Site-wide SSL is definitely good. Trying this out now!

what is SSL and what makes it going to be site-wide so good?? *is confused*

Spelling Nazi inbound: *Accessible.

ssl allows like ,metioned in the jounal, to keep stuff you type ie. usernames, passwords, searches, private to just your browser. this is useful cuz lets say your at work and you wanna check you account but your boss monitors all sites company wide, this allows you to access the site without the boss knowing your logged onto it, or atleast have him not see the password you just yped in we history.

as long as the certs stay intact.. then this is a good thing.

will FA be posting up a "Warrant Canary" status page?

SSL's actually available on regular (non-beta) FA, just change "http" to "https" in the URL (or add "https://" at the front for browsers that hide the protocol on normal http).

I can't say Ssl is good as it as it's proven to slow down the data transfer speed. Or worst when you are on mobile.

FA Is already just terrible on mobiles, doubt it could get any worse

It's disabled by default, so if SSL is too slow for you, don't turn it on.

I thought we were already testing a beta

I'll assume that you have opened the beta publicly to have a wider test group to help take down bugs it might cause.

If you were a superhero, you would be Captain Obvious.

But mommy said that was my super hero name.

I guess mommy was wrong.

Thanks for fixing that

Please don't test me, i'm not ready.

I laughed more than I should xD

Agree with you X3

*slow clap* alright, that was actually pretty good

then what happened to Alpha Krogoth?

(Don't mention the bodies, don't mention the bodies, don't mention the bodies)

NOTHING. DID SOMEONE MENTION BODIES?! I DIDN'T. DID YOU? WHY WOULD THERE BE BODIES IF NO ONE'S BEEN MURDERED. SILLY QUESTION. HEHEHEH....

I handled that nicely. Good job Beta.

....

very well...I'll just see if  Toughset knows anything...

omg I love you. LOL

+5 Internets

You. are my favorite person

Ah, perhaps this is why FA suddenly got so slow D:

Nice to try the beta again though.

I was wondering about that myself....

the uploads are faster but the beta still doesnt handle retrieving notes any better whatsoever. :C

Aaah does that mean I can stop annoying you with notes about new uploads through the beta system? XD

Very well! You'll soon miss my notes, they were written with so much haste love~ ;0

Send him notes anyway, so he'll still feel the love?

I can see a major problem/complaint with a deferred notification system: e.g. many artists who are extremely popular open up commissions via journal, and these commission slots invariably fill up within a minute or two. People that receive the notifications with delay will, by definition, be excluded from the chance of getting a slot. Extremely not-fair, and people will cry foul.

Would it be possible to deliver all of the notifications to the users, but have them hidden from view, and then when all of them are delivered the servers set a flag to make them visible? It'd sorta be like how YouTube "processes" a video after you finish uploading it, so it has time to add it into its database and alert all of its users before making it public.

I'm no backend guy, but theoretically speaking you set a visibility flag on the original submission/note to hidden until a notification exists in each user's inbox, and when all notifications are successfully received the server sets the visibility flag to true or whatever. If a user accesses his/her inbox while the server is sending everything out, it references the flag and sees it's invisible, so it doesn't show up. Likewise, when the user accesses the inbox after the flag is set to visible, it references the flag and sees it's fine to show up.

I personally think this would solve that 'time delay' issue. It is a GOOD idea, and honestly shouldn't be that hard to implement I'd think! I mean, just one more column in the table...

Sounds like an awesome idea to me. :D

I think this is a fantastic idea.

Just poking my head in here really quick to say I LOVE this idea.

That just makes me think that the first-come-first-serve system is impractical.

True indeed.

This ^

This will cause a lot of problems. :/

It sounds like its mainly for those with a ton of watchers who upload during peak times. :o

Which seems like it's going to be even worse for them. Not for users like myself lol.
A lot of those SUPER popular artists have a tendency to open up for commissions in slots. And if the journal/submission they post advertising posts to a certain group of people first, and those slots fill up before the last group of people get the notification, then it could cause problems with the typical "first come, first serve" system that is used here.

Though I suppose this could be remedied with a start time policy (slots open tomorrow at 12 blah blah blah), now that I think about it. :3

Oh yeah, I guess that would eliminate the problem with the delayed notifications altogether... Derp.

Or they can simply pick the commissions they like the most/ adhere to a lotto system. I've seen it used with folks who fill up within seconds.

True, true! That is another method that could work.

Of course there is another solution that is based on fixing the supply/demand problem such artists have. All they have to do is recognize that having many more people trying for commissions than there are slots means that the price is too low.

True! You have a very valid point there! Do we even need to start the "furry prices versus industry prices" discussion? xD That is definitely something to consider when your slots fill up!

I'd hate this system! The first come first serve is kinda absolute and that's one of its pros. An artist picking regarding his likes and dislikes all the time puts himself in the line and will cause alot of issues for his costumers.

