Vivisector
Daggers and Spears and Songs => FA Obsession Collection => Topic started by: Conan on November 20, 2013, 04:22:43 am
-
FA is looking for testers (mainly popular artists) to test out a "patch" that makes FA not choke on trying to shove 10,000 INSERT queries through the database when someone posts something.
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5269529
Good news, everyone!
We have news that's NOT a banner update notification!
We're looking for testers to help put a patch through the ringer, and we need volunteers! Specifically, volunteers who meet a specialized criteria:
* Volunteers MUST have 8,000+ watchers
* Volunteers MUST have original, fresh content to post (submissions and/or journals)
* Volunteers MUST have an account in good standing
Interested? Send a note to THIS ACCOUNT! We're accepting 20 total volunteers to help out!
We're testing a patch that significantly modifies how FA sends out notifications. Currently, artists with large amounts of watchers may face timeouts when submitting journals or uploading new submissions, and in some cases notifications of the submission may get lost when this happens. This new update in testing instantly submits the journal or submission, then breaks up notifications into smaller batches. Watchers will be notified gradually until the list is complete.
The hideous Spider People of Taurus VII need not apply.
EDIT: Lowered watch count slightly to make it available for a wider audience.
This "patch" comes just a few months shy of the site being online for 8 years. 8 Years. It took them eight years to figure out that this was a problem and figure out to fix it.
-
The best part, of course, is they could've just done a query to see who has 8k watchers or more, and then note all those people - it can't be a very long list.
But they have to look like they're doing SOMETHING.
-
The best part, of course, is they could've just done a query to see who has 8k watchers or more, and then note all those people - it can't be a very long list.
But they have to look like they're doing SOMETHING.
For the curious and lazy, the number is roughly (http://www.popufur.com/) 338.
-
The best part, of course, is they could've just done a query to see who has 8k watchers or more, and then note all those people - it can't be a very long list.
But they have to look like they're doing SOMETHING.
According to popufur.com there are fewer than 200 people that met the original 10k watchers requirement, and 340 with 8,000 watchers or more.
Contacting just those people is too hard and they probably didn't want to be accused of "playing favorites" even though they'd have a reasonably valid excuse in this situation.
-
I'm also getting the feeling that FA cannot possibly not have an announcement in the header.
-
Yesterday, these changes were put into a public beta.
Today, the site began whitescreening and MySQL crashed. Now it's slow as shit and will need to go down "to do maintenance to alleviate the issue." sometime tomorrow. This is also showing that their new redundant database servers are still not set up or are set up incorrectly.
Never change, FA.
-
Yesterday, these changes were put into a public beta.
Today, the site began whitescreening and MySQL crashed. Now it's slow as shit and will need to go down "to do maintenance to alleviate the issue." sometime tomorrow. This is also showing that their new redundant database servers are still not set up or are set up incorrectly.
Never change, FA.
I can't believe what I am reading. Are you implying that Dragoneer chose to deploy untested changes on a production site? Because that would be moronic. Obviously the admins have a staging server deployed somewhere that they can use for this kind of load testing. Yes, that's it. I am quite sure that one of the coders has written a script that could be used for the kind of stress testing which they are definitely not unleashing upon their production environment. And surely--surely--the admins used a battery of unit tests and even some integration tests before deciding to deploy to staging. And the positive outcome from their continuous integration tests supported this decision.
Or not.
-
FurAffinity is forced to switch into readonly mode due to the heavy database traffic taking place over the past couple of weeks building up a large backlog of unprocessed data. This amount of data is negatively affecting performance and has to be given time to be processed. No ETA on the removal of readonly mode at this moment.
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/795080-2013-12-09-Database-maintenance?p=4151485#post4151485
Discovered a huge backlog of unpurged InnoDB transactions spanning the timeframe of more than a day.
That explains the slowdowns and extra space being taken up by the ibdata file.
Forcing the purge as fast as the RAID10 array of 15k drives allow for.
The coding talents of Yak shine through once again.
-
They're just positively awful. They have no idea how to do any level of test. "Unprocessed data built up in the database over the past weeks"
What the fuck does that even MEAN? How do you have that much power hardware wise and still fuck it up this badly? I would ask if there are integration tests or load tests or such.. but.. let's be serious, we know the answer. This is awful, and people need to be beating down Dragoneer's door on this.
But who would take the job if Yak got fired? Really?
