# Shaarli – FAQ

# FAQ

### Why did you create Shaarli ?

I was a StumbleUpon user. Then I got fed up with they big toolbar. I switched to delicious, which was lighter, faster and more beautiful. Until Yahoo bought it. Then the export API broke all the time, delicious became slow and was ditched by Yahoo. I switched to Diigo, which is not bad, but does too much. And Diigo is sslllooooowww and their Firefox extension a bit buggy. And… oh… their Firefox addon sends to Diigo every single URL you visit (Don't believe me ? Use Tamper Data and open any page).

Enough is enough. Saving simple links should not be a complicated heavy thing. I ditched them all and wrote my own: Shaarli. It's simple, but it does the job and does it well. And my data is not hosted on a foreign server, but on my server.

### Why use Shaarli and not Delicious/Diigo ?

With Shaarli:

- The data is yours: It's hosted on your server.
- Never fear of having your data locked-in.
- Never fear to have your data sold to third party.
- Your private links are not hosted on a third party server.
- You are not tracked by browser addons (like Diigo does)
- You can change the look and feel of the pages if you want.
- You can change the behaviour of the program.
- It's magnitude faster than most bookmarking services.

### What does Shaarli mean?

Shaarli is for shaaring your links.

### My Shaarli is broken!

First of all, ensure that both the web server and Shaarli are correctly configured, and that your installation is supported.

If everything looks right but the issue(s) remain(s), please:

- take a look at the troubleshooting section
- come chat with us on Gitter, we'll be happy to help ;-)
- browse active issues and Pull Requests
  - if you find one that is related to the issue, feel free to comment and provide additional details (host/Shaarli setup)
  - else, open a new issue, and provide information about the problem:
    - what happens? - display glitches, invalid data, security flaws...
    - what is your configuration? - OS, server version, activated extensions, web browser...
    - is it reproducible?

### Why not use a real database? Files are slow!

Does browsing this page feel slow? Try browsing older pages, too.

It's not slow at all, is it? And don't forget the database contains more than 16000 links, and it's on a shared host, with 32000 visitors/day for my website alone. And it's still damn fast. Why?

The data file is only 3.7 Mb. It's read 99% of the time, and is probably already in the operation system disk cache. So generating a page involves no I/O at all most of the time.