It's like going to buy clothes and the seller always ignores you and moves to the sexier person that just walked in. In other words, people are free to take it personally in an artist not liking their ideas and thus skipping them.

customer*

*grammar nazis himself*

Some people work better when working on commissions that they have a stronger connection to/ like more. Comparing it to something that is premade is problematic, because it's not comparable.

Besides, artists are already doing that. If someone tries to commission something from me that I know I will absolutely dislike, I am going to politely reject them. When someone is working on something they don't really want to do it kind of does show in the end product. Why not have the chance to do something that truly excites you if you can? :)

First come first serve is a go-to for many artists (it's quick and easy) but it's not the only method of taking commission (raffle, lottery).
It's down to every artist for themselves to decide how to open, I've personally had a few regular clients tell me first come first serve is unfair because it promotes 'sniping' of slots and will always be inconvenient for people in different time zones or shift workers.

TLDR: nothing is 'fair' in life or art, artists must use discretion.

There are alot of ways of taking commissions, that's true! I just don't approve of the 'I draw what I like the most' because it totally depends on the artist's personality and trust. Some artists love what they are doing and they love their art and they want to keep people happy, so it hurts alot more when you have to face the "Your idea sucked compared to that other dude's" (Alot more than missing a journal of an artist opening for commissions does) and there is also the other side of the coin that uses that commission way to recreate something they had made already with a different color!

I think that a YCH is a better way to promote drawing what an artist likes because the commissioner will have to adapt to the artist's idea and not the other way around! But that's just my point of view on this!

*grumpy face*

Haha well this is where artist's can brush up on their tact, I think it's harder for less in demand artist's to pick and choose without backlash but that's how many do operate. Especially for projects that involve more time commitment, it sucks if you get rejected, but it also sucks for to draw something you don't want to (unless there's extra compensation ;>). Everyone is different, we all fall into our own place on this spectrum but it's down to us to decide where- if there's back lash then we'll have to deal with that ourselves.

Going off of my timezone, I see FA is mostly busy around 7 - 9 pm central time.

welll then

What's Site-wide SSL?

Well, there's a few things I can give a whirl. XD

What does "Site-wide SSL" mean? You haven't explained what it is here or in the settings page.

Oh boy, so this may be the reason of the lag spikes around the site?

no the lag spikes are caused by your twerking

Just trying to regulate the lag.

fair enough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy06i5WkowY

uber me all the way up.

I AM FULLY CHARGED

Hit it Doc!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTocPBgyYwA

you got my nets now.

there were problems with the upload times? Oo
i've never noticed
were these for the people who had like thousands of watchers?

Yes. Ruaidri the other day posted a journal taking 2 commissions. He waited a minute, checked to see if it got posted, didn't see it, posted the journal again.

15 minutes later there were two journals.

He is watched by over 18,000 people.

Totally rad. I'll have to check this out later.

sounds interesting, I might check it out later

Little wonder the site is slow as molasses tonight.

i have no idea whats so different bout it. nothing looks different >.>

other than the fact its slow as all get out o.o

perhaps people are using it all at once?

This mainly helps artists with a ton of watchers. You have a good amount but not enough to cause you any delays with uploads yet.

I do have delays in uploads, takes a good 15-30 seconds to load.

Several minutes up to 5 minutes for me during the worst times, so the fix really helped XD

damn, thats a long time. I am an artist as well but Im not nearly as well known as you are. but i just go with the flow. I just hope for the best ^^;

right? ahah

Oh... I'm testing that =)

Do love the near-instantaneous uploading over waiting several minutes!

Hmm, how's the order chosed which those little "batches" of notifications follow? Is it purely random? If not that'd make every "first comes-first serve"-thing quite unfair :(

To be honest I haven't noticed any unusual people commenting first on my test submissions. All worked as normal. It is safe to say that the impact on such things is minimal.

With any luck now that it's known that FA sends notifications in segmented batches, artists will simply stop offering first-come, first serve style commissions. It isn't that much more unwieldy to have a smaller window (say a half hour) to jump in, and then take the desired number of people at random from it.

Sigh... isn't the first rule of HCI-Developement: The computer adapts to the human - not the other way round? >:

HCI also says that the computer shouldn't make you wait. Really there's two methods to dealing with notification problems like that, sharding it out in batches like they're doing, or come at it with a ton more hardware. Since the latter costs a ton more money, it makes sense to send notifications in batches. To be honest, I'm surprised they weren't doing that already.

True, true.. I still hope though they find/found a way to make the order pseudo-random or at least regularly changing.. :)

There's no point/need for that. If the only reason is for commissions, then the artist should probably look at a better commission system... A lot of people look to use raffles, things like that. But randomizing the order notifications sent out would be for a very specific use-case and generally add a lot of burden to the system that doesn't need to be there.

