#database client

[dbajamey]

The Best Ways to Connect to a PostgreSQL Database

If you're working with PostgreSQL, efficient connection methods are key to managing your databases effectively. In this article, you’ll find step-by-step guidance on connecting to PostgreSQL databases using three popular tools:

psql: A command-line utility perfect for those who enjoy executing commands directly.

pgAdmin: A GUI tool offering a user-friendly interface for managing databases.

dbForge Studio: A comprehensive PostgreSQL IDE combining a sleek graphical interface with advanced database management features.

The article explains how to connect to both local and remote PostgreSQL databases and highlights common connection errors like “authentication failed” or “connection refused,” providing actionable fixes for each.

For those who prefer a robust solution that integrates functionality with ease of use, dbForge Studio for PostgreSQL stands out. It’s an ideal choice for developers of all skill levels, offering features such as SQL editing, data migration, and database comparison in a single tool.

Explore the full guide about how to connect to PostgreSQL database and find the right approach for your workflow.

If your organization relies on multiple DBMS solutions, try a DB tool named dbForge Edge that supports Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and a wide range of cloud services.

Or choose an effective solution from Devart's database management tools that fits you best.

[qu33rsources]

How to install NewPipe on Android

NewPipe is a YouTube replacement client for Android devices. It's open-source (meaning, you can see all of their code as you please), privacy-oriented, lightweight, and supports features that are normally locked behind a YouTube Premium paywall.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with NewPipe, YouTube, Android, Google, Alphabet Inc, or any other brand or name mentioned here. I made this guide to help my friends who were curious.

NewPipe's Website: https://newpipe.net/

The GitHub Repository

Step 0. Compatibility check

Make sure you're running an Android device! This won't work on an Apple device of any kind! Also, for those more tech-savvy among you, if you have the F-Droid store installed, you can download NewPipe straight from there!

Step 1. Downloading

Go to NewPipe's Github repo (repository, the codebase or where all of the code is stored). Scroll to the bottom of the page until you see "Releases". Click on the one that says "Latest" next to it in a little green bubble:

Your version number (v#...) will be different if you're reading this in the future! That's okay. Scroll past the changelog (unless you want to read it!) until you find "Assets":

Click on the first one, the one with the little cube ending in .apk. APK files are Android Package (Kit) and are the main format for downloading apps. Once you click on the link, it should begin downloading or your browser will ask you to confirm that you want to download this file. You should always verify the filename matches what you expect it to be (namely, the file format) before attempting to install! It might take a few moments for the file to download depending on your internet connection.

Step 2. Installation

Once you have the file downloaded, you can click the download popup in your notification bar or find the file in your device's file system. One of 2 things will happen:

You will get a popup asking if you want to install an APK by the name of NewPipe - confirm that you do (and make sure the app is really NewPipe!) and it will install automatically. You can then click "Open" to open the app and begin using it.

You will get a popup warning you that you have the ability to install apps from unknown sources disabled and that you can't install this. This is normal and does not mean that you downloaded the wrong thing.

If you got the first popup, continue past this step. For those of you who got the second, let's go over what this means.

By default, most Androids have this setting disabled. This is for security purposes, so you can't accidentally install a malicious app from the whole internet. If you enable this setting (allow installations from unknown/unsigned sources), you are theoretically putting yourself at risk. Realistically, you're probably fine. But, after installing NewPipe, you can always re-disable the setting if it makes you more comfortable. That will prevent you from installing updates in the future, but it can always be re-enabled.

Ready to turn that setting on? It will vary by your individual device! Some devices will take you directly to the page with the setting upon failed installation, and some you will just have to find it yourself using the searchbar in settings.

Once you've allowed installations from unknown sources (wording may vary slightly), try to repeat the steps above of clicking the download popup or finding the APK in your files and trying to install it. It should work correctly this time!

