fuzzy post-it

if you were unaware and yet still somehow care: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5417252/

basically this is complete horseshit

let us take a magical adventure of discovery to find out why

full disclosure: i am a bitter old grump

more useful disclosure: if this gets reblogged everywhere for some reason, and you don’t know my qualifications, they are: i am good at computers and no one else in this story is

Announcing Fur Affinity: Project Phoenix

Fur Affinity is happy to announce that the next version of furaffinity.net is in active development. Our goal is simple, to provide you with a better experience that can be sustained and improved upon for years to come.

some other times they have been happy to announce this, according to my handy timeline:

• June 2006: announced Ferrox 2, the second (?) attempt to rewrite FA from scratch
• Sep 2007: call for devs for Ferrox 3, the third attempt to rewrite FA from scratch
• Jun 2009: previewed a new UI design created by Zaush, which had apparently been designed while Ferrox 3 was in progress, without a word to the Ferrox devs who had also been trying to make a design
• Mar 2010: some clueless nimrod starts working on a fourth attempt to rewrite FA from scratch, apparently blessed by FA, though this was never mentioned publicly and the developer was never listed as on staff
• Jan 2011: announced a designer would soon be hired to finish the new UI, now several years old and unchanged since it was first previewed
• Jan 2014: previewed the new UI, which is actually just a different page of the same fucking design from five years ago, except now the idiot dudebro designer is also playing developer

not to mention the features that have been promised several times over the past seven years, often multiple times, in a cycle of “we’ll do” … “we’ll have a beta soon” … forgotten and never mentioned again

• prints
• fine-grained filtering by subject matter
• gallery folders
• web hosting
• a URL shortener
• supporter ribbons

but worst of all is that people are still dumb enough not just to fall for the snake-oil, but to get all smarmy at others for calling it out as snake-oil. dragoneer has promised myriad things over the past eight years and delivered fucking none of them. the only things FA ever gets are either microscopic improvements that should take a few hours to fix, or the resurrection of features it already had, after they’ve been disabled for so long that they seem new again.

so if you are running around sighing melodramatically about how it’s a free site and how dare anyone complain, fuck you, douchenugget. how about i sock you in your dumb fucking mouth for free. apparently being lied to and strung along for almost a decade is totally fine if it’s free (even when an entire community is basing its business model on the platform), so i don’t see why the same shouldn’t apply to my little fuzzy fist in your face

moving right along

To reach this goal, we will be rewriting Fur Affinity from the ground up.

i know i just said this but here’s the part where i’m super extra bitter

see i was on the dev team for Ferrox 3. i wrote the bulk of it. i was the lead dev for a while after the original guy quit. i learned Python from that project.

but nobody cared. that’s the impression that sticks with me the most. nobody really had any input, except for dragoneer’s extremely passive-aggressive resistance on occasion.

the thing was intended to be open source from the start, but it took over a year for that to actually happen. a year! do you know how long it takes to put code on the internet like fucking twenty seconds. i don’t even remember what took so long. i’d hardly believe it except i wrote it in this timeline and i assume i know what i’m talking about.

that whole zaush design would’ve been pretty useful, since i’m a pretty amateur designer and had far less of an eye for subtlety back then. (compare ferrox design with the final design for squiggle. thumbnails are broken there, but you get the idea.) but no one mentioned it to me. or anyone. because dragoneer is super paranoid.

also the rest of the staff gossipped about what a pain in the ass i was while i wasn’t around, largely for being an argumentative ass about ferrox design and features on the forums. which i totally was, and which i sort of try to be less often in my old age. but, you know, at least other people on the forums showed some interest

which brings me to the super extra bitter part

ferrox was open source, right. it even attracted a couple contributors that way, one of whom did an incredible amount of work on floof/squiggle later on, and whom i’m eternally grateful towards (and guilty towards, since wow that’s a lot of work to do for things that were never finished). the important part here is that the code is free for anyone to use and work on. someone even stuck it on github recently. hell, one of the other developers is still on FA staff to this day

so

why have there been at least two more attempts to start from scratch in the past four years?

