alexysmichele:

The tags section on AO3 took an oddly long time to load and I got all excited, thinking maybe they’d finally gotten their shit together.

But nope.

Never gonna fucking happen.

You got me excited. God I want it back. I loved looking through tags. Not having them makes me angry!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do people really use the AO3 tags that much?  I could never get the system to work properly.

Well, give ‘em time.  They’re good people.  I know some of them.  They’ll get the new system up, but these things take time to do them right.  Yes, a lot of time.  Often months and months, just like building anything else in life or your job does.  And believe me, you’d rather have them take the time to do them right, because it’s way more obnoxious to get it done fast but poorly and then have to fix it.

This is important, actually, because it’s how web technologies work.  We’re so used to hitting a button and making something happen that it’s hard to remember that building and maintaining the system takes a hell of a lot of work.  There’s working out the needs and specifications of the system (a step too often skipped), coding, testing, equipment to install, twenty other projects that all have to get done to keep the site up and running in its current iteration, more coding when the tests show you what you’ve done wrong, and then more testing to see if the fixes work…  You have to give your IT people time to do these things right, or you end up spending three times as much time and money fixing it—or worse, getting a half-assed system that will never work right at all.

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