Before I respond to anything else, let me acknowledge some donations.
Nov 1st: 0.078385 eth, now valued at ~$220
Thank you for your 1 month pledge!Nov 5th: 0.119465 eth, now valued at ~$335
Thank you for your 90 day pledge!In addition, I was not aware our XMR wallet was created in the "legacy" days and it had not updated / scanned blocks on the new chain for over a year. In the equivalent of finding bills under the couch, after updating the wallet I was surprised to find 1.9854 XMR in the balance, valued at ~$325. Most of this was received during last years donation drive and was not properly acknowledged. I apologize for that as there was no notice on the wallet that it needed to be updated.
To those privacy-conscious anons who donated XMR last year and the one on 4/7/24, thank you. I am sorry I did not see them.This brings our current donations + leftover ad revenue ($375) + leftover giga-donation ($575) to $1898 (9 additional months of hosting, if everything were to be converted to USDC for future use as of the time of this post). Just $600 more and we're set for another year and I can take this cringe thread down until next time.>>56080>Admin aren't you able to contribute cryptocurrency to the website? I'm not in a place in my life right now where I can afford to, as I'm sure many other people are. In addition, if you expect me to work for this site AND pay to have the pleasure to do so, not happening. Love the site, but on a volunteer basis, not as an investor or paypig.
>Also couldn't you just make another PayPal account if it got shut down for copyright infringement. You don't need to connect a bank account to PayPalBrother Paypal does Know-your-customer. Even if you don't connect a bank account, they know who you are, trust me. Let me make it clear: the way the site operates, there is no way for me to take traditional payments without risk to myself. I will not, have not, will never do it. It's not worth it. I've never wanted to "make money" on this site. I just want it to pay for itself. I don't want to tangle my own finances with it, not even a little. Not unless it went legit.
>>56089>I am curious though. How are we supposed to share criticism at all when assholes like the dude who was causing shit earlier can run rampant without getting banned.Simple IP bans are ineffective for obsessed, crazy weirdos. Believe me, we DO ban the people you see shitting up the place. They just come back on a new IP or ASN. Sometimes, banning them makes them even MORE crazy. It's a delicate balance between bans and just wiping up the shit stains and moving on.
>>56093>I am a longtime bbwchan poster and have been sharing and collecting content from here since the old days of gigatribe. Generally I have a lot of positive things to say about the way Barclay has run this place but I am starting to think the site has outlived its usefulness and it wouldn't be the worst thing if we let it goThanks for the appreciation and as far as "outlived it's usefulness", I have pondered this quite a bit. It is, for all intents and purposes, archaic. Do things with little value, gain it as they become more rare? Do we sometimes want to "maintain" an endangered animal population even though we know, eventually, one or two generations down the line, it will be extinct anyway, despite our efforts? I see these site like theoldnet.com and I realize that, though the internet is still relatively young, there is already nostalgia for certain eras of it, and efforts to maintain it, even if there is no "point".
>>56094With nine additional months of funding now in our coffers (plus 1-3 additional months the ad revenue will generate during those), I'd say you have time.
>>56130> get ads on the site. Even a popunder or popup will help a lot. Yes, for some may find it annoying. But for what this site provides, it's a fair trade off. I suggest adsterra or exoclick.These are traditional ad networks with know-your-customer requirements, so that's a no from me. Even if they were crypto, I hate those kinds of ads. It plagued the site in the past and I doubt I would ever willingly choose to go back to them, unless the payout was insane.... even then.... to make more money on ads, annoy users, make them leave, and then make less, idk.
>stop being so heavy handed with bans. If people are sharing things and the people don't have to pay for it, it shouldn't matter if there are ads or not. HOW people get free stuff shouldn't be policed, it's freeI've directed my mods to place no more than a few days for minor infractions, but if you're saying we should allow ad-links to be shared, nah man. It's against the rules and for good reason. We don't have sketchy ads here because we don't want our users exposed to that sort of stuff. Allowing it to be linked to is just as bad. No one should be trying to make money on sharing/re-sharing/trading.
