What is the story behind ELR and ATF sites? I can't remember the last time I visited a website and was jerked around as much as with these ones. Are they simply a relic of history or is this as good as it gets? The bandwidth speed makes 1990s dial-up connections seem peppy and what is with the flavor database constantly returning brand naming errors?
And I can't even cancel my ATF account because there's no opt-out option and I hear diddlysquat from ATF when I've sent email requests to cancel.
Edit: I really should have titled this 'What is with ELR and ATF websites?' - it is ATF that grinds my goat; ELR is just inefficient and seems poorly maintained from a technical point of view.
Never had problems with ELR (other than its database being a bloated hot mess) but ATF often falls over and gives me a server error when I'm trying to use it. Of course now when I want to copy-paste the error it's working just fine. Maybe the dude needs to use the subscription money to buy another hamster for the server wheel.
Yeah my experience is the same, ATF servers will frequently fail to load pages for me. This is concerning, I'm not requesting large downloads. It's 2018 and there's a website that struggles to send me some text and an image.
ATF has very serious bandwith issues. ELR meanwhile has deadly serious quality issues.
By coincidence, I doubled the server capacity this week. Is it doing any better?
It appears to me that ATF was a good idea that was never finished and appears to be abandoned. I cancelled my sub because of the constant errors, dead links, and incomplete functionality.
I've had technical problems with ATF website as well. I haven't complained because its a grass root product and I occasionally get something really good from there, but if you charge money then I suppose its only reasonable to expect a technically smooth service.
Thanks for thinking of me, but feel free to (politely) mention problems you have.
It's good to know, regardless of the common opinion in here, I work on ATF just about every day. And if your request comes across without any entitlement or jackassery, you may even get an answer. :P
The server errors on ATF are getting out of hand and the owner has definitely been MIA. It's worse with older recipes. You have to refresh sometimes 4 times before a recipe will load. Optimize your database bro!
Personally, I backup my recipes and flavor stash every time I add something. With things like this happening it's hard to trust that it will always be there.
Always backup from every system, you never know if any of them will be there tomorrow. That being said, ATF isn't going anywhere unless people stop using it, and last month 50,000 or so free users seemed to enjoy it without too many complaints.
Not sure what you think is happening with older recipes, but they aren't treated any differently than new ones, they are all running on a well-optimized database. What you were encountering was the dynamic and caching layer not able to keep up with demand, and those servers have just recently been doubled in size. Let me know if it's any better now.
It still seems to time out somewhere in the application. I assumed it was in between the ruby and the database, but now that you mention cache I suppose it could be that. All I know is that every 2 of 5 requests end up in a 500 error. It hasn't seemed to improve in the last while, even though you've upped the resources.
Aside from ELR not handling traffic well and derping out occasionally, I've not had any problems with either site.
ELR's content is another story
I haven't had any issues with ELR other than it's largely an un-maintained database. There are many different variations of flavors entered and other quirks but it's largely intuitive and useable. ATF has a good presentation and less fluff recipes but it's very confusing to use or try to learn. I recently just tried leaving reviews and got constant errors and when it went through it wasn't obvious that it worked. ATF could use some design and some server upgrades I think.
Either way both are the best we've got so far as I've found. Largely free and functional on basic view a recipe and mix aspects. Both are thankfully not worse but could be better.
Meh it is what it is. Reload. Click. Puff. Wait. Drip. Mix. Paper and pencil. Type when it loads.
When you have to pay a sub to get full functionality on ATF it's unacceptable though.
Agreed, but being able to unsubscribe only if you are a paying account holder is worse.
I was told that personal data is not stored on the ATF server and is instead stored with the email provider I'd chosen to create the account and log in via, and to cancel ATF was simply a matter of never logging back in again. In other words unless you hold a payed account, free subscribers who wanting to fully cancel are essentially in indefinite stasis capable of logging back in at any given time. 'Account', 'subscription', 'service', whatever, this is a first for me and as it turned out it only take a minute or so to cancel access and delete the user data.
If memory serves the owner of ATF is on a kind of hiatus right now due to responsibilities he has IRL, so ATF is kind of on the back burner. As far as the site goes it can be slow at times but at least it is a lot easier to navigate and search through recipes over ELR.
"Back burner" is a bit of a misnomer - I just added support for Liquid Barn's pre-mixed eLiquid, and sped up the mix calculations quite a bit, and I'm finishing up some code to speed up "What can I make + 1" etc, as well as fielding a dozen or so "what is my email address" messages a day. :)
But yeah, I'm job hunting pretty hard and traveling a lot to do interviews, and filling in that with consulting gigs, so the communication level has dropped from abysmal to nonexistent.