-
What the fuck does that even MEAN?
It sounds like they have some script that breaks apart the notification load into parts. If I had to guess, whatever they are using is skipping over some data causing their database cache to keep growing. This probably means that at some point they will have to rewrite their new notification system before the site will be functional again.
Pretty much just typical FA. They update a few lines of code and the whole site goes to shit.
people need to be beating down Dragoneer's door on this.
Uh, maybe not.
-
It sounds like they have some script that breaks apart the notification load into parts. If I had to guess, whatever they are using is skipping over some data causing their database cache to keep growing.
That the ibdata file is growing indicates database updates are being written to the InnoDB transaction log but the disks don't have enough IOPS to commit the transactions to the database. The new notification queueing shouldn't have increased the load more than the previous notification method. Since the database response time has been getting progressively higher after the upgrade, I suspect it's now reached a point where the disks can no longer keep up.
Curious that the new database server has rotating disks instead of SSDs...
-
Curious that the new database server has rotating disks instead of SSDs...
SSDs aren't the cure-all for applications like this, and unless you really do your homework, you could end up with some seriously shitty disk that will end up tanking on you when you least suspect it. The track record with FA's hardware purchases leaves a lot to be desired, and I wouldn't trust them to be able to spec out decent SSDs, even despite Mr. Piche's fetish with gadget shit.
FWIW, they have a serious boner for using FreeBSD on barely-supported hardware. I'd look there first before saying, "Oh, yeah, just plop in SSDs."
-
How long would FA have to be frozen to see an uptick in other furry board activity?
-
How long would FA have to be frozen to see an uptick in other furry board activity?
Something on the order of about a year? FA was down for months in the past, and that made maybe a negligible dent in things. Maybe.
-
Well, massive security breaches haven't done it, the knowledge that rogue admins read all the notes hasn't done it, the downtimes haven't done it.
It'd probably have to go down for a year or longer to get some migration, but I bet people would come right back to it.
If there were a one click "migrate away" button/website/scraper/inviter that could pull your art down, post them at a new board, check and see what friends are there (somehow?) and readd those contacts MAYBE you could overcome the network effect. Maybe. But that's a lot of work and would likely get the FA crew pretty mad at you, and then their fanboys would just DDOS the "transfer" site or something.
I think personally a bigger crash is coming. You don't have small events in isolation in broken systems. These things are symptoms, not individual root causes.
-
How long would FA have to be frozen to see an uptick in other furry board activity?
Other sites see a significant increase in traffic almost immediately. It lasts about as long as FA is down. This has been the case with Weasyl the last few times FA has gone down and I'd imagine it's even more prevelant on sites like e621, SoFurry, Inkbunny, etc.
-
How long would FA have to be frozen to see an uptick in other furry board activity?
Something on the order of about a year? FA was down for months in the past, and that made maybe a negligible dent in things. Maybe.
You seem to have forgotten the Furry Art Place incident. The rush to that site was SO pronounced, it prompted an astonishing PR campaign on Dragoneer's part, with near daily updates on hardware purchase and setup. FAP really lit a fire under those fat haunches...
-
How long would FA have to be frozen to see an uptick in other furry board activity?
Something on the order of about a year? FA was down for months in the past, and that made maybe a negligible dent in things. Maybe.
You seem to have forgotten the Furry Art Place incident. The rush to that site was SO pronounced, it prompted an astonishing PR campaign on Dragoneer's part, with near daily updates on hardware purchase and setup. FAP really lit a fire under those fat haunches...
I'm not entirely convinced that the purchases or setup happened. The moment FAP stopped being an issue, all the commentary stopped.
-
How long would FA have to be frozen to see an uptick in other furry board activity?
Other sites see a significant increase in traffic almost immediately. It lasts about as long as FA is down. This has been the case with Weasyl the last few times FA has gone down and I'd imagine it's even more prevelant on sites like e621, SoFurry, Inkbunny, etc.
To put a few solid numbers to that, Inkbunny's daily incremental file backup is usually 1.0GB (plus another 1GB for the compressed DB). Yesterday morning it was 1.5GB, and today, 1.7GB. Site traffic (https://inkbunny.net/stats.php) is also higher, but only by about 10-20%. If the downtime continues to the weekend, I'd expect these numbers to increase. It tends to last for at least a little while after downtime as people decide it's a good idea to have a backup gallery.
