Hi Everyone,

Does anything kill a website stone dead for as soon as you get through the door?

I started my own site because no-one was making exactly what I wanted to see. Lots of people were making interesting stuff, and lots of people still are. I still join websites that I like. I joined a couple recently, solo model foot fetish sites that looked fun. The photos on both sites looked nice.

One site had nicely arranged sets in ZIP files so I could download them. The other had some ghastly Flash-based gallery system. So not only no ZIP files, but I couldn’t even easily set a web spider to download galleries I liked.

That killed the second site stone dead for me. They’ve got years and years worth of content… but I’m never going to see it. Even though I’ve paid for it. It’s just too frigging painful obtaining the photos in a suitable form to view where and when I want to view them. They had an option to download the videos but I prefer stills.

I’ve explained before the dilemma that all adult websites face to balance the bandwidth bills with the membership fees. That’s why we have a rotating members’ archive rather than leaving every set from the last 13 plus years up all the time. It’s not an ideal solution, but it reminded me that there are worse ones!

This could be why that second site is set up that way: making it difficult to just grab everything or flick quickly through sets is one of the ways websites try to limit each members’ bandwidth usage. Or maybe it is some idea of “You want to see the pics? You need to stay a member FOREVER”, which I think is misguided. It’s a little incoherent with being able to download the videos. Maybe they think that people will use less bandwidth downloading videos once rather than repeatedly streaming it to watch it every time? Videos are big compared with stills. Maybe they are right, I don’t know their usage patterns or their business strategy.

What I hope that it is a misguided attempt to make the site user friendly by presenting photosets in nice galleries to click through shot by shot. Maybe I’m unusual in preferring to download the lot and do that on my local machine, flicking between shots with only the delay from a fast SSD rather than having to download the next picture each time by manual intervention. I spent too long at the computer already- when I’m signing up to something fun like a website, I want it to make it easy for me.

Whatever the reason, it killed that site stone dead for me, which is a shame because I was looking forward to seeing, saving and enjoying their work. Sad face.

The first site had a daily download limit, which was mildly annoying, but since the limit was quite generous I downloaded all the stuff I was interested in in a couple of days. I only joined for a month but if they keep producing fun new stuff I’ll very likely go back.

I’ll never go back to the other site. So they’ve potentially lost a fair amount of money, and I’ve not got value for money from my one-and-only membership of their site, either.

I have two questions for you.

1) Is there anything that kills a site stone dead for you? I mean flaws on legitimate sites, not rip-off sites which don’t provide what they advertise. (Those I’d ask for a refund/chargeback for- I haven’t needed to in YEARS).

2) Is there anything about any of our sites which kills it stone dead for you?

I’ve tried to make our sites support the way I like to use sites I join myself, but you may prefer to use them a different way. If I’ve made it impossible for you to do so, I’d really like to know about it. So if you could post a reply here it would be much appreciated!

Cheers, Hywel