Step 3. Updating NewPipe

Like most apps, NewPipe is in development currently and frequently has new versions released to improve it and fix bugs. Unlike most apps, NewPipe needs to be manually updated, since we haven't downloaded through the Google Play store.

To update NewPipe, all you have to do is follow the above steps for installing the app, except that when you get the popup asking to install it, it will instead say "Update". That's it! NewPipe and Android handle the rest.

NewPipe also has popup notifications for when the app has a new update, so you don't have to worry about checking the GitHub for a new release. Just click on the "A new version is available" popup and it should take you directly to the webpage.

That's it! Enjoy browsing videos in peace without ads and with the ability to download and so much more. Pro tip: you can copy paste YouTube links into the NewPipe search bar to go directly to that video/playlist/channel.

[omo321]

getting bothered about client's bullshit after I already did everything exactly as told

[bf-rally]

i was gonna spend my whole day in bed (productively) but i did do last minute coding

it doesnt look like much but i managed to figure out fetching from the database so its actually something!

this is just a temp photo btw lol

[the-psudo]

Trump got absolutely dumpstered in court in the last few days.

His and Elon's program to pay people to retire early has been halted by a temporary restraining order issued by District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. of the US District Court, District of Massachusetts in American Federation of Government Employees et al v. Charles Ezell (acting Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management). This temporary order only lasts until they have a hearing on Monday to determine whether this program is constitutional.

13 state attorneys general sued to prevent Elon from accessing personal data about government employees and citizen clients of their agencies, leading to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in the case Alliance for Retired Americans v. Scott Bessent (Trump's Secretary of the Treasury) ordering the Department of Justice to ensure no unauthorized persons, including Elon and his team, have access to the Labor Department's database of information on tax filings, employment, and the like.

Two separate judges have ruled that Trump's executive order trying to eliminate birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour of the western Washington district, a REAGAN appointee (!), said, "It has become ever more apparent that to our president the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain." The other judge, US District Judge Deborah Boardman of Maryland, ruled that the executive order cannot be implemented until she has had a chance to rule on the merits of the case.

US District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth in DC paused Trump’s restrictions on transgender women being incarcerated in women’s prisons and federal prisons providing gender-affirming medical treatment, after inmates (!) sued to block the policy.

US District Judge Loren L. Alikhan of DC broadly blocked the Trump administration’s memo halting almost all federal assistance.

That's six rulings scrapping five of Trump's major policy operations in the past four days (Feb 3rd through the 6th, 2025).

That's news worth celebrating!

[powerexec]

The Power of Big Data Profits Lead Gen For Insurance & Real Estate Agents

Big Data Profits: Hyper-targeted Leads for Insurance & Real Estate Agents The data power of fortune 500 companies without breaking the bank! You know how Fortune 500 companies have access to massive amounts of data and use it to generate leads at will? Well, guess what? You can now tap into that same data power without breaking the bank! Imagine having access to the same level of data insights…

[eyepatchdate]

my work software is down again so im doing what little i can on my personal computer and then. playing videogames i guess.

[dbajamey]

How to Rename a MySQL Database

When working with MySQL databases, you may encounter the need to change a database name. However, MySQL no longer supports a direct renaming option. The RENAME DATABASE command, available in earlier versions, was removed due to the risk of data loss. Despite this, renaming a database in MySQL is still possible. This article explores the available methods, like using mysqldump shell commands and MySQL tools, to accomplish this task safely and effectively.

Read in full to learn how to rename a MySQL database easily.

Graphical user interfaces (GUI tools) are highly favored alternatives to the command line due to their intuitive design and the ability to speed up task performance by switching to visual mode.

If you're using multiple databases in your workflow, try the feature-rich database client called dbForge Edge.

Or choose the database management tool that fits you the best.

[ms-demeanor]

fucking client emailed in requesting a license last night at 10, called today before nine asking for the license and if I could hurry this along because it was urgent; being the person that I am I went to go find some more information and discovered that the customer wants to do an in-place upgrade on a nine-year-old free license to a recent server license which is.

