It has to be a joke

[Koma]

Furrification? For real? We just want to be able to change from old cringy dumbass usernames to new ones and what we get is useless bullshit features? What the fuck

edit: typo

 

[RestrainedRaptor]

I can't disagree with that. If the money actually went towards paying the mods and volunteers then perhaps I'd consider it. Not even all 'staff members' are paid at FA. Getting a glimpse into FA's financials would be... interesting. I can only surmise that they weren't good enough to keep IMVU happy.

 

[fox_whisper85]

Then we have the horrible aspect ratio of the site's UI elements and look, with huge gaps between the edges of the screen. Top notch design choice there, and will they listen? Lol hell no.

 

[FitzOblong]

I see that "Furrification" as a parody of whatever Musk is doing with Twitter. It was likely easy to implement, with the potential for a bit more income for the site. Changing name would be nice, but I can imagine that this becomes messy for sites internals quite easily, since they have to be careful not to break existing links to your artwork/account on the old name. (at least this is what DeviantArt does)

 

[luffy]

I see that "Furrification" as a parody of whatever Musk is doing with Twitter. It was likely easy to implement, with the potential for a bit more income for the site. Changing name would be nice, but I can imagine that this becomes messy for sites internals quite easily, since they have to be careful not to break existing links to your artwork/account on the old name. (at least this is what DeviantArt does)

This is basically it. The guts of FA are screaming as we are working on renames. Lol.

 

[TrixieFox]

This is basically it. The guts of FA are screaming as we are working on renames. Lol.

isnt there a way to rename already?

 

[luffy]

isnt there a way to rename already?

No.

 

[TrixieFox]

No.

Oh sorry I was thinking the forums...

 

[DragonTalon]

This is basically it. The guts of FA are screaming as we are working on renames. Lol.

I pity whoever is working on this. Usernames are used for external links, internal links, icons in journals and comments and more, not to mention database indexes. If I changed my name, what happens to all the people who linked to it? Does the old one stick around and redirect? For every possible use of it? Or edit all the comments and descriptions and journals?

Makes me head hurt thinking about it and I hate my username, but I'm not going to change it now.

 

[quoting_mungo]

I pity whoever is working on this. Usernames are used for external links, internal links, icons in journals and comments and more, not to mention database indexes. If I changed my name, what happens to all the people who linked to it? Does the old one stick around and redirect? For every possible use of it? Or edit all the comments and descriptions and journals?

Makes me head hurt thinking about it and I hate my username, but I'm not going to change it now.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. (What I’m about to say here is not privileged information, as it’s been stated publicly at different points in time, but some of those points may have been up to like 10 years ago, so a lot of people probably wouldn’t have seen it.) FA’s database does have numerical IDs for accounts as well as account names. However, the people who originally designed the database for some reason didn’t use best practices and used usernames as the index of at least one table, instead of an automatically incrementing numerical ID. I believe, though my memory is fuzzy on this one, that it may still use numerical IDs for joining tables (for non-technical people, “joining” is how you reference values from multiple database tables at once), but it still creates issues.

In general, the original code of FA - like many other (maybe most) online communities with user accounts and/or content - didn’t/doesn’t scale well. This isn’t just true for community/fandom sites; most sites will at some point have growing pains where something that worked fine before just… needs to be optimized or done a completely different way because the number of users/requests resulted in the system hitting a bottleneck.

 

[fox_whisper85]

IMHO, the CSS code should be prioritized to have the UI elements' width fixed, then the name change implementation added, but I digress.

 

[Dragoneer]

IMHO, the CSS code should be prioritized to have the UI elements' width fixed, then the name change implementation added, but I digress.

I'll be working on that soon, as I hear the feedback and will be working on changes.

 

[fox_whisper85]

I'll be working on that soon, as I hear the feedback and will be working on changes.

I'm not trying to be a passive aggressive douchebag, believe me, I just honestly sometimes ask myself if legitimate concerns and feedback are being listened to or deliberated upon. I know many people do these things of their own free time and will, I'm sorry -_-

 

[Stratelier]

I see that "Furrification" as a parody of whatever Musk is doing with Twitter.

I enjoy that the tooltip for the icon is literally just "I paid $8 for this" -- not that FA needs to satirize current headlines elsewhere, but simply confirming that the icon has no deeper importance (THAT being what made it such a stupid thing to make Twitter do).

Otherwise, it's not terribly unusual to have some way of visibly indicating that a user has provided financial support/donations to the site they're on (Nanowrimo, for comparison, adds a golden halo for users who've donated).

However, the people who originally designed the database for some reason didn’t use best practices and used usernames as the index of at least one table, instead of an automatically incrementing numerical ID.

I believe the technical terms are "primary key" or "foreign key", depending on the context (PK = one column used to uniquely and permanently identify each row in a table, FK = links to a named column defined elsewhere, typically a PK), as an "index" is just a pre-sorted list of rows by a specific column(s) to help complicated queries (especially those involving table joins) process SO MUCH FASTER internally. But yeah.

 

[quoting_mungo]

I believe the technical terms are "primary key" or "foreign key", depending on the context (PK = one column used to uniquely and permanently identify each row in a table, FK = links to a named column defined elsewhere, typically a PK), as an "index" is just a pre-sorted list of rows by a specific column(s) to help complicated queries (especially those involving table joins) process SO MUCH FASTER internally. But yeah.

You’re probably right - in my defense my last database class was around 15 years ago, and I’ve probably not worked directly with databases for like… 10? More than 5, definitely.