gethane, your whole post is about the aspect of discussing paysites - which is what has happened, and thats good.  Sure, PMBD may have been a catalyst, but it was the discussion of why rather than any specific actual filesharing itself that provided the climate change we are seeing now.  Yes, the filesharing had an impact, but I think honestly thats more for the shock value and to get people to listen to the message, more than anything.

I'd be happy to hear from BlueSoup or Pescado about whether they thought the filesharing in and of itself was going to destroy paysites, or whether they knew that it would spark discussions and that would be what kicked off the revolution?

Have it your own way. If this particular forum removed the file-sharing links (ie the Treasure Chest forum), then it would only be the discussion side, and then I'd link to it, but I do not think that what you are doing is the right way to go about "destroying paysites".

You want me to polarise to your way of thinking - sorry but I'm not going to do that.  I have my opinions and the opinions of my staff and half a million members to think about, so no matter what I do, part of it wont be liked by a portion of those.

You smell bullshit, fine, I don't really care - I think the message is more important than filesharing, so think what you will.

I entirely agree with you on this point.  Spreading the message is the key thing here.

The thing I meant about alienating creators is that, yes, they are getting money at the moment, but maybe some of those are out to just create - some people who are at TSR post stuff on free sites, for example, so you can't label all creators who get money with the same brush.  

It's a tough call though, but I think a creator that knows that thier stuff is being shared regardless of any policies they might have by this site (and, by extension, the "free community"), might think "well, they are stealing *my* stuff so why should I do anything for them?".  It's unfortunate, and I wish it didn't happen, but creators can be... well, very strange.

To lure those creators, you need to think in terms of other communities where they could potentially be getting much more money - TurboSquid, the Poser ones, stuff like that.  Basically it's dangling an even bigger carrot so that they'd realise that they don't have to be on a particular Sims 2 paysite, but can instead give to this community for free.

Unfortunately, this community has been dealing with paysites since the Sims 1 days, so a lot of the work needs to be focused more on the paysite mentality of the community as a whole rather than sharing a few files here and there.  You'd get a much better "result" in the long term.

Becuase then you'd get into pro-filesharing which is a whole seperate thing than just being anti-paysite.

I realise that some people want everything to be totally against paysites right now, but change has to happen over time.  Sure, I've made mistakes in the past (hasn't everybody?), and recognised those and hopefully worked some to get through them.

I allow links to paysites becuase it's the individuals prerogative.  One thing that TSR has done lately is severly limit what people can and can't put in signatures - you aren't allowed to link to your own blog, for example, unless it's Sims related and PG-13.  Excessive rules make for very disgruntled people over there (so I've heard), and thats notwithstanding the definition of a paysite can vary depending on who you talk to, so limiting it in signatures isn't something I've even considered.

There will always be people who are "on the fringes", and thats fine.  Change can happen from those fringes, or from the big organisations in the center - so long as the change is a positive one and is beneficial to the entire community, then thats good for all concerned.

Some people have yet to make up thier mind about this whole thing, but the more people realise how this community was founded and built up the more will realise that paying subscriptions to paysites isn't the way forward.  Encouraging them to go to voluntary donations or ad revenue, or whatever, is much better.

With all that said, however, I personally have absolutely no love whatsoever for TSR, given thier business practices and attitudes in the community, so far as I'm concerned they should be nuked from orbit - but only after all the good creators have gone someplace else.

The subscriptions page does work - still has all the old ones on, but those will go soon.  Just use Donate / Support at the top if the javascript one doesn't.

sickpuppy, who says you have to respect it?  Personally I don't think 2 wrongs make a right (as I've said), and the whole pro-filesharing thing is really going about "destroying paysites" the wrong way.  I doubt very much that it'll have much of a long term impact (sorry to say it, but filesharing has always happened in this community) - better to simply educate people and give them alternatives.  

Just try and see things from a bigger picture - you don't want to alienate creators becuase of pro-filesharing, you actually want to encourage free sites (and thus, anti-paysite) by showing alternatives to hosting etc.  You also don't want to alienate a lot of people who, for them, "pirating is bad, mkay?".  No matter how you put it in terms of pieces of software, you are putting yourself out to be "pirates" - avatars, forum names, sigs etc - and for many people thats a bad connotation.

You don't have to respect what I do - god knows many others dont.  That's perfectly fine - you have your opinion just like everybody else.

Oh and just fyi, Sapphire aren't a paysite.

The whole pay mesh recolour thing is something that I'll be re-visiting later on.  We've only just implemented the flagging system so then I can see just how many items we have on MTS2 that are pay mesh recolours and see how big the issue really is.

Bluesoup,

The credits list is in the wiki version.  I wrote the bulk of the text, and then some of the staff read it over, fixed typos, suggested alternate versions of sentences and so on, but the bulk of what was being said stayed intact.

And no I didn't pay anybody to do that - why the heck would I?

We'll have to see what kind of impact this has in the community now.

Yeah but it's not about bandwidth at all Pescado.  It's about CPU load, database queries, server optimisations and just general concurrent users at any one time.

I bet if you checked the apache server-status you'd have hardly any usage there at all - for MTS2 it maxes out 200 MaxClients within about 20 seconds of starting the httpd processes.

Don't think about it in purely bandwidth terms - there are a lot of other reasons to have multiple servers.  Running MTS2 on a single server even with unlimited bandwidth would basically result in a completely unusable site and it'll kill the box.  I may not be as cheap as you, but I still do want to have a working website

Regardless though, with optimisations and improvements you can cut down the number you need, and make it so that things run better, thus not needing to upgrade so much (ie pay more for more powerful machines, etc).  MTS2 has been very static in terms of servers for quite some time - the only main change to hardware has been for the fileserver for a disk upgrade, but otherwise it's all been software changes.  I daresay if I didn't do it myself (or, like other paysites, I *paid* somebody to do it), it'd cost a hell of a lot, so I suspect that this is, in part, where paysite owners spend some of thier gains.

TSRs hosting costs are at least on par with MTS2s - probably a bit higher since they have (at last rememberance) 10 servers whereas MTS2 has 7 (if you include S2C).  They also pay people for managing the site and servers and coding and all that jazz.

Not to put a dampener on your "$150 a year" thing, but in all honestly, you really couldn't run a site the size of MTS2 or TSR on that kind of money since you'd be looking at 1) shared hosting and 2) not much bandwidth per month, which equals crappy performance and so on.  Remember that you don't have as many concurrent users download stuff as they (or I) do.  Any website provider who has a vast number of people downloading stuff concurrently is going to want to shift you onto dedicated boxes, which ups costs.

That said, they do have a lot of ads (they are *everywhere*) and a lot of "omg sign up now!!!" stuff, which is really annoying, so I'd say they are getting a lot more than you think.

I'm guessing extra stuff like specifying number of bedrooms, lot sizes, type of clothing, and all that stuff. (Which I'll be rolling into the next major MTS2 update anyway)

grizzelda,

If TSR having more upload options tham MTS2 is a reason for you staying there, then I am more than willing to enhance MTS2s system where I can.