Well I also thought at first-come-first-serve - free art xD Journals containing such things are not that rare, if you ask me.

Or they could refine the fucking coding to a point at which site lag is no longer an issue.

I am going to bitch myself blue in the face doing this, but I'm going to have to do it again, it seems: FA's hardware is more than acceptable for handling the strain put upon it. The issue is with the code running like a fucking slug, and the site staff are even slower still at rooting out the problem, let alone fixing it.

I'll give the staff credit where they're due, they're trying, but this is like watching people try to piss out a house fire. It's an exercise in utter futility - the best the staff could do at this point would be just to pull a parallel copy of the site code, strip it back to the absolute bone, get it streamlined and working instead of trying to constantly hotfix issues, and then get the site back up and operational.

There's also a school of thought that says first fix the problems, then worry about tweaking the system to better suit what the users want/need. I'm sure that most artists are going to be quite happy to see that all their watchers will get every notification in a timely manner now, and I'm sure that most users are going to be happy to see double notifications gone, and again to actually get notifications for everything that they signed on to see. Once the beta environment closes and that system is fully functioning, then they can start considering ways to make it better. It's more beneficial to release something now that fixes the problems, than it is to wait around for the absolute perfect solution and have users experiencing issues for potentially months in the meantime.

Hmm, yes you are right! Only mentioned that because I know there are enough developers around on the "world" and also many companies who prefer to let the users/customers adapt instead of fixing issues, lol

Do you think the speed on this site can get fixed a bit? It's been running a little tad bit slower....

Can u explain what SSL even IS for those who are not tech geeks?

Quick answer:

Instead of sending information in packets like this:

I am dow
nloading
some po
rn right
now.EOF

It encrypts them:

V nz qbj
aybnqvat
fbzr cb
ea evtug
abj.EOF

(Although it uses a _much_ better encryption scheme.)

It uses encryption to hide what you're viewing from those pesky lookie-loos.

fluster those spooks working in SIGINT, collecting your porn habits for future blackmail.

Or from Black Hat Hackers (link)

stealin mah pr0ns.
pwning my paws.
all while wearing a fedora.

I might be missing something but aren't these "upgrades" a bad thing? How are these a good thing?

Site-wide SSL is really good thing because it makes the site more secure.

How? It sounds like it would make things run a lot slower than normal

http://security.stackexchange.com/q.....wide-ssl-https

That's a good thread on explaining the pros/cons of site-wide ssl.

I have no idea what that said. It was like reading stereo instructions. What is SSL anyway?

SSL is "secure socket layer". Essentially, it means that the data between your computer and FA (or whatever site you're using) is encrypted. It's the same technology used when you're, say, using online banking. It's an extra, and optional, security layer you can choose to enable at all times when you're on some other sites, like Google or (now) FA

but what does it do?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Secure

Okay, as if the first link wasn't confusing to understand. Could you repeat that in layman's terms?

No, learn to read.

I know how to read, thank you very much

Then perhaps you should put that skill to use.

now you're just being insulting. I read it, I just didn't understand what it meant, so I asked. No need to be rude about it.

With a name like "anubiss_werewolf" I kinda already figured out that you weren't too bright.

I know that it is misspelled and I would love to be able to fix it, but still there is no need to be rude

well, since you posted your comment reply within 3 minutes of being linked the article. I am going to assume that either you are lying, or you skimmed through it very briefly without even bothering to answer any of your questions by yourself. Either way, your reading skills need work.

So fucking rude man. Not cool.

Lol, can you at least understand the word "security" and what it means?...


Very easy said: SSL prevents that someone can see or alter (hack) what you are doing!
There is an explanation in the journal up there now too...

If you aren't using something like SSL, anyone who gets a look at the data passing between you and FA can see exactly what it is. Those anyones include whoever controls any piece of the internet that the data happens to pass through.

With SSL, they can see that you are exchanging traffic with FA but they can't read it.

Basically, imagine that instead of using your computer on a public WiFi, you're reading a book on the bus.
SSL prevents other people on the bus from reading over your shoulder, by making it read like gibberish to anyone other than you.

thanks for explaining it. I'm not the most tech savvy person out there. I didn't really understand all the workings of it.
Thank you for taking the time to explain it and being nice about it. Some people can be so rube just because someone doesn't understand something that they find simple. I pray I can repay your kindness one day. *hugs*

Sorry they was rude to you, They didn't hafta be.

Yes, they did.

Explaining the issue is one thing - having to slow it down to 'U R A DUM FUK' is another. Any random dickhole should be able to look at the words 'secure' and 'encryption' and be able to put two and two together.

Nobody ever accused furries of being bright, but this is a whole new layer of pantshittery.

It will only be a bit slower when you first log into FA, but after that you are in a secure session so it's the same speed as normal. The impact from this will not be noticeable at all.

>still no links on submission titles in case the thumbnails don't upload

Accessible.

