What's AMA stand for?

It seems like a good opportunity for everyone here to throw in their two bits. I think users should really think about it.

K

Well, I'd definitely at least come and see what's being asked. It might even be interesting.

>>337698337698

Thanks for your input!

This should prove to be very interesting.

One change I'd like to se is a non-glitched up comment section on my first story.

On my userpage it says there are two comments, but when I click the story to read them, I can't see them.

>>337695337695

"Ask Me Anything"

Stuff like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/

>>337719337719 Oooh, okay. Thank you.

>>337696337696

Honestly, be careful what you wish for.

>>337722337722 I might not be there

Are you kidding? I absolutely love E48. The piano accompaniment in that song is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. SGaP is probably my favorite brony artist; his stuff is just so original. I really like "In History, Maybe" and "Pinkie Pie Swear".

But yes, the AMA sounds like a good idea.

>>337696337696

We can think?

Also seems you removed the "estimated words read" thing entirely at some point. I really liked that feature, any plans to have it back?

Even in blog posts and in said blog's comments, NSFW is not OK, P?

As for the AMA: It would be interesting, but IDK if I myself could attend. Semester being hectic and whatnot.

>>337745337745

It takes a pretty big toll on the server. I once spent 30 seconds waiting for my own userpage to load because it was trying to recalculate my estimated words read. It's a nice feature and I know a lot of people are upset to see it go, but it was more of a hindrance than anything. We will probably add it back sometime in the future.

If it makes you feel any better, we were (half-jokingly) discussing adding Achievements to the site. Nothing big, just stuff like "Read 10 stories" or something like that. We have to be careful that they don't add extra admin overhead, like "make 100 comments"... that would be a nightmare. If we added those we'd be more likely to add silly statistics like Words Read back to the site.

>>337756337756

They are DEFINITELY not okay in blog posts and comments, because those cannot be marked as Mature. I would say they are still fine if marked and hyperlinked, but NOT on display for any poor sap to stumble upon and see.

>>337719337719 You just know that someone is going to constantly ask: "Are you gay?"

>>337763337763 Alright then. I shall remove them pronto.

Not everyone uses reddit. I think it'd be nice if some format more native to the site (an "ask an admin anything" blog post, maybe?) was used.

>>337775337775

I don't use reddit either dude. We would definitely link it here. Our comment system is actually not so great for a Q&A format, because we don't nest comments.

>>337784337784

Point taken.

OMG, that NSFW link is hawt!

Sounds great! I definitely have questions.

Well I like a group or company that interacts with the fans and answers some of their questions. It shows that they care about the group instead of just ignoring them and avoid them at all cost. I do not know how to use reddit and this site is still giving me problems, (Althought it could be my computer giving me problems). Still I really like the idea of a Q and A and I willl try to attend, depending on my schedule. This site kinda got me into becoming a brony.

Is my user page causing any sort of server performance problem? It takes forever to load (on mobile at least, not so much on my computer) and I suspect that my excessive use of favorites boxes is the culprit, so I've been wondering recently if I should come up with some other solution for my recommended stories list. I probably would have done so by now except I'm not sure how to go about exporting my current list.

In a related question, is there any limit to the amount of text that can be entered into a user page custom box?

>>337758337758

Recalculating the estimate every time does seem very inefficient, and unnecessary. If it was me, I'd store the number for each user as part of their other user data, an extra column in the database; every time they read a story the number is increased, every time they unread a story it is lowered accordingly. Then the user page just has to get the number and show it, no massive calculation needed all the time. That'd be my approach, at least

>>337838337838

No and probably not because knighty always forgets to do that.

>>337856337856

I'm pretty sure that's how it works dude, knighty isn't an idiot. But I basically click on stories constantly, so my number is always updating. It's still a costly query for what it does, so for now it's gone.

I'll hopefully be there, also quick question: What about NSFW pictures on the comment section of stories marked Mature?

>>337860337860

You don't have to be an idiot to do something like that, it's probably a fairly common approach and calculating it each time does have the benefit that you don't risk corrupted data resulting in estimates that are way off. Edit: Not as easily, at least

It doesn't sound like what I suggested is how it was done, if the estimate was the reason your userpage took 30 seconds to load, because getting a single number from the database as part of all the other stuff you have to get from it anyway should barely register as a blip. Likewise, updating shouldn't take more than a fraction of a second, because all it is is adding one number (words of the story you're reading, which you need to get anyway because it's shown at the bottom) to another (the existing count)

But this is just a suggestion, because I liked the feature and would like to be helpful. If that is how it's already done, then I can't imagine why it's such a toll on the server.

