Something We All Can Do To Help Prevent The Next Big Downtime

[maxgoof]

Once FA comes back up, I highly recommend that everyone go through their notifications and delete everything that is more than a month old.

Then go through your note system and delete all notes over a year old. Do the same with your journals, except for those which are integral to something else.

From what I've seen, I have seen quite a few people that have tens of thousands of notifications that go back years in new submission notifications, comment notifications, and journal notifications.

Lately, FA has been crawling when I attempt to read or send a note, or create a journal. I plan to purge most of my notes and journals once FA comes back up.

Now, the one thing that FA can do to prevent this kind of a backup in the future is to put in a sunset for all notifications more than 30 days old. Yes, initially, it will bog down as it eliminates the old notifications. That could take days, like this down has done, but once done and implemented should help prevent the database bogdown we are experiencing.

Most that downtime would be eliminated if we simply do it ourselves.

 

[Etiainen]

Awesome, let's not mess up the site by jumping in all at once the moment it comes back online to have it delete all the messages that should have been deleted with 3 days of receiving.

I'd love nothing more to have the site resume functioning, only to have it get DDoS'd the moment after. No, I'm serious. Let's DDoS the site the moment it comes back up.

 

[jakeraccoon]

Once FA comes back up, I highly recommend that everyone go through their notifications and delete everything that is more than a month old.

Then go through your note system and delete all notes over a year old. Do the same with your journals, except for those which are integral to something else.

From what I've seen, I have seen quite a few people that have tens of thousands of notifications that go back years in new submission notifications, comment notifications, and journal notifications.

Lately, FA has been crawling when I attempt to read or send a note, or create a journal. I plan to purge most of my notes and journals once FA comes back up.

Now, the one thing that FA can do to prevent this kind of a backup in the future is to put in a sunset for all notifications more than 30 days old. Yes, initially, it will bog down as it eliminates the old notifications. That could take days, like this down has done, but once done and implemented should help prevent the database bogdown we are experiencing.

Most that downtime would be eliminated if we simply do it ourselves.

Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.

 

[Etiainen]

Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.

Implying FA can actually apply basic features.

 

[Willow]

I could probably stand to do this.

Why doesn't the site just delete old notifications automatically? It seems like a pretty basic feature.

I've never actually been on a site that has this feature :|

I still have emails on Yahoo from 2008/2009.

 

[RyuuYouki]

Implying FA can actually apply basic features.

Basic features? On my FA? Blasphemy!

 

[jakeraccoon]

Basic features? On my FA? Blasphemy!

Actually, on FA you can delete your own embarassing comments. You can't delete comments on Weasyl (yet).

 

[RyuuYouki]

Actually, on FA you can delete your own embarassing comments. You can't delete comments on Weasyl (yet).

You mean that feature that broke the site for a while and was horribly coded?

 

[Etiainen]

Actually, on FA you can delete your own embarassing comments.

Hahaha.

 

[kontonakuma]

I know some emails will delete spam/trash contents after 30 days of the messages sticking around in there. I don't know any other site that actually does that though aside from emails.

 

[thoron]

What site does that?

DA and IB, I think YG also does it too. But I don't think its based on dates. Its based on number of submissions where it will only hold X number of submissions and if its at the highest allowed the oldest get deleted and new ones come in.

 

[maxgoof]

Inkbunny removes notices after 180 days.

 

[StevenRoy]

Automatic pruning of notifications after only 30 days might be too aggressive for most people. Even if we set that to a full 365 days, it would still clean out a heck of a lot of those ancient notifications that'll probably never be seen/used anyway! (I would guess 80% of them. And wouldn't the database feel sooooo much better after losing all that useless weight?)

(Inb4 someone suggests submissions and journals get deleted after three years. That would be taking a good idea much too far, right?)

 

[Williamca]

This was all my fault.

(but no really, an automatic clearing every 30 days would be good. Seriously, there's probably empty accounts with more than 20k or so submission in them.)

 

[jakeraccoon]

Seriously, there's probably empty accounts with more than 20k or so submission in them.)

This.

 

[StormyChang]

haha, this seems like a good plan. maybe after 90 or 150 days or something. a good amount of my more popular friends and even my bf NEVER delete notifications like submissions/journals/comments. reason stated: laziness. XD because apparently it's too hard to just click like 2 buttons.

 

[zachhart12]

I always keep my account nice and cleaned out, but yeah...I've had some friends and I was like DA FUQ man clean your stuff out and they were like "No."...Why not?!?! Is there some phobia of this?

 

[Jashwa]

I guarantee the moment that something like that got implemented there'd be a FLOOD of people who hoard their notifications yelling at the staff for implementing something like that.

From a personal standpoint, I'd agree with it for submission notifications and journal notifications, but not for comments/watches/messages because those tend to be a lot more personal towards the user themselves instead of general things that you get a billion of.

 

[zachhart12]

I guarantee the moment that something like that got implemented there'd be a FLOOD of people who hoard their notifications yelling at the staff for implementing something like that.

From a personal standpoint, I'd agree with it for submission notifications and journal notifications, but not for comments/watches/messages because those tend to be a lot more personal towards the user themselves instead of general things that you get a billion of.

Why do people need to keep their watches anyways? There's a list for that on their userpage.

 

[kontonakuma]

haha, this seems like a good plan. maybe after 90 or 150 days or something. a good amount of my more popular friends and even my bf NEVER delete notifications like submissions/journals/comments. reason stated: laziness. XD because apparently it's too hard to just click like 2 buttons.

I never understood why people are so lazy about nuking their messages.

 

[kontonakuma]

Why do people need to keep their watches anyways? There's a list for that on their userpage.

The only thing I can think of is so they can go back and thank the people when they have the time, but even then, it's not that hard to nuke them when you're finished.

 

[Jashwa]

Why do people need to keep their watches anyways? There's a list for that on their userpage.

I dunno, man. I have like semi obsessive compulsive notification deleting disorder. I can't stand to see notifications.

 

[FoxWolfie]

I think auto purging notifications that are older than six months would be a good thing. FA should put up a notice advising people to go through their old notices, because they will be auto purged after a certain date. I'm guessing that over two-thirds of all notifications in the database or probably older than six months. Many people I've noticed have never delete theirs since they first joined the site! I've seen people with numbers like 40,000 and such. The database would definitely feel better without that weight. I delete notices as I look at them, and usually leave it at zero when I'm done for the day. Every once in a while, if I'm away from my computer, I might leave some sit for a few days. I've used FA since 2006, and I don't think I've ever had a notice that became a week old

I think it would be a bad idea to auto delete any submissions, journals or notes.

 

[Shaon the Kozo]

This was all my fault.

(but no really, an automatic clearing every 30 days would be good. Seriously, there's probably empty accounts with more than 20k or so submission in them.)

Holy balls, how do you keep track of all the comments. AND THE FAVORITES. BY GOD.

 

[Wavebreak]

I personally clean all of my notifs out asap. I hate having them stare me down. I know some of my friends keep messages for the sole purpose of just going back to look at them. I think that reasoning is really silly when we have a favorites system, and you can just bookmark them on your browser. Same goes for journals.