As for FA:
The processing rate of the backlogged data made it clear that migrating to a new server would be a faster thing to do.
Migration status is at 53%. Until the migration is over FA will have to remain in readonly mode.
Using the opportunity to upgrade from MySQL 5.5.x to 5.6.x which brings a number of performance improvements across the board, some of which are directly related to our current problem.
-
GR, you talk too much.
-
Sure he does, but those are actually interesting statistics.
As for the talk of the hardware back then, FA shut up about the hardware when the put the site back online which caused the FAP ragequit, as everyone said "Oh, the crappy site's back, let's go back there and away from the site with the 'unprofessional name'!" This time, there's a pretty strong effort by people to go 'hey, everyone, Weasyl exists, you know...', but we all know how far that'll go.
-
Sure he does, but those are actually interesting statistics.
As for the talk of the hardware back then, FA shut up about the hardware when the put the site back online which caused the FAP ragequit, as everyone said "Oh, the crappy site's back, let's go back there and away from the site with the 'unprofessional name'!" This time, there's a pretty strong effort by people to go 'hey, everyone, Weasyl exists, you know...', but we all know how far that'll go.
>>'unprofessional name'
>>FurAffinity
I haven't looked; has WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASyl picked up the pace?
-
>>'unprofessional name'
>>FurAffinity
I haven't looked; has WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASyl picked up the pace?
A bit. There are a few artists going 'I'm posting here, it's good to have a backup', which is inevitably followed by 'Kinda feeling out the audience here' and then silence as everyone just reverts to the furry porn site nobody wants but everybody uses.
Joke's on target, but there were a notable number of artists back during the great porn drought of 2008 that actually said 'I can't be professionally associated with a site that abbreviates to FAP', despite the fact that they're drawing furry art. It was the Great Excuse of the FAP era. Just like kiddie porn is the Great Excuse (albeit a much better one) to not go to Inkbunny and... I dunno, what IS the excuse for Weasyl? Is it the 'council' problem resolution system?
-
You seem to have forgotten the Furry Art Place incident. The rush to that site was SO pronounced, it prompted an astonishing PR campaign on Dragoneer's part, with near daily updates on hardware purchase and setup. FAP really lit a fire under those fat haunches...
Note that the ill-effects from FA's perspective were short lived because Dylan/Ekigyuu got tired of FAP. That writing was on the wall from day one.
-
If 12/16 couldn't kill FA, nothing will.
-
How long would FA have to be frozen to see an uptick in other furry board activity?
Something on the order of about a year? FA was down for months in the past, and that made maybe a negligible dent in things. Maybe.
You seem to have forgotten the Furry Art Place incident. The rush to that site was SO pronounced, it prompted an astonishing PR campaign on Dragoneer's part, with near daily updates on hardware purchase and setup. FAP really lit a fire under those fat haunches...
I'm not entirely convinced that the purchases or setup happened. The moment FAP stopped being an issue, all the commentary stopped.
They happened, that hardware was running FA between 2008 and up to earlier this summer when the Sun server was retired, and this madness started.
Mass exodus is the only thing that spurs Dragoneer to go into PR overdrive. See the events after the 2010 hack. That PR lasted for months until the new UI promised for that summer never happened. Things got quiet, threads were deleted, business went back to usual because people stopped caring and just wanted their porn back.
The only thing that's going to keep people off FA is if one of these sites comes up with a better feature set. They all offer nearly identical features right now.
-
Princess Piche must be a little rattled at this point since he's made a thread on the FA forums about the downtime. I think it's just PR'ing (as you might expect) and all he can promise is to try to focus on moving on with the improvements we were trying to implement which strikes me as feeble and evasive even for him.
Firstly, I'd like to start with an apology: we had not intended for the downtime last as long as it has. We'd hoped not to have any downtime at all, but were unable to avoid it. Long story short: we had an issue where queries were backing up and not being executed properly. This happened on a J-curve, and as more queries started backing up, the site slowed down, and more and more mounted into the backlog. The Tribble Effect. The issues kept multiplying, and lead to degraded performance (as no doubt all of you have felt). This all came to a stand-still almost overnight, and we were unable to resolve the issue before it ramped up to the point that it did.
We fixed the source of the issue, and had put the site into read only mode under the hopes it would finish executing the backlog. It didn't. To resolve the issue, we're taking the above steps (new server) with upgraded services which should help.