A) not possible with the service pack they have installed B) probably not compatible with the two kinds of software they have talking to the database C) probably not compatible with their actual server, which blew up spectacularly in January.

(all of which is to say nothing about the wide variety of possible ways to purchase and install the license, but probably standard is what they want even if they're technically too big for it)

I talk to my team, most of whom do not have much experience with upgrades/migrations for this software and we all agree that more research into their environment is needed, including possibly calls with their other software vendors and also possibly maybe replacing their twelve year old server.

Call the client at 2pm and let him know that this project is going to be more rigorous than just ordering a license, let them know that this isn't being dropped or ignored, but we need more information and will be in contact when more of the team knows what's going on.

5:14 PM, my coworker messages me "hey, do we have a tenant for this client?"

I message my coworker: "fucking lol, this is about their license, isn't it?"

It is about their license. They have sent in an emergency after hours ticket describing the issue as urgent: they have purchased the license on their own from a consumer vendor unaware of the fact that they need admin access to a tenant to download the software.

I create a tenant for the client and document the information, then provide the tenant ID.

And then since it's urgent, it's an emergency, I begin gathering data and composing an email.

The license won't populate to the tenant for hours at least and probably not for a full day.

They didn't actually tell us what license they've got, but if they plan to use it with one flavor of software they've got they probably need a secondary license they were totally unaware of.

I have found no evidence whatsoever that this license is compatible with their other software.

I hop into an after hours meeting with one of our tier three consultants to get the exact version number of the software and confirm that there is not a straightforward upgrade path between the license they have and the license they want.

I send an email advising that if their developer wants to make an upgrade they MUST back up the database because we have emergency backups, not database backups, let them know in writing "per our conversation this afternoon, this is why we don't think this will work" and thank them cheerfully, letting them know to reach out if they have questions about licensing.

hit send at half past eight.

Combined after hours work on this "emergency" "critical" "urgent" ticket is now probably about half the hardware cost of a better server.

I get that emergencies happen, but buddy if I tell you "hey, I know you are in a rush with this but we have to take our time to do this correctly" and you ignore me and make me stay late to handle your "critical" ticket, you and I both are not going to have a good time.

[cheerfulmate]

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[mamtarajshree]

Client Server Database Architecture

Client Server Database Architecture Client server database architecture consists of two logical components. One is “Client” and the other one is “Server”. Clients are those who send the request to perform a specific task to the server. Servers are normally receive the command sent by the clients, perform the task and send the appropriate result back to the client. Example of client is PC where as…

[stellophiliac]

how to build a digital music collection and stuff

spotify sucks aaaass. so start downloading shit!!

file format glossary

.wav is highest quality and biggest

.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality

.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality

.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know

downloading the music

doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.

i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)

i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)

of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download

file conversion

if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.

.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion

if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done

this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.

soulseek

another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.

you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known

it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row

tagging & organizing your music

tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display

if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it

i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me

basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)

there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity

how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:

artist > album > track # track

using a music player

the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)

you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with

i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)

don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here

click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS

syncing

if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this

you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify

you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)

disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!

if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server

afterword

i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment

[oh-dameron]

So it's established that if MB tries to upload itself into ship hardware it has a Bad Time™. And we've also seen that ART can split off an iteration of itself that can run on whatever super high-tech they've managed to fit in a fairly-compact drone. And the kernel that MB restored it from was hidden in the galley "in a data storage area hidden in a layer under the usual space for food production formulas." Which. If I understand correctly, ART isn't doing Star Trek food replication, this is just a recipe database and MB is describing it like a weirdo who doesn't eat human food (which it is). So ART can fit a compressed copy of its kernel into the spare room in its recipe data storage. Even if every recipe had a high-definition video tutorial the storage can't be that big. Not by MB's standards, who was designed to download and process thousands of hours of surveillance footage, copy proprietary client databases, all that jazz.

