Why AO3 Was Down

This is like seeing a brick wall 40 miles down a straight road and yet still managing to drive into it, and then blaming the wall.

I guess that whoever maintains that infra simply hadn't thought of it or was not aware. It's not something you get for free in a monitoring system with some agent like disk usage for example. You need to know and remember you have a hard limit on IDs and be aware at which ID you are.

Ao3 doesn't have a dude getting slack alerts by a dozen monitoring agents. It's one of the last holdouts of the old, more personal internet. Hell, it's even certain that they forgot or even didn't know that the type was an unsigned int.

And that's perfect. Blame the wall too, because it was running just fine. It's a site to write (mostly porn), with better uptime and more daily users than most of the companies posted on HN daily.

I wasn't sure what the percentage of porn is, so I counted the number of works for each maturity rating:

    4,247,583: Teen And Up Audiences
    4,173,082: General Audiences
    2,816,083: Explicit
    2,271,446: Mature
    1,676,061: Not Rated

Meanwhile if I keep reminding people where the wall is and how fast we are approaching it I’m considered “negative”. That”s the real reason this stuff happens. If someone noticed, the got tired of harping on it and without the constant barrage everyone else immediately let it go out of sight, out of mind.

> This is like seeing a brick wall 40 miles down a straight road and yet still managing to drive into it, and then blaming the wall.

Not really, no. For example, if you drive into the wall, you may die.

Another experience that feels like death is working in a company that implements on-call rotations.

It would be too easy to draw out a parallel between how you approach a free fanfiction website (the website should mystically owe you five 9's uptime) and the mentality that metastased in the industry.

Instead, I'm gonna take this opportunity to point out that the AO3 downtime affected you, as a non-user, enough to vitrify the admin, where hardcore users laughed it off (because they're not entitled toddlers).

> enough to vitrify the admin

Not sure it was that solid.

I don’t think I turned the admin into glass, nor vilified them - just pointed out that this sort of thing is readily avoided.

But sure, I committed a hate crime.

In a company, totally. But here it is a volunteer effort, I doubt it had happened.