ferrox had a whole lot of plumbing in place. it was rapidly approaching pretty darn usable. i put a whole lot of effort into writing a database migrator that even fixed data problems (e.g.: fucked up threading incomments) and which was like 90% done.

and they never finished it. or even tried. the remaining dev never worked on it again after a few months. (i don’t even know wtf he does for them.) none of the talks of hiring a developer have mentioned hiring someone to finish the code they already have. ferrox 3 was, and is, the closest they have ever gotten to a functioning replacement for FA, and they had so little interest in it that they have let it rot all this time.

which is why this announcement is such a joke.

oh, man, i hate the “hire a developer” schtick too. for two reasons.

one is that, jesus christ, do you even know how much developers get paid? way too much. starting salary for a new grad is like $60k. that’s $30 an hour. a week of work costs $1200. and we are talking about a project that would take a couple of months to do badly. these people don’t have any money; they can barely afford their own bandwidth bill. where the fuck are they going to find the cash to hire someone who (a) actually knows anything, (b) is willing to tolerate building a site for hosting giant cartoon penises, and © is not one of the very small pool of competent furry programmers, all of whom have been driven away and are busy with their own stuff anyway?

the other is more philosophical, and i always wish i could find the link for this, but: it turns out that paying someone for a job e already wants to do can ruin the interest in it. if someone does something for free, it’s out of belief and conviction and joy and all those warm fuzzies. if you starting handing out material rewards, it becomes about the amount of the rewards, and the activity itself becomes less enjoyable. there was even a recent study where they watched little kids who did art stuff in their free time in school; they gave half of them a reward for doing art stuff, and that half ended up spending less time doing art stuff in their free time later. because it stopped being about passion and started being about what can i get out of it. for a niche community site like FA, that is the last thing you want.

jesus christ we’re only on the second paragraph still

Codenamed Project Phoenix, we’re able to take full advantage of new technologies that have emerged since Fur Affinity’s birth

lol

l o l

i got spoiled on this because i saw the forums thread before this announcement

are you ready for this

the “new technologies that have emerged since Fur Affinity’s birth”

they are talking about node.js

they are talking about javascript

javascript is the cutting-edge new technology that will revolutionize FA

i cannot get over how fucking absurd this is

the person who wrote this cannot possibly have any comprehension of what is actually going on

WHICH IS another problem they’ve got over there: the most competent tech is yak, and he is not very competent. he is holding things together with duct tape and fishing wire. and he constantly says he’s working on getting more people (no, seriously, it’s been like three years since i first saw him say this), but he’s waiting on dragoneer to approve people. and dragoneer says separately and elsewhere that he has no idea what’s going on and no one will tell him, because he is a hapless victim who only owns the fucking site and pays for everything.

shockingly, not a lot gets done

ensuring the site is easily maintained and extended upon for years to come.

i like the key word “easily” in here, implying that the site has been maintained and extended ever, at all

and again, this is javascript. javascript will make the site easy to maintain

javascript

javascript

We’re also working on a visual refresh, improving the overall look and feel, as well as the user experience.

i stress that this is the same visual refresh as was first unveiled almost five years ago

now, though, we have a mockup of the notes page, which looks kind of like someone wanted to copy Outlook but with even worse colors. i think he spent longer on those sweet web 2.0 monochrome icons

this actually looks worse than the 2009 design, which at least used, like… a color

i keep rereading this sentence and it just makes me angry somewhere in my caveman parts. it has a slick oily gloss of PR, using words that sound like things a Serious Business would say, without actually conveying anything. but it’s not just not conveying anything; the author doesn’t actually know what to convey. there is nothing to be said, because there is nothing going on.

consider that usually an unveiling of a new design—of anything—comes with some commentary by the designer. because people tend to be proud of good work they do, and they want to walk you through the things they have done, and what led them to those decisions, and why they think those decisions are good, and how they hope it’ll work better for you.