So: if (for example) something catastrophic were to happen to ART's ship-body (solar flare caused an EMP like in one of MB's shows and it's destroying everything electrical? Got clipped by an asteroid and is now hurtling towards a star? Picked a fight with a bigger gunship?) could ART download a copy of itself to either be kept dormant/safe in MB's onboard storage or to actually run on its hardware?

And later, when they've got ART a new body to inhabit (after there are hijinks on a planet, naturally, and they work out how to share space and ART hilariously eats shit the first time it tries walking, and reassure the humans that ART isn't dead, and Iris super breaches the no-hugging clause but MB lets it go just this once because ART has never had the experience of hugging its sister before but this is one time only, understand? and ART also gets to experience being dumped firmly into the back seat when combat happens (cool) and also gets to experience being shot (markedly less cool) and they fight over the pain sensor like an old married couple with a thermostat), how easy would it be to transfer it back out cleanly if it's gotten all up in MB's organic neural tissue? Especially once ART works out that it's expandable and elastic (almost makes up for these rickety processors! Almost.)?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

EFF’s lawsuit against DOGE will go forward

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

In my 23 years at EFF, I've been privileged to get a front-row seat for some of the most important legal battles over tech and human rights in history. There've been tremendous victories and heartbreaking losses, but win or lose, I am forever reminded that I'm privileged to work with some of the smartest, most committed, savviest cyberlawyers in the world.

These days, it's more of a second-row seat – I work remotely, mostly on my own projects, and I rely on our Deeplinks blog as much as our internal message-boards to keep up with our cases. Yesterday, I happened on this fantastic explainer breaking down our most recent court victory, in our case against DOGE on behalf of federal workers whose privacy rights have been violated during DOGE's raid on the Office of Personnel Management's databases:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/our-privacy-act-lawsuit-against-doge-and-opm-why-judge-let-it-move-forward

The post is by Adam Schwartz, EFF's Privacy Litigation Director. I've been campaigning on privacy for my entire adult life, but I still learn something – something big and important – every time I talk about the subject with Adam. His breakdown on EFF's latest court victory is no exception.

EFF was the first firm to bring a suit directly against DOGE, representing two federal workers' unions: the AFGE and the AALJ, and our co-counsel are from Lex Lumina LLP, State Democracy Defenders Fund, and The Chandra Law Firm. At the heart of our case are the millions of personnel records that DOGE agents were given access to by OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell.

The OPM is like the US government's HR department. It holds files on every federal employee and retiree, filled with sensitive, private data about that worker's finances, health, and personal life. The OPM also holds background check data on federal workers, including the deep background checks that federal workers must undergo to attain security clearances. Many of us – including me – first became familiar with the OPM in 2015, after its records were breached by hackers believed to be working for the Chinese military:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach

That breach was catastrophic. Chinese spies stole the sensitive data of tens of millions of Americans. The DOGE breach implicates even more Americans' private data, though, and while DOGE isn't a foreign intelligence agency, that cuts both ways. It's a good bet that a Chinese spy agency will not leak the records it stole, but with DOGE, it's another matter entirely. I wouldn't be surprised to find the OPM data sitting on a darknet server in a month or a year.

In his breakdown, Adam explains the ruling and what was at stake. We brought the case on behalf of all those federal workers under the 1974 Privacy Act, which was passed in the wake of Watergate and the revelations about COINTELPRO, scandals that rocked the nation's faith in federal institutions. The Privacy Act was supposed to restore trust in government, and to guard against future Nixonian enemies lists:

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llmlp/LH_privacy_act-1974/LH_privacy_act-1974.pdf

The Privacy Act's preamble asserts that the US government's creation of databases on Americans – including federal workers – "greatly magnified the harm to individual privacy." This is the basis for the Act's tight regulation on how government agencies use and handle databases containing dossiers on the lives of everyday Americans.