> set up a donation button permanently at the top of the page. I know I myself would have given little bits here and there in paypal or btc.I will look at doing this. If anyone has any suggestions for pre-made scripts or 3rd parties that offer this (something that normies can just put a credit card in, buy and send in one swoop kind of thing) let me know.
>>56131>If BBWchan dies, the thing I'd miss the most from here would be, of all things, the AI board, because that board is largely original content that you can't get anywhere else, and I've gotten a lot of very nice pictures from the request threads there from generous folks. Barclay himself has made some gens I absolutely love (I'll never stop gushing about those Dorothy Haze, Stella Hoshii, and Momoyo pics, man) and I'm amazed how far AI art has come in the past few years.I would also miss /bbwai/ and I'm similarly stunned how fast AI improved from when we start to where we are now.
>If this is the end, for real this time, it's been a solid run. Thanks for everything you've done, Barclay. Would enjoy seeing you go the way of Leaf and start doing gens on another site if this one goes.Looks like we got some more fuel in the tank yet, so we don't have to panic too much. You're very welcome for the gens. I doubt I'll ever do the deviantart thing, as I only really gen for the users here, not for a wider audience.
>there will always be obese anime women to masturbate to. And isn't that what's really important?Truer words were never spoken.
>>56151>And this is why no one is going to donate to Barclays little place on the web. Well you're already wrong there. They have in the past, they have now, and emperor willing, they will in the future. Idk where all that anger is coming from, but I would suggest you take what happens here MUCH less seriously.
>>56196>The site owner is also trying to incentivise him uploading files from his old hard drive in return for donationsI'll admit it was a lame plea and not a single person took advantage of even requesting files under 350mb. I did make it somewhat difficult to parse on purpose though heh.
>All suggestions are wrong in the site owners eyes.No, it's just many of the suggestions I simply can't implement without compromising my values that I've stated multiple times.
>>56202>And all of it could sit on a server not paid for by anonymous crypto and therefore could be funded by more traditional ad revenue widgetsWhile it's true I could spin off AI into it's own server with its own url/ad revenue, it contributes a decent amount of ad revenue to BBWchan itself. With our current ad revenue being pretty pitiful, I don't relish reducing ad revenue on the main site to get some on a new one.
>>56205>really deleting some boards is not a lasting solution to hosting costs.Yea I'm not sure why this keeps coming up. We have unlimited BANDWIDTH on a 1tb pipe. So it doesn't matter how many pictures/videos are loaded/streamed/downloaded during a month, we pay the same rate. As for STORAGE, our RAID 1 256gb setup has always been sufficient, as threads and their videos/pictures fall off/get deleted from the archive all the time. You can see we only use ~140GB on the homepage. We don't pay for every GB we use on the drive or anything ridiculous like that. It's just included in the monthly hosting cost like any other server. So all these suggestions about trimming boards to save on costs are just, misguided. They don't understand whats actually happening behind the scenes.
>>56276>My advice is free though. Sell AI-generated fat woman NFTs. Until the NFT fad/scam dies, people will buy a few here and there.That's really funny I actually joked about that to my mods many moons ago. Something like a BBWChan calendar collection of the best from /bbwai/, each one costs $200 (essentially a month of hosting) and they could all be themed around the month and year that you're buying for the site. Maybe those NFT holders could access the array, get priority AI gens, or some other little perks for having them. Funny little idea, never went through with it.
>>56279>At that point it'd be easier to just buy your own porn instead of going through hoops for dude's sloppy seconds. I bet his videos are either trash or already have been shared dozens of times before lol.Make no mistake, there are some gems in there, though yes, it is mostly sourced from here, starting around 2015.
>>56284>This place will end up an AI sharing board if it survives.I have definitely considered that if the main site ever go completely tits up, I would spin off a separate, just AI site, though stufferAI seems to have that pretty handled so idk.
Anyway, whoo, that was a lot to respond to. To celebrate the extension on our life, there are now no file size restrictions for requests.