We're trying to get this resolved ASAP and to have good news soon. Nobody likes downtime (myself included). I'm as much a user of the site as I am owner, and I know the frustration. All advertisers of the site, we will be compensating all ads with 10 days credit.
Again, I'm sorry for the major inconvenience the read only has caused the community. I know "sorry" doesn't make the frustration any less so, but we are working to get this resolved. I really want to put this behind us so we can try to focus on moving on with the improvements we were trying to implement.
^
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/814724-Site-Status-What-s-Going-On-and-an-Apology
-
Well, like every time FA goes down, Weasyl's traffic has gone up. Here's some of their graphs:
(https://pcbx.us/randomguy/axtl.png)
(https://pcbx.us/randomguy/axtm.png)
(https://pcbx.us/randomguy/axtn.png)
I'm still expecting it to drop completely to it's normal amount of users after a few days of FA being up again.
-
And once again, Dragoneer is adamantly defending Yak from people who are saying he's full of shit.
I just don't get it. Every time this happens it just adds reason to believe the various conspiracies that have cropped up about just why Yak is seemingly untouchable. Nobody should be this infallible.
-
At this point I think it's pretty clear it's through massive amounts of job security (https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html).
-
The fun never ends:
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/411199706035798016 (https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/411199706035798016)
@weasyl http://projects.weasyl.com/fenderbender/ Really appreciate you trying to kick us while we're down with this insultingly named script. Classy.
Keep in mind he's talking about a project that came out weeks after Weasyl went live, that wasn't even created by them. Instead it was created and named by a user...
-
It seems that FA has had two hard drives fail:
@Lunar_Arc I don't have a status update right now. We're waiting on two new hard drives to come in as we had two drive failures, too.
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/411289299582070784
Princess Piche says he's overnighting new HDs.
Meanwhile, FA admins are really starting to get antsy and are indulging in paranoid fantasies about riots and mobs:
[...]
If you want to come here to advertise other websites, or entice riot/mob behavior, or try to frenzy many of the wonderful people we have on FA into a exodus, we will remove such posts and handle things accordingly.
[...]
^
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/814724-Site-Status-What-s-Going-On-and-an-Apology?p=4187030&viewfull=1#post4187030
Plus, no screenshots of the new FA UI which is allegedly being worked on because "people might spin it into something negative":
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/411237306729627648
-
(http://i.imgur.com/XK0MGi1.png)
-
Well they promised an update on Saturday morning, and Saturday has come and gone. Dragoneer was out of the loop (https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/411980681195974656) at one point this afternoon and didn't know what was going on, but found the time to beg for people to vote (https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/411916591928840192) on Sciggles' latest "Squishable" contest entry. Priorities are truly in place here.
-
Sunday. FA is still fucked. A badly hungover Dragoneer slowly rolls his massive bulk off of sciggles, from what he affectionately calls his "fuck position". Donation money paid for the booze, lube, and baby dick sized condoms.
Sciggles is still sleeping, dreams filled with images of shitty ornaments and squishy, ill-gotten, cows.
^
http://lulz.net/furi/res/2809695.html#2813273
Plus the thread on the FA forums about the downtime ended up getting locked. According to someone on lulz.net a person made a post which mentioned weasyl and that post was quickly deleted. When that person made a second post asking why their orignal post was deleted that 2nd post was deleted as well and trpdwarf locked the thread in a patronising fit of pique:
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/814724-Site-Status-What-s-Going-On-and-an-Apology?p=4196194&viewfull=1#post4196194
-
Surely, if we stop everyone from talking about Weasyl on our forums, nobody will find out about it, right?
-
Surely, if we stop everyone from talking about Weasyl on our forums, nobody will find out about it, right?
Yeah, about that... (https://twitter.com/weasyl/status/412337560912793600)
For some reason it's been pretty steady there until today:
(https://pcbx.us/randomguy/axxd.png)
-
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/839071-Site-Status-12-15-2013?p=4210671&viewfull=1#post4210671
trpdwarf: "YAK IS NOTHING BUT A SAINT I'M GONNA HIDE ALL THE REPLIES ACCUSING HIM OF BEING A BAD CODER"
Also http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/842635-Proposed-Idea-Bring-Dragoneer-and-Yak-under-review read it while the mods are still unaware!