^ This

I really like that the deferred notification will mean all your watchers will see something, but, depending how it goes out, like alphabetically down your watcher list, it could be problematic for popular artists what may open commissions on first come first serve basis. If they take first come, and I don't get the journal or art until 10 minutes later, there's no way I can even attempt to get a spot.

I realize this is nothing to do with FA and more on the individual artists, but just something I thought of that may cause grief.

Whyyyy would you misspell accessible! D: C'mooon :P

Blah why not leave the site how it is, it works ok right now

....except it didn't. The batched notifications change is to help alleviate issues with duplicate/missing notifications.

Wooooo... minimal fixes to rather inconsequential things... woo.

Vital fixes for very annoying things that affected a lot of artists, actually. WOO INDEED!

I look forward to when this goes live, and my submissions don't take ten minutes to upload.
I will kind of miss being able to upload to InkBunny and SoFurry before FA is done uploading, though.

That's.. really not how you spell accessible!

I will have to check this out though!

I'm tempted to test on my old account. It had 6k watchers and could take a minute or two to put up a new upload.

Hopefully they'll do a real fix eventually so that it won't send out notifications in batches. If anything such notifications should be on art only. I fail to see how journals would consume so many resources that it would need this kind of distribution method.

The only real remedy I can think of for the first come first serve commissions would be for an artist to post an hour in advance and state that its open in an hours time, this way everyone who might want to get in on will have equal opportunity. Of course if its a commission journal it might be a good idea to have an option to forgo having a notice sent out in batches too, like a little check box.

A notification doesn't include the entire submission/journal with it. It, presumably, just includes basic information which is then loaded in the message center. The problem is creating, say, 10,000 entries in a reasonable amount of time regardless of whether it's art or a journal. Either way the same amount of work has to be done, and it lags just as much.

Still though, its rather annoying for an artist putting out commissions and for would be commissioners who get left out in the could because their username starts with a Z. Art submissions I think would take longer because a thumbnail copy must be created were as a journal is text only.

Even on the old non-batched system, some users were notified before others. I'm assuming it runs in order of date the watch was added, oldest-to-newest. Say you have 10,000 watchers now, and it still takes a few minutes to process all of that. That means some people will, inevitably, get the messages before others. I highly doubt this will actually add much time to the overall process of everyone receiving a notification, it just prevents them from being lost and makes sure the person posting the submission/journal isn't sitting there watching a wheel spin when the submission itself finished a while back.

And thumbnails are generated before the notifications are sent out, I'm sure. Again, that all has to do with the submission itself. Depending on how the database is structured, the notification will contain something like the ID of the submission/journal its referencing, and possibly some redundant copies of information to lessen database load.

And it was just as annoying to not receive a notification at all on the old system. At the very least this system ensures that everyone gets exactly one notification per event instead of most getting one, some getting two, and some getting none.

This is true, I guess it'll just come down to how quickly the system can handle a batch. I kind of wish they would give an estimate on that and it would likely clear up the fuss over the whole thing. Will it be faster over all and will those at the end get it in less time than it would to have it all sent out at once.

A solution for those who want to keep with the first come-first served commission system:

"I will shortly be opening commissions, the first six people to post after the opening time get them. The opening time will be at some undisclosed point between 0800 and 0830 GMT, (this post is being made at 0745GMT)."

I think I already made mention of that idea.

Yours was for a fixed time, I'm suggesting something where people don't know exactly when the window opens until after the slots are selected.

The big advantage of an unknown start time is that you don't get a whole bunch of people writing their "pick me" comment then all clicking post at the exact same time.

Well, I'll be damned. I was just going to pessimistically check this page to see if SSL would ever be added. THANK YOU!!!

ONLY ssl and messages? srs... when there is SO much wrong with the site as is? we should try re-writing the site and upgrade it from 1995 before just adding a few new trinkets.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Not while 'neer can make another grovelling journal, begging you for even more money to embezzel! Why fix the core issues, when you can have your loyal patrons shit out another few thousand dollars on unnecessary hardware upgrades?

Owning FA must be the best damn job ever. I mean all they have to do is sit and whine and bitch and get free money without having to lift a finger.

I know, right? These guys could be running for office and nobdy'd know any different.

I take our earlier disagreement back. You're fucking awesome and I want to engage in completely consensual and yet absolutely, shockingly vile intercourse with you for the purposes of recreation and procreation.

Nuns may die.

Haha sounds like a good time.

Btw. Never held anything against you for disagreeing. This shit happens :P

"These changes ONLY apply when accessing the site via beta.furaffinity.net. If you go back to live site (www.furaffinity.net) the fixes/changes will no longer apply."
Site-wide SSL works in the live site as well and it's good. I enabled it in the beta site and went back to live site but it didn't disappeared.

