ffdotnetrants | (no subject)

I just tried searching and fandoms that normally are completely unharmed aren't working. Now I have to go through archives. I hate going through the archives. I saw someone say the curse of March, in case you people haven't noticed that FF is cursed all year round. Not just a certain month. But yea...Search Engine is looking to get shanked. Actually, I think the mods of FF should get shanked. And then people who know how to actually do things can take care of the website.

lol I'm all for that. It's not like they know how to do their bloody jobs. If they did they might have answered one of the half dozen support emails I've sent in the last two weeks by now.

Seriously, from the tech side of things I understand the kind of stress a database of that size is under. The sheer number of bots that attack it on a daily basis is astronomical. That alone can knock an under protected server offline (I know from sad personal experience). But damn. A site that size shouldn't be under protected. It should be a given that it needs to be a safe as Fort Knox if you want it to stay operational. Not even taking into account the supposed 2 million registered users or the untold number of unregistered users that come in to read anonymously.

But that just means the owners of said best be prepared to keep it up and running. Yes that means top of the line service and that isn't cheap to maintain but it's the go-to for fan fiction. They need to man up and start living up to the reputation of being the 'go-to' before the reputation of 'always being a problem' causes something else to become the next bigger and better thing out there.

I do understand keeping a site like that is not cheap, but I've been to crappier sites that have less problems. It's ridiculous how the site is a "problem site." What's even funnier is that it's a writing site, so it doesn't really have too many things that make it overload, unless everyone updates on the same day. and by everyone I mean Every single account on that site. Something big to overload that site. I'm pretty sure that the site is on a server of it's own based on how huge it is right?

That's just the thing. I don't think it's on a dedicated server and I seriously doubt it's got a sizable dedicated tech support staff (despite the support email address) based on how poorly they respond to these situations. I've been a member there for seven years and I can tell ya they have ALWAYS been this bad at support and up-time. The problems have always been one behind another.

When I had my own site, I was lucky. We had a dedicated server (custom designed and privately hosted) and had a team of 5 dedicated geeks that worked on her (on and off site) and that didn't stop the occasional down times (average 10 days a year). We only had 500 registered members and didn't allow unregistered users for most of the site. It was the bots that were our problem. If you're server isn't built to handle, it crumble in a heartbeat under an onslaught attack from them. I can't count how many times we had to reboot the database or go as far as upgrade hardware because a 'bot attacks' had cause unrepairable damage to one drive or another.

I imagine a site of this size gets hit by an infinite number of bots a day. That sort of stress has to be taxing on a machine. Again that's with taking the users out of the equation. How taxing are they on the database and hardware? Constantly calling up archived information that's been there, some as long as 10+ years now.

Shit that that requires substantial resources. It's resources I simply don't think the owners of FF.net have at their disposal. Either by choice or by negligence someone is lacking the realization that the site is badly in need of MORE power to run smoothly. I'm not sure which is the problem. But either way, it's my thought on the matter.

Agree with both of our following anon commentary. It likely won't be long if things are fixed soon before the entire database crashes. The problems that appear to be showing would throwing kernel panic errors on the back-end, so they have to know their is a problem (emails aside). To not evaluate those and correct them is sheer laziness in my opinion and bad for your hardware. You're asking it to fail on you.

The reason you rarely ever see Facebook, YouTube, or even something like ESPN fail is the sheer magnitude of resources at their disposal. These aren't sites running off one little PC tower sized server. They are running off dozens of server racks that fill entire floors of of a building if not more. They give a whole new definition to 'dedicated server'.

Yes Anon #2 it's a writing site. One to which 2 million people are registered. Of that probably 2/3 have posted stories (you can probably assume most have posted more than one). Almost everyone who has registered has at least left a review of marked a story as a favorite. So the database has to track them, their likes, and their emails, 24h/7d a week. Add in the fact that the systems allows anons to leave messages for those users. There are also the communities, the forums, the DocX system and a half dozen other things not yet mentioned. It's all interconnected and thus if one this fails, like dominoes falling, something else falls and you 'writing site' goes tits up. The same would happen to YouTube if they didn't employ and army of tech support to keep it working properly.

