. Maybe the quit or were removed because of inactivity.
No one new has been added to the admin page. The only admin I know of that isn't listed on the staff page is qmelon/arshes, and thats because they requested to not be listed.
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Another staff update.
Added is Bazeel.
Gone are Xipoid (Left a while ago, but finally removed from the page), Browder, Irreverent, and (shockingly) Gavin for a net loss of three admins.
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Another staff update.
Added is Bazeel.
Gone are Xipoid (Left a while ago, but finally removed from the page), Browder, Irreverent, and (shockingly) Gavin for a net loss of three admins.
Ha ha, hey guys, remember that plan to add admins?
Ha haha.
Ha.
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I guess these other "new admins" haven't finished the prerequisite fan art yet.
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Another staff update.
Added is Bazeel.
Gone are Xipoid (Left a while ago, but finally removed from the page), Browder, Irreverent, and (shockingly) Gavin for a net loss of three admins.
Damn. Irreverent was one of the few who did his job, or at least acted like an adult.
His own page still says he's an admin, though?
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Another staff update.
Added is Bazeel.
Gone are Xipoid (Left a while ago, but finally removed from the page), Browder, Irreverent, and (shockingly) Gavin for a net loss of three admins.
Damn. Irreverent was one of the few who did his job, or at least acted like an adult.
His own page still says he's an admin, though?
The FAF staff list still shows Browder to be a site admin though (despite his @ being gone), so I'm pretty sure this is just an issue of FA forgetting to remove permissions from everyone. I don't think there's ever been an incidence of anyone accidentally being removed from the staff page. I know Arshes opts to not have herself listed, but I can't imagine why Gavin would opt to do that, since the title of co-owner is pretty important.
But yeah, considering Irreverent's FA account has shown no activity in 5 months, and his last forum activity was on November 2nd, I think it's very safe to say that he was removed for inactivity, and they just forgot to remove his permissions.
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jWhy do I get the strangest feeling that removing people from the staff page but letting them keep their @ is an attempt at "hiding" inactive admins? Or just the new "punishment" for being inactive? It seems like exactly the kind of non-confrontational "solution" FA is notorious for regarding staff.
Because "forgetting to deop former staff" is a pretty big fucking deal, and really shouldn't happen three times in the same week.
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Hey, don't complain. De-admining someone and forgetting/not bothering to remove their admin privs are the sort of things that tend to work out in our favor. Considering how volatile the average furry is, and the sorts of explosions of unreasonable anger that come with the perceived slight of being de-admined, and the childish desire to seek some form of revenge...
OTOH these people are all pretty ineffectual; I'm about 70% certain that the FA team wouldn't 'forget' to remove anything if they felt these collective heads of knuckle posed any real threats w/r/t leaks or compromises. And it sounds like in this case we're just talking about irc and the forums anyway. Boo-urns and all that.
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Necroposting, I know, but I think this is the most apt place to point out that Irreverent is back on the staff page, and once again has the @ on his name. As a matter of fact, he recently responded to a trouble ticket a friend put in about the beta site.
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Hey guys, look which mentally unstable trainwreck is an admin again (again (again))!
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/glaide
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Constantly being reminded that I am nobody.....
I dont know what to put here... Im but a worthless hasbeen that apparently had no use...
How inspiring.
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I finally noticed today that Yak had a Steam profile (http://steamcommunity.com/id/wooden_lumberjack).
Steam has a bad habit of screwing up playtime counters, so either he's played 3025.3 (!) hours or 1389.18 hours of Team Fortress 2 alone. Compare that to Dragoneer (http://steamcommunity.com/id/thedragoneer/games/?tab=all), who has only 478 or 655 hours (as you can tell, these timers are indeed as broken as FA is).
Remember, this is the same guy who "doesn't have time" to work on FA.
In other news, I got a tip today that Glaide has answered exactly zero tickets since being reinstated.
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The larger time number counts any time the game is opened. He probably just idles for hats.
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If it wasn't obvious that most of FA's administration is completely incompetent, I'd almost think that a lot of these updates are all psychology tricks. E.g. they'll purposefully introduce some unnecessary and/or broken shit along with the stuff they actually want (that the users wont like), so that when they fix/remove it, they've then improved the situation, and all the users forgets that they never actually wanted it in the first place. Success!
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This morning, May 31:
* Outage Notice 5/30/2012
We will be doing work on the database server some this week, with an estimated 2 hours of downtime.
estimations! yaaaaaaaaaaay