FA's developers, working hard!

[Jim Demintia]

They are claiming that the human restrictions are because of their payment processor--i.e. they won't allow payments for porn of humans, but apparently don't care about, uh, other stuff.

[LordNagetiere]

That sounds like such a legal band aid. When the payment people get wind of what's going on why will fur and ears make a difference?

[Sechs]

I've never heard of a single law or ToS or anything that said porn of humans or anything humanlike is verboten, but porn of humanoid animals is hunky dory. So yes, it sounds more like a wet paper-thin excuse to ban humans and attract murrypurries. Hell, it's more likely to be the other way around, with various laws regarding "prurient" imagery that could interpret drawings of humans fucking as fine but drawings of furries fucking as too close to bestiality.

There are already various people proclaiming FA better watch its ass because, among other things, zomg Inkbunny launched with a search function! Just wait until the first drama with some murrypurry throwing a fit over something stupid, when the mods side with the murrypurry and ban anyone that even implies they might have been in the wrong.

[Jim Demintia]

There are already various people proclaiming FA better watch its ass because, among other things, zomg Inkbunny launched with a search function!

Yeah...see, thing about that is they seem to just be using MySQL for search, which, if you think the site is/was slow now, try back in a few months after they hit the 10k submission mark, and they end up removing search because it doesn't fucking work anymore.

[Sechs]

try back in a few months after they hit the 10k submission mark, and they end up removing search because it doesn't fucking work anymore.

This. As I think I've said in this very thread, it's easy to sit around yapping about all the zomg awesome future features you have and are going to have when it's you and your friends and ten other people on a site, slightly harder when it's ten thousand people hitting f5 every minute checking for new posts and new porn.

[GreenReaper]

The overly murry intentions may just make it intolerable, but at least they launched with a 'search' feature

And keyword-based blocking, and a few other features, too. Not that they couldn't be duplicated - most exist on other sites in one form or another - but it's nice to have them on launch.

As for the search . . . I honestly don't think it's going to be a problem unless the site gets a whole lot bigger and busier. That's the sort of problem we'd like to have. It seems OK with 6000 submissions.

[ProvincialTwit]

Tsk!  Oh, Greenie, don't tell us you're in on this...

"Keyword-based" anything is a fine idea when people actually bother to attach keywords.  I suspect that will wind up being considerably -less- useful than even the rudimentary filtering there used to be over on the VCL.

Also, MySQL is a toy database for babbies and barely adequate for a small forum like Viv, let alone an art site with the potential to become very large.  Grown-ups use real databases like Postgres.

[GreenReaper]

I'm a moderator - I don't own or code the site, I help out with tickets and the like, because I think the site's concept of helping furs make a little money off their art and having that money support the site at the same time is pretty neat.

The dev team is working on the "but people don't use keywords" issue (most do, but it's still something that needs to be addressed). There might be some community input involved, e.g. you suggest a keyword but the artist or a mod has to OK it.

The site does use PostgreSQL. I'm not sure where Jim got the idea it used MySQL. I suspect they'd both be perfectly adequate as long as you know how to use them effectively, with an understanding of their limitations. I don't, but fortunately that's not my job.

[loki]

If it's not Oracle it ain't shit.... good luck holding 10 million rows in your puny little Postgres DB. :>

[Lazarian]

Oracle licensing costs over twenty grand per CPU. Methinks they'll be sticking with Postgres or MySQL.

[Jim Demintia]

Oracle is for government databases and Fortune 100 companies, not 99% of database-backed websites out there.

But, why do you think every art site on earth can't seem to get search right? It's because 'SELECT art FROM submissions WHERE term="foo"' only gets you so far, and that's about all your average furry web designer knows.

I don't really think it matters which open source database they use, it's more the fact that they don't have any kind of index or search software (i.e. Apache Lucene) in between. If they hope to be the size of FA one day, that isn't going to cut it.

[loki]

Oracle is for government databases and Fortune 100 companies, not 99% of database-backed websites out there.

But, why do you think every art site on earth can't seem to get search right? It's because 'SELECT art FROM submissions WHERE term="foo"' only gets you so far, and that's about all your average furry web designer knows.

I don't really think it matters which open source database they use, it's more the fact that they don't have any kind of index or search software (i.e. Apache Lucene) in between. If they hope to be the size of FA one day, that isn't going to cut it.

What do you mean term isn't indexed? What the hell are cartesian joins? Why can't I retrieve everything instead of what I just need? It's not that hard to optimize DB queries if you know what you're doing... of course that assumes they have basic knowledge of SQL. If your queries are shit (which FAs and Inkbunny's probably are) then no matter you do it will still run like molasses. They probably had to buy all the expensive, over-priced hardware at FA because no one volunteering for them has ever taken a basic course in SQL... lol :X

[ProvincialTwit]

I thought it was pretty much confirmed that the whole reason they blew so much money on overpriced hardware was exactly because nobody knew enough about web development to scale the thing beyond a few hundred users or a few thousand submissions.  Granted, they also don't seem to understand how to properly network a cluster of machines (Hey Pi, didn't you have some kind of ridiculous notes or a chart or something showing their networking scheme?), or...well, anything, really.  There's probably more functional customization on Viv than anywhere on FA.

Also enough with the e-cockwaving; if you're not a DBA, I don't want to hear your opinions on databases.

[AshleyAshes]