It's only a trial at the moment, to see what's what really.

As wob said, we have massive issues with hotlinking and image theft at the moment (eg people loading images directly off our server). We don't mind this, but we want some advertising in return.

Unfortunately, also as wob said, we'd need to keep 2 copies of every image to be able to do 1 with and 1 without the watermark. Our primary server's file system is 79% full. This is difficult without yet another round of hardware upgrades (we've not paid off 10% of the last round yet, advertising is bringing in stuff all, and yeah..this shit's getting expensive).

It is, unfortunately, becoming a necessary evil. We need to drive more traffic, to drive some advertising revenue, to pay for the site, so we can run it. We said 2 years ago that it's all become too big a burden for us to continue to fund ourselves, so it was either move to an advertising supported service, paid subscriptions, or bin it all.

For the advertising to work, we simply need more traffic.

Anyway, I am interested to hear, in a score out of 10, just how much the tiny watermark bothers you all. Let me know, it's valuable feedback.

Thanks
-p

There isn't a way around it but there is a way to make in almost invisible.
DK will hate me for this but I don't think many users will bother trying it.
Anyhoo, just upload a REALLY big image, as big as the system allows.
The watermark is placed AT SIZE on the original file but when the webpage shrinks it you will hardly notice it.
This example is almost big enough, as uploaded by our illustrious leader.

on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being unnoticeable and 10 being an intolerable pain in the ass...I'd say its about a 2...
I personally would prefer if it was at least a little bit transparent..
and I believe someone on the porn side pointed this out also, but shouldn't it say plus613.net instead of #plus613?

I'll look at making the image more transparent.

As for using plus613.net and not #plus613 we own .com and .net and you can't have # in a url so it's not rocket science for people to guess the url.

Also it's about branding more than actual image containing the url addy.

And for those interested the selection of the corner where the branding takes place is based on which corner is 'less busy' so this should help eliminate any stamping over the top of what's interesting in the pic.

pulse has covered everything else.

yeah, put me down for a 2. no biggie if it's that much trouble.

Put me down for a 3 - I don't really like it, but its not too big, and I can understand the reasoning for it, and I definitely don't want to see you guys go under financially because of this site.

Only question I have with the logo is how is it going to be done with GIFs? At the moment it seems to stop them acting like GIFs. I know not many are uploaded, but I am curious if there is something that can be done there.

I've stopped the tagging of gif's for the moment. When i have a bit more time i'll fix it up so it brands multi-frame gifs and keeps them as multi-frame gifs.

Animated gifs or icons usually need an extension to the one of the edges. It's usually done as a black bar kind of like a subtitle in a movie. However if DK loves coding as much as he implies, it is possible to watermark gifs and movie formats but it can delay the uploading process by several seconds.

Some anon just uploaded about 30 pages of mostly boring pictures.

I've seen people upload a lot at once before but this is rediculous!

In my opinion that basically results to spam or a malicious attempt to overload the server.

I think it should all be deleted, and while you're at it how about only registered accounts can post?

Have we ever gotten anything good from an anon on here? Let em browse and read posts and whatnot but in order to upload or post anything I think they should have to make an account.

that argument has been lost a dozen times.

Try 45 now..lol

Looks like the same jackass put about 27 pages on the porn side too. He must be very proud. Too bad all that effort wasn't put into something constructive.

You take the good with the bad here, I find it annoying but it seems to be a one-off. I have limited myself to 15 images because that is the default page view, I think it's hard to find current images and topics if you have to flick through more than one page. It is in the best interests of the site if everyone uploads regularly, rather than in huge blocks. I'm guilty of all of the above so maybe I should just shut-up now...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 31/01/2009 11:57PM by woberto.

Re: the logo branding discussion.. on a 1-10 to me it's more of a 5 in annoyance but I also understand the necessary evil reasons. You can also prevent offsite hotlinking through other means. Put in an image request engine that receives the parameter of the day, use the referrer, etc. I come across it being done regularly when image searching on Google, several sites will not let you view an image alone unless it's being called from their page directly.

As for generating more traffic, isn't that a catch 22? The more traffic you generate the more advertising you generate but that also incurs higher system loads and further bandwidth and hardware expenses to keep up. If the advertising isn't covering the existing expenses then will more advertising cover the resulting higher expenses? I don't know your exact costs but either those two lines on a graph are converging or diverging.

how about making the logo transparent?

Internet hosting is a funny thing. The bigger you get the cheaper it is to run your sites. The people who pay the most are the smaller sites (i'm talking users accessing your site / cost to run). The hardware has all been brought and paid for during our last hardware expansion, the hardware is also enough to cope with 3-4 times the amount of load the sites experience. So growing the sites even larger is our next big task. Then once we've reached the end of the hardware we look to buy bigger better servers and repeat the never ending process, only the next time we expand the cost to host users accessing the sites goes down even more.

I know nothing about gifs, but in order to 'get around' having the #plus613 logo on your pics could you create a gif with your image repeated? There is no logo on gifs.

The GIF format only supports a palette with 256 colors...so a lot of the images posted would not look as good


source

Re costs of running the site, I think DK pretty much covered it all. Since our last hardware expansion, we actually bought all the hardware we run from. This required significant capital investment (which we're a long, long way from covering) but in exchange the ongoing costs dropped quite significantly from what they were renting hardware.

With this in mind, the hardware we bought was more than capable of running the sites at many times our current hit rate (I disagree with DK's 3-4 times, I reckon closer to 10 times but could be wrong, we never capacity planned this) which means we can grow significantly without experiencing any increased costs on what the sites cost at the moment. I'd be surprised if we couldn't take 1000+ users on each of the sites concurrently without slowdown (as opposed to the 50-150 plus613 usually has, and the 150-400 porn613 does).

It's simply a case of the more traffic we generate, the cheaper each hit becomes. At the moment, each hit is quite expensive (especially when you factor in the piss poor advertising revenue we generate, which isn't enough to cover our ongoing costs let alone pay back the thousands from the last round of upgrades), but with each individual extra user we get, the cost per hit drops ever so slightly. At some point the two lines will converge and the costs of running will be less than the income generated from a hit. That's our next target.

As for hotlink protection, it's very difficult for us to do this due to the architecture of the sites. Unfortunately, the image farms consider hits from the core webservers as hotlinks, so if we deny others we also block ourselves.

It's unfortunate, but it's the cheapest and easiest way of doing this.

By the way, we don't actually want to profit from these sites. Right now, our ongoing plan is to meet the running costs & pay back the hardware (which was purchased out of my own pocket) and then we want to be able to give back to our users.. Some form of competitions etc.. It'd be ace to be able to have monthly prizes for things like best uploader, most image tags etc.. I don't know what, but something you'd actually be able to use, like an ipod or something.. but yeah. We're a long way away from meeting those kinds of commitments.