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Old 10-Nov-14, 03:08
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Naji Naji is offline
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Exclamation Forum policy change

Dear members, I would like to announce a major change to the forum policy concerning sharing of full-length videos.

Starting today, sharing of full-length videos produced by active producers is prohibited in any section of the site. Any video or link to a video that is longer than 5 minutes by an active producer who still sells his / her content, and which is not made available by the producer himself / herself, should not be shared at the forum. This includes the contributors' section.

This decision was not easy to arrive at, and yet harder to announce, but it had to be made eventually.

Why?

It's true that piracy has been a part of this forum from the start. But I can't help, but believe, that we have outgrown it. The forum has morphed into something more important over the years. We are the largest mixed wrestling community on the internet. At the moment I see piracy as something that jeopardizes what this forum tries to stand for.

To give you a rough idea of what this forum is today, with a little bit of self-indulgence, if I may, we have 22858 registered members as I'm writing, 9151 of which are active. The forum gets around 5500 unique visitors daily. There are from 150 to 350 users online at any given time. We have 66 registered producers half of which actively advertise their products at the forum. There are around 250 unique clicks out to producer pages each day. My rough guess is that piracy constitutes around 15-20% of all forum activity.

Since I became a producer myself, I've been getting emails, mostly from other producers, inquiring as to how I, a producer, shamelessly contribute to piracy via this forum. And I've been arguing with them since, using the logic that the way it is done in our forum actually contributes to the community, first, making an argument that on a controlled scale piracy is a positive thing, which can be true in some instances but can never be evaluated or proven, and then reciting user statistics, number of producers signed up and involved in community, how they advertise for free, etc. But over time I realized that what I was doing was just a way to hide the bad stuff behind the good stuff. It is not a dignified position at all.

Only after becoming a producer I came to understand that what is being done here is wrong, wrong, wrong. It happens often that some fresh video gets shared for free, and receives hundreds of downloads. While roughly only 15 sales would most of the time cover all the costs associated with producing that video. What eventually happens is that the video goes on to be posted elsewhere, and then somewhere else, and then it never stops. Ironically, this only happens to good videos. To those that really deserve our money... And it's really heartbreaking to see someone who did the best vanish, or at least not be able to expand.

Prohibited Producers List will be deleted, as it bears no significance from now on. It was just a list of people who were technically-equipped enough to find this forum and understand what is going on. It was only partly adhered to, in all honesty. And there are at least four times as many producers who never knew how piracy affects them, and still don't know.

This brings us to the reasons behind piracy.

Firstly, and most importantly, there is a lack of producer engagement. Producers should be actively engaged in user communities, talking to them, taking their wishes, opinions into account. When I think about some of them Diablo and Veve Lane from Doom Maidens pop into mind first. You don't see their videos posted here very often, do you? By producer engagement I also mean caring for the fans, posting some free content for them from time to time. Putting ridiculous prices and providing false descriptions of videos you produce is one way to contribute to the increase of piracy. Being genuine with your customers, closing the gap between you and the fans, is crucial to decreasing piracy, and thus sustaining your business. Both sides win in this type of collaboration. Unfortunately that happens seldom. Often we see absence of care for customers, or the community at large.

Second reason, as an extension of the first, is that some of producers are not tech-savvy enough or do not understand the need to control illegal distribution of their content. Like was the case of DWW.

The world of underground wrestling is a small one. We, producers and fans, have to stay together and do whatever we can to sustain and improve and expand this world, and ultimately, enjoy our experience of this weird fetish. Don't we all want more videos? Don't we all want BETTER videos? Don't we want more female wrestlers joining the industry because they can get paid better?

Before concluding, I would like to apologize to those who have been promised by me that the way this forum is will never change. Everything changes. The world changes. We change. Hopefully, for the better.

I would also like to thank those who helped me make this decision, namely my fellow admin @[Only Registered Users Can See LinksClick Here To Register], and very valuable @[Only Registered Users Can See LinksClick Here To Register].

To sum up:
  • posting videos or links to videos longer than 5 minutes from ACTIVE producers is prohibited, unless they made the video available. This rule does not affect other sections of the site, such as Pictures, Discussions, Stories, Art, etc.
  • [Only Registered Users Can See LinksClick Here To Register] is modified to reflect this
  • forums will be cleaned from such posts as myself and WF have time to do it
  • prohibited producers list will be deleted
  • I'm still thinking about what to do with the contributors' section, but I'm inclined towards keeping it after cleaning it up, at least for now, to keep the content posted at the forum unique, since everything posted in the public section most often gets distributed elsewhere
I can attest that getting free videos is certainly a thrill. But what we are sacrificing for that is more significant.
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