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Downtime doesn't need to happen
13 years ago
General
Why does the furry community rely so much on a site with no vision, no technical expertise, and no plan to sustain itself?
It's 2012. How long has FA been around? Seven years? At this point, it's laughable that the site should go down for 5 days not just because of a server failure, but because there was no contingency plan for such a failure. If you're FA and your single point of failure is your RAID cluster, why do you not have backup hard drives in case one goes down? The RAID controller bug could not have been foreseen--the one that caused so much trouble--but having no backup hard drives is quite silly.
Speaking of technical failures, the site has stagnated for years. Whatever happened to all the announced redesigns? Whatever happened to moving the site forward? Remember when the commission information pages were pulled from profiles due to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities? They haven't been put back. I'd say the coding people involved are asleep at the wheel, but then again there is only one coder in a sea of admins. How on Earth is that viable for a community of thousands online at a given moment?
And not to mention that FA has no plan to sustain itself--donations and ads aren't viable in the long term, especially when all the ads are furry related. How about taking the dA route and introducing premium features worth paying for? How about doing something to move the site forward?
Frankly, FA's whole setup can be thrown away. Here's how the site should be structured: FA is rewritten in Ruby or Python and hosted on a cloud platform like Heroku or Amazon Web Services. Pictures are stored in a cloud file store like Amazon S3. Amazon CloudFront provides a suitable content distribution network.
And before you tell me I'm crazy, this model has been done before. It's called Instagram. Oh, a picture-sharing website that uses cloud technology? Yup. And FA can sure use it, too... if they ever got their act together. Until a site like that comes out, everybody should migrate to SoFurry or InkBunny.
It's 2012. How long has FA been around? Seven years? At this point, it's laughable that the site should go down for 5 days not just because of a server failure, but because there was no contingency plan for such a failure. If you're FA and your single point of failure is your RAID cluster, why do you not have backup hard drives in case one goes down? The RAID controller bug could not have been foreseen--the one that caused so much trouble--but having no backup hard drives is quite silly.
Speaking of technical failures, the site has stagnated for years. Whatever happened to all the announced redesigns? Whatever happened to moving the site forward? Remember when the commission information pages were pulled from profiles due to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities? They haven't been put back. I'd say the coding people involved are asleep at the wheel, but then again there is only one coder in a sea of admins. How on Earth is that viable for a community of thousands online at a given moment?
And not to mention that FA has no plan to sustain itself--donations and ads aren't viable in the long term, especially when all the ads are furry related. How about taking the dA route and introducing premium features worth paying for? How about doing something to move the site forward?
Frankly, FA's whole setup can be thrown away. Here's how the site should be structured: FA is rewritten in Ruby or Python and hosted on a cloud platform like Heroku or Amazon Web Services. Pictures are stored in a cloud file store like Amazon S3. Amazon CloudFront provides a suitable content distribution network.
And before you tell me I'm crazy, this model has been done before. It's called Instagram. Oh, a picture-sharing website that uses cloud technology? Yup. And FA can sure use it, too... if they ever got their act together. Until a site like that comes out, everybody should migrate to SoFurry or InkBunny.
FA's value is in how the site serves the community. If FA had no role on the Internet, then nobody would care that the site went down. The cost of using the site is not just a monetary transaction. FA has a responsibility to its users--if that responsibility is not met, then why should its users trust FA? If the solution for artists using the site is that they should use anything but FA for their business, why should we be using FA?
Not to mention, nobody is demanding that FA stay free and never make money. FA should have some sort of premium services. The fact that FA is free to use is the fault of FA and not the users.
The funding issues are due to the fact that payment-processors refuse to cooperate - due to the amounts of pr0n on this place. It worked well back when Paypal was still available for FA.
So it's not that simple :P AND NO 'BUT' @N@ You know various services go apeshit once you mention the word SMUT!
There's always been rumors about how FA funds were used for their shopping sprees and how the Admins are just 'friends' with other admins. They don't seem to do any checks or credibility which is hurtful to most people because of the whole 'biased' thing.
For example, I remember one occurrence with a friend of mine but fail to remember the other person's name, but he commissioned an artist to draw something for him and after months of waiting, he got it but then they ended up not being friends anymore so the artist used the same picture but just redid it and sold it to an admin. When my friend saw it, he did one of those tickets because LEGALLY the original piece was my friends since he payed the artist to do it, and it was that same admin that denied and even messaged back something a long the lines "It doesn't matter if it was yours or not. The artist can do what he wants with it." But my friend found someone who had a similar problem and that same admin had the picture taken down.
That's either biased to playing favorite for artists (which we know isn't a secret) but also because it meant the admin didn't want to give it up, not caring that it was basically theft.
And before anyone gets on me, saying I'm wrong, go to any real artist, NOT an FA artist, I mean an actual professional for a studio or something and they will tell you. It doesn't matter if you draw it. If someone pays you for their service and tells you what to draw, once you say 'here it's yours' and you take their money, you are giving up all legal rights to it.
Either way, I agree with you one hundred percent.
-Korkan