Its not supposed to do that :P

Actually it is, I just noticed that FA has used site-wide SSL since 2011 but it was never publicly announced: http://forums.furaffinity.net/threa.....=1#post2595809
All you need to do in order to use it is go to https://www.furaffinity.net/

I meant that it isn't supposed to transfer over from the beta site :P

i vote for a new layout.

Will we ever see the new layout or should we just stop getting our hopes up?

-wants to know this aswell-

maybe in ten years or so
but really these changes are nice and all but it would be really nice to update the site like you know give it a decent upgrade it needs dearly. Like being able to respond to shouts and crap would be amazing as well as a new layout.

also folders for the love of god

Both of these.

I would like to know this too.

YEAH SAME :)

Whatever happened to this whole layout change?
http://furaffinity.tumblr.com/image/16946656619

This ^

Exactly.

You better stop getting your hopes up. They've been talking about this since when I first joined the site in 2009
and almost 5 years later nothing has change :/

NOT TRUE! They totally made submission thumbs have more rounded edges. That counts!! THAT COUNTS!!! ..right? >w>

Excuse me! How have I forgotten?

I am happy for the changes. :3 It shows you guys still are wanting to do more work~ I'm sure the bigger changes that most of the users want will come in due time, so I'm fine with this.

I will go crazy with the folders once they do pop up, though. FOLDERS. GLORIOUS FOLDERS. lawl

Loving the site-wide SSL option. I will be using this from now on. I have always thought that it would be good idea to implement something like this, and now it has happened, so thanks.

Is there a chance that there will be SSL site-wide by default? If everyone uses it, then that can only make the whole of furaffinity a safer place to be! It isn't like there will be compatibility issues to think of, as 99.9% of web browsers support encryption nowadays. Sure, there will be slightly more server load due to the SSL 'handshake' process, but it would be well worth it!

No Folders? Or that "UI Overhaul" that was promised back in 2008? Or the bunches of other actually useful features that users have been requesting for years?

I gave up on that a while ago to be honest with ya. There are other, better sites out there that actually got the job done like so furry or inkbunny.

FA: "oh most users want folders, lets do this pointless stuff instead that only affects a handful of our users"

Actually, it affects more than a handful of users. It affected anyone with a significant somewhat decent (ie. 1000 or more) amount of watchers. All because the notification and database handlers are badly programmed and they are too damn lay to rewrite the damn thing properly.

Having folders would prevent having alt accounts :I

seems like pointless upgrades. Can we opt not to install the changes? Seems like a waste of time if you ask me.

Without SSL, anyone could steal your login data or private messages. Also, the deferred notification system makes it much much more reliable when artists who have lots of watchers upload art. Overall both these things will actually make the site safer and faster.

I don't really understand how. Still seems like they are just making uploading stuff a lot slower and clunkier than the old way

OK, let's use an analogy.

The old way of uploading is like trying to do lift weights while running on a treadmill while reading a book while eating some spaghetti. It's way too much to do at once and you'll fail at doing everything.

The new way of uploading is like just lifting weights, then running on a treadmill, then reading a book, then eating some spaghetti. It is chronologically spread out but each task is guaranteed to succeed.

Try opening every program on your computer at once. Do they work well? No, of course not. Your computer will crash. When a popular artist uploads a piece of art, every single watcher receives a notification; there's a computer out there that has to think and do the work for every single notification. If you've got over 10,000 watchers, the chances are high that the computer doing the thinking is going to crash just because it's way too much to do at once. In the new way, it will think about only sending out, say, 500 notifications at a time. That's a much easier and much more manageable amount. After those 500 are done, it moves onto the next one.

When you eat, you don't try to shove absolutely everything on your plate into your mouth at once to "save time". You'll choke and die. Instead, you take your fork and you eat just a bite at a time.

The new way is better.

maybe, but it still seems like it will be a lot slower.

Sort of it is "slower" as in not all people will get the notifications at the same time. But therefore it will be more reliable and less taxing for the Servers, that means loading of pages could be faster because the Servers aren't loaded with thousands notifications at once...

Perhaps a computer science minor can explain?

Trying to submit notifications to everyone at once is a process wherein many small tasks are executed simultaneously. This is known as parallelism.

Normally, parallelism can help to speed things up (hence why almost all modern computers have multicore CPUs). However, there's a small cost associated with running each task. Depending on how complex the task is, this might be more "expensive" (time-wise) than the task itself.

For example, a computer might take one millisecond do something but five milliseconds to start doing a list of things. That means that...

Doing everything at once --> 6 milliseconds per task
Doing things in groups of two ---> 7 milliseconds per two tasks
Doing things in groups of three ---> 8 milliseconds per three tasks

Therefore, breaking a collection of tasks into small chunks, rather than into individual units, can actually improve performance.

The treadmill analogy is very accurate- although it might be efficient to read a book and eat spaghetti or to run on a treadmill whilst watching the news, trying to do everything at once is actually less efficient than just doing things one step at a time.

