Eunuch and modification sites do not have the resources of Google!

[Losethem (imported)]

I decided to start a new thread, and I do not expect it to get far, but I do hope the users will at least read it because I believe this is also a concern on EA.

Recently I've gotten a lot of flack on a website I run for not giving everything away for free for a limited time. Well, why would you buy the cow if I give you the milk for free? Folks would come in, take their one-week free membership to the entire contents of the site, then simply open up a new account and repeat. Well, sites like this have expenses. One user in particular was very rude about it instead of just wandering off, which is the reason I write this.

That user had several concerns, of which a software switch I'm working on will mostly correct. At the moment the software the site I run uses, will not let us set it up to run the business model we would prefer. We know our present model sucks, but we were also forced to take something, anything, very quickly a few years back (or have the site disappear completely) and have not fixed this all in the meantime. Well, we are now. It's still some time before launch though.

As Krister, Paolo, and I have noted on another thread, it's a lot of work to keep these things going, and it's often thankless. I know we've all reached out on numerous occasions asking for assistance. We have plenty of folks wanting to use the content on the sites we manage, but few or none willing to help maintain it.

I, for one, am happy to do the work. But at the same time I wanted to let users know/show them that there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes and we often get approached by folks expecting a Google level of service from these sites, with 2-3 people running it. The thing folks should remember is this subject matter (Castration, body modifications, etc.) is a VERY niche subset in the general population. I'd love to provide a Google level of service, but I'm not a coder, and that's what it would take to begin to approach that level of service on niche sites like this. These sites are also not general enough in nature to attract the talent to provide (nor able to pay for that talent) to provide those Google levels of service.

This is not written to ask you to throw a pity party for us, or for you to feel sorry for us, it's not what we want. But we simply need folks to realize often these things are not as simple as they seem and we're doing our level best to keep up with them.

You can stop reading here if you do not wish to see an example of the kinds of things we deal with. If you're curious, read on...

This lack of coding ability leaves us with off the shelf alternatives to run the sites, in the Eunuch Archive case, vBulletin. On my site, I'm working on a software switch (which will be obvious and revealed later), which is a manual, pain in the neck, process. For example, I discovered just last night that 3-weeks of work is gone not because the content I was working on was unusuable to most people, but because a switch wasn't set in my software to encode videos to the h264 standard, which meant those I uploaded (one at a time I may add) were not visible on iOS devices in addition to PC/Android. I want to hit as close to possible 100% compatibility for my users, so the 15% on iOS devices that can't see the videos for me is a problem. It's also a huge problem because I've noticed that in the body modification community, especially among those of us that have removed all or part of our genitals, that the nerd/geek quotient (and therefore the use of iOS devices) is much higher than the general population. This means that this incompatibility is probably causing around 30% of my potential users to be unable to view videos. That is something I wanted to fix with the software migration I'm working on, because the present site software won't process for h264/HTML5 at all. So back I go, with the new switch on, testing each video as I load them, one-by-one, manually, to ensure PC and iOS visibility. It takes an average of half and hour to do so for each video, and I have 250 videos to work through.

The above is a lengthy explanation of the types of things we deal with behind the scenes, and is but one issue, there are a LOT more. Just know that we want to provide a good service, and please keep that in mind when you ask what are seemingly simple things of us. Often times they are not simple when you're dealing with coding issues.

[CastratedTomcat (imported)]

Why do you not use youtube?

As far I know, there you can upload also as private video and sharing the link in hidden areas in your forum or what ever.

Or you can make it as e hidden channel for invited users.

This you can play on any device with good compression rate.

[Paolo]

Because depending on who you are, Google/YouTube will remove a video at the drop of a ham sandwich.

That, and you can't trust the users to NOT share the private links.

[Losethem (imported)]

Why do you not use youtube?

As far I know, there you can upload also as private video and sharing the link in hidden areas in your forum or what ever.

Or you can make it as e hidden channel for invited users.

This you can play on any device with good compression rate.

For Paolo's first reason. It's about control of the content. If I use a YouTube channel, then YouTube objects to one of the many videos we have of castration being performed, don't think for a second that they won't delete. When I control the server, I do.