-
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/842635-Proposed-Idea-Bring-Dragoneer-and-Yak-under-review read it while the mods are still unaware!
They're aware.
Find something more productive to do with your time than run around pretending to be informed about something that you are not. There are a lot of people who have left staff that well, lets just say there are two sides to every coin out there.
I found that response somewhat disgusting, but that's how FA treats it's users I suppose. Clearly she means "Find something more productive to do than try and help us out, we aren't listening."
Also do they seriously expect people to believe it's luck that the coin lands on the same side every time? Every Ex-Admin has the exact same story to tell, but they are all lying?
-
Christ, Kitashi left simply because Yak was taking 6 or more months to "review" the code he submitted.
Yak refuses to let others see the code? Nonsense! That just isn't true! ...But submitting new code, now that's another story.
-
Find something more productive to do with your time than run around pretending to be informed about something that you are not. There are a lot of people who have left staff that well, lets just say there are two sides to every coin out there.
I found that response somewhat disgusting, but that's how FA treats it's users I suppose. Clearly she means "Find something more productive to do than try and help us out, we aren't listening."
Also do they seriously expect people to believe it's luck that the coin lands on the same side every time? Every Ex-Admin has the exact same story to tell, but they are all lying?
More so than that the assertion, per se, is ridiculous. FA/Ferrox Art, LLC is not a trustworthy organization. Historically, they've failed on far too many occasions to deliver on a critical promise or even satisfactorily expound on an issue. This sort of activity from FA has become rather banal, but no one on their side seems particularly concerned about it... or rather, no indication that anyone is concerned has made itself visible to the community as a whole. It's incredibly stupid and self-serving to posit the premise that people are choosing the make up rumors as opposed to do research on the subject when the people with all the answers are -- through all appearances -- withholding them, consciously or otherwise. To be fair to them though, they are a private organization, and a private organization can run itself however it pleases within the confines of the law and entirely irrespective of what their customers think. I say customers because I believe FA is nothing more than a service organization.
This cycle of FA's ineptitude doesn't seem to end. There's a disconcertingly high turnover rate in the staff, no one seems to understand -- or in some cases care -- how to properly fix issues, communication escapes them most of the time, the hierarchy of command is nonsense, the team is headed by the wrong people, and there is a great disconnect between action and promise on all sides of the fence (at least while I was there). If you ask me, the ultimate issue is the leadership which is not going to change for a long time... especially not when people still flock to it like a life-giving medicine. Though, it is a bit fascinating to watch in a sadistic way.
As for Weasyl, I'm very dubious that this will have any lasting effects on their status. Once FA is back in business, I imagine Weasyl will return to baseline or something near it. They just don't offer enough value to justify migration. Right now, it's hard to see them as anything other than FA 2.0. If they want to be taken seriously, they need to differentiate themselves or provide something that FA does not (of which there is plenty). The alternative is to wait until FA dies out, a nebulous possibility. However, they're not entirely positioned to dive off the springboard just yet.
-
With enough sustained effort on the part of those people who would like to see FA gone and enough apathy on the part of FA, I think Weasyl can eventually reach a critical mass - that fenderbender utility is a good example, I am pimping the hell out of that to people where I can. I'm not certain "offering something FA doesn't" makes sense here, because for the majority of users it's not a service organisation - it's just a platform. Nobody picks a platform based on its featureset - it's either a pragmatic choice (I prefer X over Y because my friends all use X) or an ideological one (I prefer X over Y because X's philosophy and ethics are more compatible with my own than Y's).
-
With enough sustained effort on the part of those people who would like to see FA gone and enough apathy on the part of FA, I think Weasyl can eventually reach a critical mass - that fenderbender utility is a good example, I am pimping the hell out of that to people where I can. I'm not certain "offering something FA doesn't" makes sense here, because for the majority of users it's not a service organisation - it's just a platform. Nobody picks a platform based on its featureset - it's either a pragmatic choice (I prefer X over Y because my friends all use X) or an ideological one (I prefer X over Y because X's philosophy and ethics are more compatible with my own than Y's).
I certainly hope you're right, and I certainly hope Weasyl doesn't follow FA's footsteps.
