# Something We All Can Do To Help Prevent The Next Big Downtime



## maxgoof (Dec 15, 2013)

Once FA comes back up, I highly recommend that everyone go through their notifications and delete everything that is more than a month old.

Then go through your note system and delete all notes over a year old. Do the same with your journals, except for those which are integral to something else.

From what I've seen, I have seen quite a few people that have tens of thousands of notifications that go back years in new submission notifications, comment notifications, and journal notifications.

Lately, FA has been crawling when I attempt to read or send a note, or create a journal. I plan to purge most of my notes and journals once FA comes back up.

Now, the one thing that FA can do to prevent this kind of a backup in the future is to put in a sunset for all notifications more than 30 days old. Yes, initially, it will bog down as it eliminates the old notifications. That could take days, like this down has done, but once done and implemented should help prevent the database bogdown we are experiencing.

Most that downtime would be eliminated if we simply do it ourselves.


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## Etiainen (Dec 15, 2013)

Awesome, let's not mess up the site by jumping in all at once the moment it comes back online to have it delete all the messages that should have been deleted with 3 days of receiving.

I'd love nothing more to have the site resume functioning, only to have it get DDoS'd the moment after. No, I'm serious. Let's DDoS the site the moment it comes back up.


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## jakeraccoon (Dec 15, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> Once FA comes back up, I highly recommend that everyone go through their notifications and delete everything that is more than a month old.
> 
> Then go through your note system and delete all notes over a year old. Do the same with your journals, except for those which are integral to something else.
> 
> ...



Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.


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## Etiainen (Dec 15, 2013)

jakeraccoon said:


> Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.



Implying FA can actually apply basic features.


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## Willow (Dec 15, 2013)

I could probably stand to do this. 



jakeraccoon said:


> Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.


I've never actually been on a site that has this feature :|

I still have emails on Yahoo from 2008/2009.


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## RyuuYouki (Dec 15, 2013)

Etiainen said:


> Implying FA can actually apply basic features.



Basic features? On my FA? Blasphemy!


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## jakeraccoon (Dec 15, 2013)

RyuuYouki said:


> Basic features? On my FA? Blasphemy!



Actually, on FA you can delete your own embarassing comments. You can't delete comments on Weasyl (yet).


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## RyuuYouki (Dec 15, 2013)

jakeraccoon said:


> Actually, on FA you can delete your own embarassing comments. You can't delete comments on Weasyl (yet).



You mean that feature that broke the site for a while and was horribly coded?


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## Etiainen (Dec 15, 2013)

jakeraccoon said:


> Actually, on FA you can *delete* your own embarassing comments.


Hahaha.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 15, 2013)

I know some emails will delete spam/trash contents after 30 days of the messages sticking around in there. I don't know any other site that actually does that though aside from emails.


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## thoron (Dec 15, 2013)

Teal said:


> What site does that?



DA and IB, I think YG also does it too. But I don't think its based on dates. Its based on number of submissions where it will only hold X number of submissions and if its at the highest allowed the oldest get deleted and new ones come in.


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## maxgoof (Dec 15, 2013)

Inkbunny removes notices after 180 days.


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## StevenRoy (Dec 15, 2013)

Automatic pruning of notifications after only 30 days might be too aggressive for most people. Even if we set that to a full 365 days, it would still clean out a heck of a lot of those ancient notifications that'll probably never be seen/used anyway! (I would guess 80% of them. And wouldn't the database feel sooooo much better after losing all that useless weight?)

(Inb4 someone suggests submissions and journals get deleted after three years. That would be taking a good idea much too far, right?)


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## Williamca (Dec 16, 2013)

This was all my fault.





(but no really, an automatic clearing every 30 days would be good. Seriously, there's probably empty accounts with more than 20k or so submission in them.)


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## jakeraccoon (Dec 16, 2013)

Williamca said:


> Seriously, there's probably empty accounts with more than 20k or so submission in them.)



This.


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## StormyChang (Dec 16, 2013)

haha, this seems like a good plan.  maybe after 90 or 150 days or something.  a good amount of my more popular friends and even my bf NEVER delete notifications like submissions/journals/comments.  reason stated: laziness.  XD  because apparently it's too hard to just click like 2 buttons.


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## zachhart12 (Dec 16, 2013)

I always keep my account nice and cleaned out, but yeah...I've had some friends and I was like DA FUQ man clean your stuff out and they were like "No."...Why not?!?!  Is there some phobia of this?


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## Jashwa (Dec 16, 2013)

I guarantee the moment that something like that got implemented there'd be a FLOOD of people who hoard their notifications yelling at the staff for implementing something like that. 

From a personal standpoint, I'd agree with it for submission notifications and journal notifications, but not for comments/watches/messages because those tend to be a lot more personal towards the user themselves instead of general things that you get a billion of.


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## zachhart12 (Dec 16, 2013)

Jashwa said:


> I guarantee the moment that something like that got implemented there'd be a FLOOD of people who hoard their notifications yelling at the staff for implementing something like that.
> 
> From a personal standpoint, I'd agree with it for submission notifications and journal notifications, but not for comments/watches/messages because those tend to be a lot more personal towards the user themselves instead of general things that you get a billion of.



Why do people need to keep their watches anyways?  There's a list for that on their userpage.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

StormyChang said:


> haha, this seems like a good plan.  maybe after 90 or 150 days or something.  a good amount of my more popular friends and even my bf NEVER delete notifications like submissions/journals/comments.  reason stated: laziness.  XD  because apparently it's too hard to just click like 2 buttons.



I never understood why people are so lazy about nuking their messages.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

zachhart12 said:


> Why do people need to keep their watches anyways?  There's a list for that on their userpage.



The only thing I can think of is so they can go back and thank the people when they have the time, but even then, it's not that hard to nuke them when you're finished.


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## Jashwa (Dec 16, 2013)

zachhart12 said:


> Why do people need to keep their watches anyways?  There's a list for that on their userpage.


I dunno, man. I have like semi obsessive compulsive notification deleting disorder. I can't stand to see notifications.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

I think auto purging notifications that are older than six months would be a good thing.  FA should put up a notice advising people to go through their old notices, because they will be auto purged after a certain date.  I'm guessing that over two-thirds of all notifications in the database or probably older than six months.  Many people I've noticed have never delete theirs since they first joined the site! I've seen people with numbers like 40,000 and such. The database would definitely feel better without that weight.  I delete notices as I look at them, and usually leave it at zero when I'm done for the day.  Every once in a while, if I'm away from my computer, I might leave some sit for a few days.  I've used FA since 2006, and I don't think I've ever had a notice that became a week old

I think it would be a bad idea to auto delete any submissions, journals or notes.


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## Shaon the Kozo (Dec 16, 2013)

Williamca said:


> This was all my fault.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Holy balls, how do you keep track of all the comments. AND THE FAVORITES. BY GOD.


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## Wavebreak (Dec 16, 2013)

I personally clean all of my notifs out asap. I hate having them stare me down. I know some of my friends keep messages for the sole purpose of just going back to look at them. I think that reasoning is really silly when we have a favorites system, and you can just bookmark them on your browser. Same goes for journals.


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## DarrylWolf (Dec 16, 2013)

I still have a bunch of notes from people from when I started in 2009. I will make it a New Year's Resolution to get rid of excess data. Let's start out clean in 2014!


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

Wavebreak said:


> I personally clean all of my notifs out asap. I hate having them stare me down. I know some of my friends keep messages for the sole purpose of just going back to look at them. I think that reasoning is really silly when we have a favorites system, and you can just bookmark them on your browser. Same goes for journals.



I typically clean out my messages as soon as I look at them too, opening anything in particular I want to look at in a new tab for when I have the time to get to it.


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## zachhart12 (Dec 16, 2013)

Shaon the Kozo said:


> Holy balls, how do you keep track of all the comments. AND THE FAVORITES. BY GOD.



I calculate a 90% probability than he doesn't keep track of them, he lets them sit because he's scared to delete them for some reason .


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## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

This is actually a pretty great idea! I know that my partner Libra-11 never removes his submissions, so I'm gonna kick him a few times until he agrees to do so. X3


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## jayriavieock (Dec 16, 2013)

At one point I had over 6000 messages. but I cleaned them out before FA went down so its now at 1083.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

Wavebreak said:


> I personally clean all of my notifs out asap. I hate having them stare me down. I know some of my friends keep messages for the sole purpose of just going back to look at them. I think that reasoning is really silly when we have a favorites system, and you can just bookmark them on your browser. Same goes for journals.






Agreed. I keep  friends submissions sometimes for a few days just to look at them when I log onto FA, since I loge right into my favorites page, but I nuke the journals immediately and only keep comments that are relevant to something I am doing until it is no longer relevant, only a few days usually, so I rarely have more than half a dozen messages/submissions saved at any one time. 
It would drive me NUTS to a constantly have a big backlog.


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## zachhart12 (Dec 16, 2013)

http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/843220-Site-Status-2013-12-16

YAY They are going to purge all notifications older than 90 days!


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## Dreaming (Dec 16, 2013)

I guess this is a bad time to admit that I only recently cleared out 12,000 notifications... 



jakeraccoon said:


> Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.


That's no fun if you've got the memory of a dying goldfish and forget to even check for important notes :c


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## Catilda Lily (Dec 16, 2013)

I keep my stuff cleaned out, I keep 5 journals all the time, they are the same ones that I want to keep. I would hate it if these got automatically deleted.


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## GamerFox (Dec 16, 2013)

So it was the notifications table that caused the choking... Well, it's a good thing pruning's been established now. Shame it had to follow an outage.


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## GamerFox (Dec 16, 2013)

Catilda Lily said:


> I keep my stuff cleaned out, I keep 5 journals all the time, they are the same ones that I want to keep. I would hate it if these got automatically deleted.


Maybe put them in your browser's bookmarks. They're giving us a grace period.


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## Shaon the Kozo (Dec 16, 2013)

This is for IF FA ever comes back up. Another update of "in the next 24 hours." Joy, the third promise that it'll be up in the next day. Time to wait for it to take another week for this site to work at all. I'm sorry, but at this point this entire thing seems like a huge, poorly run joke. This is absolutely ridiculous. A hundred bucks some other mysterious excuse pops up and they can't get that up in time, either.


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## teil (Dec 16, 2013)

I can't express how relieved I am to finally read something that shows progress. Even if it says it's going to be even longer for the site to come back. I'm glad to see that they're doing SOMETHING to avoid this happening again. 

But yes. Time to clean out our sh- ssssstuff. ;D


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## Chazykins (Dec 16, 2013)

I really don't get the new update. Maybe they just need more memory space? Then again I don't know, they are pulling more false hope out there. "In the next 24 hours we will tell you YET another lie on when the site will be reopened." loool


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## Stratelier (Dec 16, 2013)

net-cat said:
			
		

> 2. To reduce the size of the absolutely huge notification tables, we will be pruning notifications for submissions and journals older than 90 days.


It's about damn time to implement a policy like that.  I am curious as to a few things, though, like how much space in the current notifications tables is over the 90-day mark?

I imagine that users not deleting their notifications isn't the only reason the table is so big -- sure it's the most obvious reason, but notifications sent to lurking/inactive accounts are possibly another reason (because if they don't log in, how are they going to dismiss any notifications?).


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

Chazykins said:


> I really don't get the new update. Maybe they just need more memory space? Then again I don't know, they are pulling more false hope out there. "In the next 24 hours we will tell you YET another lie on when the site will be reopened." loool



At least they told us what was going on and what the plan is. They can take longer than 24 hours at this point for all I care, as long as there's updates letting us know.


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## kevincorgi (Dec 16, 2013)

I'm laughing at the fact that it took SIX DAYS to arrive at this point.  Good thing this is not a serious website.


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## Jashwa (Dec 16, 2013)

Meh, PSN went down for a MONTH for Sony and everything turned out fine in the end.


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## idejtauren (Dec 16, 2013)

I was planning on doing that anyways.

It's just my notes that have never been deleted or anything.


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## Catilda Lily (Dec 16, 2013)

GamerFox said:


> Maybe put them in your browser's bookmarks. They're giving us a grace period.


 Because booking marking something that gets deleted works. Also no double posting please.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

Catilda Lily said:


> Because booking marking something that gets deleted works.



No, you click on the message and bookmark that page, then delete the message.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

GamerFox said:


> Maybe put them in your browser's bookmarks. They're giving us a grace period.





They aren't giving us any information on how long this "grace period" is. I understand that they are busy trying to get the site up, but if they suddenly say "Oh, grace period is up, all your s**t is gone!"  a week or two (or even three) after it comes up (which could be another week or two or three the way it is going) I can see a WHOLE LOT of VERY pissed people. 

The lack of communication so far doesn't make me optimistic that we will get a lot of information about this "grace period". 

But we shall see I suppose.


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## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

Jashwa said:


> Meh, PSN went down for a MONTH for Sony and everything turned out fine in the end.



Sony also gave us lots of free stuff. Where's my commemorative "OH NOES FA LULZ" tee shirt? I expect it in the mail by tomorrow. >:C

But seriously, I'm very happy with this update, and it makes a lot of sense. I just wish Yak would have had the foresight to fix the problem before it overloaded on us, but at least it's not quite so serious as I was worried over. And, yes, people need to actually clean out their notifications, and I fully support an auto-delete for anything after 90 days.


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## Kesteh (Dec 16, 2013)

I had a feeling that notifications were once again a scapegoat.

But seriously though. I cannot for the life of me understand why people keep all notifications, even ones that are "removed". 
I've seen some streamers have over 10k. I cringe. WHY? You don't read them! "I'm going to later..." Bullshit they're still there from five streams ago when we saw them last time!
Hit the god damn nuke button.