It's not your little fandom nitche website that hosts a few thousand authors for your favorite ships. That boat sailed for ff.net a long time ago. I think the problem is when it grew pasted that, they forgot how they couldn't treat it like that's what it was anymore. There is no doubt, that someone or a lot of someones there fall in the lazy bloke category. It takes as arse load of work to keep this large a site up and running smoothly. Personally I would very much like them to get off their soddin' lazy arses and get it fixed before it all falls to shit.

I understand that, but if you are going to run a site this large run it properly. Its like a business, and if this "store" was having this many problems here in the real world. I can tell you now it wouldn't last long. All I want is some answers that's all.

The site's problems go back a lot further than seven years. I'm not sure if there's anyone else who's still around in fandom that can remember the summer of 2001, when the whole site went off line for a least a couple of week. At least that time, they did posts status messages, and a time frame for when it would be up again. Of course, it went back up a few days later than they'd predicted. Or, it may have come up, gone back down for a few days, and then they got it working again. But ever since then, the site has had frequent downtimes.

I always look forward to the times when I get into a fandom that has it's own centralized archive. That gives me a least a few months of having a place I can read fanfiction and count on to stay working. And sometimes, I've had fandoms that have been just as active on livejournal as they are on fanfiction.net.

This time, though, the situation is seriously driving me crazy. Although, there are a livejournal communities for my current fandom, and even a community for the group that I consider to be my current favorite characters, very few stories about them get posted on livejournal. I am afraid that if fanfiction.net fails completely, I will end up with nothing to read about my favorite characters. And, as I discovered in the few days last week, before people started finding the way around the error message, when that happens, I spend all of what's supposed to be my writing time, looking all over the internet for something to read. And the worst thing is, because my current fandom is Hetalia and the characters are personifications of countries, I can't just enter their names into Google, and look for fanfiction that way. I don't think I'm going to find anything about the characters by doing that.

In other words, if these problems with fanfiction.net get worse then they are now, I don't know what I'm going to do.

It did that several week crash thing around '05 as well because I was just starting to really write then and was so completely bummed to not have a place to post. (Before I found the smalled 'shipper' sites to post at). I think it came and went 3 times before it went stable again that time.

I don't remember a crash in '05, but back then my family still had dial-up internet. And my former best friend was living with us, and she kept very tight control over what fandoms I could be in to. So, I spent very little time reading fanfiction, because I always had to get her permission to read about a fandom. And, I used to write stories with her, so we probably just worked on our stories then, and it didn't matter.

(And I am the same person that posted the comment yesterday. I was signed into my writing journal yesterday morning, and today I'm signed into my personal journal.)

Alright then. FF sucks. Major Ass...well their team people suck major ass. I like comparing FF to Lunaescence for some reason. Sure Luna doesn't have many members (like 7,000 or something), but the thing that irks me is that they have the doante/paypal thing. FF should get that, cuz I think they use ads or something? But yea, if I could find the FF team I'll probably Tazer 'em to death...a really slow electrifying death.

They used to have paid accounts way back in the day, and then those sorta disappeared around the same time they went to having a lot more ads. Thankfully I never see no ads because I use Firefox + Noscript + Cookie Monster. :)

lol. I have AdBlock Plus. I dun see no ads either. I remember their no ads thing use to be for three days, and then they changed it to one day. That thing isn't really worth having if it's only blocking ads for one day.

I don't even know why they have that feature. I mean, if they need the ad revenue, I don't have a huuuuuuge problem with it if they keep the ads fairly unobtrusive. I do know having no ad-blocker means you get interrupted with a full-page ad and then a "click here to go back to your original ff.n page" or whatever, but they shouldn't NEED ads like that to raise revenue.

Yea, I got AdBlock Plus just to get rid of the full body ads. I remember one time I was reading a fic and it was like after EVERY TIME I click for the next chapter a full page ad would come up. I would tear my hair out. FF.net was the only reason I got the Adblock...oh and the annoying video ads that play with sound. But yea they don't need ads like that. I think they just left it like that from when they probably did need money.

Oh I remember the days of paid accounts and no ads at all. Oh how I miss those days. I didn't even mind the 3 day time out from the ads so much. But I agree with you

hanfatolfethe one day time out is silly. It's not like it does any good.

