Desiderius Price

I initially misread that (or at least I hope) of 100 hours/week. I’m lucky to be in a gig where overtime is frowned upon and requires prior approval/justification; this lends itself to be very friendly to writing and other hobbies. And, as an aside, you might enjoy: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/01/microsoft-pimps-it-old-school-with-a-pricey-text-adventure-game/

I’ve never had a good knack for making decent “ballpark” estimates except in the simplest of cases. And in this case, I don’t know the state of the current codebase, the state of the database, which features would actually be desired, or the modifications/rewrites needed to make that happen, so any estimate aside from “possibly major” is deceptive IMO.

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That's the crux of all this. For any website overhaul, “AFF and its crew" is DG & Manta. DG’s work is near murder on her, and Manta’s really busy too. Like you, I program professionally too, so I’m very picky in what I do with my free time; at the moment, that's my story writing and it’s related software. (An hour or two per month might be acceptable, maybe, but that's not enough for this proposal.)

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If we did this properly, then we’d need to Collect requirements/desires as we examine the codebase. Review the existing codebase, figuring out what we want to change Determine if an overhaul vs rewrite is more appropriate, with long term maintainability and reliability and performance in mind. Create a rough conceptual design Setup source control and a prototype-dev-beta server (maybe even a task-issue-manager/bugzilla), Iterate with some sort of sprint style, where we’d prototype/refine, and have a predefined target for switching the website over (upon approval from the mods/admin). A key question would be whether to combine databases, such that a story could be cross-listed, BUT also maintain backward compatibility with existing URLs. Categories would remain, but could be implemented as, the original poster mentioned, tags, or another mechanism.

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Maybe some misunderstanding, but also a disagreement, when it comes to disclaimers. It’s authors posting stories, ones they’ve (presumably) written, so asking that they write a (short) disclaimer shouldn’t be a tall task, especially if there’s some examples for them. When I took the GRE ages ago, they wanted me to hand-write (in cursive) the anti-cheating pledge… annoyed because that’s a skill I hadn’t really used; however, the point there, like here, is the author understands the disclaimer. Mods currently flag/hide a story caught without one, and make the author fix it. A few suitable examples would let them copy-n-paste, but that’s the author’s decision there. To tags, you can technically add in custom ones today in AFF, because its a simple list tacked onto the end of the description. And once it’s free form into the top of the story/chapter, it’s unlimited. Having a table of available tags, a table that links tags to stories, along with suggestions, auto-suggest, etc, would be lovely to have, TBH. I mean, if it sees “Hogwarts” in a story, having a harry potter automatically added would be great, and more lexical analysis would be wonderful additions too. However, I wouldn’t make the pursuit of the perfect automated tag system get into the way of doing any overhaul. > For me to do it would require giving me access, I am acting under the presumption that this would not be possible, particularly since I’m just a guest user. It shouldn’t cost anything, like I said a good chunk of it can be done in an afternoon. I’ve heard that before, and days/weeks later you realize that “small” task had some unexpected glitch. I actually did ask, years ago, but nothing ever really came of it; thus I’ve turned my spare-time coding efforts toward other things. My expertise is more in the backend, less in the frontends, and I prefer C++ over HTML/Javascript so mileage would vary. A first task should be to make sure the website’s code is in some form of source control, to make sure “rolling” back and collaboration is easy; second task being to verify a separate test & development setup so things can be prototyped out before making the actual switch. Still, at the end of this, we can have as many ideas as we want, but without volunteers, no overhaul is really feasible.

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I’ll disagree to the auto-fill disclaimer too. Simply because the authors should THINK about it, that it’s fanfiction (or not), and what the copyright position is in their work. (Not sure if the field enforces a minimum length, but it ought to… say, at least 16 characters?) Second, I concur some distinction on the tags would be nice, whether the tag is considered more of a warning (ie scat CYA) vs an advertisement (ie exhibition tag due to persistent nudity). Custom tags would be nice, from an author’s POV. However, it’s also a bit frustrating on AO3 to know if I’ve got *EVERY* applicable tag for my story, so I clicked the “author chooses not to use tags” and proceeded to tag the heck out of it, along with “maybe I missed some?”. Databases – combining them might be advantageous, along with a single (new) URL; though you’d have to preserve old URLs for a while, if not forever. If combined, then it’s resolve the category issue for crossovers, letting them show up under both, without having duplicates in the database. Other improvements could also be had, but even switching to another software (commercial or otherwise) requires having people & time to execute it. Volunteering?

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