Jashwa said:


> Meh, PSN went down for a MONTH for Sony and everything turned out fine in the end.


That was a security vulnerability and they made damn sure they closed it. This is different. This is inefficient and poor software issue.
Irony of the situation: Sony was warned like FA was prior to certain security hole exploits... and neither listened to the warnings.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

kontonakuma said:


> No, you click on the message and bookmark that page, then delete the message.





If you bookmark a page and then delete the message on the page, it won't still be there.. now if you save the page as an .html file, then that would work.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

seaweed said:


> If you bookmark a page and then delete the message on the page, it won't still be there.. now if you save the page as an .html file, then that would work.




No...that's not what they're saying to bookmark... 

You have a message. Click on the message and it takes you to the comment, submission, whatever. Bookmark that page it takes you to, not the message page.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

kontonakuma said:


> No...that's not what they're saying to bookmark...
> 
> You have a message. Click on the message and it takes you to the comment, submission, whatever. Bookmark that page it takes you to, not the message page.





But if the person deletes the submission or comment, etc, then you are in the same boat.  I have quite a few pics in my favorites that people have deleted, and all I have is a gray x there now.  
So saving whatever it is that you want as an .html file so you get the whole page makes more sense.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

Duraji said:


> Sony also gave us lots of free stuff. Where's my commemorative "OH NOES FA LULZ" tee shirt? I expect it in the mail by tomorrow. >:C




Yeah we got like.. 2 or 3 free games and I think some free PSN time if I remember correctly. They really went out of their way to try to keep their user base. 

Have to say that it worked for me. I love my PS3.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

seaweed said:


> But if the person deletes the submission or comment, etc, then you are in the same boat.  I have quite a few pics in my favorites that people have deleted, and all I have is a gray x there now.
> So saving whatever it is that you want as an .html file so you get the whole page makes more sense.



There would be no point in keeping the message notifications either at that point. Which is why the bookmark idea was suggested, to help clean up your notifications you may wanted to look at later.


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## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

seaweed said:


> Yeah we got like.. 2 or 3 free games and I think some free PSN time if I remember correctly. They really went out of their way to try to keep their user base.
> 
> Have to say that it worked for me. I love my PS3.



I got Wipeout HD and Dead Nation as my free games. I also got a couple PSP games, and they gave everyone free PS+ Membership for like 60 days.

So I know for sure that Dragoneer will give me some "Yiff+(tm)" Membership and two free sexy androids of my choosing! Right?

... what do you mean real life androids haven't been invented yet? Goddamn it. :<


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

kontonakuma said:


> There would be no point in keeping the message notifications either at that point. Which is why the bookmark idea was suggested, to help clean up your notifications you may wanted to look at later.




I have enough bookmarks as it is right now to be honest. I would rather keep the favorite submissions so I don't have to bookmark every single one. Bookmarks would get out of hand quickly. 
I really don't see any reason to keep any notification more than 90 days. That is totally separate from favorite submissions, which of course people keep semi-permanently.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

Duraji said:


> I got Wipeout HD and Dead Nation as my free games. I also got a couple PSP games, and they gave everyone free PS+ Membership for like 60 days.
> 
> So I know for sure that Dragoneer will give me some "Yiff+(tm)" Membership and two free sexy androids of my choosing! Right?
> 
> ... what do you mean real life androids haven't been invented yet? Goddamn it. :<





I want to say I got Little Big Planet? I forgot the other one. I unfortunately don't have a PSP so no free game for me for that system. Oh well. *plays my 3DS happily*

Androids kinda freak me out.. humaoid robots are creepy. I'll just take the Yiff+(tm)


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## StevenRoy (Dec 16, 2013)

There's an FA user I watch (not naming names!) who occasionally Livestreams art. Sometimes we get a glimpse of the artist's FA page, and I always cringe when I see how many notifications are indicated at the top of the page. At one point, I even begged, begged the person: clean out some of them! "That can't be good for the database," I said once, at least several months ago - not knowing just how right I would apparently be!

It's been a while, but if I remember right, there were over 500,000 - and that's just the submissions, not the journals (also a huge number), watches (over 1000), or unread notes (also over 1000 - shame, shame!).

(Or maybe 50,000 submissions; I'm only 80% sure I remembered the number of digits right, but it's still up there!)

...

That's who I blame for this outage now.

(No, not really!)

(Well... maybe a little bit. But I respect this artist enough to forgive a bit of sloppiness, and if any of you know who I'm talking about, I ask you to do the same. Remember, with better site coding, this wouldn't have been an issue in the first place!)

...

As for FA's new pruning limit, I fully approve of the concept. I think the limit itself should probably be more lenient, though. Instead of 90 days, how about 1 year? That'll still purge tons of junk, but be much less likely to be noticed by the people who'd be annoyed by it! (It could even be a gradual limit to get us used to the idea; make the limit 3 years for two months, 2 years for six more months, and then 1 year.)


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## GamerFox (Dec 16, 2013)

seaweed said:


> I want to say I got Little Big Planet? I forgot the other one. I unfortunately don't have a PSP so no free game for me for that system. Oh well. *plays my 3DS happily*
> 
> Androids kinda freak me out.. humaoid robots are creepy. I'll just take the Yiff+(tm)



Mm. I'll settle for Curtain No. 2.


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## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

seaweed said:


> Androids kinda freak me out.. humaoid robots are creepy. I'll just take the Yiff+(tm)



Aww. Ahh well, to each their own! ^^ I can see why the idea of an attractive and friendly yet uncanny lifelike synthetic entity wouldn't be for everyone. More for me, then. 

(and if anyone's morbidly curious as to what I'm talking about, you can always look at my gallery while we're still in read-only mode and I feel like pimping out my ideas! But I shan't be held responsible for anyone who goes deaf dumb and blind from what they might see in there... X3 )


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

StevenRoy said:


> It's been a while, but if I remember right, there were over 500,000 - and that's just the submissions, not the journals (also a huge number), watches (over 1000), or unread notes (also over 1000 - shame, shame!).........
> 
> As for FA's new pruning limit, I fully approve of the concept. I think the limit itself should probably be more lenient, though. Instead of 90 days, how about 1 year? That'll still purge tons of junk, but be much less likely to be noticed by the people who'd be annoyed by it! (It could even be a gradual limit to get us used to the idea; make the limit 3 years for two months, 2 years for six more months, and then 1 year.)



Holy crap, That's...WAY too many messages to let build up and sit there taking up unnecessary space.


People build up a lot of messages in a year. My friend gets 1k in messages, submissions only, in the span of a month. Maybe do messages from over 6 months ago at most.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

StevenRoy said:


> There's an FA user I watch (not naming names!) who occasionally Livestreams art. Sometimes we get a glimpse of the artist's FA page, and I always cringe when I see how many notifications are indicated at the top of the page. At one point, I even begged, begged the person: clean out some of them! "That can't be good for the database," I said once, at least several months ago - not knowing just how right I would apparently be!
> 
> It's been a while, but if I remember right, there were over 500,000 - and that's just the submissions, not the journals (also a huge number), watches (over 1000), or unread notes (also over 1000 - shame, shame!).
> 
> ...





You have me curious as to who it is.. I have a guess but I don't think they would have had *THAT*  many.



I do like the idea of gradually pruning it down, though I would probably go 1 year, then  9 months, then  6 months, and just leave it there.. But I am not sure if gradual pruning wold actually cause more trouble than just one quick wash of the system. 
I agree 90 days is pretty low.. But maybe the issue is worse than they are letting on and they really need to purge that much crap.  6 months- 1 year makes more sense, but I am just glad they are taking this step. We can only hope that it will help the stability issues.


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## Nicthalon (Dec 16, 2013)

Shaon the Kozo said:


> This is for IF FA ever comes back up. Another update of "in the next 24 hours." Joy, the third promise that it'll be up in the next day. Time to wait for it to take another week for this site to work at all. I'm sorry, but at this point this entire thing seems like a huge, poorly run joke. This is absolutely ridiculous. A hundred bucks some other mysterious excuse pops up and they can't get that up in time, either.



There's an old saying.  "SHIT HAPPENS!"

Sometimes, unforseen problems come up, and you're forced to take longer than expected.  I've had more than my fair share of that doing electrical and HVAC work.  The biggest issue, from what I've been reading, is that FA was using a certain software for notifications, and FA has vastly outgrown that software's capacity.  Whether this happened 5 years ago, now, or 5 year from now, eventually they would have to change to different software.  That it caused a critical backlog now is just luck saying a great big F U! to FA.  

They will get it fixed.
They will come back online.
They could do some of this in a much more timely manner if some people who sat there bitching because they can't get their daily fix of porn actually donated some money to the site instead of God knows how much in commissions every year.
If this site being down causes an artist's (whether art, music, writing, photography, etc) business to come to a complete standstill, then that artist needs to get a better system of communicating with clients outside of FA, since nobody should rely on one single website for their entire livelyhood.
If this site being down causes a watcher's life to come to a complete standstill, I'd encourage that person to go to yellowpages.com and search for local psychiatrists.  Because, seriously, they need help.  And fresh air.

tl;dr it's just a website.  Check in, then move on, until it's back up.  THEN go back to being obsessive, and FFS, delete notifications you haven't even looked at in the last 3 years!


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## Wandering_Smoke (Dec 16, 2013)

Looks like I'm screwed. I keep watches from friends or local furs because I can't remember names. Certain submissions I keep because I want to remember it, like the "Creepy Comment Etiquette" pics http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8633325/ and merchandise I'd like to buy someday, like these shot glasses http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8847455/ pocket watches http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10185323/ art books http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10292561/ or comics http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10397293/ I have no excuse for accumulating 33533 submissions, other than depression after losing years worth of stuff a few months ago due to a HDD failure. I'll get it cleared out as fast as I can, but PLEASE give me some time! 

The start of the art I need to fav is 232 days old. Could we get an initial limit of 1 year, please? That should clean up FA considerably, and give people like me a chance to go through everything.


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## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

Wandering_Smoke said:


> Looks like I'm screwed. I keep watches from friends or local furs because I can't remember names. Certain submissions I keep because I want to remember it, like the "Creepy Comment Etiquette" pics http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8633325/ and merchandise I'd like to buy someday, like these shot glasses http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8847455/ pocket watches http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10185323/ art books http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10292561/ or comics http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10397293/ I have no excuse for accumulating 33533 submissions, other than depression after losing years worth of stuff a few months ago due to a HDD failure. I'll get it cleared out as fast as I can, but PLEASE give me some time!
> 
> The start of the art I need to fav is 232 days old. Could we get an initial limit of 1 year, please? That should clean up FA considerably, and give people like me a chance to go through everything.



I think they said you'll get a grace period, at least for the really important stuff. But it would be good to get rid of favorites really quickly, then really old journals. From there you can go through comments at your own pace, and then submissions, though you'll have to go through a week's worth at a time to purge them in a timely manner. I think they won't have any limits on notes for now, since those are still extremely important to be able to archive.


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## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

Lord knows this site needs this feature as I'm ashame to admit that I'm guilty of letting my notifications slip into the 200K range.


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Shaon the Kozo said:


> This is for IF FA ever comes back up. Another update of "in the next 24 hours." Joy, the third promise that it'll be up in the next day.



Where do you see promises?  They have not promised anything in any of their update statements so far.  The current timeline says, "sometime in the next 24 hours."  But, that's only a hopeful estimate, which may not be met if other problems crop up.  It will be up when it is ready, but they can only estimate the timeline.


----------



## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

Duraji said:


> I think they said you'll get a grace period, at least for the really important stuff. But it would be good to get rid of favorites really quickly, then really old journals. From there you can go through comments at your own pace, and then submissions, though you'll have to go through a week's worth at a time to purge them in a timely manner. I think they won't have any limits on notes for now, since those are still extremely important to be able to archive.



This is all stuff in the notifications page right?


----------



## Nicthalon (Dec 16, 2013)

StevenRoy said:


> (Remember, with better site coding, this wouldn't have been an issue in the first place!)



Don't blame it all on site coding.  As Net-cat pointed out in the update, the issue isn't the site, it's the program that was handling the notifications database.  That software has a capacity far below what FA has grown to have.  I don't even want to imagine what software licenses for that kind of thing cost, so I'm betting they simply haven't changed software until things broke completely.  Everybody needs to remember that this site runs entirely on donations.  None of the admins get paid to do this.


----------



## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Sometimes it feels like some people let their notifications pile up to extremes so they can brag about it. -_-



I'm not bragging, I feel ashamed of what I let pile up through procrastination and forgetfulness.


----------



## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

Nicthalon said:


> They could do some of this in a much more timely manner if some people who sat there bitching because they can't get their daily fix of porn actually donated some money to the site instead of God knows how much in commissions every year.
> If this site being down causes an artist's (whether art, music, writing, photography, etc) business to come to a complete standstill, then that artist needs to get a better system of communicating with clients outside of FA, since nobody should rely on one single website for their entire livelyhood.
> If this site being down causes a watcher's life to come to a complete standstill, I'd encourage that person to go to yellowpages.com and search for local psychiatrists.  Because, seriously, they need help.  And fresh air.
> 
> tl;dr it's just a website.  Check in, then move on, until it's back up.  THEN go back to being obsessive, and FFS, delete notifications you haven't even looked at in the last 3 years!





Yay, way to rehash dead horses that have already been beaten. 


People *HAVE* donated to the site, donated hardware and money.. and yet, here we are, so please don't tell us that throwing more money at it will make it work. We have already seen that it has not. 

The communication issue outside of FA has been beaten to death as well. Telling someone just go elsewhere doesn't work, so I am not going any further into that. 