I will say, I'm glad you mentioned AdBlock Plus however. I wasn't aware it would block them.

Yea, I have Firefox and saw adblock plus. I have like 3 subscriptions (the bolded ones mostly) and it completely blocks the ads of FF. That way I don't have to keep pressing the one day thing. A good 30 more seconds of my life dedicated to reading instead of wasting time on ads.

I remember the paid accounts, and I didn't know until recently that they'd gotten rid of them. When writing became my way to relieve stress, I started wanting to support writing sites. (I donated to NaNo, and will probably donate to Script Frenzy next month.) So, I was thinking I may have reached the point where I'd be willing to pay, and looked to see if ff.net still had that, and they didn't. And seriously, if they need money, they should have kept that feature, rather than having ads that can hijack people's browsers. (I've had some do that, and the only way I could get rid of it was to close the browser, and come back. If they didn't have ads like that, I would just not even bother turning on the adblock. Because, I want to help support the site.)

I love your explanation. I never thought about the sheer size of the server farm you'd need to keep a site like ff.n/Youtube/etc going reliably. I'm actually shocked that bots of various kinds have actually destroyed databases, though O_O Usually one hears of SQL vulnerabilities that allow this, but you're saying the sheer number of queries can also do it? O_O Damn.

Re: resources.

I'm with you on thinking they're woefully inadequate. There is a person named Xing who has run ff.n for a long time (He's mentioned in the Cassandra Claire plagiarism report on badpenny on JF, for example), and I know as recently as 2007 his e-mail was on the domain WHOIS info.

I believe he is still running things, but I have no idea if it's actually down to a one-man operation with extensive subcontracting for on-demand server upgrades and maintenance, or if it's a few-person operation with woefully inadequate personnel for being able to stay on top of stuff.

Either way, it ends up being the same because every time some genius upgrade happens at ff.n, shit breaks. It's like they don't even understand how to keep the database from going tits up when they decide to introduce some lamebrain decorative feature that's gee-whiz and oh, by the way, also kills all the section breaks. (>_<)

This has been a fascinating discussion. Like, I always knew that ff.net had shoddy, absentee administration but I hadn't considered that this latest set of problems was resource-related and not just broken code or something. It makes me wonder how sustainable the website is, given that it doesn't exactly seem to be a labour of love focused on user experience. The problems seem to be getting bigger and lasting longer. Did Archive Of Our Own see this coming?

(oblig. glitch party discussion: I'm not working around to update my stuff. Screw it, I don't reward ineptitude by generating extra hits and revenue. Sorry, readers.)

Of all the bots, I don't mind the crawlers from search engines. They may be plentiful and mighty (lord god does Google love their crawlers - hardly a day when by that we didn't see a few dozen of them).

But it what we dubbed the 'attack' bots that usually had Asian ISP's that would hit with anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand at a time that were a problem. You could bet if they caused a problem, they were virus loaded and you were going to have to pick that shit out of your database. Lord knows how many users you had online when they attacked. The worst ones are the ones that are smart enough to make it through the registration process of site. You can those are coming inbound with a virus and they will rain havoc in moments flat.

A site with as much virtual real estate as FF.net...well I hate to imagine what their logs look like. (The thought of Facebooks and YouTube's give me the hives).

No doubt. Someone around there hasn't got a clue! how to install new anything to the site because you're so correct. EVERY time they go to make any kind of change to the site, they break something in return. I'm not saying I was much better. I crashed my site more times than I care to admit doing upgrades but never on a long-term basis. It was always fixed within a few hours.

My suspicion is that their day-to-day maintainer is some college student who's out of town on Spring Break at the moment.

That explanation may make sense, because the problem became really serious, and then went through the next week. Of course, if that was the case, we might start seeing some sign of improvement today.

With the number of Users and stories plus their connected comments and all the forums and communities on the site, if it was ever only hosted on a single server it would have moved beyond that years ago. I have no idea what the site is using now, but I'd guess 30+ web-servers minimum, 1 master with 3+ slaved Database clusters (5+ servers per cluster minimum) for stories and another smaller database cluster for the forums. Those numbers I tossed out would probably get their admins waxing nostalgic about how they worked with that setup years ago.

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