I may have used "service organization" a bit too loosely or in too great a grand sense. When I said "service" and "providing something FA does not" I did not mean features. Rather, I meant the whole package, all the things associated with using the site and consuming any content found therein. That is what I'm calling the "service", and this service is what differentiates FA and Weasyl (by definition if nothing else). To give examples of things Weasyl could offer that FA does not (purely as an exercise of theory), they could make Weasyl in numerous languages, begin offering micro-loans, cut deals with major companies to offer discount pricing on art supplies, or even start investing animal welfare. It really could be just about anything they think is worthwhile to the site's and/or community's health and interests. Unless I am mistaken, we both share the standpoint that people come to these sites for a multitude of reasons and not just because of which one offers what features.
-
Okay, yeah, I get you now and we're reading from the same hymnsheet.
Apparently FA went back to normal operation briefly and then went into read-only mode again?
-
Apparently FA went back to normal operation briefly and then went into read-only mode again?
Our Eastern European "benefactor" does not know how to plan ahead. What else is new.
-
Apparently FA went back to normal operation briefly and then went into read-only mode again?
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/843220-Site-Status-2013-12-16?p=4219237#post4219237
Two of the hard drives that failed earlier have been replaced and the RAID arrays are being rebuilt.
Because of that FA can not yet handle the full load and has to remain in readonly mode for a while longer.
-
Two of the hard drives that failed earlier have been replaced and the RAID arrays are being rebuilt.
Because of that FA can not yet handle the full load and has to remain in readonly mode for a while longer.
it-keeps-happening.gif
You'd think they'd have figured out what happens when you replace RAID drives by now. But no...
-
FA is operating in "reduced-capacity mode" - you can't click the nuke button to clear notifications, but you can click "check all" and then "delete notifications".
-
(http://i.imgur.com/EijBoZq.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/o7mumzh.png)
And as soon as people started using it, it went to shit again. Something tells me the RAID is still rebuilding, but someone decided that having the site "open" and slow as shit is somehow better than having a read-only site that loads fine.
-
FA is operating in "reduced-capacity mode" - you can't click the nuke button to clear notifications, but you can click "check all" and then "delete notifications".
There was a group of people on lulz that wanted to start nuking submissions as soon as the site came back to put load on the servers. Something tells me this is a direct response to that.
-
I guess this means they watch the lulz site lol.
-
I guess this means they watch the lulz site lol.
That's been known for some time. In the past people have reposted funny/stupid/awful submissions on lulz that broke the AUP in some way, months after the submission was uploaded; the original then vanished within the hour. It's a sort of running joke that posting things on lulz is more effective than a trouble ticket.
-
I'm about to head to bed but at this moment, Yak is flailing around after changing some MySQL settings, which... wait for it... caused MySQL to crash.
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/867077-Server-restart-on-Fri-2013-12-20
I don't know WHY people doubt his Superior Administration Talents when just days after the site returns from a week+ long outage, he knocks the site offline for more than an hour changing settings live in production.
-
After figuring out a way to get rid of them two years ago, the "Submission has been deleted by the owner" messages have returned to the submission notification page. Presumably, the "fix" to make these go away caused some of the problems.
After absorbing this thread, be sure to head on over to this historic link for some top lol. http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/621439/
-
This is how Dragoneer dealt with people whose paid-for adverts were affected by the downtime:
I was emailed at the beginning of the outage saying that all ad holders would get 10 extra days added to their time. Once the week was over, I felt it was more than a bit unfair to basically get only 3 extra days in exchange for a week out of the holiday season. So I complained, and Neer told me he had already MADE an announcement about a second extension for ads. When I told him I had not seen it and asked for a link, he did not link me to one and then proceeded to send out a mass email explaining how 'a couple (aka me) of people complained and he was extending it again'. Then he bawwed at me for suggesting that he wasn't going to do the right thing in the first place. I told him he was unprofessional and I was taking my business elsewhere.
^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5362239/#cid:37706245
-
Once again, our "friend" from behind the Iron Curtain has proven that his coding is bringing FA ever closer to its final fate.
Also it appears like Chase is turning Stalinist on FAF.
-
Stalinist Russia was way better run than this clusterfuck.
-
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/907176-2013-rewriting-attempt?p=4352906&viewfull=1#post4352906
There is, apparently, a DIFFERENT recode project going on that Dragoneer approved of back in October. Somehow that "slipped his mind" when allowing Zaush to do the same thing.
Interesting thing here is the recent fundraiser for a "mobile UI". Why bother when you have two recode projects going on??
