We’re over the line for December. Not as much of a buffer as I’d be fully comfortable with, but it’s over $2.4K. Merry Christmas, I guess?
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It’s a Christmas Miracle!! Hell yeah Weight Gaming might just live afterall!!
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Any further updates on how AI content will be moderated going into next year? Once Projects are open to new threads will there be any changes as to how AI is tagged/flagged/etc?
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Krod and I have been discussing it on and off but plan on getting it sorted fully out with the rest of the moderation stuff when we start discussing and working through it through starting after the 1st.
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I’m quite late to the party, but here I go. I’ve been busy for pretty much the past year and didn’t have the time to dive in this whole discussion. After developing and getting an early development demo out over the Christmas and before the lockdown, I had some time to catch up.
First of all, with the dead internet theory going strong, I feel like this place has been greatly spared. Some AI slop and whatnot, but at least you can say something and people will actually read it and react. So I really would hate to see it all shut down.
I believe that it should be the developer’s responsibility (at least those with paid/supported projects) to help the website stay afloat. It’s wild how good this forum is at generating traffic. The bare bone demo I’ve released and clearly marked as being in early development generated 51 downloads in just 12 hours. This allows me to relax and focus on making the experience engaging, knowing that I won’t be throwing hundred of development hours into the void.
I’m not really in a good spot right now, but it’s not like I cannot skip on half a basket of food over a month for the only place that generates traffic to my content. I hope to increase my pledge, once I’ve got a proper polished demo that I feel comfortable with attaching my own Pateron page to it.
Speaking about Patreon, I don’t think anyone would be angry, if you tried to take their slice of the pie and used it to support this forum. Asset store and whatnot is a good idea, but a future to support the developer directly on this site would probably bring a lot more income. Especially since Patreon might execute a ban on NSFW work at any time, so many would likely be prepared to pay a bit of premium for that stability.
Lastly, I’d like to suggest allowing Patreons to still post in the Project category. It would incentivize people who benefit the most from it to give something back.
P.S. After reading your open letter, it’s clear that you stress over the website way too much. It’s users that create a community and you can only try to gently steer them in a direction. I suggest you set some time of the day (or a day of a week, whatever works for you), when you don’t allow yourself to log in and follow the conversations. Whatever important might happen during that time, is not worth sacrificing your health over. You have to trust the mods you find, and trust requires a proper trail run, before it can be established.
— dimensions out
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I couldn’t see if this was already discussed, apologies if it was.
I respect that the goal is to keep the ads on this site minimal, and as an ad hater I’d generally appreciate it. However, if it would lessen the burden on you/lower the donation threshold then I for one would be perfectly happy to have, say, column ads on the sides of the site. Other vaguely similar platforms, like F95Zone, have them and while it’s mildly jarring I much prefer it to having the forum go down. Is there a reason why it isn’t being done?
There are a handful of reasons.
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I get contacted by a fair number of ad networks wanting to run ads and offer better payouts then google adsense but they either back out when they find out we are a NSFW site and the ones that dont so far has a really bad rep when I look into them.
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Ads just dont pay out as well as they used to anymore especially for NSFW sites. When we first started google adsense we where making around $600/month on a small fraction of our current traffic, and while we have grown quite a lot our ad rev dropped to between $100-$150/month.
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The root of the issue is the low payout rate for restricted ads. The ads we serve usually have good impressions and CTR but the payout is really low. Due to that even if I was to up the number ads on the site it would not do enough with the current payout rates for restricted ads.
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Sites like F95Zone cater to a much larger audience then we do so they likely have a ton more page views and users then we do. Due to that increased size they may be able to deal with the reduced payout just through bulk and ad networks may be more willing to work with them due to their larger audience.
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Serving community ads like FA does would be much more effective for us, but currently if I was to support it I would have to setup all the ads manually which would be hard for me to manage on top of everything else. I do have plans for a system to help with that but I need to get the main site finished up first before I start looking into that.
There are also a handful of other reasons but these are some of the biggest ones. Generally speaking its just payout for ads is really trash atm so unless we go with a really shady ad network or start shoving as many ads as we can in front of everyone its just hard to make enough money through it alone for a site like ours.
Community ads could be more feasible but until I get time to set something up for them it would be a ton of work to keep on top of managing them manually.
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Yeah, do not focus on implementing community advertising right now. Moderation first (and thank goodness you’re working on it), so you can reduce your overall time investment. Then I’d say split work between focus on the main site (because you clearly want that in place, it’s been a long time coming and you talk about it a lot - so give yourself that checked off the to-do list) and developing automation tools for whatever it is which keeps you from being able to do actual game-dev work (since that’s something you want to be doing but don’t have time for).
Only after you aren’t running yourself ragged should you be looking at additional site features (and for most heavy posters on this site, “paying money to sell your game to every forum user” is a feature). Plus, automation tools which ease moderation burden can be shared with the new recruits to reduce burnout. I never would have been able to keep up with the subreddits I used to moderate without third-party script tools making it easier to take actions without having to manually navigate the awful menu set-up every time any action needed to happen.
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Hopefully you can find some moderators with Discourse experience so they can take some of the burden / plugin research off of your plate.
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