Austin Dern, Dean of CoatisPlease increase the 'times Austin has gone and checked FurAffinity even though he knows it's down until theoretically 7pm' counter.
Ruby Tails@Austin_Dern Ohhhh that's rightttt 
I was about to check a bit ago 
@foxyloon Yeah, it's down.
@Austin_Dern Yip! Scheduled maintenance. Purging a toooon of old notifs, hehe~
I remember seeing that on the official FA discord a few days ago, but of course this airhead forgot until just now.
Lady Lus, Rubber Bouiphant@foxyloon @Austin_Dern They’re force purging people’s notifications? I saw there was downtime but didn’t look at the details, and the Discord only seems to have a link to a post about the downtime… hosted on FA. Which is down.
@lusrangifer @Austin_Dern I read the journal post a few days back, and yeah. They're purging all the notifications that are older than six months. Apparently the dataset as it sits now is around a terabyte in size with billions of database entries.
@foxyloon @lusrangifer Yeah, which is ... really baffling me because I don't understand how the notifications and notification counts aren't just automatically generated (and counted) on the fly from the upload and watch and comment entries that have to be there anyway.
I mean, I've never programmed anything with a *huge* database with high user volume like FurAffinity has but I don't understand why notifications would be a separate persistent bunch of data that takes up like any space.
I had a pretty modest number of notifications by FA standards, but because there wasn't a good way to fave comments, I'd leave the notifications for those when someone had a good idea or tease or said something nice that wasn't on one of my own uploads, so I could find my way back to it.
Good to see that I'm irrecoverably losing about 200 of those because I was out of the loop and people with 200k+ notifications they never intend to look at find it funny to never clear out anything ever.
@lusrangifer @Austin_Dern This is why journal or comment favorites needs to be a thing, but I know that's gonna need to be a whole new implementation in itself.
IMO, FA needs to stand up a whole new site from scratch and migrate user data to that instead. WAY easier said than done, but that would guarantee that such features would be properly implemented while utilizing modern practices to prevent this in the future.
@foxyloon @Austin_Dern That would be nice, but sounds like it's basically "damage done" on anything I'd have wanted that system for. :/
@lusrangifer @Austin_Dern Yeah... I can already hear the folks coming out of the woodwork to complain about exactly this.
No joke, this is why I have a dedicated FA bookmarks folder in my browser, to effectively function as such. Again, doesn't help you here and now, though.
@foxyloon @lusrangifer I can't fault people for not deleting their notifications. If people keep doing the same wrong thing, it's because something about the setup is making that look like the right, or at least reasonable, thing to do.
I don't know any other web site or application where you have to choose to reset your notifications, and the assertion that leaving them un-cleared slows the web site down seems bizarre. So people aren't trained to clear notifications, and when they hear that they should, the why sounds absurd.
(I also wonder if 'nuke' was a bad choice for how to reset them and if, like, 'clean' or 'refresh' or something might encourage people to do it more just because that sounds more positive-and-side-effect-free.)
@Austin_Dern @lusrangifer Agreed 💯
Frankly, the site has a number of weird UI issues, on top of weirdness with back-end implementations and an office culture that was very toxic. The last point only changed a few years ago when Dragoneer passed away and his wife took over.
I also remember the shit-flinging that would go down in the fourms when folks would discuss this stuff back in the day, before said forums were shut down for good and replaced with a Discord server. 
FA is in desperate need of a ground-up rebuild and that takes a lot of time and resources to do properly, so the onus has been to just keep the lights on in the meantime while building those resources up. I hope they can get there, but I know this is no simple task to take on such an enormous project like this.
@foxyloon @lusrangifer I didn't know that about the office culture change, but I suppose I have been hearing less spillover drama from there lately. I mean apart from the occasional extreme unwelcome weirdness about babyfurs and egg kink and stuff.
The codebase would probably do well to have a full-up rebuild, but --- speaking as someone whose work is basically salvaging a project that was built for years without any kind of design --- I know how hard it is just to understand what data you have and how to test whether you've changed something out for something that works at least as correctly.
@Austin_Dern @lusrangifer When Sciggles opted to open up announcement journal comments for the first time in years, I made sure to bring up a number of these concerns. The big point I stressed was that if morale has been this bad with the mod team for a long time, it may be time for folks to step down and walk away. That's when half the old mod team walked out. They also walked back some of the overzealous rules with babyfur stuff and similar.
Yeah, exactly. I don't even have a full grasp of the dataset of a site like FA, and I know that would be a years long full time job in itself.
@foxyloon @lusrangifer I wonder if they even have a map of, like, what the database looks like and what the pieces are supposed to do and how they're meant to relate to each other.
(My work would benefit greatly if we had such but every time I try constructing one it trails off into madness.)
@Austin_Dern @lusrangifer So I've heard, at least some progress has been made towards doing this. Again, I don't know specifics, just what they say in the announcement journals and Discord chat.
If I had the means, I'd gladly volunteer to do this for them.
@foxyloon @lusrangifer Part of me would kind of like to collaborate on something like this, programming something that's about a fun project, but the sensible part of me knows I really don't have the time for it and if I did, did I want my recreational time to be doing the same thing as work? Given how much of work is salvaging a years-old programming nightmare especially?