(no subject)

[chrkya-ler.livejournal.com]

Seriously ff.net needs to get their bleeding act together. First I couldn't edit my stories (thanks to the person who posted that fix) and now I can't search for a fic! Seriously?!?! This is messed up.

These folks needs to get on it and fix their junk. UGH.

Comments

Re: Yup

[hanfastolfe.livejournal.com]

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. (>_<)

[sometimeselkie.livejournal.com]

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.)

Re: Yup

[chrkya-ler.livejournal.com]

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.