No one is saying that their life is coming to a complete standstill, we are just ticked that we have heard "its almost done" for at least 4 days now.


----------



## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> I know someone who has six accounts.
> Four are inactive yet are still watching about 500 people each.
> 
> People like the artist stevenroy was talking about who just let it pile up.
> ...



Probably


----------



## Blackheart the wolf (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> I think auto purging notifications that are older than six months would be a good thing.  FA should put up a notice advising people to go through their old notices, because they will be auto purged after a certain date.  I'm guessing that over two-thirds of all notifications in the database or probably older than six months.  Many people I've noticed have never delete theirs since they first joined the site! I've seen people with numbers like 40,000 and such. The database would definitely feel better without that weight.  I delete notices as I look at them, and usually leave it at zero when I'm done for the day.  Every once in a while, if I'm away from my computer, I might leave some sit for a few days.  I've used FA since 2006, and I don't think I've ever had a notice that became a week old
> 
> I think it would be a bad idea to auto delete any submissions, journals or notes.


 http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/843220-Site-Status-2013-12-16 they said they will be doing something like that for notifications older than 90 days. I honestly don't see the point of keeping notifications that old lol. I mean if you have notifications that old then you have obviously seen them already so just get rid of them lol. I try to clean mine out every couple of weeks. And i would imagine that the more old notifications people keep the more it backs up the system.


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## AmaruKaze (Dec 16, 2013)

Once in my life I have been a good guy and actually deleted all my notifications. Given the fact that I have about 100 Submissions plus Journals to work through a day. We all know what one year of absence would mean, now take all those semi-dead users who are all about faving and watching hundreds of artist. So, maybe one should limit that and I mean not imposing by rule but simply by logic. If you cannot view all those images and journals, then probably choose the artists you want to watch better.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Sometimes it feels like some people let their notifications pile up to extremes so they can brag about it. -_-



I use to feel like that too, until I've talked to plenty of friends about it. The majority of them are just too damn lazy, while a few really do watch that many people where they'd spend the entire day if they went through their messages all at once.


----------



## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

I saw someone mention favorites. As I understood, and someone correct me if I am wrong, this will not affect your favorite submissions list, but only your notifications, which means private notes, friends' journals, and friends' submissions, correct?
I am hoping this is the case because getting rid of favorites would be quite sad.


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## StevenRoy (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Do dead and banned members accounts still receive notifications?



Oh my. If they do, that needs fixing!

We're all probably unanimous in that, right?


----------



## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

seaweed said:


> I saw someone mention favorites. As I understood, and someone correct me if I am wrong, this will not affect your favorite submissions list, but only your notifications, which means private notes, friends' journals, and friends' submissions, correct?
> I am hoping this is the case because getting rid of favorites would be quite sad.



I'm pretty sure they're just talking about the notification build up.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Catilda Lily said:


> I keep my stuff cleaned out, I keep 5 journals all the time, they are the same ones that I want to keep. I would hate it if these got automatically deleted.



They are purging old notifications, not the journals, submissions and comments that they point to.  Your journals should be perfectly safe.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

kontonakuma said:


> I'm pretty sure they're just talking about the notification build up.





I hope so.. That would make sense.


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## Alexandere (Dec 16, 2013)

I keep watches to a minimum but an interesting thing I've noticed is that if you haven't cleared out stuff for a looong time and the number starts to get lower, I get to look through my watches and see who ragequit FA or cleared out their entire page of stuff.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> You know FA may be outdated and go down a lot, but it still works better than DA. :I



I do like FA's simplicity and you don't get viruses with the ads refreshing.


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## Blackheart the wolf (Dec 16, 2013)

I personally think removing notifications that are over 90 days old is not a bad idea.


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## muddypaws (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> Once FA comes back up, I highly recommend that everyone go through their notifications and delete everything that is more than a month old.
> 
> Then go through your note system and delete all notes over a year old. Do the same with your journals, except for those which are integral to something else.
> 
> ...



Max, I actually do that frequently.  I usually do a MASS delete of any submissions, journals, notes, etc.  The only one I haven't done yet is the notes.  I'm probably going to do that as well, but... Well, it would be a nice feature if we could do that operation like we can in, say Yahoo email.

Just click selections and then mass delete.  Outside of submissions, and one's own gallery, I haven't yet seen that feature in notes.

Good idea, overall though, clean out the clutter.


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## Blackheart the wolf (Dec 16, 2013)

StevenRoy said:


> Oh my. If they do, that needs fixing!
> 
> We're all probably unanimous in that, right?


 the first account that came to my mind was lemonade coyote(R.I.P)


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## muddypaws (Dec 16, 2013)

Whatever happens, all I can say is I've had work related projects that are/have been similar to Dragoneer's situation.


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## Kesteh (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Guys, (for those who don't realize this) clearing out your submission/comment/journal/watch/favorites notifications does not remove or alter those things. It just removes a message telling you that you have a new submission/comment/journal/watch/favorited thing.
> Notes and TT's are different. (But they work different anyway).



That simple "message telling you..." would actually take up space here. Because WHY


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Is it possible to keep dead and banned members accounts from receiving notifications? (If they do receive them).



I'm sure there's a way to.


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## DrkKaiser (Dec 16, 2013)

Nicthalon said:


> Don't blame it all on site coding.  As Net-cat pointed out in the update, the issue isn't the site, it's the program that was handling the notifications database.  That software has a capacity far below what FA has grown to have.  I don't even want to imagine what software licenses for that kind of thing cost, so I'm betting they simply haven't changed software until things broke completely.  Everybody needs to remember that this site runs entirely on donations.  None of the admins get paid to do this.



I'm sorry, but you seem to be unaware of how code works!
The issue IS the site coding, as the notifications database is CODED.
SOFTWARE has nothing to do with this!

Jeezus.


----------



## Northern-Crosshair (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> And FA really only has terrible lag and glitching when it's about to go down, not all the time. -_-


 That's related to the back-end though, not inherent to the interface itself.



kontonakuma said:


> I'm sure there's a way to.



Easiest method would be to set those accounts to auto-delete notifications once per day or something, though the most efficient method would be to have them not recieve notifications.


----------



## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

Northern-Crosshair said:


> That's related to the back-end though, not inherent to the interface itself.
> 
> 
> 
> Easiest method would be to set those accounts to auto-delete notifications once per day or something, though the most efficient method would be to have them not recieve notifications.



Depending on the ban type as well. If its a temporary ban it would recieve updates to the standard 90 days but if its permanent it recieves nothing. Though as a whole with everyones notifications now set to clear out anything older than 90 days it shouldn't be a problem anymore anyway.


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## AmaruKaze (Dec 16, 2013)

thoron said:


> Depending on the ban type as well. If its a temporary ban it would recieve updates to the standard 90 days but if its permanent it recieves nothing. Though as a whole with everyones notifications now set to clear out anything older than 90 days it shouldn't be a problem anymore anyway.



If he is banned permanently I do not see any point keeping any submissions, any comments or anything from him/her at all.

Cascade all the comments/Journals/etc he/she ever created and done.


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## GreenReaper (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Can you imagine 90 days from when it's implemented and all those notifications are eliminated?
> That wouldn't crash the site would it?


Most likely there will be a cron job to clear them every day. So, you're clearing out just day 91, except the first time you do it.


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## Haystack (Dec 16, 2013)

Kesteh said:


> That simple "message telling you..." would actually take up space here. Because WHY



database entry for notification (my best guess)

your userid key number + submission/journal/comment/shout key number + time/date stamp + (possibly) key number of submission/journal  on which comment was made.  

I'm wildly guessing that's gonna be at least 32 bytes for the actual notification, plus another 16 for database keys and such.

so, talking totally on conjecture here, make it 48 bytes per notification.  multiply that by 20,000.
yeah, that's almost a megabyte of database space just for those notifications, if I'm at all in the ballpark.

not to mention, each extra record can make a search of the database take a little bit longer (it's really tiny, but still significant).  

I clear out most of my notifications EVERY day.  I might keep a  handful of notes hanging for giving a more timely or coherent response, 
but other than that, I feel no need to cling onto notifications -- if it's an artwork or journal I really like, I'll archive it on my own machine.


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Several excellent points have been brought up, especially the one about abandoned accounts accumulating notices.

For these accounts, I would recommend the following:

1) Any account that has not been logged out of for a month gets auto logged out (this should not be a big deal. It takes, what, ten seconds to log in again?)
2) Any account that has not been logged into for a year gets locked and is considered abandoned(which would mean you only have to log in once in 13 months to keep it active)
3) Any abandoned account has all notifications purged, all notes purged (nobody but the user could see them), all journals not on the front page purged (this might be slightly problemmatic, as I have one journal I use for the index of The Beach Bears Story. Perhaps I should consider a better alternative).

This would leave all of the submissions, scraps, and favorites intact, which is just about the only things left of an abandoned account you would still want.

I have the feeling that this would go a VERY long way to preventing the notifications from getting out of hand, short of an autopurge.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Wandering_Smoke said:


> Looks like I'm screwed. I keep watches from friends or local furs because I can't remember names.



You don't need to keep any of your watch notifications.  Just go to your user page, scroll down to where it says, "Watched by", and click on, "Full List (###)". That will display a list of everyone who is watching you.  You can save that page to your own hard drive if you like.

For faves, you can click the Stats button on your user page. It tells how many people faved each of your submissions, and if you click the number of faves, it will list who those people are.  So, you can delete all the old fave notifications.  That leaves journals, comments and submissions to actually deal with. 33,533 submissions is going to take a while to deal with!  If you start now, I suspect you'll be done before they start the 90-day pruning. I'm guessing that their "this will not happen immediately" will translate into at least a few months.

BTW, the link from here to your FA page doesn't work. If you edit it to remove the underscore character, it will work.


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## brine (Dec 16, 2013)

i'm cool with nuking everything, but watchers and the PM's... 
i have about 3,000+ notifications, not hoarding, just due to inactivity...
i was unware it created any type of load on the system.

 i agree with OP.

 but on the positive side, while FA has been down its given me a lot of time
to work on more art =3

-Brine Cat

http://www.furaffinity.net/user/brine/


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

AmaruKaze said:


> If he is banned permanently I do not see any point keeping any submissions, any comments or anything from him/her at all.
> 
> Cascade all the comments/Journals/etc he/she ever created and done.



Before you do that, I would recommend informing those who watch and/or have faved their stuff that the account is going bye-bye, and give them 30 days to download what they want before purging. I would not delete any comments from them on any other account, though. Simply mark it as banned, or if they want to make it less judgemental, simply call it closed. A simple color change of the name with a strikeout would suffice. Often their comments were commented on, and without the original, the followup makes no sense.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

muddypaws said:


> I'm probably going to do that as well, but... Well, it would be a nice feature if we could do that operation like we can in, say Yahoo email.
> 
> Just click selections and then mass delete.



We already can, to some degree. On your notes page, you can check messages individually, or click the "all" button to select all on that page. Then click on the "trash" button. That lets you kill whole pages at a time if desired.  The messages are only moved to a trash folder though. To actually delete them from the server, you have to go into your trash folder, select all of them, and click the "delete" button.

I think FA should auto purge anything in the trash folder after 30 days. I looked in my trash and noticed stuff that was up to four months old - probably when I deleted my trash last.  I keep my inbox pretty well cleaned, but I don't always take the time to go into trash and actually delete the stuff. That part should be automatic, after a reasonable time has passed.  A "nuke all" button in the trash folder would be welcome, since it's very unlikely that anything good would be deleted by mistake from that folder.


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Catilda Lily said:


> I keep my stuff cleaned out, I keep 5 journals all the time, they are the same ones that I want to keep. I would hate it if these got automatically deleted.



The obvious thing to do then, is only purge the journals older than, say, a year, that do not appear on the front page (that's 12, if I remember correctly). Which means if you have fewer journals than 12 they would not be touched.

But purging journals is not as important, seriously. A journal is one database entry. That journal, however, generates as many notifications as you have watchers. Getting the notifications under control is far more important.


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## Wandering_Smoke (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> 33,533 submissions is going to take a while to deal with!  If you start now, I suspect you'll be done before they start the 90-day pruning. I'm guessing that their "this will not happen immediately" will translate into at least a few months.
> 
> BTW, the link from here to your FA page doesn't work. If you edit it to remove the underscore character, it will work.



Yes it is. I'm guessing it'll take about a month of doing nothing but going through submissions, but I'LL DO IT!


Fixed my FA link. Thanks


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## Northern-Crosshair (Dec 16, 2013)

AmaruKaze said:


> If he is banned permanently I do not see any point keeping any submissions, any comments or anything from him/her at all.
> 
> Cascade all the comments/Journals/etc he/she ever created and done.


Please tell me you aren't serious? Just because someone has been banned doesn't mean that they've never contributed anything good or meaningful.

Such a policy would do nothing but create additional problems by increasing the amount of re-posting that is done by people "just in case" someone gets banned and suddenly those favorites links come up as 404's.

Don't know how it works for banned accounts now, but give them 90 days or something to copy out their notes and such and then purge notes and notifications. Sure, troll accounts with no submissions are one thing and could probably be deleted completely, but not every banned account is like that.


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## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

AmaruKaze said:


> If he is banned permanently I do not see any point keeping any submissions, any comments or anything from him/her at all.
> 
> Cascade all the comments/Journals/etc he/she ever created and done.



Whats the point of deleting actual summissions and journals? I'd say keep it around but lock the comments.


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Let me detail the problem, if I may:

Presently, FA does not purge old notifications. Normally, this would not be a problem, as most people see notifications like a reminder. Once that reminder is no longer necessary, they remove it.

This assumption that the users would automatically delete their own notifications, however, proved to be false, and they accumulated.

