Furry's favorite rapist wants to fix FA

[rodox_video]

No, really:



Didn't he come up with something like this before? What the hell is going on here? Who the fuck is this "small team"?

[Conan]

He previously gave them a UI mockup that, quote, "never went anywhere after I handed it off."

Zaush claims to be a "3D UI Developer", which apparently qualifies him to lead a massive recode project ahead of the dozens of other actual software developers who have volunteered in the past. Though, it's FA, so I'm not really surprised Piche chose a UI developer to lead the project. How it looks is more important than how it works, right?

What's the over/under that it's going to be written in PHP and use MySQL?

[a pigeon]

Hostage to fortune there. Maybe he'll end up leaving the site in a huff (like most of the furocity staff did) if (when?) this project falls flat on its face. Perhaps its also a bit of hostage to fortune for Princess Piche too, since Zaush, having so many watchers (I think he's currently in the top 5 most watched on FA), could make a lot of fuss and drama on FA if he wanted to. Makes me wonder if such an consideration played any part in Princess Piche letting Zaush do this: he might have been afraid Zaush would kick up a fuss, or perhaps he just saw a kindred spirit in Zaush.

I noted from twitter exchanges that Zaush boasted he is presiding over a "small and focused" team, but when someone replied to him that you don't run projects by team size alone and he just brushed them off:

https://twitter.com/Zaush/status/415390189368774658

Looking at exchanges on his twitter:

https://twitter.com/Zaush/status/415424777650569217

He's received a lot of sceptical responses about the prospects of this project and his responses seem to me to be rather arrogant e.g "Ok, clearly there's no pleasing you", which does not bode well.

[graeme]

I'll wait to see if FA is actually going to acknowledge this or use it.  Anyone can post something on twitter, and I've seen lots of people say things like this on twitter without having any permission from FA.

As for Zaush's technical skills, he and I've gone back and forth.. he definitely seems to know that a rewrite is in order, he knows the faults with the old system, he knows how new websites are designed.  He's got to be better than their current guy.

I just don't know if this is an official FA project, or just an official Zaush project.

[graeme]

Also my vote for language that Zaush has chosen is Ruby and the platform being RoR.  The UI guys love Ruby.

[nrr]

Also my vote for language that Zaush has chosen is Ruby and the platform being RoR.  The UI guys love Ruby.

I heard through the grapevine that it'll be node.js, which means everyone's lost before they've started, especially when it comes to furries and their ineptitude.

Frankly, I don't care what they write it in. They don't know how to scale, so in a handful of months after they finally figure out how to cut everything over, they're going to run into some pretty disastrous problems resulting from not being able to handle all of the traffic.

[Pi]

Last time they made any progress towards a rewrite was in 2010, and (of course) a copy of their source code made its way over to me somehow. It was written in PHP, using the gigantic Zend framework. It also came with a copy of the history, and I can see their crack coding team, made up of net-cat, Ice-Wolf, and someone named either "joel" or "carlos", fumbling around rather a lot with case-sensitivity issues.

They also had some kind of internationalization plan in place?

Code: [Select]

Author: Ice-Wolf <IceWolf@localhost>
Date:   Thu Mar 11 19:36:32 2010 -0800

    Language updates, confirmed for cs, sk, sv

+++ b/ferrox/application/languages/cs_CZ/site.cs_CZ.php
 <?php
 return array(
+  // Confirmed: 2010-03-11
   'site:index:Help translate FurAffinity into English' => 'Pomoci s p&#345;ekladem do &#269;eské FurAffinity',
 );
+++ b/ferrox/application/languages/sk_SK/site.sk_SK.php
 <?php
 return array(
+  // Confirmed: 2010-03-11
+  'site:index:Help translate FurAffinity into English' => 'Pomôc&#357; s prekladom do slovenské FurAffinity',
 );
+++ b/ferrox/application/languages/sv_SE/site.sv_SE.php
 <?php
 return array(
+  // Confirmed: 2010-03-11
   'site:index:Help translate FurAffinity into English' => 'Hjälp till att översätta FurAffinity till svenska',
 );


[graeme]

The interesting thing for me in all this, I was talking with SilverAutomatic, another guy seemingly tied into FA somehow to the point that he to uses the royal "we", about the outage a few weeks back.  He made it clear to me that they don't WANT to do it with some pro in the fandom because there's just tons of drama tied into that.