The US government tried to get the case tossed out by challenging our clients' "standing" to sue. Only people who have been harmed by someone else has the right ("standing") to sue over it. Does having your data leaked to DOGE constitute a real injury? Two recent Supreme Court cases say it does: Spokeo vs Robins and Transunion vs Ramirez both establish that "intangible" injuries (like a privacy breach) can be the basis for standing.

The court agreed that our clients had standing because the harms we alleged – DOGE's privacy breaches – are "concrete harms analogous to intrusion upon seclusion" ("intrusion upon seclusion" is one of the canonical privacy violations, set out in the Restatement of Torts, the American Law Institute's comprehensive guide to common law).

But the court went further, noting that DOGE's operation is accused of being "rushed and insecure," rejecting DOGE's argument that it only accessed OPM's "system" but not the data stored in that system. The court also said that it wouldn't matter if DOGE access the system, but not the data – that merely gaining access to the data violated our clients' privacy. Here, the judge is part of an emerging consensus, joining with four other federal judges who've ruled that when DOGE gains access to a system containing private data, that alone constitutes a privacy violation, even if DOGE doesn't look at or process the records in the system.

So in ruling for our clients, the judge found that the mere fact that DOGE could access their records was an injury that gave us standing to proceed – and also found that there were other injuries that would separately give us standing, including the possibility that DOGE's breach could expose our clients to "hacking, identity theft, and other activities that are substantially harmful."

The US government repeatedly argued that we weren't accusing them of disclosing our clients' records, every time they did this, the judge pointed to our actual filings, which plainly assert that DOGE agents were "viewing, possessing and using" our clients' records, and that this constitutes "disclosure" under the law, and according to OPM's own procedures.

The judge found that we were entitled to seek relief under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), which proscribes the conduct of federal agencies – and that our relief could be both "declaratory" (meaning a court could rule that DOGE was breaking the law) and "injunctive" (meaning the court could order DOGE to knock it off).

Normally, a plaintiff can't ask for a judgment under the APA until an agency has taken a "final" action. The court found that because DOGE's actions were accused of being "illegal, rushed, and dangerous," and that this meant that we could seek relief under the APA. Further, that we could invoke the APA here because the remedies set out in the Privacy Act itself wouldn't be sufficient to help our clients in the face of DOGE's mass data-plundering.

Finally, the court ruled that our claims will allow us to pursue APA cases because OPM and DOGE were behaving in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner, and exceeding its legal authority.

All of this is still preliminary – we're not at the point yet where we're actually arguing the case. But standing is a huge deal. Ironically, it's when governments violate our rights on a mass scale that standing is hardest to prove. Our Jewel case, over NSA spying, foundered because the US government argued that we couldn't prove our clients had been swept up by NSA surveillance because the details of that surveillance were officially still secret, even though Snowden had disclosed their working a decade earlier, and our client Mark Klein (RIP) had come forward with documents on illegal mass NSA spying in 2006!:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/effs-flagship-jewel-v-nsa-dragnet-spying-case-rejected-supreme-court

So this is a big deal. It means we're going to get to go to court and argue the actual merits of the case. Things are pretty terrible right now, but this is a bright light. It makes me proud to have spent most of my adult life working with EFF. If you want to get involved with EFF, check and see if there's an Electronic Frontier Alliance affinity group in your town:

https://efa.eff.org/allies

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/09/cases-and-controversy/#brocolli-haired-brownshirts

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecomms.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

EFF (modified) https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/opm-eye-3b.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

[phneltwrites]

AO3 Stats & Notifications

One (1) person said this would be interesting so here's a post about what AO3 authors can see about their works and what they get notified for.

