Ok, my dear pretties. This is a little bit of a wake up call for those of you who aren't aware how this site technically works. We have a certain amount of bandwidth we are allowed every month from Nexcess for the 500$ that we pay them. A month. This archive is not free for the administrators to run. That's why the require donations.
Every time you click on a page, it uses a certain amount of bandwidth. Each chapter in each story runs about an average of 6mb every time you click on it. So a ten chapter story, of which there are plenty, is an average of 60 mb or more. Imagine a ten chapter story that updates every week to more and more chapters. Say, 2500 hits slam that story every time it updates. So, for every 2500 hundred people, let's say a 1000 of them read all the chapters over again as it updates. That's SIX Gigabytes of bandwidth every time someone updates. This can be remedied to lesser amounts if the topics are compressed with in one another, making the stores sub-domains and using up less bandwidth.
How does this work? Every time you bring up a page, and it has FIFTY GAZILLION links on it, it generates a query (a request to the domain to retrieve those links) and that takes up data usages. (A lot of it.) So ontop of having 6GB of usage on reading alone, we're also using up massive amounts of data because the site is not running efficiently.
Basically, it makes the files smaller and take up less space. It's like putting a box inside of a box, so to speak.
Let me make this crystal clear.
AFF techies are doing their absolute best to keep this site running on the load it carries AND be affordable for the runners to maintain without flooding us with advertisements and popups. We have a unique viewing of 25,000 people PER DAY, and that's just the people who sign in. So let's give DemonGoddess a break and work with her. There won't be some mass exodus from AFF and no one is going to quit the site because they don't like what they see. Everything is still THERE. It's just organized better.
So this is great for all you OCD people. It means tighter control. Tighter categories on your stories. They'll be going RIGHT to the fan base that they need to be going to.
As for the rest of you that have an issue with the organization... Try running a server as big as AFF with 600$ overages AND a 500$ bill on top of that... and then we'll talk.
Have a nice one.