I am writing this because there is someone who is an active member right now posting each of our videos onto pirate tube sites as they come up.

PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS!

It probably won’t make any difference putting this notice up here. But just in case the person doing this doesn’t realise that what they are doing is wrong, I’d just like to go over it once again.

A typical RE video represents AT LEAST a day’s work. Even a 10 minute video takes over an hour to shoot by the time we’ve set up the lights, camera, microphones, the model has repaired her makeup, changed her outfit, we’ve done the typing up and the filming. Then we have to back up the footage, edit it, colour grade it, do an audio pass, export it, transcode it to MP4, upload it, write the storyline to go with it, post it to the shopping cart, queue up a few of tweets about it to let people know it exists, etc..

We get about 5 short video shot in a day. Some longer videos take a full day to shoot, and up to a week to edit.

They represent a LOT of work. And a lot of YOUR money.

Why YOUR money? Because all of this work is bought and paid for by YOUR subscription fees. Several hundred of you kindly club together to join the site, and this is where the money comes from. The money to pay the model – comes from you. The money to buy the camera equipment, lights, bondage gear, hire the location? All comes from you. They money to make it possible for me to live and therefore devote my time to making these videos? Comes from you. The money to get Ariel to help out with the rigging and the editing? Comes from your subscriptions.

So in a way, the person posting our videos on tube sites is stealing from all of us.

Because this whole deal only works if everyone sticks to the bargain. Each of us can have the full fruits of the work we do to make these videos, for a very reasonable price. If you’ve ever ordered a custom video you know how much more expensive they are than a website membership. That’s the power of crowd-funding.

Posting the videos on a tube site is cheating ALL OF US, the people who have paid for the video to be made in order that we can all enjoy it, securely and safely, in high-resolution, on a nicely-built website that doesn’t bombard you with ads or slurp all your personal data against the day when they decide to blackmail you with it (or whatever the end-game business plan of the tube sites actually is). I enjoy my job- it is a privilege to be the one at the sharp end who gets to spend my time creating BDSM erotica. I do it because I love it- I love looking through the stuff you have generously allowed me to have my part in creating!

If fewer people join the site as a result, we will have less money to pool together to do the next shoot. Which means we maybe have to be less ambitious. Shoot faster, churn out an extra video in the day rather than making the ones we shoot the very best they can be. Fewer two model videos. Fewer locations. Lower quality, generally.

A website membership allows you to access content which would have cost a hundred thousand pounds or more to have shot for you as custom commissions. It’s the bargain of the century- Netflix for bondage. Except we are much smaller.

So when we have to pay money to DMCA agents to get the content taken down, it comes from YOUR money and it leads to less money for future shoots. When I have to spend a morning compiling long lists to get it all taken down, that’s time I’m not spending writing scripts or editing or filming. That’s just not efficient!

I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me here. I’m trying to point out that the asshole who is posting our stuff is stealing time, energy and attention from the core mission of Restrained Elegance- which is to pool our resources to make exceptional, high quality BDSM erotica. I can and I will chase it down and get all this stuff removed, but it is a stupid, unnecessary distraction.

Hi,

Apologies if you tried to access the site earlier this week and got a 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) error. This was due to timeouts in our web host/payment processor’s security scripts, exacerbated by a couple of inefficiently-coded helper functions on our own part of the site. As it was an intermittent error it took several days (and in my case more-or-less sleepless nights) to track down and fix.

To make it up to you, there will be bonus new updates between Xmas and New Year, plus at least THREE archive sets a day for all of December!

Cheers, Hywel

UPDATE 16/11/2018: This morning’s error log looks MUCH more hopeful. If you continue to have problems accessing the site please let me know. But it looks like yesterday’s changes have fixed it.

UPDATE 15/11/2018: OK we have tracked down two or three code errors which may have been consuming a lot of server CPU, and we’ve increased several settings which should give more headroom before declaring a timeout. Also taken several measures to improve efficiency and cache a few more pages which were database-access-heavy to help reduce load on the server.

The error rate has decreased significantly, and although I’ve seen a couple of timeout errors in the last hour or so it isn’t the pages full that we’ve had for the last few days. If you get the problem again persistently, please could you let me know? I’m going to leave the site running as-is overnight again and assess the apparent error rate in the morning to see if this has made a significant impact.

In parallel, I have been processing all of December’s updates and I promise to make up for the unacceptable poor service in the last few days with a bunch of bonus updates for the Xmas season! Apologies again!

Hywel

UPDATE 4: Last update for today. Have I mentioned how much I hate trying to chase down intermittent problems? Tech support have made some changes to the security scripts and things now appear to be running more smoothly, so I am going to go to bed and see how the site survives the night. At least we should get a cleaner error log tomorrow if the problems recur.

Apologies again for the very poor service over the last few days. I will make it up to you with lots of bonus updates in December! 🙁

UPDATE 3:

The whole site is currently giving the 503 error. Whatever is causing it, it doesn’t seem like it was the code I was playing with. On the plus side, that’s eliminated all the other spurious warnings and errors from the error logs, so maybe tech support will find it easier to track down the problem now. Apologies, be back up as soon as we can 🙁 🙁

UPDATE 2: 14th November evening

OK, so I’ve found and fixed a couple of runaway function calls which were using a lot of server resources. The error logs are much quieter since I made that change. Let’s see if that’s properly fixed it.

UPDATE: 14th November

We are having strange intermittent problems following the server outage. The main symptom seems to be a 503 error message (“Service Temporarily Unavailable”) when trying to access the members’ area. The public pages seem to be working fine, and the members’ area works some of the time. But at other times it will give the 503 error when you try to access it. There are a bunch of error messages in the logs and it looks as though something is failing to terminate properly, using up a lot of server resources, and when the server load gets too much, triggers the 503 errors.

I am working on it along with my developer friend and the tech support people at our web hosts. We can’t quite understand why it has suddenly started happening as nothing on our side of the site has changed recently; it might be a security update patch or something has caused a problem with depreciated PHP-database calls.

I’m very sorry for the spotty service- intermittent problems are a bastard to find and fix. We just need to detective-hunt every warning in the log files and run some experiments to figure out where the “first cause” is – what process is it that is using a bunch of resources and not terminating properly? Then triggering a cascade of 503 errors. Please rest assured that we are working as hard as we can to fix!!! Many apologies.

Hywel

RestrainedElegance.com was offline briefly yesterday because of a database access issue. We’ve solved the immediate problems but are still getting a bunch of warning flags in the log files so we are chasing down the cause. The site is running “at risk” until we’ve figured out exactly what the issue is- we may need to reboot the server again to apply fixes. We will keep the disruption to a minimum, please bear with us.

Thanks, and apologies- we’ll be back to smooth running as soon as possible.

Hi,

Something messed up in the upload of today’s tutorial on flash lighting. I’m re-uploading and fixing (and testing) now, apologies.

On the subject of tutorials, an RE member has asked for one on sharpness and focus. This is a big topic so it’ll take me a few months to put one together, so look out for that in early 2019.

Are there other topics you would like to see us cover in our tutorials?

Cheers, Hywel