Wednesday, November 19, 2014

TV Tropes apparently needed another server upgrade

I recently saw this message on that crappy site announcements thing TV Tropes has:

We've switched servers and will be updating the old code over the next couple months, meaning that several things might break.

Of course, the thread they have for this reveals that the whole site had over half the features break.

Now, for those who don't know any better, TV Tropes probably did need a server upgrade, and having presided over that myself, I'm not going to give them any grief over doing the needful.

I will, however, laugh my ass off at the fact switching servers caused their whole setup to freak out and the very idea that Fast Eddie is still hellbent on polishing that overripened turd known as PmWiki.

For those not in the know, switching servers for a MediaWiki wiki (hell, most other wiki engines) is as easy taking the site down for maintenance briefly, moving the files from one server to another, then making sure your server configuration has everything point to the new server.

Usually, this is painless and bloodless, unless you are using some weird server setup, and I seriously doubt a Web 1.0 kludge like PmWiki needs an esoteric server setup. However, the fact TV Tropes apparently remained up the whole time means that Fast Eddie was apparently unwilling to shut things down for so much as five minutes to minimize issues, which is idiotic because that can lead to data corruption and the laundry list of site fuckups they had a thread created to report, and two, how the blue fuck can you update software that is the long dead corpse of what appears to be PmWiki 1.x build that Fast Eddie has been keeping alive with coding necromancy, duct tape, and the fact he's still around to keep it from dying completely.

Which brings me to my main point.

TV Tropes will still continue for the time being, despite having shitty software, worse moderators, and an easily butthurt, greedy old man who wipes his ass with copyright law running things, but let me leave a warning to everyone who enjoys TV Tropes despite all that:

When Fast Eddie dies, TV Tropes goes with him. If I died tomorrow, I have no doubt anyone with a mediocre level of competence in MediaWiki could take my place on All The Tropes, but when Fast Eddie dies, I dare any of his sycophants to claim they can resume operations when the site software goes belly up again.

And when it does, (and given Fast Eddie's age, I'm confident I'll be around to see it, barring unforeseen calamity) I will be laughing my ass off.

5 comments:

  1. He's so scared of losing traffic he refuses to turn off the site during a system check?!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a guess on my part, but likely, considering so many people F5'ed the site when it was down awhile back it had the effect of a mini DDoS attack, all because he didn't give an ETA awhile back.

      He probably wanted to avoid that this time, but it's still stupid if true.

      Delete
  2. So how old is Fast Eddie?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Based on the information culled from various threads on TV Tropes forums, ED, and what else can be found on the tubes, somewhere in his sixties apparently.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you're telling the truth, you forgot to pothole to Sincerity Mode.

      Delete

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