i mean, to pick an arbitrary example, look at this most recent github blog post that happens to have screenshots in it. it’s actually way shorter than most of their unveilings, but still infinitely more genuine than FA’s quote above. they sound like they are actually talking about the thing in the screenshot, like they care about it. hell, they sound like they’ve used it. (which they have. github dogfoods everything.) they say what it is, what it can do for you, where to find it, and that they’re happy to have done it.

now, not everyone blogs about every design change they make. but generally you either see a post made by someone who is genuinely attached to the work, or just a silent change. there’s not a lot of middle ground.

except with FA, where there’s a faint obligation to post something (because that’s what you do, and it’s way easier than actually getting the work done), but nothing to say about it. because no one is invested, really. no one who has any actual political power also has any creative or technical power. so all that comes out is a jumble of appropriate-sounding words, with no heart behind any of them.

how are they improving the user experience? what do they even think that means? no one knows, and no one cares, as long as it sounds good.

and it must sound good, because there are people saying the new ui looks amazing and they can’t wait for it

ho ho

yes they can

We’ll be holding our design to a higher standard to ensure that Fur Affinity provides ease of use while retaining high visual appeal.

“holding our design to a higher standard” would seem to suggest that the design is currently ugly as sin

and yet, “high visual appeal”

this is some sweet doubletalk

does “ensure [it] provides ease of use” mean it currently doesn’t, or that it should continue to do so?

this is even more hollow than before; it doesn’t mean anything at all!

Fur Affinity relies on its community, and it’s because of you that we’re all here today. We’d like to thank you for your patience and your faith.

you condescending prick. the best way to show gratitude for patience and faith (called collectively “goodwill”, a thing so valuable that real companies list it on their balance sheets and give it a dollar value) is to not keep yanking chains.

From today, we’re going to be posting regular updates regarding this project and the site in general.

i swear to god this is the sixth time this has been said, at least.

no one there—

ok, let’s be honest, this is pretty much all dragoneer

dragoneer does not seem to grasp that promising things does not magically make them come true

much better than to promise regular updates is to just start fucking doing something, so that it becomes a natural habit

e.g. look at me, i am already getting way more in the habit of tumbling jumbled thoughts, and in turn i’ve made a bit more headway in blogging For Real

tweet design revisions. keep a dev journal. open source the fucking codebase or something so people can actually see what is happening instead of having to chug on this PR swill

or maybe that’s it. i really do think dragoneer is paranoid (generally) about FA and his control over it, and this is another symptom: he does not want anyone to know what’s going on unless it goes through him first

2014 is a new year for us, and we want to increase transparency and trust for all aspects of the administration.

no one cares what you want

just do it

lol who am i kidding half the comments are from people who are genuinely excited to be promised all these things. are y'all new here or just really forgetful i really don’t know

i think “transparency” has come up before, but like most PR, dragoneer doesn’t seem to understand what it means. it means people can see inside, and he has never made the slightest iota of effort to make that happen. where did all those furocity admins go, i wonder? was that ever even discussed publicly? so many things are kept hush-hush as “site business”, like anyone gives a damn about the business secrets of Fur Affinity™

About Fur Affinity: Fur Affinity was created in 2005 as an outlet for creative expression within the furry community. Today it continues to be the largest active community site for the furry fandom.

are you serious, are you actually trying to write a press release

About the Team:

oh my jesus lord you are

We’ve established a team experienced in product management, UI, and the development of large-scale web applications.

i’ll believe that when i—

Dragoneer: Owner and head admin of Fur Affinity, Dragoneer has been with FA since 2005. He manages the organization as a whole as part of his day-to-day responsibilities. For Project Phoenix, he provides top-level guidance and direction to ensure the project meets the organization’s needs and vision for the future of FA.

top-level guidance and direction

where the fuck was any of that the last four fucking rewrites

what the fuck experience does dragoneer have in product management? he BOUGHT the current incarnation of FA, and under his leadership, four software projects have gotten confused and lost and ultimately failed

here, right here, is your opportunity to be transparent. and that you didn’t even think of it while writing means you have no idea what transparency is.

what are the “organization’s needs and vision for the future”?

seriously, what are they? what does this Phoenix project actually intend to do? anything concrete. anything at all.

you don’t have a fucking clue. and if you did, you wouldn’t say. and if you did say, it wouldn’t happen anyway!