So! This is a thing.

Also, what is spelling

Will we ever see a better system for storeing old art, other then just haveing a gallery and scraps?

When will this go live, across-the-board, do you think?

We can not change usernames yet?

Nuuuh, hopefully never! That'd be stupidly confusing! >: ..one reason why I'd never get comfy on DA >_>

Yes and no... I've had to hop accounts before to change my username and bam people are confused on where I went even though I told them in journals and so on. I have to regain a lot of watchers and so on... its annoying tbh.

Why exactly would you have to change your username in first place?

Because people like change?? or their art has gotten better and they feel like a name they came up with when they were 14 like dragonlover4564 doesn't suit them anymore....

^

Mmhm. I really wish I could change this horrible username :(

And we care why? I guess it's to say that backend upgrades really don't matter to normal members. How about an upgrade of the site's layout and optimizations of that? FA is perpetually stuck in 2007.

Also proofread your titles before you paste them everywhere on the site. Just saying.

Changes are appreciated.
UI overhaul and gallery folders would be even more appreciated.

Yes, but does this fix the thing where comments occasionally appear in the wrong tree branch?

*equips poke shield*

No it does not. :P Comment threading is still way goofed up.

Thanks for the update! I haven't had any trouble uploading, but I know some artists who do, thanks for looking into it :>

I don't notice anything different, I haven't had any problems uploading on the main site. I don't really know what to say, the beta hasn't done anything different for me. I will say that I can't stand that everything is smaller on it though, it hurts my eyes.

There shouldn't be a size difference. Did you increase the text size on the non-beta site with your web browser?

No I haven't >_> everything is smaller though. Fonts, icons, thumbnails everything.

Nothing on the beta is smaller. As was posted on the journal, the only differences were stated. Did you check your browser's zoom levels?

No I haven't >_>

Not to split hairs, because it's not a problem to me, but the font is appearing smaller to me too, I use firefox version 25.0.1. I thought I'd maybe just changed the zoom by accident - checked the options and it hadn't changed and every other tab was normal sized.
Hope that helps!

Maybe it's a browser issue? The CSS (which controls the font size) didn't change. I checked it in Firefox, IE and Chrome, no issues here. So I don't know. Try a CRTL-F5 on the page to re-download the CSS?

Tried refreshing, no change. It's not a big deal or anything, just wanted to let you know :>

This happens for me, too. I even pulled up the two side-by-side for comparison.

You should make a tiny cosmetic change so the people who don't even understand the significance of the SSL update get distracted by some flashy new button instead of complaining about nothing.

^ this. haha XD cause I totally don't speak computer enough to know wtf this is about haha..

where's my shiny bobble?

this new update explain why the images quit loading on either version of the site? banner ads loaded fine, avatar images loaded fine nothing else is.

Seems what ever caused that hiccup got fixed

click o-o

Like.. I understand why you wanted to be more efficient, but why is it that you only pay attention to things that effect only the minority?

Shouldn't you take the MAJORITY'S suggestions as well?

Like, oh I don't know... folders? organization options? Or even the other updates you have promised for YEARS.

But god forbid a "popufur" can't upload an image fast enough. :/

I agree with this, I have to wait about five minutes for an image to upload, but I'd rather wait those minutes and have gallery folders and a decent UI :/

Same, I mean.. it doesn't make any sense..

thousands of users have been suggesting this for years and there is no change, only promises

But only 100+ popular artists complain about this and the admins lose their shit and fix it immediately.

Upload speed is important, but damn, the admins and people who run the site seem to be picking favorites

I wonder if everyone with over 10k watchers started demanding gallery folders, how long until implemented?

If someone does, I'd bet it'd only take 1-2 weeks.

To be fair, a broken notification system sucks for everyone. :(

I never said it wasn't important though.

I just find it funny how the admins/people who run the site ignore every suggestion thrown at them, unless it's hurting popular artists. This has happened on multiple occasions.

There's a difference between a suggestion and a bug, though. If things were breaking for a lot of people, I imagine they'd get fixed. This is a case where, because the artists had a lot of watchers, the site was breaking.

or the UI change which was brought up several years ago and promised to be implemented in January 2013, and then sometime in the first few months. And now it just doesn't exist anymore?

I mean, I understand FA will never be ideal, I get that. Not expecting it. But maybe if they could stop promising stuff if they have zero plans to implement it in a timely manner (a year)? All it takes is not promising timelines if there's no plan to keep them. Or to get new coders, which they keep putting off on and making excuses for, and should have been addressed much sooner. The false and empty promises time and time again are the things that seem like FA doesn't care about its userbase, which is upsetting. I know FA is the biggest furry site and won't die, but there's still something inherently wrong when you can drag your users through the mud for literal years and not even apologize, give explanations, or be honest with your users.

This.. 100% this. I couldn't word it better myself.