So they go with Zaush? Really?

[Pi]

SilverAutomatic, another guy seemingly tied into FA somehow to the point that he to uses the royal "we"

Silver is/was roommates with Dragoneer and Sciggles.

they don't WANT to do it with some pro in the fandom because there's just tons of drama tied into that.

So they go with Zaush? Really?

Professionals wouldn't start this endeavor off with a total rewrite from scratch yet again. They would start with the database, because that's where their pain-point is.

And, they would also look at, perhaps, the total rewrite some pokemon nerd did for them and the import script.

[Conan]

The interesting thing for me in all this, I was talking with SilverAutomatic, another guy seemingly tied into FA somehow to the point that he to uses the royal "we", about the outage a few weeks back.  He made it clear to me that they don't WANT to do it with some pro in the fandom because there's just tons of drama tied into that.

So they go with Zaush? Really?

Silver, at last check, lives with the Piche's and is probably on the short list of people who will be appointed arbitrarily into an administrative position, if he isn't one of the people using a false name already.

My guess is that they're delusional enough to think that Zaush wouldn't ever cause anything bad to happen compared to, say, any of the professionals on the FA forums who have offered to help before. Zaush has a special place in the heart of Sean Piche (that much became clear three years ago) and he knows if he got anyone else to work on it, they might call him out just as Eevee did once before. Can't have that, now, and it's not likely Zaush will do that... yet.

[a pigeon]

Not 100% on the db, but probably going to run MariaDB in a cluster considering the resources. For the rest, node.js

^
https://twitter.com/Zaush/status/415713723655782400

According to wikipedia: MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL [...] The intent is also to maintain high compatibility with MySQL

[ProvincialTwit]

Yeah, Maria is gaining a lot of popularity for its clustering capabilities; in fact we're migrating from individual MySQL servers to a pair of production MariaDB clusters where I work.


.....However!  We have 1 full-time DBA with 10 years' experience in various forms of SQL and a dev/systems guy with quite a lot of additional knowledge to add, both working full-bore on this project, and they're running into problems they're having a great deal of difficulty surmounting.  We've even hired a 2nd full-time DBA to help.

So yeah.  If 3 grown mature professional people are having trouble getting a Maria cluster to work, what the hell hope does Piche's legion of losers have?

[ColonThree]

So we get to learn about some big and exciting rewrite project not from Dragoneer, or the official twatter account, or even a forum post, but from Zaush's twatter feed. FA's communication is so bad it's like 'neer forgets what PR actually is, or that it even exists.

[Conan]

So we get to learn about some big and exciting rewrite project not from Dragoneer, or the official twatter account, or even a forum post, but from Zaush's twatter feed. FA's communication is so bad it's like 'neer forgets what PR actually is, or that it even exists.

Nah, he knows exactly what he's doing. This way, when the project falls apart, there is no official announcement about it and they can pass it off as something Zaush was trying to do on his own.

There hasn't been an official announcment about any of the recode attempts (i.e. The 2010 one Pi mentioned) since Eevee and Ferrox v.2.

[nrr]

So yeah.  If 3 grown mature professional people are having trouble getting a Maria cluster to work, what the hell hope does Piche's legion of losers have?

Their only hope is to build a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes, and I'd say that they're going to succeed at it.

[a pigeon]

^
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/417141741142016000

Also, Zaush continues to be unable to handle criticism or even discussion about his role at FA:

https://twitter.com/Zaush/status/417125377685745664

From that exchange:

@SilverAutomatic @coderlion this is likely an issue with the owner's history with untrusted outsiders he has no experience with.

Rewriting the history of FA so that anyone who helped or offered to help is now an "untrusted outsider"!

Also curious:

Two weeks ago, @SilverAutomatic told me outright they are not wanting volunteer coders from fandom anymore

[Pi]

I've read this story a million times before. Wake me up when something happens.

[rodox_video]

It's probably going to end with some manner of clash involving Wan's massive ego. That is, if it ends with a bang and not the usual whimper.

We now have open endorsement of Wan's side of the story from Piche (as opposed to the last three years of implicit endorsement). It took some doing, but FA is now even less of a safe place than it was before.

[BrokenCrayons]

So, does anyone happen to be a "confirmed follower" of Zaush's twitter?

[graeme]

It says inactive.. is it really inactive?  Wonder what made him do that.