I must voice that I oppose the story every five minutes thing. It gives new stories even less time in the spotlite and I have seen them leaving the front page with less than ten views. I would prefer it the way it was.

I'm a redditor and I would love to see you guys do an AMA.

I don't spend much time on reddit personally but I might pop on for this, sounds pretty interesting

>>337758337758

Perhaps it would be less taxing to only count them by the thousand, instead of trying to be extremely precise? It just sounds like there's an inefficiency in the calculations if it's taking that long. EDIT: Just saw your conversation with adcoon, never mind <<;

>>337883337883

No, they have to be tagged.

>>337901337901

Well I have great news for you, because that's never how we did it in the first place!

I would definitely be interested in an AMA. I probably won't have any good questions, but it would be cool to read other people who are more intelligent than me talk about one of my favorite websites.

Since people seem to be asking just about anything and everything, I would like to ask why there is a limit on the number of favorite boxes a person can have. From a user standpoint, it seems kinda silly. If I want to overload my page with 100 favorite boxes, why can't I? Of course, I can understand that a limit is necessary if too many of them bogs down the site.

So yeah, just curious here.

>>337984337984

Because that isn't the point of the boxes. The point is to pick a few stories which you think are the cream of the crop, to bring back some of the functionality users felt was lost with the Favorites/Tracking merger. It isn't intended to let you show off literally all of your favorites - that's what the "Favorites" button on your User Bar is for.

Plus, there's the fact that if you put 100 favorites boxes on your page, it would just look awful and cluttered, though Myspace let users have full HTML pages, I guess.

>>337986337986

I understand that. But at the same time, if you look at my page, they're all categorical boxes. If I were to just list, say, my top 5, or even top 10, it would be almost entirely Sadfics. But I do happen to enjoy other stories of other genres. So to give anyone who stumbles across my page a wide variety of stories to choose from if they're looking for something to read, I have the categorical boxes. After all, not everyone likes Sadfics as much as I do.

I also like all the pretty pictures!

Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/misc_Twilight_crazy.png

I wonder if this might be the right place for this, being an admin post and all, but I can't find a "report bug" feature. How do I report a weird programming issue to site administrators?

>>338007338007

You can just email or PM us, dude.

>>337993337993

Uh, okay great, you still don't need that many. We could maybe increase the limit by a couple of boxes, but I guarantee you knighty will be unwilling to do that. He probably thinks the current limit is already too high.

A wild Tepig appears.

>>338011338011

It's not that big a deal. I was just curious and then felt the urge to explain my reasoning. If you raise the limit, great. If not, that's great too. My curiosity has been satisfied, so I'm no longer particularly concerned about it.

>>337966337966 A new story used to update every ten minutes though. I thought that's what I was getting at.

Acheivements sounds fun. The Rooster Teeth community has them, fun little icons like 'took a survey' and '1st million users'. They're not much, but it's a neat little feature I wouldn't mind seeing implemented here, jokingly or not. But only if you have time or desire. Keep up all the good work, regardless.

>>338109338109

And it still is.

Yeah, sure. Nice music choice btw.

>>338109338109 If I understood right the current situation is that it's two stories every ten minutes, not one story every five minutes. They still get their ten minutes of being on top of the list together, then they drop down together when the next two arrive after ten minutes.

Though yes, they do get less front page time with that. Let's see, there's 15 stories on the front page. So originally Story A would be there for 150 minutes (that's 2 and half hours) and then get dropped from the front page. Now that instead of one story per 10 minutes it's two, it logically about halves that time because two stories push the ones before them down two blocks instead of one. So for Story A (top of the list when it's published) it's 80 minutes (1 hour and 20 minutes) and for the unfortunate Story B (second on the list when published, since two stories can't both be the first one) gets 70 minutes (1 hour and 10 minutes).

I think that's still plenty of time. If the stories don't get views in that time then it's either because they get published at a bad time of the day (that bad time would be in the middle of the night and during school/work hours in America (since I think most users are American)) or they really just look uninteresting based on their summary and picture which means people won't click them.

I suspect they made the change because of the amount of stories that are waiting to be published at all times. I know I'd be frustrated if I uploaded a story and had to wait hours upon hours for it to be published for real. So I personally would rather take down the amount of time in spotlight in exchange for getting my story up faster (not necessarily a smart move of course, but I'm just that eager to see others' reactions to my creation so I just can't wait until they can see it!). Of course, I haven't published a single story in here so I have no idea how long it usually takes for the story to get published after it has been sent to the queue, but this is just what I think might be the reason.

... well, that's a lot of text there

>>338183338183

It usually takes several hours to be approved and posted anyway. To be honest, I think I'd prefer to have a slow story post/ longer time on front page rather than a quick story post/ short time on front page.