Now, remember: Every upload, whether it be a submission, or a journal, generates a notification to each and every one of your watchers. I don't know what the average number of watchers is, but let's assume that it is 100 (remember, many users have close to 10,000 watchers, which would cover 100 users who have only a handful). That means for every upload there are 100 notices sent out. If people don't go through them and purge them, they quickly become a sizeable chunk of the database.

As the database gets bigger, the response time degrades for just about everything.

The best thing you can do is go through them and remove them. Do this every day.

Submission Notifications: Look at the artwork you are notified about (even if it's just the thumbnails). Remove the ones are are not interested in immediately. Examine the ones you are interested in and fave the ones you want to refer to later. Then, remove all submission notifications. Remember, you are WATCHING the artists. Removing the notification does NOT remove the art.

Comment Notifications: Examine them, respond to the ones you feel like responding to, then purge all comment notifications.

Watch Notifications: Examine the new watcher's profile. Thank them for the watch, if you wish. Watch them back if you want. Then purge the watcher notifications. You still have your list of watchers at the bottom of your profile that never goes away.

Journal Notifications: Purge the notifications you are not interested in, immediately. View the journals you are, and respond to them if you wish. Then purge those notifications.

Private Note Notifications: These are the least problematic, as a note generates only one notification which is automatically purged when you view the note. None the less, go through your private notes on a regular basis and remove old ones that are no longer important. Same with old journals. Remember that viewers can only see your last twelve on the front page, and have to access your journal tab to see any more.


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## Raphial Hebert (Dec 16, 2013)

I gotta point out something no one has really said anything about...

FA is a website full of thousands of users and has been around for years and years, and for some reason, FA's staff -still- cannot seem to get their shit together. The downtime I believe has been a week now? For thousands of users accessing such a popular community website, there is just about no excuse for that. Unless something went -horribly- wrong (Something way worse than some database purging...). I myself am a server administrator, and have plenty of experience to back up my statement. You can't just sit on your ass for an entire week after you could have prevented something like this for years now. Sure they are working on the problems, but honestly with FA's long drawn out history (Don't get me started on Furocity), they have yet to make their website remotely stable. And I'm not going to even touch on the stuck-in-the-90's layout FA's appearance has. 

The way I see it, after seeing -this- much downtime after years and years of being on FA, I think it's about high time I stop relying on the site and stop hoping it'll become stable because the website has a shitty foundation to begin with, and because of that, there will -always- be serious problems.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> Let me detail the problem, if I may:
> 
> Presently, FA does not purge old notifications. Normally, this would not be a problem, as most people see notifications like a reminder. Once that reminder is no longer necessary, they remove it.
> 
> ...



Opening things such as submissions and journals that interest you in a new tab and then nuking is helpful as well. You'll have it there for you to look at later when you get the time.


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

kontonakuma said:


> Opening things such as submissions and journals that interest you in a new tab and then nuking is helpful as well. You'll have it there for you to look at later when you get the time.



Good point.


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

So, here is my plan of action for when FA comes back up. Yours will differ, as your needs are different from mine:

Notifications: No need for me to change. I eliminate all my notifications before I log out.

Notes: Go in and remove all received and sent notes that are older than six months. Don't forget the sent folder. Then go into the trash folder and delete them from there.

Journals: Remove all journals older than a year. Move journals to a scraps submission that are integral to something else (say, like an index or something).

Submissions: No change, as this is not a problem. I may go through them and remove older ones that I have improved upon. I was reluctant to do so before, as it would reduce my favorites number, but frankly, I don't pay attention to that number anymore.

Lastly, post a new journal recommending that all of my watchers purge their notifications while the memory of this downtime is still painfully fresh, giving them alternatives to keeping the notifications, and impressing them on the problems they have cause, no only in this downtime, but in every unscheduled downtime. It is apparent that even the staff was unaware of the size of the notifications in the database. Here's hoping they do something about it as soon as they can to prevent future problems.


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## GreenReaper (Dec 16, 2013)

This reminds me of a recent article by Nathaniel Stein in _The New Yorker_:


> To my executor, I give the following instructions: everything must be burned.
> 
> My personal papers must be burned without exception. My correspondence: burned. My financial papers: burned. My journals: burned. My notebooks: burned. My restaurant placemats: burned.
> 
> ...


----------



## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

GreenReaper said:


> This reminds me of a recent article by Nathaniel Stein in _The New Yorker_:



Hee hee...

The point of all this, of course, is to eliminate everything you are not likely to need in the next month. Chances are you won't ever miss them, and you will go a long way toward making the database more manageable.

One more point: As I said, it appears that the primary problem that caused this downtime is the sheer mass of the database and the unpurged notifications.

There is nothing we can do about the mass of the database, nor can we do anything about the staff or programming. I don't know what is going on behind the scenes, but it should be remembered that coding the most efficient database maintenance program will vary with the size of the database. One that supports a thousand users is simple. One that supports hundreds of thousands are far, far more difficult. It could be that FA is simply the victim of its own success.

But there is one thing we CAN do, and that is limit the things on our own pages that cause problems for everyone, most notably the notifications. If we can eliminate ours and convince enough others to eliminate theirs, we will go a long way towards preventing this from happening again.


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Raphial Hebert said:


> And I'm not going to even touch on the stuck-in-the-90's layout FA's appearance has.



That "stuck-in-the-90's" layout that you don't like is one of the things that I love about FA. It's not bloated down with 150k of javascripts and css per page, like so many other sites.  It's not cluttered to the point where people can't find what they want.  It's simple, it's effective and it works. Try going to Deviant Art and opening 20 browser tabs with different art in each one, and watch how it makes a quad core system become sluggish. Try it on Weasyl, and it's just as bad.  Come here to FA, and you can open over 150 tabs, and it still hardly slows my system down.  I have to give Ink Bunny credit here too, as I can have about 120 tabs open before it starts to become slow.  I don't want them to update the interface, unless they can keep it as simply, uncluttered and fast as it is now.  I don't want it becoming like Deviant Art, where simply going to a page puts you at risk for getting malware.

Another thing about FA that I love and need, is that it lets me use larger than normal fonts without all sorts of bad side effects.  I have low vision, and absolutely need to use large fonts.  FA simply adapts to the size I choose, within reason. Weasyl completely breaks if I make my fonts even one or two points larger than their tiny default. I have to deal with overlapping text, and text that is clipped or hidden because their css defined ares don't expand to contain the larger size as it should.  DA is not too good in this area either. Once again, Ink Bunny is pretty much like FA, and works extremely well.  If they decide to upgrade, and screw up the interface in ways that break things that are currently working, like working well with large fonts, I'd be essentially shut out of the site.  I can't use what I can't see well enough to read.  I can actually make the font characters an inch high on this site, and it still works. It gets pretty ugly at that size, but there is no significant overlapping or clipped text. Luckily, I never need to make my fonts that large. Whoever designed the layout did an excellent job for making it so adaptable without breaking. There are over 50 million people in North America with vision problems. About half of those require the use of large text in order to use sites as efficiently as everyone else. FA and Ink Bunny get an A for this.  DA gets a C-, and Weasyl gets a nice big F for being a total accessibility nightmare.  They said they would fix those problems before it went out of beta, but they ultimately never did.

Some people gripe about how FA looks old, but the interface works well.  I'll take the Captain Nemo's old looking Nautilus over a modern submarine any day.  I'll take most any old looking car from the '70s over most anything made after 2000.  And, I'll take an old looking, less cluttered, site like FA over most any modern web design that I've seen so far.  They can enhance how it works under the hood, but don't screw up the excellent user interface.


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## DarkOverord (Dec 16, 2013)

I do openly apologise, there's probably a few megabytes of data in that notification table attributed just to me. :V I do try and keep my message box clear, but I have this habit of actually wanting to look at things in my message box, and I can't really sit in day in day out trying to keep on top of my messages.

I think the hilarious thing was I had a clear weekend and was planning on sitting down and clearing my inbox this weekend >_>;


FoxWolfie said:


> It's simple, it's effective and it works.



Well, it works for now. Sadly for you, FA will have to be updated because HTML5 isn't even compatible with FA


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

DarkOverord said:


> Well, it works for now. Sadly for you, FA will have to be updated because HTML5 isn't even compatible with FA



They can update, but they need to be careful to not break things that are already working well, which would be most of the user interface.  For example, they could add the folders that people keep asking for, but do it in a way that does not interfere or break what we already have.  Ideally, such an addition would be transparent to anyone who wasn't going to use it.

They can certainly fix the thumbnail feature that people are asking for, but that doesn't required re-doing the interface and breaking stuff. They also need to consider that half the users didn't like the thumbnails when it used to work, because it prevented them from seeing what they were about to click on. Some galleries were page after page of the same exact thumbnail, with no clue whether the image would be a photo or a drawing, grayscale or color, comic or single drawing.  viewers couldn't even tell where they left of viewing someone's large gallery, because the thumbs hid the actual images and were rarely not representative of what the image would be. So, we actually had to click on them, wasting our time, and FA's time.  So, if they fix that feature, please let users choose to bypass it in their account settings, thus not breaking what I already have - thumbnails that actually show small versions of what I will see when I click on them. Fix it for those who want it, without breaking it for those who don't.

They can add the ability for users to edit their own comments, without breaking what we already have. Let users edit their own comments for at least a few minutes after posting, or until they've been replied to.

Some users want different color themes.  That can be done too, without breaking what we already have. Simply leave the existing light and dark backgrounds available, in addition to any that are new.  This would demand a small addition to the font colors - letting people set the background color for their font text.

Users have mentioned wanting quoting that works properly in notes and comments. Right now, it doesn't work well with quoted text within quoted text.  They should fix that, without breaking anything.

There are plenty of updates they can do. Some updates can even enhance the design, but in no case should they break what we already have and use.  There is simply no excuse for an updated UI to ever break the ability for people with low vision to use the site as efficiently as they currently do.  There is no excuse for doing anything to make the interface slower, or restricted to only a few browsers, or favoring on OS over another.  There is no excuse for adding scripts or features that would turn FA into a memory hog, or make it an easy vehicle for carrying malware.

I'm not against updates.  I'm against updates that break things, slow things down, make things less easy to access by people with disabilities, including those with low vision, etc.  It they don't know how to do updates without meeting at least these requirements, then they are better off leaving those areas alone.  It can be done.  Amazon works amazingly well, even with large text, and it remains pretty fast.  eBay has a few barely accessible areas, but for the most part, they've kept it usable by the blind, and extremely fast.  On the other hand, sites like Verizon, Yahoo and even Disney are slow bloated masses of garbled overlapping and truncated text, totally useless for people with low vision.

Unfortunately, it is more common to see a modern site that does not work properly, than one that does.  The last thing I want is for FA to imitate Weasyl or Deviant Art in any way, as those are two sites I can't even use effectively because of their limited thoughtless interfaces. Add SoFurry and FurriesXtreme to the barely usable interface list.  FurriesXtreme used to work very well, until they upgraded and broke half the features.

When FA upgrades their interface, as they eventually will, they should probably ask for help for the people who designed Ink Bunny.  It's basically FA with a few extra features, still fast, and they didn't break anything.  It has a few minor features that I'm not as fond of, but nothing is broken in the accessibility area, and it's supposedly using modern HTML5-compatible code.  Upgrading FA properly can be done, but they really need to think about everything they do before they do it.


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## Trpdwarf (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie, you touched topic on the whole comment system. I'm not sure long term if I'd want people to be able to edit what they post in comments and such. If such an option was given we'd need the database to also save earlier versions, similar to how if you edit something here staff can still compare what was originally said, and each edit. If it can't do this, than harassment tickets are going to get a hell of a lot worse to deal with because people can edit things, and it's going to be one big game of cat and mouse to catch what people really said if they think staff might have been notified via ticket. That's my two cents on that.

As for the quoting system, if my memory serves me right (and I am a very tired dragon right now, not much sleep) the original way things were made dealing with this is quite borked, and the way in which it was done makes it intensely difficult to fix. I am quite sure it is something that will be fixed, it just isn't as easy as it should be.


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## Ehrinlove (Dec 16, 2013)

can I just mention I have 0 issues with scaling weasyl up in size I'm not sure when your last tried it, or how you were doing it, but using ctrl+ scroll wheel to up the overall size I run into no issues at all


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## Kipper0308 (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> You don't need to keep any of your watch notifications.  Just go to your user page, scroll down to where it says, "Watched by", and click on, "Full List (###)". That will display a list of everyone who is watching you.  You can save that page to your own hard drive if you like.
> 
> For faves, you can click the Stats button on your user page. It tells how many people faved each of your submissions, and if you click the number of faves, it will list who those people are.  So, you can delete all the old fave notifications.  That leaves journals, comments and submissions to actually deal with. 33,533 submissions is going to take a while to deal with!  If you start now, I suspect you'll be done before they start the 90-day pruning. I'm guessing that their "this will not happen immediately" will translate into at least a few months.
> 
> BTW, the link from here to your FA page doesn't work. If you edit it to remove the underscore character, it will work.



And if you're one of those that needs to see an icon to put a face to a username you can just go to "MY FA" > Page Management > Watch List. Of course those are only for people that you watch yourself, but if you're one of the types that does watch backs a lot this can be helpful to a point! :'3


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## Kaeko (Dec 16, 2013)

Auto purge is bad bad bad bad for some people..

I mean don't purge my notes. All my ref indo for commissioners is in there!  Journal are fine only in notifications. Remember some of us have journals dated 2008 linked to a queue or tos.

Shouts could be nuked too. Maybe.

But don't you dare touch my over a month old notes!!


