
Postmortem - Fictionalley.org - nostrademons
http://nostrademons.livejournal.com/103250.html
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nostrademons
Some background, since this was written for HP fandom members who already know
what FictionAlley is...

FictionAlley.org is the leading Harry Potter fanfiction site on the net (a
category that's larger than you might expect). It was small but growing when I
first joined the staff, having about 2000 registered members and roughly 30-50
simultaneous users at any given time. Over the next 5 years, it grew to
100,000 registered users and 350-500 simultaneous sessions.

This postmortem's describing the project to replace the original upload system
- which was basically built on hand-uploaded HTML files and off-the-shelf
forum and directory software - with a more modern database system. This
project wasn't really a failure per se: it's in production now, people use it,
and FictionAlley's still getting 350 or so simultaneous users. However, it
took _much_ longer and was much more difficult than expected, and the final
result has fewer features and more bugs than I'd like. I initially figured on
3 months to finish; it took 3 years.