-
I'd love to see people defend Dragoneer as not being an incompetent owner at this point.
He approved two COMPLETE REWRITES, in a three month period, to two completely different groups of people and the site mentioned NEITHER of them officially.
-
At the risk of stating the obvious, Dragoneer is basically just clinging to FA because it allows him to feel important and powerful. Like, imagine dragoneer without FA. He's one of the most boring, generic furries you could possibly imagine, but because he owns FA, he gets to feel like a celebrity. Everything he does at the helm basically telegraphs that he wants all of the fame and none of the responsibility, while at the same time keeping anyone away from touching his popularity gravy train out of fear that he'll be upstaged and lose the spotlight.
I would say it's funny, but really, it's too boring to be funny. So it's just kind of sad.
-
I also wonder how many other people have secretly and privately been told they could do FA Rewrites with Neer's blessing. Your average software project of this scope is much longer than three months, and if he can't remember someone he approved three simple months ago, I wonder how many more there are out there.
-
And we're a few days in and already developers are storming off the project.
http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/907176-2013-rewriting-attempt?p=4358527&viewfull=1#post4358527 (http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/907176-2013-rewriting-attempt?p=4358527&viewfull=1#post4358527)
Zaush, to me and Myr, also showed quite a lack of knowledge, which is probably why he's going with NodeJS - he's probably picked that one language up the best and stuck with it. It became even more worrisome when he started belittling me and Myr, thinking we were unintelligent in the subject - according to himself, he has been a "PHP Pro" for 12 years! Pretty sure he's not old enough to have been doing Pro PHP for 12 years. When he said PHP was FAR slower than NodeJS, he wouldn't accept me or Myr's reasonings to use it, it was ALWAYS about speed and nothing more - not maintainability, not flexibility with its settings, not its ability to distribute easily etc. despite the fact that both of us have worked for large corporations (and have credentials to prove it) and he just expected us to take his "skills" at face value. Even his "proof" that showed PHP being slower clearly stated in plain english that the test was Biased to Node JS - and the Graphs he constantly pointed out showed NodeJS having higher CPU usage as well, kind of ruining his argument of "less resources".
He wants things done his way regardless of logical reasoning. I like NodeJS, but for FA's usage I don't think it'd be a good fit - Java, PHP, Python et al. I think would be better but he just wouldn't have it. Even something as powerful as Java he shunned away because NodeJS is apparently some magical elixir that fixes EVERYTHING.
The final nail in the coffin was when he flat out patronised me, asking me basic questions like "Explain to me, what are Database Indexs?" - I didn't answer, playing dumb, and he replied with how Index are slow (???) even though by definition an Index is a faster method for data retrieval. He actually dodged his own question with a hair-brained answer that in itself was incorrect. He even said how we had NOTHING to show for our month of work except for the fact that we DID and I even explained it in detail + our future plans - yet he didn't show us anything in return except a PDF with some bullet points for "development milestones" (that didn't really make a whole lot of sense because they included no real back-end work) and two mock-ups that looked like knock-offs of Weasyl with rounded corners. He says I can't take criticism, yet he thinks his mockups where the shit and bit down on us when we pointed out things we didn't like; yet my front end was actually made based on user-criticisms and feedback. He says he doesn't want idea men, either, and no crowdsourcing because to him that is "designed by committee" and that is bad, apparently.
He said that anyone who didn't share his drive was dead weight, he didn't want to motivate people and he was going to be a hard ass, me being busy with my real world job and Myr trying to pull money together to fix his car meant that "we were not suitable for the position" because our full attention was not on the subject - he even went as far to call Myr's money management pathetic if he couldn't afford to fix his car! It was a LOT of money Myr had to fork over! Like, A LOT, he needs to make it back somehow!
Zaush lives up to his name of being an insufferable jerk.
Me and Myr bailed.
According to Zaush it is HIS project, along with ONE of his friends. Two people in total, everyone, and I'm not even sure they really know what they are doing.
Likelihood of this actually going somewhere? HA.
Get used to Weasyl and SoFurry, folks, because what Zaush has in store will mostly likely fall over in a heartbeat. The way he was describing it all, it really did sound like a bit of a mess.
Yeah, I'll probably get banned for spitting bile about him, heck I may even get a white knight or two he's such a damned stereotypical Pop-Fur! But damn oh damn oh DAMN! People needed to hear this.
