Too many sub-sections...

[Harley Quinn hyenaholic]

Well, it's not so much that there are too many subsections. But there are a lot of fandoms - specifically the ones that take place over multiple media genres - that have more than one subsection, in totally different places. It would make it so much easier for browsers, if these subsections were merged, perhaps into the section where the largest collection of them already resides, or perhaps into the section where they are on Fanfiction.Net.

Because really, we only need one Transformers subsection - not three.

[DemonGoddess]

That is in large part what the whole clean up project is FOR you know. To find things like that and correct it.

[Harley Quinn hyenaholic]

Yeah, but why's such a little thing (that yet feels so big) take so long to do? It was this way several months ago when I was noticing the problems with having to visit three different subsections for Transformers and it's still going on with that AND things like TMNT.

[Melrick]

Because it's NOT a simple little thing. There is one person only doing everything technical with the site, and she does that after working loooong, awkward hours, doing things with her family, living a life (sort of) and battling to not fall asleep. I know enough to know that the archive software is old and complicated, which makes it a nightmare to do much beyond simple things with it - and even then it's still time consuming - which means a new software needs to be written from the ground up (and no, existing software just doesn't cut it with the size and workload that would be required of it). And that would come down to that one person again. Most of what she's doing is behind the scenes stuff so people don't get to see it, but it would be really nice if she got an occasional thank you for expending SO much effort and energy for no reward whatsoever and almost constant abuse.

[DemonGoddess]

Thankee Melrick!

Actually, there is software being written. Manta2g is doing that, and has been for the last year. However, understand that it takes time to write a solid framework so that the software will work in the first place, bearing in mind that what we are both doing, is geared towards not only making the coding work and work in the current language versions; but WITHOUT data loss. That's an important factor, right there.

As far as the time this is taking, kindly remember that at any given time, I may have 3 people AT MOST helping me with it. Provided they are not having computer problems, or commitments in real life make it impossible for the assistance to be given. Now, we could maybe increase my 40 hour days....so I can be a zombie....or something...

[Harley Quinn hyenaholic]

Yeah, well it's kinda hard to thank somebody for improvement work that you CAN'T SEE, Melrick. No offence, DG.

I mean, I'm pretty grateful for the site's existance - where else am I going to get my daily fix of smut? - and if I was capable of programming I'd offer my own help (except I'm not capable) so occasionally I've donated...

Nothing personal to whoever made it, but the new logo for the site is... well... just a little pointless. By which I mean, sure, AFF is six years old. And next year it'll be seven years old, and you'll need a new logo. That's all. I just get hung up on dumb things like that.

If there's ever anything I can do that somebody without anything more than the most basic of programming skills CAN do (apart from donate; I do that anyway) try asking me and I'll tell you if I can do it.

[Ezriee]

I have no programming skills at all and there are things that I do that need no knowledge of that kind of thing.

Taking care of this site, ALL aspects of it, is very labor intensive and since there are so few of us, it goes slowly. We cant help that and we're going as quickly as possible, but we're not going to stress ourselves out further, especially during this time of hardships that everyone seems to be going through.

Back in march or april of last year (or probably even before that), there was a notice that appeared on all of the main pages of each sub domain asking for volunteers to help with the site cleanup and only a few people responded, but we did our damndest to try and do what needed to be done. That notice just recently disappeared off the list because of the news updates that have occured in the past few weeks. The need for volunteers to help with that clean up is still there. It involves sitting in front of your computer, looking at EACH story in EACH subdomain, creating a list of/removing unfics, look at EACH chapter of a story (some with 100+ chapters) to make sure that the author link is there and there are no processing errors from the crash that happened before this small group of volunteer techies, admins and moderators came to be and documenting those that do have them so that they can be corrected. We also have to decipher what pairing the story is for and putting them into a spreadsheet so DG can play musical chairs and move them to the appropriate category on the site.. That is not always easy, believe me, especially if you've never heard of/read/seen/played the series that is being worked at the moment.

That is only SOME of the things that we have to do when doing the cleanup.

Along with that project, each day, we have to go through and make sure that people are doing their disclaimers correctly and send reviews to those who don't. While personally, I don't understand why it so damn difficult it is to do a proper disclaimer, it happens every single day. That take hours, but we still do it. Sometimes real life decides to bitchslap us all and that task is delayed for a couple days. When that happens, categories like Harry Potter and Originals, just to name a couple, have PAGES of updates to look through. You sometimes get what I dub 'Disclaimer hypnosis' because of the hundreds of stories that we look at.

With both of those projects, we have to keep our eyes peeled for minors, plagiarists, trolls, spammers, etc, and get those taken care of. We can't just go delete whoever we suspect to be a minor or a plagiarist, there is investigation that is needed before action can be taken and that takes time as well.

So you see, there is a lot to be done. The logo is the last of anyone's concerns. Since this new group has taken the reins, I don't remember having a site crash or having a time where I haven't been able to access the site for several hours or days at a time.

Dg's....Jaxxy's....Manta2g's time, ALL of our time is otherwise occupied. We don't have time to go person to person to solicit help from members. Thats what the announcement was about. We can't make people respond, we can all just hope that people will take a few moments, read these requests when they're put on the news page (even though personally, I think that everyone should be checking out that news page to watch for site changes/updates on a regular basis, they don't.) People can just ASK an admin here in the forum what they can do to try and help move things along instead of turning their noses up when something isn't moving fast enough or if something happens that they don't like or if something they WISH would happen, doesn't.