Yay! You didn't volunteer me. Whew! I am so glad you didn't too.
Not that I couldn't mind, just I rather not. Yes, can own up to some laziness.
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A minor disagreement from me here. Leave the free access tier alone. Do not start charging for as is with free access. That would I'm afraid see a lot of membership loss. In fact I know I would not justify the as is being valued enough to pay. Sorry, just my view on that.
There's already the "Fan Club" idea which well I've not paid for membership to. All that it offers is unlimited picture views for user profiles & access to creating your own private chats via the site. For one thing if I so desired I could script up something to allow access to unlimited picture views and cost nothing, the same for accessing the chat. Again, I'm too lazy. you'll find *cough* hackers *cough* are like that, too lazy but capable.
(And factually, I could probably search for about ten minutes & locate pre-written scripts, "side load" those and hack a bash script to scrape the pics. Hm, ten minutes searching, five side loading, five hacking the shell script. It might take thirty minutes really to implement. Might take a bit to down the pics. Give me a few hours.
Say ten minutes to side load a script and shell in to the site for a chat. Although Not sure, seem to recall the site having IRC (Internet Relay Chat) ports closed. Not that they couldn't be opened and accessed. It would just take a bit longer. And well just f*ck java access, not going to try that as the java chat is handled via another site.
That would entail coding up some C at the least and nope, not worth the time. Eh, maybe use some python, grab the chat client & toss it unto the local server. But nah, still not worth the time.)
*Ahem* Ultimately, though it isn't laziness keeping me from it. Rather, I'm an ethical person. The site here itself has done me no injustice. I've got no qualms with any associated with the site. Ergo, it's unethical I would bother. BTW, I've not revealed any "tricks" or "secrets" here. I just offered a skimming of "it could be done".
Besides there's ways this site can be made to run for near dirt cheap to free. I've already d
iscussed this years ago. It's just a matter of locating resources which doesn't take long. Knowing it can be done for dirt cheap to no cost and then asking members to pay, well, it just kind of didn't settle well for me and others. And yes, a lot of others did leave when the "Fan Club" option "rolled out".
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I can agree that a site like this warrants a degree of privacy. Yes, securing a site like this does incur a cost. I could understand and possibly value paying a site like this for explicit privacy. Here's the rub though, ... I've been around the web since oh, ... about 1985.
Yep, back when DARPA was first working out the bugs. At age 13 I wrote a BASIC program that halted a network and sent it over a modem from a school's Apple II E. The network was brought back up gradually fifteen minutes later. My instructor knew the people running it, called ahead, they took a break.
From having that long of time in knowing the Internet/Web, I can say there's no way to genuinely guarantee "explicit privacy" on the internet/web. The only way? Keep your sh*t offline. That noted, I do also know there can be a high level of security used. Yes, I could see paying for that. That has value. Trouble being someone could also pay for a VPN and/or relays, use
TAILS distribution. They then, don't have need to pay any site for security.
Apologies if it seems I'm being contrary out of hand. Assure you I'm not though. Merely expressing a point of view and offering insight to why that p.o.v exists and has merit.You have some good ideas and I'm not meaning to discourage you, hon. I sincerely am not. I just don't think this site needs to become yet another cash whore.
And yes, I know my opinion is naught but less than a speck of cosmic dust. Not my site, not running it. Seems we got asked for input though, so ...
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