Development roundup: September 2022

Hi everyone.

Firstly, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support.

If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits.

Wow. It's been a while. Half a year has passed since the last dev roundup, although you wouldn't notice if you used the site as a yardstick. Still, a lot has happened behind the scenes, and will continue to happen in the coming months until it's ready. Let's dive in.

Since the last update

In the development roundup I posted in March, I noted that the theme for this year was still around the "Search" project. More improvements and reliability for the search interaction and tagging. An improved upload process. Unfortunately, after the April fools Cryptocurrency prank, it was Patreon's turn, or rather, Mastercard's turn, to throw a wrench into the works.

When I joked about the control of the financial system over adult creators during the Patreon prank, I did not yet know about Patreon's intent to bring the hammer down upon us. I had based the prank in reality, since I'm aware that fringe creators have little to fall back on except Subscribestar and cryptocurrency. In June, Patreon Trust and Safety, on behalf of their finance overlords, demanded Smutbase and SFMLab remove a plethora of NSFW pages due to alleged violations of their community guidelines. The result of non-compliance would be the suspension of the Patreon page, and cut off the site's primary source of income.

I initially wrote an essay worth of argumentation slamming Patreon's policy, their handling of the situation, the flawed legal and morals grounds behind their policy, and the financial oligopoly that backs it all. But in the end, I will save that for another time. Patreon is still here, supporting the continued upkeep and development of the site, and for that, I am very thankful.

It is worth recapping that, in response to Patreon's demands, I took a few days off from work to develop and deploy a crude review tool. This review tool allowed for the quick classification and removal of uploads that violated Patreon's policies. A community team was assembled for the task. They went through every single upload on the site in record time. The result was the bye-bye list; a list of 300 questionable uploads that was submitted to Patreon for final review. The list of uploads that ended up getting deleted was much smaller, and only consisted of 50 uploads total. It also highlighted Patreon's strange, uneven application of their policies. But that's beside the point. The result is that thanks to a few intense weeks of hard work, the threat of suspension was averted.

In the wake of this, I also got in touch with Subscribestar again to get them to finally review and activate my account, nearly two years after creating it. A helpful site user connected me with the right people to get the page going. Account integration similar to Patreon is still being worked on, but there are technical hurdles to overcome before that's possible. This is an item that will remain high on the priority list until resolved.

Comment Moderation

The aforementioned spike in urgency with the Patreon drained a lot of my energy, and took away a lot of the forward momentum that I started the year with. Unfortunately, things would continue along a similar trend in the following months. Urgent fires that need quenching.

There has been a steady uptick in abusive behavior from users in the comments section on various uploads. Uploaders already had the ability to delete abusive or negative comments and disable comments on their uploads entirely. However, this did not seem to deter some tenacious site users, intent on making abusive, and hurtful comments. Much to the annoyance of frequent uploaders.

Policing web communities is a contentious and politically charged topic. I've always been of the belief that online discourse requires a hands-off approach. It's extremely easy to stifle free speech and silence valid criticism using automated and semi-automated tools. A shame, since I've seen many internet communities function without needing any kind of moderation for a long time.

The problem, however, comes with scale. Small, tight-knit communities are generally kind, fun and can more easily self-censor and self-regulate without hands-on moderation. People in small communities are generally more savvy, and aware of proper netiquette. The complete opposite of the average netizen in the age of mass internet consumption.

SFMLab and Smutbase have felt the consequences of this growth in audience for several years now, and it has allowed the moderation issues to grow more severe. There has long been a moderation team, but the tools for moderation were fairly limited. Recognizing this, I've started implementing features that help make the moderation team more effective. Although I don't intend to go into detail on the tools that are now available to the moderation team, you may have noticed some positive effect in the past few months.

More changes will need to be made to improve the situation, but they will take some development time to realize fully. And the same goes for the moderation of the Discord. I also intend to expand the moderation team in the future when the moderation process and site policies are better documented.