Don't expect anything, and if it does work, expect it to break instantly due to lack of adequate planning.
If he asks you to work with him, don't. He wants yes men and bitches and will break you if you have an idea that conflicts with his.
I'm done. Peace out. Enjoy your new FA if it ever gets here or even works. My team? Its dead, everything has been removed from public viewing because Zaush wont allow us to do anything.
-
Meanwhile, it's the same old same old on Twitter:
We will be bringing on new admins soon to help quell the queue as well (week or two?).
^
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/418545263670607873
AUP is in final draft, pending approval. AUP will be updated, clarified, massively re-written.
^
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/418547840344788992
It's just a shame the site won't be massively re-written!
Also I loved this:
he didn't show us anything in return except a PDF with some bullet points for "development milestones" (that didn't really make a whole lot of sense because they included no real back-end work) and two mock-ups that looked like knock-offs of Weasyl with rounded corners
-
Zaush, to me and Myr, also showed quite a lack of knowledge, which is probably why he's going with NodeJS - he's probably picked that one language up the best and stuck with it.
(http://i.imgur.com/KxLGUla.jpg)
Now I really wanna know if his decision making process was as simple as it looks, i.e. "does Ryan Dahl share my laidback brogramming slacker lifestyle"
-
Node.JS, where you can go from "Does anyone I know use this" to "an expert" in 10 days!
-
At this point it's evident all Zaush wants is a group of yes-men who will do all the hard work for him.
If it succeeds? He'll take all the credit for himself.
If it fails? He'll have a group of naive suckers to shift the blame onto when things crash and burn.
-
http://benanderson89.tumblr.com/post/72023618116/a-chat-with-zaush-over-fa-2-0
videozaush: speaking to ant of you: if your dedication does not match my own, then you'd just be dead weight
Ben Anderson: Moral 101 - don't say anyone is dead weight
Ben Anderson: you have to motivate people
videozaush: how do you motivate a soldier?
videozaush: you make them realize how human they are, strip him of his pride and his self importance
Ben Anderson: or ya know "for queen and country"
videozaush: from there, you can motivate them to the stars
Ben Anderson: we are NOT soldiers
Ben Anderson: we are website coders
videozaush: you see this as a way to get attention, or money, or something
Ben Anderson: we are people who want to do a good thing for a large community
Hunter: He's right zaush. You motivate coders with irish coffee. :3
videozaush: you need to be prepared to get nothing in return, have people jeering at you and throwing rotten fruit, but not drop out
Ben Anderson: so
Ben Anderson: your idea
Ben Anderson: to motivate your co-workers
Ben Anderson: is to basically stomp them into the dirt and say "get this shit done" ????
videozaush: i motivate them by putting us against the world
videozaush: and you don't get anything done just jamming on ideas, or having wishful thinking
Zaush:
stripping people of their pride and self importance since 2005.
-
I still struggle to understand how he still has a job. If he had some iota of talent, he'd probably come off as one of those micro-steves Apple is attracting and churning out in horrifying number. Silicon Valley is teeming with egotistical brogrammers, and he's a particularly caustic example.
Problem is, unlike the majority of said brogrammers he can't seem to code his way out of the toilet. You have to wonder what the fuck is going on here that makes him useful to an organization in the slightest.
He did get canned at Google a few years back, and he occasionally brings up how much he hated his supervisor. Needless to say, I'd love to hear from any of his former co-workers there because with the way this guy swaggers around there have to be some stories.
Speaking of Micro-Steves:
he didn't show us anything in return except a PDF with some bullet points for "development milestones" (that didn't really make a whole lot of sense because they included no real back-end work) and two mock-ups that looked like knock-offs of Weasyl with rounded corners
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt
-
Zaush:
stripping people of their pride and self importance since 2005.
Man, I wish I kept logs of my conversations with him on IRC from way, way back in the day. He particularly liked belittling me for refusing to use some of the more questionable parts of PHP, like its object system.
As he mentioned to someone else, "But he's passing everything around as hashes!" Oh, if only you knew, Zaush. If only you knew.
PHP lacks structs, and swaddling everything in objects didn't seem like the thing to do. Passing around associative arrays in a manner fitting for PHP that were full of strings containing names of functions (as function "pointers") and other key-value pairs was about as good as it got. It was delightfully arcane, like JavaScript.
Oh well. Gotta use the trendy shit, right?