FEBUARY 15, 2012: 12/16 PART 1: ONE YEAR LATER

[rodox_video]

Well, it's finally up. An article about the biggest furry scandal in years, and it took way the fuck too long to write about. I'm not even sure it SHOULD be written about, but here it is nonetheless.

I'm sure there are a number of fuckups in there, if you find any be sure to point them out.

Also see: the original thread.

[Jim Demintia]

Not so much a fuckup, but if I may play typesetting Nazi for a moment: you don't need to write the titles in all caps. If there's not already a style rule on the blog pages, you can set "text-transform: uppercase" and still get the same effect.

I'll let someone else with familiarity with your blog software comment on how to actually do that.

[ProvincialTwit]

(psst, the serendipity theme we're using does that by itself and p_n probably just copy-pasted the result. now stop being such a pedant, fag.)

[Pi]

I don't really have much to add. I did my usual twice-yearly "yell at yak for fucking up an upgrade", which had the usual results - a few small chunks of actual info about what's going wrong with their shit, embedded among miles of bullshit about why competent people aren't allowed to help out.

[rodox_video]

I'm pretty much convinced at this point that the FA administration does not actually want anyone's help, and they don't actually give a fuck what anyone else thinks. If they don't want any help, I don't see the point in offering it to them. Talking with them is a waste of time. Blathering about whatever big glitch/outage they're experiencing at the moment is also a waste of time. They've elevated handwaving to a martial art; they'll give a solution lip-service, but once they think nobody is looking they will simply go back to doing whatever it was they were doing before.

The site is beyond help. There's no fixing it; it can only be replaced. The amount of work it would take to truly "fix" FA would be tantamount to starting over again from scratch. The trouble with doing that is is that once you've started the site over again from scratch, why let the current batch of incompetent bozos run it? It's why FA ultimately shitcanned Eevee and his Ferrox project, and it's why the Ferocity merger was a short-lived farce.

So really, I'd just concentrate on supporting the development of the next big furry art/community site, whatever it is. I wouldn't give fuck one about FA itself.

[ProvincialTwit]

Continuing to point and laugh at this sort of thing does serve two valuable purposes (aside from being funny):

1: The more that places like us make this shit public and put it out there for everyone to see, the more likely it is that the userbase will realize just how lousy the entire site is, along with all the people who run it.

2: By more or less archiving all their many failures, we're like a one stop shop of Protips on how -not- to run a site like FA, and anyone who feels the need to create a competitor need only browse the many threads of the FA subforum to learn the wrong way to do it.

[Dr. Dos]

I learned more about web security from FA's failures than I ever did in college.

[Jim Demintia]

I dunno; I get the impression that FA's code is so grade-school that you aren't likely to encounter such glaringly obvious vulnerabilities in the real-world anymore. Even PHP monkeys have the capacity to learn from constant repeated hacking of their web sites.

[rodox_video]

Continuing to point and laugh at this sort of thing does serve two valuable purposes (aside from being funny):

1: The more that places like us make this shit public and put it out there for everyone to see, the more likely it is that the userbase will realize just how lousy the entire site is, along with all the people who run it.

2: By more or less archiving all their many failures, we're like a one stop shop of Protips on how -not- to run a site like FA, and anyone who feels the need to create a competitor need only browse the many threads of the FA subforum to learn the wrong way to do it.

Everyone who ever wanted to know how fucked FA is pretty much already learned all they really need to know years ago. The vast majority of FA's userbase (to say nothing of the rest of the subculture) really doesn't give a shit how broken FA is so long as it lets them flog their commissions and gives them their daily porn. That's why everyone is still goddamn there. It's demoralizing, really. Especially if you're working hard on a new furry art/community site, because it makes you wonder why you should even be bothering. It's probably part of why so many efforts to take the top spot from FA have failed or stalled.

Everyone who is trying to create an alternative art/community site pretty much knows what not to do by now. Do they really need to look so hard at just FA when the internet is littered with community sites (for subcultures and interests of all types by the way) that make the same damn mistakes FA does and worse, day in and day out?

The events of 12/16 are probably the only major incident related to FA that is going to be remembered in ten years. Nobody is going to care about much else. It didn't happen just because the site administration decided security by obscurity was good enough to cover their asses. It happened because some self-important dumbfucks took Piche's teenage bullshit so seriously that they had no problem causing real-life pain and suffering in the name of trying to stick it to him. It revealed problems with the subculture that are actually important, problems that are much deeper, older and more universal than some spoiled child's inability to run a website.

That is why I wrote about it - because it represented a level of ugliness that is "new" to furry but familiar everywhere else. The only role FA's incompetence and Piche's spiteful laziness played in it was to serve as a launching pad.