That said, I can imagine the old system getting backed up massively and taking days to resolve. I suppose it's just that at the 'peak' times, I'm asleep, so I don't get to see as many new stories as I'd like.

>>338183338183 yeah, you basically said what I was too lazy to type out.

The one potential issue I see with the 2 stories per 10 minutes thing is that stories on the front page during the day (stateside) tend to stay up there for long periods of time currently.  I'm guessing this is because stories seem to be added to the queue primarily at night.  With the queue emptying faster, the last few stories in the queue will now be up there even longer.

This also means that a story which goes live at night, as part of those larger approvals, now gets even less chance to get viewers.  Lower potential audience, fastest moving front page.

It seems to me that unless there is a big backlog at most times of the day, the rate really shouldn't increase.  And, ideally, the rate should be self regulating, that if the number of stories in the queue exceeds some number, say a day's worth at 10 minutes per story, then it goes to 2 per 10.

We just can't win no matter what we do, huh? It's exactly the same system as before. The number was chosen based on the amount of submissions we got. We have more submissions now, so we upped the speed at which they were posted.

This is why we stopped making blog posts... even tiny changes like this, people find something to complain about.

Thanks for the update!

Since I'm too lazy to figure out when the AMA Q&A is, can someone please tell me (preferably Wanderer D, heh heh heh) if its possible to add chapters to fics in between or before previous chapters. I want to do a thing where I add fan idea (or later thought of ideas) into my fic alongside chapters that matter to the story.

And simply putting bonus chapters after the fic is done just isn't the same ya no?

>>338183338183

I would honestly rather wait longer for it to be published and get more chance of hitting the precious peak time of what I assume is around 5pm East US time. Since actually timing that is impossible (we have no idea when we get put into the queue as we have no idea when we will be checked by admins) lowering our time on the page is pretty unfair.

And 150 minutes down to 80/70 minutes can screw over people badly as we might of gotten into the site peak hours if it still went 1 at a time and we would have more chance of it.

I honestly would rather have 30 stories on the front page instead of 15 with the current system of 2 every ten minutes.

Might I just say that, I find the update to be completely unnoticeable and has done nothing to change the site in any damaging way and so has still left me a satisfied user of this site. Continue to do what you all do to make the site run well and nice for all of on here and no that there are a few users out there who appreciate the work you do whether it's noticeable or not.

Posting more than one at a time is a great idea, in my opinion. Whenver I'd post a new story, I'd always be nervous during the time I was waiting for it to get approved and put on the front page. Great to hear the time won't be as long, anymore. (Waiting for, like, 2-3 days really is nerve-wraking, haha. )

Thanks for all the work you guys do on this site. It's really, really awesome.

Is it possible to brig back the 'read/unread' search option for general search?

That sounds like an awesome idea. Go for it.

>TFW the image linked isn't actually NSFW

Image: http://i.imgur.com/mtrHM.gif

People are silly. The change to how often new stories update? Yeah, do some math.

There are 24*6=144 ten minute segments in a single, entire day. So, as long as the number of fics submitted to the mods (and, by extension, submitted to the queue) averages out to 144 or less a day, all is well. The size of the backlog doesn't matter; as long as the rate fics come in is about the same as the rate they go out, there's no problem. (This ignores fics that are submitted but aren't approved. To my understanding, there aren't all that many of these relatively, and they aren't artificially staggered in any case)

What happens when the site becomes more popular, and, say, twice as many fics (2*144=288 fics submitted to site) are submitted? Suddenly, you have problems. After one day, your backlog has grown by 144. After two days, it's grown by 288. Three, 432. This creates problems. To fix these problems, the only solution is to have more update slots per day. Thus, two fics every ten minutes (2*24*6=288 fics per day added to site). Now, the numbers match up, and equilibrium is restored.

You don't like it? Too bad. Fics have to be added to the site at about the same rate as they are submitted. There aren't all that many options to go for, here. We're lucky that knighty staggers fics at all.

If you're one of those saying that they should just double the number of fics on the front page, think about it. That flat doubles whatever resources are needed for that system. This wouldn't be so bad, except that there's a View All Latest button RIGHT THERE.

As to the estimated words read count, my guess is it's set to only update upon certain triggers (probably, when you hit your user page). So, if you're a power reader like Poultron, and might "read" 300 chapters before hitting your page, that's a pretty big dump that the system isn't really meant to handle. The only real way around that, is have it update constantly, which is a drain on resources in a different fashion. The behind-the-scenes site design has been going through some fairly major restructuring regarding efficiency recently; I'm not surprised that this feature was cut.

