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I don't normally complain about site downtimes by KrakenTango

but when I do, it's a site on which I have unavoidable fixations with hammering F5 on

I understand, but srsly, come on

I don't normally complain about site downtimes

KrakenTango

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    malebranche_e_malacoda

    Every few years FA has a complete meltdown. From the sounds of it, despite the new server and SQL update, it sounds like the site is living on borrowed time unless some serious fixes are enacted. But who knows, armchair programmers and site managers everywhere!

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      KrakenTango

      I'm just wondering what the deal is with the lack of redundancies. Read-only mode is nice and all, but after you've checked the site once you may as well have the 'We are down' banner up. I can understand perfectly fine if there's simply a lack of available funds for more reliable infrastructure, but there's really no such thing as, say, a big obvious donation button, or a more obvious and user-friendly public announcements feature (short of just +watching dragoneer's account, and keeping track of that is simply unfeasable to keep track of for those of us who watch over 3,000 people); they have the frontpage splash text stuff, but that only tends to get put up in case of an emergency rather than having something useful like a visible maintenance schedule.

      I'm not exactly a UI genius here, but I've been in the tech field long enough to know there are measures you can take to make noncrucial internal information more accessible if it's something likely to be user-impacting. They need someone dedicated to keeping a more transparently-informative front end up.

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    malebranche_e_malacoda

    Actually I may have used the site more during downtime than ever when it was up. But I'm going through my own little file integrity check over here, and that's a lot of cross-checking on FA.

    Regardless, I agree. It's amazing the site even functions at this time.

    The problems you describe all generally fall into the complaint of "Poor Management" which seems to really be the pervasive issue here. As you've stated there is dragoneers twitter, there's the site forums, the site itself. All populated by different people without any real cross-over. As you recommend, they really could use someone to communicate between teams.

    That said, I don't think they have a real maintenance schedule. They don't really have transparency, and I don't think it's because they lack in communication but because they don't have a plan. Some would say they don't actually know what they are doing. If someone was keeping track of the server this issue would have been seen when it started and the red flags could have been put up and something done about it. It took the site crashing for them to figure it out. And I'm going to speculate here for a moment, but it happened shortly after their new updates system went online, and the problem sounds very close to what you would expect from such a thing. So I wonder why nobody was looking there from the start.

    You can find a document regarding donations here: http://donations.furaffinity.net/

    It might imply a few things. There was a big donation drive to get new hardware. But there were also issues with site money being spent on fancy sports cars and other frivolous purchases. I'm using hyperbole here, but that is the gist of it.

    I can't find anything significant, but IIRC there was also a big problem of Paypal banning FA from their services in late 2009. If you look at the link I provided, you'll find that FA only accepts money orders. Who uses money orders today? Can't they find another service?