If you want to make a video games analogy:

FA runs on Valve time, puts out the product quality of the Madden series, and expects gleeful praise for their practises like EA.

^ THIS

Let the "fun" begin...

Hiiiiiinteresting.

The batched method of delivering notifications really helped me out a lot ;3; I can post something basically instantly whereas before I would be literally waiting 5-10 minutes to post a journal or image! I'd basically go get something to eat and while I waited

I know people are gonna get mad about the idea of commission journals going out in batches though...

But herros! We lurves your arts and stuff. Making us wait for the delicious Drip-y goodness is torturous!

Though faster times are a plus! It means... uh... we'll... get Drip-y goodness uploaded to the servers faster? :D

Rather hoping the timeframe on the upload batches is minimal rather than 10 minutes. :/ ... Though maybe 10 minutes will go by the time it takes to load the submission page.

Telling people to "stop offering first come first serve" isn't really fixing the problem at all. Kinda feels like its just patching holes on a leaky boat. Some tape over the cracks to kind of cover a booboo on a slow and hobbling system.

The site seems slow as ever despite all the upgrades and donations. Haven't seen many new features. Haven't seen many fixes. Still don't have those thumbnails working from when they broke them. Harassment trouble ticket is still sitting in my inbox since June. Never been looked at. No replies. What happened to the last adminpaloza?

Meh.
Maybe one day it'll all come together. Maybe.

Okay, SSL is good, I agree. More security for certain pages is good.

But damned if I know why FA needs SITE WIDE SSL. I mean, either people are THAT paranoid about.... noisy roommates? Or something.

If the login system uses SSL, great. But there's no reason I can see other then that.

Seriously, are there people on FA who have their credit cards/passwords/SSN/other vital statistics plastered on EVERY PAGE where this would be necessary?

It's not like it's going to protect against people checking browser history, or phising scams, or... other things.

All I can tell that this will really do is pretty much bog the site down even more, because of all the extra cycles it would need to do.

FA has to use site-wide SSL because SoFurry, Inkbunny and Weasyl uses it as well so without it FA would look insecure than them which would just give even more advantage to those technically better sites.

Without SSL it's really EASY to do a man in the middle attack and take over your account since any data you send is in plaintext... including passwords and session related data (what keeps you logged in).

It's actually considered to make encryption mandatory for the above reason with the draft of HTTP 2.0 for the above reason.

I never had any problem with the site to begin with. but I do know others have so hopefully this will help them.

Still waiting on the site-wide return of the custom thumbnails.

But that isn't a site-wide, site-breaking problem... so it probably wont be fixed for a while ever.

Probably some dumb questions but im curious.
How manny people work on programing and designing for the site and how do they operate?
I know they are volunteers but is it difficult for staff to work from long distances when working on the site?
What are some things that would help projects to quickly get completed? Possibly get the site wish list out of the way.

_{Not just for my sake but for others who maybe thinking similar things}

I don't know how many people work on site programming and all that, but it's definitely possible for them to work from anywhere as long as they have an Internet connection.
What would ultimately help projects get quickly completed? Publishing code and letting everyone contribute on a site like GitHub. Other than that it's all internal to the FA staff and how they get things done, which is unknown to me.

One. There is only one programmer for this site, and he does not share power.
Ok but reference aside our one programmer is a jerkoff who basically sat on his ass and drove off anyone who tried to help or anyone ne'er tried to hire to help. And neer has let him. Probably has something to do with that big drama from the hacking/leaks forever ago.

Is this why my submissions were taking 2 or 3 minutes to process?

That's literally writing a line of text on each person's account right data? So for me, it's like notepad saving 7900 lines of text and emailing it back to me?

There is a large ferrety fox answering my questions..

Now if only we could fix the obvious mistakes, like </body> and </html> missing at the bottom of the site's html code of every page. How do you forget about that anyway?

Well, that's definitely embarrassing. I'll take a look tomorrow and get it fixed.

I seriously lol'd

The W3C and all the HTML validators seem to think differently. There are a lot of badly coded websites out there that don't conform to the standard so all the websites have to compensate for all this and slowing down the browser and adding bloat in the process. If they coded them right to begin with, web browsers wouldn't need to compensate, allowing them to be much faster and leaner.

The validator service will correctly mark a current page as invalid XHTML if it doesn't have, say, </body>, because XHTML requires that tag and the page is declared to be XHTML by the doctype. If the doctype is changed to HTML5 (or you override it), it should permit the omission of </body> without complaint, because it is valid in HTML5. [There may be other issues which still render a given page invalid.]

In an ideal world, every page would be perfect, but that is not the case. Browsers are already built to handle that. They do so quite quickly. Nowadays there are even standards for what to do when a page is wrong in certain ways (for example, you get overlapping <a> and <i> tags mixed up). It is still possible to make a page very slow, but that is more likely to happen for other reasons - for example, I caught one furry site loading its front page as a CSS file in every page.