As to the favourites tabs on user profiles; I haven't done much tinkering, but can't we add static text boxes that aren't tied to bios, blogs, comments, or the like? If so, just list your multitude of favorites there. You can do everything there that the Top Five tabs do, and more, while being less cluttered. It's more work on your end, but not much. Besides, if you want to draw attention to an overlooked fic, writing a mini review  will do a much better job than just linking the title, pic, and description.

Sorry if I'm being judgmental. I'm extremely tired (fourth straight day with no sleep, woo) and had to deal with a lot of very stupid people at work today. My Self Restraint levels are pretty low. Nothing personal is meant if I seemed to be attacking anyone; I'm merely venting.

Regarding the OP; cool idea, though this thread seems to have kinda turned into a Q&A all on its own. The way I've seen lots of other sites that don't do nested comments is to just compile a list of questions (pulled from the irc, emails, open thread, whatever), write up your answers, and then just post them together. Advantage is its neat and tidy, and you can take whatever time you need for each question. Disadvantage, it's a lot more boring, and takes away the fun of doing an AMA. I like the idea however you do it.

Well I don't see any problems with any of this, the only decision I ever disagreed with was suddenly finding all my tracked stories turned into favourites.

Now I have a favourite list which only contains about 10% favourites and 90% "things I want to emails about."

Other than that- you guys are doing great, and I'm pretty sure you know that.

Since people are making guesses at how the estimated words count read thing worked, it was literally (and anyone calling themselves a dev in here should be fine with this) just doing a sum of chapters you've read's word counts. ie: SELECT sum(words) as estimate_words_read FROM read_chaps WHERE userid = something. Frankly I don't know why a sum of a bunch of indexed values is so slow but I guess mysql's arithmetic operators suck or something.

Obviously it should just increment a single user value when you read something but the main reason I didn't get around to that was that I'll likely have to take the site down for a bit to populate the table and I was being lazy :V. Spose I could always just create the cache of each user when you first visit your page...mumble mumble

>>339153339153

Also this^.

Image: http://www.fimfiction.net/graph.php?field=stories

As you can see we get close to that value, and of course we miss some slots due to mods being unavailable and such.

Btw, it's been at 2 stories per 10 minutes for like 2 months now. Or something like that.

>>339153339153 There is an alternate solution that you overlooked. We could just raise the standards for submissions, and bring that number down instead of bringing the number of posted stories up.

Personally, I've always thought that - especially considering how easy it to proofread, or get another brony to do it - fics that have improper formatting, abysmal spelling, and/or disregard for proper grammar shouldn't be approved. I consider it almost disrespectful to the the people who have to sort through the crap that gets submitted (mostly Wanderer D), the folks who host and manage this site, as well as the readers to submit a story like this one (didn't have to look past the first page to find a good example... *sigh*).

It would, given a little time, deter folks from submitting blatantly unedited stories, which ultimately is an improvement for everyone - mods, readers, and writers alike.

>>339337339337

The problem with that is that while truly bad fics exist, they aren't really that plentiful.  Sure, there's a few each day, but that wouldn't make much of a difference.  Unless you made the requirements more stringent than just the basics, in which case the volume of stories submitted would require a lot more people working on approval.

I'm not sure it would deter people from submitting either.  If they've been on the site for a bit, they have to have seen what happens to stories that are that bad, how they get a ton of thumbs downs and are often taken down by their authors.  Plus they'd have to have read some stories and that should have given some clue that capital letters exist and how one could format one's text.  And yet, well, we get things for the TWE to explore, things for which they can pretty much use a form letter that covers grammar, spelling, and Mary Sues.

But, anyway, I expect the extra overhead in bringing the number down isn't something Knighty or the others want to deal with.  Plus I sort of like the casual openness.  The truly bad can usually be easily identified by the errors in the descriptions anyway and, quickly enough, by the down votes.

>>339431339431 Yeah... I guess I probably overreact a lot to fics that are really just... painfully mediocre, thus increasing my perception of the number of bad fics submitted.

I stand by my point on deterrence, though. Getting bad reviews and just not getting on the site at all are two different things. One involves attention, one does not. A lot of the time, I feel that's just what some of those authors want - attention.

You're sure right about the extra work, though. There's really not much motivation for the mods to overhaul a system that admittedly works very well.

And I guess that's what I get myself into by choosing to be one of the first to read new fics. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're shit. I could just browse the popular or "What's Hot" sections if I really wanted to read consistently good writing, and I don't.

>>338595338595 I'm not sure if there a way to actually insert an "in-between" chapter, but there is a simple way to do what you're suggesting, via the magic of, cut and paste!