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## teil (Dec 16, 2013)

I'm fine with everything but notes being purged. : V


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## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Kaeko said:


> Auto purge is bad bad bad bad for some people..
> 
> I mean don't purge my notes. All my ref indo for commissioners is in there!  Journal are fine only in notifications. Remember some of us have journals dated 2008 linked to a queue or tos.
> 
> ...



They're talking about the "X new Whatevers" notifications, not actual "private message" notes. Not actual pictures, just the little message that says "hey someone you watch posted a picture." Not the actual journals or comments, just the little message that says "hey, your buddy replied to one of your comments."

Little things add up. One person said they had some 500k notifications; if we guess 60 bytes per notification that person alone is using 28.6 megabytes of raw storage, not counting any of the database's bookkeeping for keeping track of each of them. It takes a while to search through 18.6 MB 60 bytes at a time.


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## Ozriel (Dec 16, 2013)

Kaeko said:


> Auto purge is bad bad bad bad for some people..
> 
> I mean don't purge my notes. All my ref indo for commissioners is in there!  Journal are fine only in notifications. Remember some of us have journals dated 2008 linked to a queue or tos.
> 
> ...




if you can still access your notes, I'd go ahead and do it now for the sake of refs and stuff if you haven't just in case. :/


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## Kaeko (Dec 16, 2013)

Socks the Fox said:


> They're talking about the "X new Whatevers" notifications, not actual "private message" notes. Not actual pictures, just the little message that says "hey someone you watch posted a picture." Not the actual journals or comments, just the little message that says "hey, your buddy replied to one of your comments."
> 
> Little things add up. One person said they had some 500k notifications; if we guess 60 bytes per notification that person alone is using 28.6 megabytes of raw storage, not counting any of the database's bookkeeping for keeping track of each of them. It takes a while to search through 18.6 MB 60 bytes at a time.



Ooooh that makes more sense.

Cause I have like 46+ pages of high priority notes for regular customers and shipping/emails/refs. Also commissions I owe but just my job get in the way.

I just can't have my notes themselves purged. That'd be very disheartening. .. 


Ozriel said:


> if you can still access your notes, I'd go ahead and do it now for the sake of refs and stuff if you haven't just in case. :/



Oh man..If fa note system was easier to organize I could do this. But right now it's rather backlogged...


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## Littlerock (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Sometimes it feels like some people let their notifications pile up to extremes so they can brag about it. -_-



Does that mean that I can get in on this pissing contest?! 






:D
But seriously, I'm all for an autodelete function for notifications. I hardly ever use the main site, and these just build up like mad. I for get they're there, and there they stay. I'd say let the individual user select a time period in which their excess notes/watches/ect. would be cleared out with a nice little dropdown, since one size clearly does not fit all. Some of these should have a "do not delete" option as well, but things like faves and journal notices would only have a 'delete after', say, 15 through 90 days options. 

Did that make any sense the way I worded it?


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## Ash-Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Raphial Hebert said:


> The downtime I believe has been a week now? For thousands of users accessing such a popular community website, there is just about no excuse for that. Unless something went -horribly- wrong (Something way worse than some database purging...). I myself am a server administrator, and have plenty of experience to back up my statement.


As you are pushing your credentials as a reason to trust your comment, please elaborate more about what you administrate, what scale, deployment strategies and if you're involved with development, I would also like to see information on development methodologies you go by oh and I would like to know of your testing strategies.


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## Troy Ryder (Dec 16, 2013)

To whoever suggested deleteing irrelevant journals, that is a really good idea.  I never thought of it myself, and I should probably clean some of mine up as well since they were just journal versions of my stories that I posted, as well as some really old updates.  I never let my notifications back up though, I think the most I ever had at one time was about 30, but that was only because I wasn't able to access the site for a few days


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Let's not turn this thread into a "Bash The Admins" thread. There is already a thread of that.

Let's keep this a discussion of what WE can do to prevent the next one, and there are things we can do.


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## PraeUni (Dec 16, 2013)

I haven't had a housekeeping session in ages, I will definitely remove the unnecessary journals and notes from my pages

Good advice thanks


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

So, it seems to me, the best things each of us can do to prevent the next big downtime are these:

1) Clear out all submission notifications. Use your favorites or download items you want to revisit. Remember, you are WATCHING these artists.
2) Clear out all comment notifications. The comments will still be there tomorrow. You don't need to be reminded of them once you read them.
3) Clear out all journal notifications. Be honest, do you really read all of the journals?
4) Clear out all watch notifications. Thank new ones or watch back, whatever, then clear them out. You have a list down at the bottom of your profile.

Those will do the most good. Also good ideas, but not as necessary:

a) Trash and Delete old notes.
b) Delete old journals.
c) Delete old, improved on, submissions.

Lastly, convince all of our watchers to do the same.

We do those things, we lose nothing important, and stave off the next database crash.


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## Stratelier (Dec 16, 2013)

Did anyone mention that if we can customize WHAT we want to watch from users this would also help avoid generating wasted notifications?


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## TehSean (Dec 16, 2013)

jakeraccoon said:


> Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.



:^)


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## PheagleAdler (Dec 16, 2013)

to the people that are saying, "DON'T DELETE MY NOTES" or something, they're not deleting actual content, they're just deleting NOTIFICATIONS! You know, the messages that you see at the top of your screen when you log in? The notes, journals, comments, and submissions attached to them WILL NOT BE TOUCHED. So you have nothing to worry about unless you're a notifications-hoarder (if that is the case, may I suggest a new year's resolution?)

Edit: just noticed that I'm "HOT HOT HOT!" ...when did that happen?


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Stratadrake said:


> Did anyone mention that if we can customize WHAT we want to watch from users this would also help avoid generating wasted notifications?



No, because this thread is about what *WE* can do, not what we can complain to the admins to implement.


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

PheagleAdler said:


> to the people that are saying, "DON'T DELETE MY NOTES" or something, they're not deleting actual content, they're just deleting NOTIFICATIONS! You know, the messages that you see at the top of your screen when you log in? The notes, journals, comments, and submissions attached to them WILL NOT BE TOUCHED.



I honestly don't get why this isn't getting through to some people. Deleting your notifications does not delete the actual message, you can go bookmark the page clicking the notification link will give you and then nuke the notifications once you're sure you've got everything saved to look at later. Or if you don't let it build up over time, just simply opening things in new tabs to look at later, as I mentioned before. An artist's work/journal isn't gone once you delete the message about it in your inbox.




Stratadrake said:


> Did anyone mention that if we can customize WHAT we want to watch from users this would also help avoid generating wasted notifications?



Well since this thread isn't about it, it's about users themselves helping with the issues that are going on, I would suggest starting your own thread about this?


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## Kalmor (Dec 16, 2013)

PheagleAdler said:


> Edit: just noticed that I'm "HOT HOT HOT!" ...when did that happen?


Fahrenheit 451 reference. You have 451 posts.


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## TehSean (Dec 16, 2013)

Not to split hairs, but
Complaining to the admins is still something _we can do._


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

*take out the trash sigghhh*

I don't know if this was said yet, but I've notice alot of people don't know, and i didn't know until recently, that even if you trash a note, it does NOT get deleted unless you go into the trash and delete it yerself.

by the time i learned this, i had notes going back 2 years and it took me a year and a day just to get them down to one year ago because of either conversations or commission info.

i haven't had a chance to check if this goes the same for the OUTBOX as well since it keeps sent messages there as well and from what i noticed it doesn't delete them after a certain time either.

so people might wanna check those out and put some effort into cleaning them out


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## kontonakuma (Dec 16, 2013)

*Re: take out the trash sigghhh*



prinnyex said:


> I don't know if this was said yet, but I've notice alot of people don't know, and i didn't know until recently, that even if you trash a note, it does NOT get deleted unless you go into the trash and delete it yerself.
> 
> my the time i learned this, i had notes going back 2 years and it took me a year and a day just to get them down to one year ago because of either conversations or commission info.
> 
> ...



This as well. Which I need to remember to do myself.



TehSean said:


> Not to split hairs, but
> Complaining to the admins is still something _we can do._



We _can_, but what is it going to do at this point? We have an update explaining what's wrong and when they hope the site to be up, another update just repeating it in short version, complaining really isn't going to do much else at this point.


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## GreenReaper (Dec 16, 2013)

Some users are concerned because their mental model of the system doesn't match reality. Such mismatches are a common cause of usability issues.

Because notes appear in the same place as other notifications, they think they are stored in the same area of the database and handled in the same way - and are therefore at risk of being lost. In practice, they are different things, and I suspect are handled through quite different mechanisms.

On sites where private message notifications appear in a different area, they are less likely to be confused/conflated with other notifications.

There is also potentially a further mismatch between identifying the notification as the thing itself. Users may also think that notifications take up no space because they are attached to a particular item. Indeed, this might be the case for notes; the "notification" is likely based on how many items remain unread, which could be a property of the actual note object. This makes sense for notes because the system only has to keep track of whether the receiver has read it; it's not a one-to-many relationship.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Trpdwarf said:


> If such an option was given we'd need the database to also save earlier versions, similar to how if you edit something here staff can still compare what was originally said, and each edit.



That's why I suggested a reasonably short time limit, or until the message has been replied to.  Most edits are likely to be mistake corrections, like spelling or missing words.  Actually saving earlier versions would probably be best though.  The larger point is that they can make these updates without removing what we already have, and without introducing things that would break it for some people.



Trpdwarf said:


> As for the quoting system, if my memory serves me right (and I am a very tired dragon right now, not much sleep) the original way things were made dealing with this is quite borked, and the way in which it was done makes it intensely difficult to fix.



It's not a deal-breaker if they never fix these things.  I'm just saying that I'm not against the upgrading, which some people are demanding, as long as they don't break stuff that works in the process. I'm happy for the current look and feel to remain as it is.  I'll still be happy to see some things updated, if it doesn't make it harder for me to use as efficiently as I do now.


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## Nanakisan (Dec 16, 2013)

...ashamedly... 196887S, 2509C, 106223J, 3172F, 835W, 7N, 133TT

This is the culmination of my notifications. Submissions is nearly 4 years old since the last nuking. Journals are 1 year since last nuke. Comments are 1 year since i last nuked em. Notes however i will not remove. I have a lot of notes that have good memories in them.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Ehrinlove said:


> can I just mention I have 0 issues with scaling weasyl up in size I'm not sure when your last tried it, or how you were doing it, but using ctrl+ scroll wheel to up the overall size I run into no issues at all



There are two ways to zoom a page, and some of them are not really practical for efficiently using a site.  When you use ctrl+, are you zooming the entire page, pictures and all, thus causing a horizontal scroll bar to appear?  If so, it is not very fun or efficient to read pages when you have to scroll down, then go left to right about three screens worth of distance, then scroll down a little again, then move all the way back to the left, and repeat for the length of the page. If done that way, Weasyl scales without overlapping or clipped text, but it's pretty much unusable because of the excessive horizontal scrolling required.  On the other hand, if using ctrl+ only zooms the text, but not the page layout, the width of the page stays the same as the width of the screen, but then Weasyl overlaps and clips text severely, but there is no scrolling hell to go through.  FA and Ink Bunny work fine with either type of zooming, with no need to scroll left and right just to do basic reading. Weasyl simply does not, as I am looking at it using Firefox, and just checked using IE. Actually IE handles that site a little better than Firefox, but Weasyl's css container areas do not change size to accommodate any text they contain. FA's tables do adjust, keeping things readable without the need for a scrolling nightmare. Ink Bunny appears to work perfectly well in this area too, and I think theirs is all css.

I don't want to see FA turn into the accessibility nightmare that Weasyl is, just because some people want a new look.


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

Nanakisan said:


> ...ashamedly... 196887S, 2509C, 106223J, 3172F, 835W, 7N, 133TT
> 
> This is the culmination of my notifications. Submissions is nearly 4 years old since the last nuking. Journals are 1 year since last nuke. Comments are 1 year since i last nuked em. Notes however i will not remove. I have a lot of notes that have good memories in them.



uwu; this is part of the problem of why the site is so easily slowed down and bought to its knees, and its not caused by any one user, i've seen several people with similar posts and numbers. notifications and notes both need an expiration date. 

and while i understand that some people have notes they want to keep, thats what the the archives option is for. That way, you can go through your notes and toss the unnessisary ones and archive the ones you wish to keep forever without threat of them being deleted after a certain time.

I'm also betting this is even worse with people who have namesquat accounts and/or abandoned accounts. Even if the account itself isn't deleted, im betting if they have even one person watched that the notifications are piled up.

Its good that they put a limit on the notifications on submissions and journals, but they need to add it to the rest of the notifications as well.


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## Nanakisan (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Keep the ones you like and delete the rest?
> Copy the text to somewhere else?



easier said then done with over 25 pages of notes. XD culmination of nearing 5 years even though i've been on FA nearing 8. Maybe it would be just easier to erase them page by page.


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## Etiainen (Dec 16, 2013)

All I have are 7 submissions that I meant to delete the day before the Read Only mode.


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

Nanakisan said:


> easier said then done with over 25 pages of notes. XD culmination of nearing 5 years even though i've been on FA nearing 8. Maybe it would be just easier to erase them page by page.



When i realized i had to delete them from my trashcan , i had 20+ pages as well haaaa, yer best bet is the scan the page, archive what you wanna keep and then nuke the page.

it takes a long ass time but its something that needs to be done.


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

Etiainen said:


> All I have are 7 submissions that I meant to delete the day before the Read Only mode.