Yeah well irrespective of my 'experience' they appear to be contributing good and not evil so I hope they get it sorted.
The owner of ATF can almost always be reached here and yes he is definitely good not evil, in fact he’s a great dude, both ELR and ATF owners are and I can’t say I know for absolute certainty but I suspect they’re not web designers by trade and for laymen do their best and better than I could operating a website for love not money and to give us somewhere to store our recipes etc... This being a relatively new art form I think they’ve both done well and if I’m not mistaken are always open for suggestions to improve and from what I’ve witnessed have addressed issues here promptly.. I’m going to murder his name if I try to spell it being my Reddit challenged self 😂😩 but you could pm him here, his name is @queue...? but not or maybe idk lol uuugh but for sure ELR’s dude is @daath if u want to reach him. They do the best they can and know it could be better but if you have knowledge of what specifically could help maybe you could share that and they won’t mind. And like dude said it’s likely his life took priority at this time and I’m sure you understand that site doesn’t pay his bills and for creating that in his spare time is impressive. I think it is anyway and I’m very appreciative to them for those sites....;)
Scott is not a web designer, he's a programmer, and ATF was a passion project because he didn't like ELR one bit. That's also why his real life has gotten in the way, he's a programmer and has been extremely busy for the last ~18 years. Anything I left out /u/queuetue?
If you want to cancel ATF you have to do it through PayPal subscriptions, not available on the App, only the PayPal website. I didn’t cancel but needed to see what card was on file, but yes not any help from emailing support. ATF is always quick for me, same with ELR so I can’t comment on that. I can say ELR’s content is 90% garbage though.
Yeah, that's something I wish I knew beforehand. I don't use PayPal and haven't for years so don't know how to cancel my account - which I really want to do now! If they operate with such disregard for their users then it is not unreasonable for me to call them dodgy.
How did you sign up? Your profile settings should tell you. If you did use papal, login to your account and look around for recurring transactions or something like that.
I've sorted it now but I had a free account. My point was there was no way to terminate ATF from deliberately or otherwise accessing potentially private and external data because my email was associated to the site, and I'm not saying they were up to no good, As a matter of principal and given the widespread abuse of peoples personal data I have a problem with services that are vague and ambiguous if you choose to cease using them.
I'm kind of glad to hear I'm not the only one having performance issues with ATF. With this subreddit swearing up and down by ATF I always thought it was a small minority having these performance issues. But yes, recipes and batches fail to load for me constantly and sometimes you have to refresh 3-4 times before you get anything. Even the pages that you don't have to reload it feels like it sometimes takes ages before a page will load.
Maybe this discussion will inspire a more skilled 'someone, somewhere' to volunteer their expertise and help better the service quality for both end-users and site maintainers alike by offering efficient and quality usability; the ideal outcome for any grass-roots community service with limited resources, and it doesn't have to necessitate reliance on advertising bombardment and associated detrimental effects*. That's the single greatest thing about constructive community collaboration that is greater than the sum of any single part - there is always (well, usually) potential for a better 'win-win' for all.
*Take a look at the network activity .js object scraping, particularly of Facebook and Google metadata, plus the number of scripts all making network requests, then add to that the network burden of function error loops from ad-block detection and you have a good part of why the bandwidth issue is an issue - and the server is possibly not on a fast connection...
Anyway thanks for the input - criticism can be useful if you are willing to listen so I hope things improve because, after all, these sites do provide a useful function that can be easily forgotten.
Edit: Really gotta stop impulsively clicking the Save button before checking that what I've written makes sense.
ELR is great for me apart from the flavour lists but that's just a function of allowing all to edit so I don't mind that but I recently have been trying to use ATF because the word was it had better recipes but i'm finding it pretty unusable because of the glitches.
I don't have a problem with ELR as much as I do with all the misinformation. The problem is everyone thinks their a master and ratings are inflated, its like a big circle jerk. if a recipe has more than 4 ingredients I just assume they don't know what the fuck their doing unless they have ungodly amounts of rep across multiple recipes because there's so many accounts with only one recipe that has loads of ratings that's actually shit. the best recipes have 2 maybe 3 ingredients, you can split a profile into 2 ingredients and consider it one, say two different strawberries, but anything more and it becomes a bit extra.
Great point and few people appear to be making other's mixes because they are too busy creating their next masterpiece. But I guess we all have a little Dunning-Kruger going on sometimes - I attempted a ground-up chocolate base a few nights back with about thirty ingredients, and a lot more planning. But "...o' er the sink ye go..." lol.