Site Administration
Hi,
I've been holding this post back for a while now because, well I love OGA, and I just don't want to be on here complaining about it, but I think we've reached a point where something needs to be said.
Still just to be clear, this is NOT a complaint, it's an expression of concern and an offer to help.
I think it should be pretty clear to all that OGA is no longer getting the administrative attention in needs.
Search is broken. It doesn't return results past January of this year. The issue was reported in February, it's now June. A year ago search broke in the same fashion. It took four months to get fixed, and then broke again just a few months later.
The main page hasn't had a 'news' post since the fix for a spam attack was announced last Novemember. That post itself is not peppered with obvious spam posts.
Furthermore, unless there's something going on that hasn't been announced publicly, I think it's pretty clear that development on the site has basically stopped.
I think the admins are doing an admirable job keeping up with montioring posts for legal issues, etc. and fortunately, artists and developers still seem to be finding and using the site. This is a real testament to the strength of the community and the technology already set up for the site.
However, it doesn't take a Nostadamus to see that over the long run, if the site doesn't get day to day administration or future development, it's going to die. It'll either slowly fizzle out as artists and developers turn away from it because they find it's not working, or one day it'll just crash or disappear and no one will know why or how to bring it back.
Again, this is not a complaint, it's an expression of concern.
I have nothing but love and respect for Bart and what he's created here with OGA. But it's clear whoever is currently handling the admin for this site simply doesn't have the time or inclination for it anymore. I am totally ok with that. For Bart personally, if he wants or needs time away from the site, by all means he should take it. He's certainly paid his debt and then some. If it were up to me, he'd be able to retire happily to the Bahamas anytime he wants. But there must be some process whereby adminstration and development responsibilities for the site can be passed on or even just shared or temporarily delegated to some person or persons who do have the time and interest to do it.
I am offering myself up as one such person, but even more importantly, I'd like to get the process and the conversation started. What can we do to ensure that OGA endures past the current difficulties and beyond?
Scott
search is definitively broken but for me title search works better than the normal ever did...
enter "attack icon" in the normal search will find 150 times the same art.
enter it in title search will find 4 proper results.
I tried "Attack icons" in the main menu search it returned 1 result, I then tried in the same in advance search, in the search box space, it returned 183 results, the first one being from April 2009 to last 2013. Then tried it in advance search title space, it returned 292 results first being from 2009, so your getting much more results, change the the search relevance to "post date" and you still get the same 292 results, only this time it's in date order from the last post being the most recent, which would be expected, so the search is actually picking up newest work, why it only chooses to show work up to January and nothing after is odd on main page search. Maybe a spam filter? Or some sort of block?, clutching at straws really, but maybe thought about just narrowing it down may save some work trying to find a fix.
are we all getting the same results? I wonder how different it is for different country's using the search, presumably we would get the same results right?
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
there is more going on...
@MikeeUSA: Not trying to fear monger, or say the site is in imminent danger of collapse. Just rasing some alarm bells about the future of the site and some sad endings I see as entirely possible for it.
Regarding backups, I am not concerned about how the site is backed up, presumably there is some roboust setup for doing that as part of the server hosting arrangement.
My concern is more that something might 'go bump in the night' (eg. database corruption, configuration hiccup, disk or memory utilization maxes out, unpatched security vulnerability, etc. etc.) and there'll be no one around with the access, ability or time to fix it. Like any web site, OGA has suffered from these kind of errors in the past (you can think of the current issues with search as one of them). So far there's always been someone around to set the ship right again, but there's no guarantee that'll be the case in the future.
For certain, as with any large archive, finding what you're looking for on OGA does take a bit of work and dedication. However, it should be patently obvious that hiding works newer than January 2016 is in no way part of the intended design for the site.
About, further development, you're right the core of the site certainly works as needed (busted search aside). But if you browse these forums for a bit, you'll see that the list of ideas for little improvements, new features, etc. etc. is endless. Not saying it all needs to be done, but for sure there's always room for some work to be done. A good case in point is the new search engine bart was working on, development of which appears to have stalled indefinitely.
Finally, thanks for your dedication to the site! Considering the spectre I was raising of artists gradually losing interest in the site, it's great to hear so many speak up and express their commitment to the site!
Larger post triggered spam filter, so breaking these up to see if that helps...
@Danimal: Just want to say I share your concern about the disappearance of contests, comissions, etc. from the site. It's sort of separate problem from the strictly technical issues I've raised here, but it's every bit as important for the future of the site. Well, I suppose the site could limp along without that stuff, but I'm not sure OGA as a community can.