1 journal and 1 favorite ahaha, because i lose things so easily , i tend to keep my notes and notifications as clean as possible to an annoying degree. ;w;


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## Kayla (Dec 16, 2013)

You know that makes me curious for the people that are no longer on FA, and that their notifications are just going to keep piling up. are FA admins going to clear notifications periodically?o.o


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> They said they're gonna auto delete after 90 days now. :I
> 
> Makes a bit worried that when the first time it happens the site will freeze up.



they'll only be auto deleteing for submissions and journals tho. favorites/unfavorites, watches/unwatches, and notes still have no expiration date.

altho that will take care of most abandoned accounts unless they have submissions on them.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Kipper0308 said:


> And if you're one of those that needs to see an icon to put a face to a username you can just go to "MY FA" > Page Management > Watch List.



I don't usually need to see the icons, but it's definitely nice for those who do.  I mainly use the single list, because it's faster to get to people near the end of the alphabet, but the icons do help sometimes.


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## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Nanakisan said:


> This is the culmination of my notifications. Submissions is nearly 4 years old since the last nuking. Journals are 1 year since last nuke. Comments are 1 year since i last nuked em. Notes however i will not remove. I have a lot of notes that have good memories in them.



Nobody's asking you to delete your notes. This whole thing has almost nothing to do with notes. Just the little message that says someone you watch posted a submission/journal or someone replied to something you posted. Not the actual stuff.


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## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Wasn't the notes piling up making using notes slower for everyone?



I was under the impression it was the confusingly-similarly-named notifications, given the talk about submissions and journals from net-cat's post. Seems a lot easier to get out of hand given it can easily balloon into thousands of them per user per month, and not many people clean them out.


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

Socks the Fox said:


> I was under the impression it was the confusingly-similarly-named notifications, given the talk about submissions and journals from net-cat's post. Seems a lot easier to get out of hand given it can easily balloon into thousands of them per user per month, and not many people clean them out.



notes are just as bad because even if you trashcan them, unless you go in the trashcan and delete them, they stay there forever. Same for outbox notes.


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## Teal (Dec 16, 2013)

Socks the Fox said:


> I was under the impression it was the confusingly-similarly-named notifications, given the talk about submissions and journals from net-cat's post. Seems a lot easier to get out of hand given it can easily balloon into thousands of them per user per month, and not many people clean them out.


The note problem I was referring to is a different thing than what's happening now.


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## Nanakisan (Dec 16, 2013)

prinnyex said:


> notes are just as bad because even if you trashcan them, unless you go in the trashcan and delete them, they stay there forever. Same for outbox notes.



you'd think trash can notes would have a expiration on them.


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## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> The note problem I was referring to is a different thing than what's happening now.



Yeah I realized a few minutes after I posted that that was what you meant. Still, I don't think that the notes themselves are as big a problem as notifications, simply because there aren't nearly as many. Plus, the solution to the notes problem could simply be to partition that table by note age. That way the DB doesn't have to search the entire table only to show the latest couple dozen. Partitioning by year aught to cut down on the load a bunch, especially with the new year coming up. Plus with partitioning, you get the benefit of not having to search through every note ever, while still getting to keep every note ever (within hard drive space limitations, of course). However, I don't know what DB software they use, or if it supports partitioning tables.


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## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

prinnyex said:


> notes are just as bad because even if you trashcan them, unless you go in the trashcan and delete them, they stay there forever. Same for outbox notes.



Not quite as bad as note notifications are shared strictly between two users so it shouldn't explode out of control unless your a rabid RP addict or something.


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## Nanakisan (Dec 16, 2013)

thoron said:


> Not quite as bad as note notifications are shared strictly between two users so it shouldn't explode out of control unless your a rabid RP addict or something.



Skype is such a godsend for RP'rs. Keeps really long logs for yah! But yeah i agree unlike submission notifications which is a global event to all watchers. I doubt notes alone would be cause for a DB lock up.


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## Charn (Dec 16, 2013)

With Yahoo, if you are not logged in for x amount of time (three months, I think), it purges your inbox, spambox, etc, but will keep your private folders and contact lists for the yahoo messenger intact. 

Having a routine check, maybe every four months or so, to see if a person has logged on at all, and if not, to do a similar purge, would get rid of ALL of the alt/abandoned/dead/banned/etc accounts. 


Or maybe, instead of adding submissions to someone's submission table when someone they watch posts something, it should instead, when they log on, do a query for new submissions by the artists that person follows once they click on the submissions link, since the last time they logged on, and add that to their "submission table" instead. The downside would I guess be that instead of someone having one file, they'd essentially be doing a search each time they clicked on the submissions link, which would be kind of cloggy.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Teal said:


> Makes a bit worried that when the first time it happens the site will freeze up.



They will most likely set it as a low-priority background task, so we should not see much of an effect on the site.
I currently have only 16 messages (11S, 5J ), so the auto-purge won't even have to deal with me.  I always keep my notifications as close to zero as possible.

I know that they are not purging any private notes, so people really need to take care of that on their own for now.  I imagine some people have over 50,000 notes in their in-box and out-box by now.  I keep mine down to where they fit on a single page.  I move the rest to trash.  Sometimes I'm guilty of forgetting to empty the trash.  FA should consider auto-purging all trash folders after 30 days.  Most online email services purge their trash folders after a certain amount of time.  If people don't want something deleted, they simply don't move it to their trash.  Since FA doesn't purge trash, we should be doing it ourselves.  If everyone purged their own, the note system would probably be a whole lot faster.

I also clear out ancient shouts.  I keep only the most recent shout from any user.  Only the most recent 12 shouts are display on our pages, and the shout manager page gives us access to the most recent 25 shouts.  After deleting multiples from the same user, I go to position 13 and select everything down to the last one, and remove them. I repeat until there are only 12 left, plus two or three older shouts that I've never deleted for personal reasons. Those are not seen on my page, because they end past the 12th position.  Overall, at any time, there are usually around 15 total shouts in my history, as I've deleted thousands of no-longer-visible ones over the past seven years.


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## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

Charn said:


> With Yahoo, if you are not logged in for x amount of time (three months, I think), it purges your inbox, spambox, etc, but will keep your private folders and contact lists for the yahoo messenger intact.
> 
> Having a routine check, maybe every four months or so, to see if a person has logged on at all, and if not, to do a similar purge, would get rid of ALL of the alt/abandoned/dead/banned/etc accounts.
> 
> ...



Especially if that person hasn't been on in a while.


----------



## BakedGewds (Dec 16, 2013)

I can honestly say I never have more than 200 notifs before I scan over and nuke em'. :3
*feels like a good person* aha.
Also kind of unrelated but is the main site not loading at all for anyone else?

Is that a good or bad thing?
xD


----------



## DarkOverord (Dec 16, 2013)

BakedGewds said:


> Also kind of unrelated but is the main site not loading at all for anyone else?
> 
> Is that a good or bad thing?
> xD



http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/843220-Site-Status-2013-12-16
https://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/412705641833037824 <-- an hour ago


> In roughly one hour, we will begin the final fixes for FA. The site may go in/out during that time while we do hardware changes, reboots.



There you go


----------



## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

BakedGewds said:


> I can honestly say I never have more than 200 notifs before I scan over and nuke em'. :3
> *feels like a good person* aha.
> Also kind of unrelated but is the main site not loading at all for anyone else?
> 
> ...



https://twitter.com/furaffinity

its purposely down for the last touches and such apparently, ie it'll be down until tomorrow probly :/


----------



## BakedGewds (Dec 16, 2013)

DarkOverord said:


> http://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/843220-Site-Status-2013-12-16
> https://twitter.com/furaffinity/status/412705641833037824 <-- an hour ago
> 
> 
> There you go



Thank you, I've seen the Site Status update but that said nothing about the going in/out for an hour. I don't have a Twitter so I don't know/check updates there.


----------



## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> I also clear out ancient shouts.  I keep only the most recent shout from any user.  Only the most recent 12 shouts are display on our pages, and the shout manager page gives us access to the most recent 25 shouts.  After deleting multiples from the same user, I go to position 13 and select everything down to the last one, and remove them. I repeat until there are only 12 left, plus two or three older shouts that I've never deleted for personal reasons. Those are not seen on my page, because they end past the 12th position.  Overall, at any time, there are usually around 15 total shouts in my history, as I've deleted thousands of no-longer-visible ones over the past seven years.



omo; -SWEATS NERVOUSLY- Well i know what im doing when the site's finally back


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## corghi (Dec 16, 2013)

I really really really really disagree with this. Really.

There's no reason that this website shouldn't be able to handle notifications. This reminds me back on the days of Balto Source when we had to clear out our PMs because they were slowing the site down, somehow. 

If FA really can't handle notifications then, well, I think it's time for some serious renovations. That, or they implement a feature that deletes them after a certain period of time, although that'd be ridiculous.

I don't know, I just feel like we don't know the whole story. FA already knows they need to redo their system with notifications but I'm not going to be obligated to delete them.


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## Blekarotva (Dec 16, 2013)

uh I can't understand why people keep their messages - unless it's note I nuke everything. I have an obession with seeing "no messages", I nuke them even when there's only "1F" xP


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## DarkOverord (Dec 16, 2013)

corghi said:


> I really really really really disagree with this. Really.
> 
> There's no reason that this website shouldn't be able to handle notifications. This reminds me back on the days of Balto Source when we had to clear out our PMs because they were slowing the site down, somehow.
> 
> ...



If you read Net-cat's post, they're going to be implementing an auto-delete of notifications that are more than 90 days old. It'll be implemented at some point, no idea when though, just going off the post


----------



## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

Blekarotva said:


> uh I can't understand why people keep their messages - unless it's note I nuke everything. I have an obession with seeing "no messages", I nuke them even when there's only "1F" xP



I recall at one point they had to disable the nuke button because everyone was using it to delete even small number of notices and it was causing the system to slow down. This was back when the nuke button was first introduced though.


----------



## DarkOverord (Dec 16, 2013)

thoron said:


> I recall at one point they had to disable the nuke button because everyone was using it to delete even small number of notices and it was causing the system to slow down. This was back when the nuke button was first introduced though.



Sounds about right for "FA implements a new feature"


----------



## Blekarotva (Dec 16, 2013)

thoron said:


> I recall at one point they had to disable the nuke button because everyone was using it to delete even small number of notices and it was causing the system to slow down. This was back when the nuke button was first introduced though.




woah? really? That sounds, weird :V
I use more the Global select button, then nuke if favs are over 30


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> That's why I suggested a reasonably short time limit, or until the message has been replied to.  Most edits are likely to be mistake corrections, like spelling or missing words.  Actually saving earlier versions would probably be best though.  The larger point is that they can make these updates without removing what we already have, and without introducing things that would break it for some people.



They way I've seen it implemented elsewhere (I forget where) is that a comment can be edited until such time as it is responded to. At that point it gets frozen. It can still be deleted by the thread owner at any time.

Now, if you attempt to respond to a comment while it is being edited, you are prevented from saving your response with a note saying that it is being altered, and to wait until the altered comment is saved to respond.


----------



## Terror-Run (Dec 16, 2013)

Blekarotva said:


> woah? really? That sounds, weird :V
> I use more the Global select button, then nuke if favs are over 30



The global select button is made of pure love  Maybe I'll un-check one or two things before I remove stuff though.


----------



## ferretsage (Dec 16, 2013)

9518S, 509C, 5626J, 20F, 76W 

...and almost 1450 (60 per page) pages in favorites. That's about 87,000 Favorites! I use the +fav as a Facebook like button. I could live without the LARGELY UNUSED DATABASE-KILLING favorite gallery attached to my account (unused except as a backup if my hard drive tanks).

I am watching over 1,600 artists (4-5 watches a week over SEVEN YEARS). I delete 150-300 new art submission notifications EVERY DAY. Once, I left FA for a month. That's how I got the backlog of over 9,000. I thought I'd eventually get around to them, but they're just sitting there. If I ever abandoned my account (no intention to), it would quickly bog down and kill FA. No excuse for the Journals. I'll toast those as soon as I can.


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Here's a funny thing that many may not know:

When you see the *7N* notice on your front page, that means you have seven _UNREAD_ notes in your received folder. Why haven't you read them? Once you do, that notice goes away.


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## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

corghi said:


> I really really really really disagree with this. Really.
> 
> There's no reason that this website shouldn't be able to handle notifications. This reminds me back on the days of Balto Source when we had to clear out our PMs because they were slowing the site down, somehow.
> 
> ...



There are plenty of things that can be improved in the coding, sure.

But in this instance, it is the notification system that we, as users, can help eliminate.

Rather than complain that the coders haven't put this one thing at the top of their todo list, above all the other things that people whine about and wonder why THAT thing isn't at the top of the todo list, why not do something positive and remove your own notifications?

Much of the complaining about this sounds like this:

"Why does the neighborhood look so crappy?"

"Well, a lot of it is the trash that is strewn everywhere. How about we all pitch in and pick it up?"

"Well...why can't the government do it??"


----------



## Littlerock (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> Here's a funny thing that many may not know:
> 
> When you see the *7N* notice on your front page, that means you have seven _UNREAD_ notes in your received folder. Why haven't you read them? Once you do, that notice goes away.



I was under the impression that some folks read them, then mark them as unread so that the little notice stays up as a reminder to reply to that note or reference it, if they haven't already.


----------



## AuraBeedit (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> 2) Any account that has not been logged into for a year gets locked and is considered abandoned(which would mean you only have to log in once in 13 months to keep it



Bad idea, those accounts can be groups, I've made many group accounts and I havent logged in those accounts for years, tho' they have activity in there from other people


----------



## Kesteh (Dec 16, 2013)

Group accounts are just a pestilence.


----------



## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

AuraBeedit said:


> Bad idea, those accounts can be groups, I've made many group accounts and I havent logged in those accounts for years, tho' they have activity in there from other people



I'd recommend logging in to them. There could be notes sent to it that only you can access.