What authors get notified for:

comment on a fic

EDIT on a comment (some of u edit like 16 times and it is very sweet. I get an email every time)

Response to a comment

Request to join a collection (note: don't do this. collection owners have a lot of power over fic and should only be used for specific reasons and not to create a collection of fic you enjoy. that's what bookmark collections are for)

Gift

Related work notification

Daily kudos email. The daily kudos email shows all the kudos of the previous day in an order that makes sense to the ao3 database and not to human eyes.

The only bit of this that is clickable is the title of the fic. I can click into the profile of a nice user if I navigate to the fic and then go to the bottom where the kudos are displayed.

Things authors do not get notified for:

subscription to a fic or author

ending a subscription

deleting a comment

creating a bookmark

a fic view (if you visit a fic twenty times, no one knows that but your isp and your browser history and you)

Now here's what authors can see about their fic under the cut because more screenshots

The first thing an author can see is something everyone can see, and that's who left a public bookmark

If you click on the number next to bookmarks you can see this. And each username is clickable to see the other things they have bookmarked or written (side note, this is the best way to find other fic to read)

The author can also see the note a reader leaves on a public bookmark.

Please note that authors don't get a notification for this and I don't look at them (screenshot proving me a liar) so you aren't guaranteed to be seen by the author. If you like that last nice user want the author to know it stuck with them, you gotta leave a comment.

But there are also private bookmarks! And private bookmarks are, as the name sounds like, private. However. On the statistics page for each fic the author gets a little more information.

Here is the statistics page:

This can be selected to by year and the numbers will change EXCEPT user subscriptions. User subscriptions shows the current state of subscriptions. And since authors don't get a notification of number go up or down, they won't know when it's changed unless they are tracking it. Additionally there is no way to see who has subscribed. So you can subscribe to whoever you like or unsubscribe at any time and that is between you, the ao3 database, your ISP tracking your history, and your email client. But the author doesn't know. You are released from any social obligation to stay subscribed or any embarrassment you might have. Go forth.

See? Here is 2024 and it has the same number of users.

Also fun fact, the word count shows fic FINISHED in that year. I wrote a 90k fic that straddled 2024 and 2025 and the full word count for that is tracked on the 2025 page.

anyway back to info.

I can scroll down on this and get a bit more information on each fic.

Here I can see the number of people who have subscribed to a fic - but not who they are. I can also see the TOTAL NUMBER of bookmarks including private bookmarks.

Compare contrast:

The public listing shows 47 bookmarks, the statistics page listing shows 127. On average, most fics have about half of their bookmarks private.

I can't see who made those extra bookmarks, just that they exist.

Also on the statistics page the comments are shown as the number of threads instead of the total number. I always reply to comments so the thread count is a more accurate reflection of how many people left a comment.

So to sum up, what authors can see if they investigate:

username on a public bookmark and any note left

the total number of bookmarks

the total number of subscriptions to themselves right now

the number of subscriptions on a fic

hits

[paper-mario-wiki]

Hey dudette, how do you make money?

i do a lot of things! though my primary role at my job is "business manager".

stuff i do/have done for my job:

manage ongoing relationships with clients

manage internal databases

manage weekly and biweekly emails that go out internally and to clients

keep on top of my boss's email folder by deleting spam, organizing things into folders, and marking the most significant emails as such

forecast the trajectory of the business a few times a year

fly out to business events to act as an in-person assistant for the boss

one time i was at home while the boss was at an event and i had to design an attractive business casual corporate-style social bingo cards from the ground up, locate a printing shop in san diego, and put in an order for 50 of them to be delivered to the hotel the event was happening at. all of these things had to be done within 24 hours. here's what it ended up looking like (minus the actual logo of the company running the event, which is now 2 now red squares)

one time i wrote a pilot for a tv show my boss was going to be on with someone from a different company. it got accepted and recorded 2 episodes before they decided to drop it

research different appliances my boss wants to buy for herself and her home

code a website for the business

really anything else that needs to get done. the reason i was hired is because my boss saw me as someone who can kinda do anything if i have enough time to do so. im compensated well enough for the effort though so im not complaining.