Just pick an existing chapter, retitled it with whatever you want, then use it as the "fan idea" chapter or whatever you were on about. Cut the remaining text from the original chapter, then paste it in the next chapter. Continue to cut and paste the content of your chapters into the next one. This should only take a few minutes, unless your story happens to be Trixcord or Pinkie Pie's Mystery Theatre or something like that.

Once again, there may or may not be a way to do this using the actual UI, but that's just how I would do it.

>>339496339496 i thought of that, but I realised something, it would make the latest chapter in the stories timeline be changed to unread, while the reader would have the new chapter already set to read!

This would cause so much confusion that it is a thing to not even attempt

>>339313339313

Could be wrong, but pretty sure it has been a month or less.  When I published my first story, once it got approved, I calculated when it would go live based on the 1 story per 10 minutes bit and my prediction was on track hours later when I went to bed.  That was a little over four weeks ago.  Not that the exact when really matters :)

Ultimately, the quantity of the stories that go live on a given day will need to drive the rate at which we are fed stories.  And that number being high is both a blessing and a curse.  A curse in that it means we need to share our front page  time with others, but a blessing in that it means the site and MLP fan fics are popular, which most likely means more readers as well as more writers.

That said, going from one every ten to two every ten is a bit of a hop, especially when most days I'm guessing you aren't over the max per day limit yet?  So I'll toss in my suggestion of having it kick up to two per ten minutes only if there's a certain number of stories waiting to go live.  That way, if there aren't that many stories, people get their ten minutes per update.  And if there are, people get their stories live within a reasonable time frame.

But if that isn't feasible, too much of a hassle, deemed pointless, you guys just don't feel like doing it, or you come up with something way more awesome, that's all great too.  Regardless, I'll enjoy the site, both as a place to read and to write and I appreciate all the hard work that goes into providing this place for all of us

>>339469339469

Yeah, that's the risk one takes.  Me, I like picking some of those stories off the new list as well, though I usually go for ones that have a description that interests me.  And many of those stories are not that well written.  But there's something to be said for unique concepts and the enthusiasm.

>>339503339503 Do a lot of ponies care about which chapters they've read? I know I sure don't... All that matters is that there's a single unread chapter, and therefore an update. That's just my take though, maybe some folks care very much about the little fireballs and checkmarks...

>>339545339545 My personal reason is that I like meeting new people, forming mutually beneficial relationships with writers who are in more or less the same position as me.

>>339567339567 some people have hundreds of unread fic chapters, trying to remember which chapters you have or have not read is a serious challenge which creates confusion.

Of course I keep a steady 10 unread fic chapters so I'm good

>>337758337758

I would feel uncomfortable with achievements.  It would seem out of place on a site that hosts fanfiction.  What purpose would it serve to keep score in this way?  None good.  

Words Read being removed to improve the site was a good call.  Thank you.

>>338334338334 A few months ago, I used to think you were a bit of a dick.

Now I wonder how you're even still sane at all.

>>339689339689 He said jokingly, dude. I highly doubt they'll add any achievements.

>>339778339778

Very true he said that as a joke.  He also mentions how it would pain in the butt.  I understand the likelyhood of achievements being created on this site is low.  

Having said all those reassures...  I am still uncomfortable of the idea.  

I should lighten up and relax.

I'm loving the back-end fixes, but I have to once more plead that we be able to DL our submissions as files.  Okay, I get that HTML submitting is too risky, but letting us post an ODT or Word Doc couldn't be too perilous.  Having to go to Skeena.net to have my fics converted for BBCode and then make sure the code didn't screw up is a tad much, and actually WRITING a fic in BBCode... Yeah...

>>337763337763

Here I was thinking you meant that we weren't allowed to post

Image: http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT4UWzv6G_JXEFjIdY9VkJ0A2iPl-BAkjlNCgjoxlc3Sqd2_nLg&t=1

this image and I was like but now I get that you meant pictures that would fall into that category of pictures

Welp... Not much to be said. Never heard of an AMA, but it could be interesting.

Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/shrug_Twilight_Sparkle.png

>>341193341193

They're pretty popular on reddit.com.

-

Would these "achievements" be sort of like Steam badges or deviantart merits, little icons displaying small accomplishments?

Oh Luna, no achievements please... Not unless they're strictly comical.

Sounds cool.

Good song. Good post. Just a whole lotta good for me today :)

Don't know what anypony's talking about here. Listening to Coldplay's third album X&Y. Q&A sessions sound interesting. Coldplay is awesome. My new phone sucks. Ponies rule. And can somepony fill me in on what's happening here?