[*logs onto his own group that he created*]

Um....yeah....I should clean that out....

[*add it to his todo list*]


----------



## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

corghi said:


> There's no reason that this website shouldn't be able to handle notifications. This reminds me back on the days of Balto Source when we had to clear out our PMs because they were slowing the site down, somehow.



Because that crap builds up. I already did the numbers, and even at a measly 60 bytes per notification there are individuals with almost 29 megabytes worth of useless notifications. Forcing the database to wade through 29MB at 60 bytes a pop is not fast in any way, shape or form, and that's not even counting all the notifications of all the other users as well.

Clean out your crap.


----------



## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

Kesteh said:


> Group accounts are just a pestilence.



Speaking of which, I'd love to see official group accounts made possible, complete with owners/admins and subscribers. Basically like mini forums on the main site. It would probably be a lot to ask for FA to do, but to be fair the competition hasn't done it, either, so it would be a massive leg up on the other sites!


----------



## AliothFox (Dec 16, 2013)

Duraji said:


> Speaking of which, I'd love to see official group accounts made possible, complete with owners/admins and subscribers. Basically like mini forums on the main site. It would probably be a lot to ask for FA to do, but to be fair the competition hasn't done it, either, so it would be a massive leg up on the other sites!



The competition has done it.  SoFurry has real groups, and so does deviantART (though I usually don't count DA among furry sites).


----------



## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Focus, people. This thread is about what we can do to help make the situation better rather than complain about it.


----------



## AliothFox (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> Focus, people. This thread is about what we can do to help make the situation better rather than complain about it.



Oh, I wasn't complaining, just pointing it out.  I agree - that's definitely something FA ought to do.


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> They way I've seen it implemented elsewhere (I forget where) is that a comment can be edited until such time as it is responded to. At that point it gets frozen. It can still be deleted by the thread owner at any time.



That's how I've seen it done most often, at least on the sites that allow editing.  I often see stupid mistakes that I've made, usually right after I've posted something, like an included link that doesn't work, and stuff like that.

I've also seen sites where a timer would appear after hitting the send button.  The user comments as normal, but their content is not actually committed to the database until 60 seconds after posting.  They have that long to interrupt the pending post by deleting or starting to edit.  After each edit, the 60 seconds would reset, in case they noticed another mistake.  This would let users fix immediately noticed mistakes, but once the timer runs out, the comment is committed to the database, where it can be seen by other users.  There would be no way for trolls to abuse it, since they could never alter a message that was visible to someone else, and it would cover the 90 percent of mistakes that are discovered right after hitting the send button.  Personally, I'd benefit from just having a 15-second time to start an edit, since almost every mistake I make is noticed immediately after hitting send.


----------



## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

AliothFox said:


> The competition has done it.  SoFurry has real groups, and so does deviantART (though I usually don't count DA among furry sites).



Oh? I guess it's been a while since I've been on SoFurry, so I'll have to look into that. Would be a great way to spread some of my story ideas! (and, yes, DA doesn't really count, they have a ton of their own problems that make me not want to post there, plus it's a haven for 4chan)


----------



## DuckO (Dec 16, 2013)

I still don't understand how this thread is supposed to help compared to the many other suggestion box threads regarding ways to help improve the many issues FA has, including those that caused today. If no ones really taken any of those to heart, where is this one supposed to succeed? 

Not a complaint, just curious.


----------



## thoron (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> They way I've seen it implemented elsewhere (I forget where) is that a comment can be edited until such time as it is responded to. At that point it gets frozen. It can still be deleted by the thread owner at any time.
> 
> Now, if you attempt to respond to a comment while it is being edited, you are prevented from saving your response with a note saying that it is being altered, and to wait until the altered comment is saved to respond.



I believe that would be Ink Bunny. I believe you have 5 or 10 minutes to edit a comment before it becomes permenant.


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## Teal (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> I'd recommend logging in to them. There could be notes sent to it that only you can access.


Clearing the groups notices should be easy enough. Just nuke everything.



Duraji said:


> Speaking of which, I'd love to see official group accounts made possible, complete with owners/admins and subscribers. Basically like mini forums on the main site. It would probably be a lot to ask for FA to do, but to be fair the competition hasn't done it, either, so it would be a massive leg up on the other sites!


I asked them about this back when they had the "town hall" livestream. The answer to that was nope. Way to many things to do before that.


----------



## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

thoron said:


> I believe that would be Ink Bunny. I believe you have 5 or 10 minutes to edit a comment before it becomes permenant.



Yes, you have ten minutes to edit comments. I kind of like the idea of being able to edit until there's a reply, though. Sometimes I leave a comment, then I realize I forgot something, but eleven minutes passed and no one responded anyway. Still it's good to get an edit feature for obvious mistakes.



Teal said:


> I asked them about this back when they had the "town hall" livestream. The answer to that was nope. Way to many things to do before that.



I think it would require a full rewrite of the site's code, because I'm pretty sure the current code base for FA is incompatible with many of these social features that people want. If it took them this long to hide comments, it would probably take a decade just to add a "this" button to actual site comments. XD (and trust me, there are some amazing comments on FurAffinity, and amazing journals for that matter, that I wish I could thumbs up or anything to give them more recognition)


----------



## AliothFox (Dec 16, 2013)

Honestly, having dedicated group-type accounts (like what deviantART and SoFurry have) would be one of the biggest improvements to the site.  You know what else would be awesome?  The ability to thread shouts.  I've always found it annoying that I have to go to another person's user page to reply to a shout - and it's not because I'm lazy; it's because conversations get lost in the shuffle.  Sure, the argument could be raised, "Well that's what notes are for!" but that just seems like more of a hassle and more of a strain on the system than necessary.  I dunno.  I'm no IT guy.

But I gotta run upstairs and wrap some Christmas presents for a bit, so I'll check back and see what you guys think of that idea ^^


----------



## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

AliothFox said:


> Honestly, having dedicated group-type accounts (like what deviantART and SoFurry have) would be one of the biggest improvements to the site.  You know what else would be awesome?  The ability to thread shouts.  I've always found it annoying that I have to go to another person's user page to reply to a shout - and it's not because I'm lazy; it's because conversations get lost in the shuffle.  Sure, the argument could be raised, "Well that's what notes are for!" but that just seems like more of a hassle and more of a strain on the system than necessary.  I dunno.  I'm no IT guy.
> 
> But I gotta run upstairs and wrap some Christmas presents for a bit, so I'll check back and see what you guys think of that idea ^^



Threaded shouts would be great, but they have already acknowledged that they need to fix the comment threading system in general. I know the new UI under Ferrox had it fixed, but now I have to wonder just how much of that project could be salvaged and started anew? There are plenty of folks willing to help, but I don't know how willing Yak is to let anyone help him. And if he keeps not letting anyone help him, of course the site will never get these fixes. It's not about complaining, it's about wanting more information as to what's going on and wanting to offer help, but some white knights don't see it that way and only help enable nothing to get done.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Kesteh said:


> Group accounts are just a pestilence.



This is true - if the owner of the group is never logging in to maintain their group.  Any group that is not logged into on a regular basis is mostly just a waste of server space.

Some groups are actively used and maintained.  Those groups have good value and are fun to participate in.

My guess is that there are probably at least ten abandoned or unmaintained groups for every one that is active and useful.


----------



## Mint Chip (Dec 16, 2013)

Do they have a system for deleting older accounts (like some of us have) that if we notify you that we no longer need the account and we want it to be deleted - if that would help the system with 1 less thing. Though that's probably small.

I also have a question, when the notification thing (I saw in a different thread) suggesting that they will implement a system to delete notifications over 90 days old, if that includes notes. Submissions and journals I can understand clearing after 90 days. But there are some notes that I have from that can date back further than 90 days that are still relevant/important for me to keep. 

Also - when the site comes back up, perhaps everyone who goes to submit should try to lessen the number of submissions they do in a day. I mean I honestly have like 7 or 8 images that need submitted - but I could lower to submitting those to a minimum of two a day until I catch back up to the proper day. (Mine's a day by day thing going up to the 25th.) Of course this is honestly just a low-grade suggestion. Though sometimes just the small things could help the site. 

Though I have to agree with many others above who have said we do need more updated software. Though I'm sure that's quite a long list.


----------



## GreenReaper (Dec 16, 2013)

As addressed earlier in this thread, notes are not an issue, nor are they planning to delete them.


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Littlerock said:


> I was under the impression that some folks read them, then mark them as unread so that the little notice stays up as a reminder to reply to that note or reference it, if they haven't already.



Is there a way to mark notes as unread?  If so, I've never seen it.  I'd love to have that feature.


----------



## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> Is there a way to mark notes as unread?  If so, I've never seen it.  I'd love to have that feature.



Yeah, you just click the notes you want to get unread, and then click the "restore" button. At least I think so, I can't demonstrate it to confirm just yet for fairly obvious reasons. ^^;


----------



## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

DuckO said:


> I still don't understand how this thread is supposed to help compared to the many other suggestion box threads regarding ways to help improve the many issues FA has, including those that caused today. If no ones really taken any of those to heart, where is this one supposed to succeed?
> 
> Not a complaint, just curious.



This one differs in that it is SUPPOSED to be things we, ourselves, can do, immediately, once FA comes back online. If we make a campaign of it, and point it out each time we see others with thousands of notifications, we can make a difference.


----------



## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Mint Chip said:


> Do they have a system for deleting older accounts (like some of us have) that if we notify you that we no longer need the account and we want it to be deleted - if that would help the system with 1 less thing. Though that's probably small.
> 
> I also have a question, when the notification thing (I saw in a different thread) suggesting that they will implement a system to delete notifications over 90 days old, if that includes notes. Submissions and journals I can understand clearing after 90 days. But there are some notes that I have from that can date back further than 90 days that are still relevant/important for me to keep.
> 
> ...



Here's an idea on what we can do if we wish to close an account:

1) Change your profile information to inform visitors that the account is closed with pertinent information of what the viewer should do.
2) Trash all notes in the received and sent folders, then go into the trash folder and delete them there.
3) Delete all shouts not on the front page.
4) Unwatch all watched accounts. (this is crucial. It will prevent most notifications from accumulating.)
5) Delete all journals.
6) Delete all favorites.
7) Delete all submissions.
8) Change the password to a weird series of letters, numbers, and symbols.

If you want to leave things up for visitors, you can skip steps 5-7.


----------



## maxgoof (Dec 16, 2013)

Oh, my gosh!! Something I just now realized!

Shouts! Are you aware that only the last 12 shouts can be readily viewed? But they are never removed, unless you remove them.

How many old shouts do we have in our accounts that we can simply trash?


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Mint Chip said:


> Do they have a system for deleting older accounts (like some of us have) that if we notify you that we no longer need the account and we want it to be deleted - if that would help the system with 1 less thing. Though that's probably small.



They can't delete accounts, but they could probably add a new account type called "Abandoned". They already have Suspended, Banned, Deceased, Member and Administrator.  If they did that, they could set rules for the Abandoned status, just as they have settings for Banned and Administrator.  Maybe those settings could block notifications, notes, shouts and watches to abandoned accounts, as well as purging all existing notes and notifications from them.  Obviously, this would only be good if the account was truly abandoned, as the purging would not be reversible. The same applies if someone has a permanently banned account, or a deceased status. There is no reason for those accounts to ever waste resources by accepting new notifications or notes. There is no reason for them to accept shouts either. Watching them is questionable, since nothing new would ever show up. People might watch a deceased account just for the memories I guess.

I can think of two ways an account should be marked as abandoned. One is if the user asks an admin to set that status for them, knowing it is not reversible. Maybe a 30-day wait could be required so drama seekers would have a chance to re-decide before it was too late. Another way might be if an account was never accessed for a set period of time. It would have to be at least a year or maybe two years. By not accessed, that means the user has not logged in for at least that length of time, and no modifications were down to the account, no submissions, no signing in to fave stuff, etc. It would take care of the many accounts where someone signed in once, looked around, and decided that FA wasn't for them, so they never returned.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were 100,000 never-used accounts on here. I believe there are over 950,000 accounts total.  Maybe I should contact Yak and see what he thinks about adding an Abandoned status.


----------



## Mint Chip (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> They can't delete accounts, but they could probably add a new account type called "Abandoned". They already have Suspended, Banned, Deceased, Member and Administrator.  If they did that, they could set rules for the Abandoned status, just as they have settings for Banned and Administrator.  Maybe those settings could block notifications, notes, shouts and watches to abandoned accounts, as well as purging all existing notes and notifications from them.  Obviously, this would only be good if the account was truly abandoned, as the purging would not be reversible. The same applies if someone has a permanently banned account, or a deceased status. There is no reason for those accounts to ever waste resources by accepting new notifications or notes. There is no reason for them to accept shouts either. Watching them is questionable, since nothing new would ever show up. People might watch a deceased account just for the memories I guess.
> 
> I can think of two ways an account should be marked as abandoned. One is if the user asks an admin to set that status for them, knowing it is not reversible. Maybe a 30-day wait could be required so drama seekers would have a chance to re-decide before it was too late. Another way might be if an account was never accessed for a set period of time. It would have to be at least a year or maybe two years. By not accessed, that means the user has not logged in for at least that length of time, and no modifications were down to the account, no submissions, no signing in to fave stuff, etc. It would take care of the many accounts where someone signed in once, looked around, and decided that FA wasn't for them, so they never returned.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were 100,000 never-used accounts on here. I believe there are over 950,000 accounts total.  Maybe I should contact Yak and see what he thinks about adding an Abandoned status.