Adam Wan: Also known in the fandom as Zaush. Development lead for the new Fur Affinity. Adam has over 11 years of experience in various technical fields such as web development, game engine development, UX, and applications for integrated systems. Lately his work has been related to user experience, complex intranet tools, and integrated applications.

for the less technical in the audience, “intranet” means “only works with IE6”

for the even less technical in the audience, every time i say “for the less technical in the audience”, i am about to make a really dumb technical joke

this guy is Sir Rapist

or maybe he’s not a rapist but honestly i do not give a fuck

if you are accused of rape and your response is to tweet “don’t stick your dick in crazy!” in the most dudebro fashion imagineable, even if you did absolutely nothing wrong, you are still an abomination of a human being for being incapable of taking this seriously for even a picosecond

not like there aren’t similar stories (cont’d, cont’d) about him

but most appalling at all is that people are showing up to defend him, to say that hey sometimes people do lie about rape and assault

and that is true: sometimes they do

however let us consider the example you are setting here

you are telling any charismatic popular person in a position of power that, hey, it’s fine to lean across the line. maybe even cross it a bit. maybe even cross it entirely. because even if we find out, we’ll be here to cast doubt on the unknown nobody you chose to target.

i.e. you are making it easy to shrug off accusations of rape, which makes it easier to get away with rape. (this wasn’t even an accusation; it was uncovered only because FA’s entire private message database leaked.) so, you know, fuck you with the horse you rode in on.

ctrlaltdel123: Developer working under Adam Wan to help with the new Fur Affinity. He has experience designing, implementing, and testing real-time software systems and web applications.

who the fuck is this? the only internet presence he even has is the same four pictures of an oversaturated blue mewtwo posted several places

Nanuk: Product and marketing lead for the new Fur Affinity. Nanuk has experience managing and marketing products for large scale web properties. He works to help organize planning and development of the new Fur Affinity, while maintaining transparency with the community.

i don’t know who this is either but he seems to have been doing a lot of damage control on the announcement thread, so i guess he might actually do the thing his role is for

oh wait wow this is nice great

one of his earliest comments is this gem, responding to an early question about whether the project will be open source:

While a proprietary nature of code is one aspect when deciding whether or not to make a project open source or not, it often boils down to the flexibility that can be afforded for a closed-source codebase as opposed to an open source codebase. The code can be specifically tailored for FA in every aspect, as opposed to a generic image board software, of which countless numbers of open-source alternatives exist online.

this is fucking insane. it doesn’t make any sense at all, made all the worst by being written to sound like it’s supposed to. in fact it appears so coherent that i almost suspect it’s an outright lie.

you don’t have to make your app be super generic to be open source.

you know firefox’s extension website? addons.mozilla.org? well here it is. who the fuck is ever going to need to run that except mozilla? fucking nobody. but they release the source anyway, because that’s what they do. they release the source to everything.

it goes without saying, of course, (and here i’m about to say it again) that this cannot possibly be true since FA has already had a rewrite attempt that was open source.

marketing lead indeed

anyway

i don’t know how to end long-winded intense posts

it always feels like i should have some cool conclusion, and i’m bad at those, because i totally just said everything i wanted to say??

basically fuck most of the people involve in this clusterfuck

i wanted to build a cool art site, truly. i even still do

but i do not want to play furry politics and i do not want to play marketer

so i’m going to try improving on regexes instead because at least i know programmers will appreciate programming tools