So uh; how about a filter system?

I'm using FA Filter which (for the most part) works, but it would be nice to see this feature implemented first party.

Gallery folders and folders for notes please.

seconded

So about them folders and filters....

what about the problems caused by the recent rule change? Don't you think that THAT should be addressed first?

No.

Shame

It's easier to leave them vague and ambiguous so they can be molded to fit the situation depending on who it involves, don't you know.

Of course not. Far, far easier to put the boot in and change the rules to fit your broken code rather than fix the issues causing the problems at the start, 'm I right?

It's painfully obvious that you need some help with getting this site working properly, 'neer. Having read some of your other comments lower down it's also pretty obvious that the only thing stopping you from taking on that help is your own poor, bruised ego - you want to be the one single-handedly dragging FA out of the shit.

Recruit. Some damned. Help. Get other people looking over the code, have your work proofread before you release it, get other people working on other issues instead of shouldering the burden yourself like some misanthropic Atlas. The community is full of able-minded, helpful and talented programmers just oozing for the chance to get FA up to par, and you keep not taking advantage of them. Citing reasons such as 'I did a thing but wasn't happy and so I scrapped it' is fine if you're an artist - you get to throw failures in the trash and nobody suffers. When you're working on live code you cannot afford to be fucking up, nor can you afford to just keep putting updates and improvements out.

SSL is something that should have gone into the site as a mandatory feature back in 2010, rather than something optional. There really is no excuse at this point. Anybody with half a brain cell is laughing at you, 'neer, and while I'd love to be able to defend you and say 'you're trying your best', with PR statements like the ones I've seen in these comments, there really isn't any point in trying to.

Careful now. Don't wanna get ban(baw)hammered. XD

If Dragoneer swings the hammer at me for telling him to get some perspective and external critique on his work, then the fandom truly is lost.

As an artist myself I can appreciate the value of showing somebody else your work before publishing it, to get an outside view on it and get help with any corrections that need to be made before putting it out there. This is especially important on a high-load website, like this one, since you need to be sure that your code won't break something when it goes live - and, generally speaking, two pairs of eyes are better than one.

In long and short: getting some people to review and help with the coding process only benefits the site. It reduces the time between major updates, and it enables those updates to be of a high standard - rather than one guy making vaporous promises and never being able to deliver them thanks to his own lack of perception. The talent is out there already, the FA staff just need to stop skateboarding off each other's dicks and harness it.

Mm.. When I used to write we would pass everyone's stuff around the class and ink it all up in red. XD
I wouldn't say furries as a whole are lost just because of princess piche here. I would say that FA is probably lost. External help is what they need badly since their team as is is incompetent. But this is why I have names out on weasyl, ib, sf, ect. For the day that FA fails. This has all given me an idea for a journal once I roll my lazy ass outta bed and stop using my phone. :P

This has nothing to do with broken code, everything to do with /spamming/. Spam is bad. Period.

Most excellent.

the more encryption, the better.

I wouldn't mind a few changes in the way it's worked.

First off we should be allowed to have the image uploaded to whatever sizes suit the picture with a selection of the sizes for the page while the download section shows the larger image. Avatars should be given the deviantart style treatment on uploading an image we want and using the box selection we select what we want to use for the pictures. It would be nice.

That'd explain why it's taking me about 10-15 minutes just to load someone's journal entry, and then another 5 just to comment on it. Good job dude

Loading times are a different issue than this process. We're working on that, too.

Does this also include the support/report system? I'm pretty sure from your staff page there's a good amount of people on staff, but for it to take a week plus (not even mentioning ones that took TWO months for a single bloody reply to it) is ridiculous. Only ones that seem to get actually any attention is when you report someone for spamming on the site or such

We're going to start adding new admins soon. It's a staffing issue, one we're working on.

So how 'soon' does soon mean. It's been nearly a month since I sent in a ticket, the dude is harassing me in other ways since me and my friends blocked him, and still no one has bothered with the ticket

Note me the ticket number.

Noted. Five days ago

Ahahaha I'm sorry. Is this an alt account or have you really only just gotten here this year? I don't mean to insult but uhmm if you're new.. You'll learn. I mean, it's not like hundreds of people complaining about the same thing are wrong or anything, right?

So I have a question regarding this new way of managing notification pushes. When it comes to high profile artists opening commissions (as one example) where slots can literally be filled in a matter of a minutes. How will this affect their watchers? If they open on a first-come first-serve basis,are the people who get the notification later just going to end up on the short end of the stick?

Seems so :/

To give an example; I got a YCH slot recently. The comments soon filled up with " Aww I wanted that one" type comments. If I had had the misfortune of a staggered notification I would have lost out and felt rather miffed.

Depends on the watchers too, if they're impatient and dislike getting left out often, they might just go to another artist.