@chasergaming: What you describe sounds similar to what I have observed. I should add that search was always a little wonky even when it did return newer results.
@Rainbow Design: Yikes! What did you search to make that happen?
@farrer: I don't think the community re-org has actually taken place, at least not that I've heard of, nor clearly enough of one to get the right person(s) in place to fix search. It is good that bart has said he is open to talking about it, I guess my goal here is to make sure that conversation actually happens.
@all: I am going to contact bart directly to ask him to chime in specifcally on the search workaround I've suggested and the several offers of help folks have posted here. Considering the impending holiday, I am going to wait until later next week to do so. If there's an admin or someone else with a closer relationship with bart than I have (which is basically none) , who'd like to contact him instead, feel free to do so, just let me know so we don't double pester him.
Finally, just want to note that another incident of a user confused by the current state of search has turned up:
opengameart.org forumtopic how-does-the-search-work
Thanks chasergaming for replying so quick to that one!
@all admins:
Setting aside all other proposed fixes, community re-orgs, etc. etc.
Is there no hope of getting something posted to the main page acknowledging and explaing the current situation with search?
This would seem like the bare minimum that should be done here.
ok, just a note, looks like it was the URL in the last part of that post that the spam filter didn't like.
Funny since it was a URL pointing to an opengameart.org forum post. But that sounds like a problem to address another day...
you can use google search:
@ capbros i searched "attack icon"
@ mold thankyou. personally i use google as little as possible and i would not really say the google search could replace the oga search.
@all: Just a note, I have contacted bart via PM asking him to comment on my proposed temporary workaround for search and on the best steps forward for those wishing to contribute time and energy to OGA's ongoing maintenance and development. It's a busy time of year, especially for those with young families like bart, so we'll need to be patient but hopefully he'll be able to spare a few moments to comment soon.
I'm interested in how that goes-- I'd be willing to donate my time to help out. (I'm a software engineer with four years of professional web development under my belt, most of that in PHP.)
Hi folks,
I may have figured out why indexing is failing. I'm running a test right now that might fix it, but I expect it to take all night, if not longer. I'll post a status update tomorrow.
If this doesn't work, we'll talk about getting people set up with developer access.
Bart
Oh, that's good news!
Hopefully the fix works, it'll be nice for search to work reliably, even though I don't use this site much ;)
One day I will think before I post. Today is not that day.
Yay! That's great news! Thanks for looking into this bart!
Just a quick update: We've got some data corruption on a few nodes, and that's causing the indexing process to fail. I'm trying to alter the behavior of the indexing process so that it logs the corrupt nodes and then skips over them, which seems to me like a more intelligent way to do it.
Out of the roughly 60,000 items we need to index, a couple thousand got done last night before it failed again. There are multple cases that might cause it to fail, so I'm working on finding all of them.
That makes a lot of sense. I'm ready to assist in whatever way I can. If I need to manually de-corrupt a thousand nodes, I'm willing.
I've noticed the site has trouble handling some extended ANSI characters sometimes. Is it possible the trouble-nodes contain special characters that are freaking out the cron job? I've used some Japanese kanji in several of my submissions, so I might actually be (one of) the culprits. :(
--Medicine StormI've found and added another possible failure case. 55509 nodes to left to index, as of this post. Might take a couple of days.
@MedicineStorm: The latest node to cause a problem doesn't appear to actually exist. I don't recall the node ID number, but further node IDs will be added to the watchdog log so I can go back and figure out what's up with them. My first guess is that when nodes are deleted, some orphaned data is being left somewhere in tthe database. Thus far, it seems like one or two nodes here and there that appear to have been deleted, as opposed to, say, an ton of nodes that should still be indexed.
Update; We're down to about 36,000 more things to index, so maybe I've caught all of the edge cases. Hopefully new items will appear in the search when all is said and done.
Status update: All nodes are indexed, and I just succesfully searched for something submitted on December 30th. Looks like search is working, but let me know here if there are any other problems.
Yay! Thanks for looking into this bart!
I'll try to spot check new submissions over the next week or so to make sure the indexing is continuously updating correctly.
At the risk of asking too much (as previously stated, I am aware you are a busy guy and this is a busy time of year), any hope of getting a front page post briefly explaining the issue and letting folks know it's been addressed?
Dear bart would it be okay work for you to add a category setting for code snippets? I dont mean something very fancy just an entry under browse and a serch function and tagging feature.
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