Actually that sounds really great. I would love to see this implemented. I know when FA is back online I will be going to my prior account (I had an old one that I never used) and will unwatch and clean everything out. But after that, the account will be empty. So this solution to getting rid of the tons notifications coming into these accounts that aren't used any more (due to someone wanting a new start or someone simply never returning to FA) would probably help the site a lot. I definitely agree with this idea.


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Duraji said:


> Yeah, you just click the notes you want to get unread, and then click the "restore" button. At least I think so, I can't demonstrate it to confirm just yet for fairly obvious reasons. ^^;



I'll certainly be trying that when the site goes live again.  I always figured that the restore button was to restore stuff from trash back to it's original in-box/out-box location, but I honestly never clicked on it to see what it did.  It is clustered with the archive and trash buttons, which move messages to other folders.


----------



## AliothFox (Dec 16, 2013)

FA lives again!  Don't everyone crash it at once X3


----------



## ForestFright (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> Here's an idea on what we can do if we wish to close an account:
> 
> 1) Change your profile information to inform visitors that the account is closed with pertinent information of what the viewer should do.
> 2) Trash all notes in the received and sent folders, then go into the trash folder and delete them there.
> ...



you can disable your page, too. this would also prevent anyone from watching the account (unless you want people to still see art/journals/ect)
its under account settings


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

maxgoof said:


> How many old shouts do we have in our accounts that we can simply trash?



Lots!  I bet you have more than 10,000, and you can only check and delete 13 at a time, without affecting the visible ones on your page. That will keep you busy for a while. Then, while you are deleting, you are bound to spot some that will distract you into looking at their page.  If you don't care about keeping the most recent 12, then you can take care of your shouts a lot faster using the "check all" button.  I don't know if "check all" means all, or just all on the current page.


----------



## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

site is up but its moving at an incredibly slow pace. who wants to bet how long it'll take before people spamming it crash it back down


----------



## AliothFox (Dec 16, 2013)

prinnyex said:


> site is up but its moving at an incredibly slow pace. who wants to bet how long it'll take before people spamming it crash it back down



Not spamming.  Just an unintentional DDoS attack.


----------



## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Yay! Now I can go back to ignoring the forums!


----------



## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

Duraji said:


> Yeah, you just click the notes you want to get unread, and then click the "restore" button. At least I think so, I can't demonstrate it to confirm just yet for fairly obvious reasons. ^^;



I just checked.  If I am in trash, the restore button moves stuff from trash to its original folder.  If I am in my in-box or my out-box, the restore button is ignored.  It does not mark them as unread.  I had my hopes up there for a bit.


----------



## BakedGewds (Dec 16, 2013)

Welp we killed FA again. xD


----------



## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

Annnnddd its down again -back to pittering around-


----------



## Rorick (Dec 16, 2013)

And the site's down again.


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## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> I just checked.  If I am in trash, the restore button moves stuff from trash to its original folder.  If I am in my in-box or my out-box, the restore button is ignored.  It does not mark them as unread.  I had my hopes up there for a bit.



Then I don't know how it's done, sorry! But I thought I did it once before, maybe there's like a "mass action" button or something.

Also, am I the only one having problems with the forums going slow or sometimes making a 404, too? If we lose the forums as well, there's gonna be riots.


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> I just checked.  If I am in trash, the restore button moves stuff from trash to its original folder.  If I am in my in-box or my out-box, the restore button is ignored.  It does not mark them as unread.  I had my hopes up there for a bit.



maybe you can make use of the priority marking? i use them for my commission notes, marking things depending on how soon i need it (low/medium/high), otherwise i throw it in the archives


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## suicidalfox (Dec 16, 2013)

Etiainen said:


> I'd love nothing more to have the site resume functioning, only to have it get DDoS'd the moment after. No, I'm serious. Let's DDoS the site the moment it comes back up.



Looks like you got your wish!


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## Zenia (Dec 16, 2013)

hehe I just got up from my nap and was like "Oooh FA is up again and I have one new submission and one new journal! Better go look!" Then I clicked... and FA was offline again. lol


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## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Dang, so close... How am I supposed to post a journal advertising my site if FA is down X( *raeg and wrath*


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## Wandering_Smoke (Dec 16, 2013)

I think I killed it lol. I was looking at submissions when FA went online, so I immediately went and nuked everything except submissions. It was only around 6000 total, but still probably too much for FA to handle right now lol. I'm still hoping I'll have time to get through the 7 month backlog of submissions before they disappear.


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## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

I bet my auto-refresher every 30 seconds doesn't help at all...


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## orcaowl (Dec 16, 2013)

This reminds me when Katrina knocked out the power for two weeks and randomly in the middle of the second week it came back! And then the power line across the street exploded! And there was a fire and the power was out again lol

Also -- according to FA's twitter "Don't panic. We're not offline again. Just tweaking the database for speed!"


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

prinnyex said:


> maybe you can make use of the priority marking? i use them for my commission notes, marking things depending on how soon i need it (low/medium/high), otherwise i throw it in the archives



Priority marking works okay, not as good as mark unread, but certainly better than nothing.  I probably should use that instead of reminding myself with bookmarks.


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## Duraji (Dec 16, 2013)

I think this is PRECISELY what happened here: http://i.imgur.com/KJnk9.gif


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## Zenia (Dec 16, 2013)

orcaowl said:


> Also -- according to FA's twitter "Don't panic. We're not offline again. Just tweaking the database for speed!"


Gotta add some speed holes. 



Duraji said:


> I think this is PRECISELY what happened here: http://i.imgur.com/KJnk9.gif


OMG Cutest GIF!


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## Teal (Dec 16, 2013)

This is what happens when everyone tries to use the site immediately when it goes back online. -_-


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## Jyvris (Dec 16, 2013)

Seems like we're nearing on another record on the forums for the amount of people on.  Sweetness.  Can't wait to get back on FA again!

Cough, cough, I mean, we DID make another forum record.  Woohoo!


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## Cocobanana (Dec 16, 2013)

Only the richest and fattest of the furries (whether their money is through hard work or welfare checks) should be allowed to resume their FA activities first, followed in succession by those who are both poorer and get laid more often. Everyone would be happy eventually this way.


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## prinnyex (Dec 16, 2013)

Well the instant it came back up, it did have close to 9k users online (i took a peek since it was loading so slow), tho they should of "tweaked for speed" ahead of time rather than getting it online and then going "OHSHIT"


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## Mint Chip (Dec 16, 2013)

At least you guys were lucky enough to see it online. My internet went out (and when I got my internet back on) and I went to get on FA was Offline. And I felt quite slided. ha ha.



prinnyex said:


> Well the instant it came back up, it did have close to 9k users online (i took a peek since it was loading so slow), tho they should of "tweaked for speed" ahead of time rather than getting it online and then going "OHSHIT"



Yeah - this reminds me of a phrase my friend often says in a situation like this "Darn you hindsight!" Yup. Let's hope they can figure this out though.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

Mint Chip said:


> At least you guys were lucky enough to see it online. My internet went out (and when I got my internet back on) and I went to get on FA was Offline. And I felt quite slided. ha ha.
> 
> 
> 
> Yeah - this reminds me of a phrase my friend often says in a situation like this "Darn you hindsight!" Yup. Let's hope they can figure this out though.







Yeah. I was working, and by the time I got home and ate, it had already gone up and gone back down.. So here I am again.. still waiting.. I missed it too..


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## Blackheart the wolf (Dec 16, 2013)

The site was up for maybe 20 minutes. GAH!! *starts pulling fur out*


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## Wandering_Smoke (Dec 16, 2013)

Mint Chip said:


> Yeah - this reminds me of a phrase my friend often says in a situation like this "Darn you hindsight!" Yup. Let's hope they can figure this out though.



You just reminded me of Captain Hindsight. His retrospective abilities are a true super power! xD http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqkI691dxNg


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## Socks the Fox (Dec 16, 2013)

Argh, so close. Just barely didn't get to post my journal XP


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

Read only mode again..

We are back to square one... *sigh*


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## chow-chow (Dec 16, 2013)

This is almost comical.


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

chow-chow said:


> This is almost comical.





I am resigned to the fact that getting FA back up before Christmas is about as likely as me getting snow for Christmas.   (I live in the southeast US)


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## zachhart12 (Dec 16, 2013)

I'm getting frustrated :C


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 16, 2013)

seaweed said:


> I am resigned to the fact that getting FA back up before Christmas is about as likely as me getting snow for Christmas.   (I live in the southeast US)



You're welcome come here and take the 5,000 cubic feet of lake-effect snow that is on my property right now!


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## seaweed (Dec 16, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> You're welcome come here and take the 5,000 cubic feet of lake-effect snow that is on my property right now!





Okay, I will expect the shipment of snow soon.


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## Pogonip (Dec 17, 2013)

seaweed said:


> Okay, I will expect the shipment of snow soon.



on site pick-up only


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## seaweed (Dec 17, 2013)

Pogonip said:


> on site pick-up only







Well.... crap.


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 17, 2013)

seaweed said:


> Well.... crap.



I should actually go out and enjoy it while it's still fresh and clean.  I'm tempted to put on one of my fursuits and go rolling around in the snow and maybe build a snow-coon.  It is the most snow I've had at one time in something like the past five years, and it isn't even officially winter yet.  It's up to my knees at the moment.  Playing in the snow beats checking to see if FA is up every half hour.


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## Duraji (Dec 17, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> I should actually go out and enjoy it while it's still fresh and clean.  I'm tempted to put on one of my fursuits and go rolling around in the snow and maybe build a snow-coon.  It is the most snow I've had at one time in something like the past five years, and it isn't even officially winter yet.  It's up to my knees at the moment.  Playing in the snow beats checking to see if FA is up every half hour.



Please take photos if you can!


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 17, 2013)

Duraji said:


> Please take photos if you can!



The only camera I have is an ancient 1 MP camera that is tethered to my computer by a six-foot cable. It can't operate away from the computer.  

I'm almost fully in my fur to go out.  It's after 1 AM here, and I'll probably scare the crap out of someone in my fox suit if they happen to be out this late and see me.


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## Zrcalo (Dec 17, 2013)

totes my fault.


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## kaliam (Dec 17, 2013)

Holy crap man! How do you accumulate that many notifications? Sweet Bejebus!


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## Teal (Dec 17, 2013)

Zrcalo said:


> totes my fault.


This is why we can't have nice things.


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## chow-chow (Dec 17, 2013)

seaweed said:


> I am resigned to the fact that getting FA back up before Christmas is about as likely as me getting snow for Christmas.   (I live in the southeast US)


True that.

I drew something that I think really expresses a lot of this dilemma FA seems to be having, though. Half-vent, half-laughing at ineptitude.


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## Mint Chip (Dec 17, 2013)

FoxWolfie said:


> The only camera I have is an ancient 1 MP camera that is tethered to my computer by a six-foot cable. It can't operate away from the computer.
> 
> I'm almost fully in my fur to go out.  It's after 1 AM here, and I'll probably scare the crap out of someone in my fox suit if they happen to be out this late and see me.


Aw that's sad, I would have loved to seen some pics. ha ha, you'll have to tell us if anyone freaks out!


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## FoxWolfie (Dec 17, 2013)

Mint Chip said:


> Aw that's sad, I would have loved to seen some pics. ha ha, you'll have to tell us if anyone freaks out!



I'm back inside, and out of my now wet and snowy suit.  There are several bad snow angels in my back yard, if you can even call them that.  My tail got in the way, making it impossible to get a good angel.  At one point, I just laid in the snow and scooped what was within reach onto myself so I was totally covered.  Then I got up, shook myself off and came inside.  I don't think anyone saw me, since I went to my back yard.  I had to walk past the neighbor's security camera though, so if he has reason to check his video logs, he's going to wonder what was up.  It was fun.  I didn't try to build a snow-coon as my hands got too cold.  I was only out about 15 minutes.

Looks like my little snow break didn't help FA to come up.  Perhaps it'll be working by the time I get up tomorrow.  At least I'm not hitting F5 every few seconds like many furs probably are.  I try only about every 30 minutes.


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## cc_ (Dec 17, 2013)

chow-chow said:


> True that.
> 
> I drew something that I think really expresses a lot of this dilemma FA seems to be having, though. Half-vent, half-laughing at ineptitude.



This is cute.

Excuse me if I'm repeating.
Considering a rewrite is unrealistic, FA needs some adjustments to maintain itself and streamline its output. These might include:

Elimination of notifications in favour of a feed.
Pruning of shouts when more than 30 have been made, per userpage.
Loading comments dynamically beyond the initial 100.
Removal of no-content, no-login accounts after 2 years.

A number of revisions and small optimizations like this could make all the difference.


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## CaptainCool (Dec 17, 2013)

I have 95.397 notifications right now.
Has the "Nuke all submissions" button been fixed? In the past when I wanted to nuke everything the system told me that wouldn't work and that I could only remove a certain amount at a time.

The whole notification management always seemed like a huge hassle to me because the system is clunky to use so I never bothered removing them... I could imagine that other users have a similar issue which could be why most of the notifications don't get removed...


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## Armaetus (Dec 18, 2013)

Really, it took 7 damn years to implement a PRUNING feature to this site? Seriously, sometimes I wish Yak was more of a social person and not some shut-in in the asscrack of the former USSR doing his own thing. I think more than half of the issues with the database and general coding is because he refuses help outside of his little clique of staff friends on FA...or something like that.

He is at fault for the general lack of progress and Dragoneer as secondary for not being aggressive enough. This site is stagnant from 8 years ago, we need an overhaul already. Not every website keeps the same face forever. Sometimes you must have outside help and not just within the circle of friends.

/Gripe
/Cynical and longterm FA user


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## Etiainen (Dec 18, 2013)

Fire everyone. Start all over.

Forbid we update the site though.


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