Business Administration

After all that, I needed to set aside some time and review server expenses, Patreon income and start budgeting for next year. The Patreon has been running steadily for a while now. I had two concerns.

The first is that rising energy costs in Europe will result in a sharp increase in the operating costs for hosting providers. Costs they will likely shift to their customers. I have already heard through my regular job that this will happen. The uncertain factor is the height of the price hikes. While I have put some money aside in the event of emergencies, this may eventually force me to increase the price on some of the Patreon tiers if price hikes will be significant enough.

I'm very hesitant to update pricing for Patrons, since changes of that sort are almost always met with resistance. So I'm thinking of ways I can increase the pricing while also giving some kind of new feature or added value back to Patrons. I'm open to suggestions and ideas, however, a new Patreon feature like that should not also force me to increase spending on server capacity. A real dilemma of resources. However, the next point might result in enough savings to not have to change Patreon tiers.

The second concern was with the biggest headache of all: Taxes. Up until this point, this entire operation has been operated on my personal title. This has several financial consequences for me personally. All expenses, like domain names, servers, and API subscriptions are paid under consumer pricing, and income tax has to be paid on all earnings. I won't bore you guys with the details, but my accountant advised me that at this point in time, it's become cheaper to start a business entity to house all the site's finances, than to keep doing this on my personal title. Therefore, in late August, I started a sole proprietorship for operating the sites.

To clarify; this changes very little about how I operate this site. The main benefits of this change are in the savings on site expenses, and tax. I have a full-time job unrelated to any of this stuff, and it allows me to maintain myself just fine. The site is a passion project for me. It's not about maximizing profits. While I would love to stop working my day-job and see the sites become my new full time job, the site is far from profitable, and can't sustain my cost of living in its current form. And I'd also be more than happy if the current situation persists. I get to serve an eager community, the community funds the site, and I get to use it as a vehicle for learning about and applying technology I find interesting.

October and beyond

So while the year started with focus and steady progress towards the goal of improved Search, we seem to have gotten off-track slightly. What's left for the rest of the year? There are a few pressing issues that are still work-in-progress:

• Subscribestar integration.
• Further development of moderation tools
• Site search reliability
• Community tagging
• Upload system improvements

In addition, I will also need to make some major changes to the site development environment. Deploying new site updates is a slow, manual process, that could do with a bit more automation. To make this happen, I'm creating a configuration that allows me to deploy the site to a Kubernetes cluster. This has benefits over the old process. It involved configuring and getting a development cluster running on a new server, or updating an existing one through numerous manual steps. With this system, all of this configuration is recorded in script files, and automated, and deployment of a new site instance just means running a single command. Kubernetes also has built-in capability to scale additional servers when more capacity is needed for the site. Moving everything over to Kubernetes may take a while still, but it also makes site development easier before that happens. It is also a learning process for me, and it's very exciting to figure out how it all fits together.

Lastly, I want to highlight that I will be attending the Blender Conference in Amsterdam this October. You can find more information on the conference on the official site. I'm personally looking forward to picking the Blender team's brain about the integration of online services into Blender. If you guys saw my post/video regarding the asset manager, you will understand why. If you are also attending and want to say hello, feel free to reach out.

So yeah, lots to do on the development side still. I also want to shoot that datacenter video, but who knows when I'll get the chance to do that.

Furthermore, if you have feedback regarding the site, please feel free to drop a comment, send an email, or leave it in the Discord. Please don't contact me about bugs with specific uploads, but contact the uploader instead.

As always, many great models were uploaded to the sites over the past few months, and I would like to thank the contributors who shared their models with the world.

I want to thank the Patrons once more. Your pledge helps keep the site running, and I couldn't be more thankful.

Best of luck to you all.

Salaryman (Ganonmaster)

PS. I've been seeing reports of Russian and Ukrainian 3D animators and artists getting drafted to fight the war in Ukraine. Artists who spend most of their time creating works of art for the joy of the world, being forced to fight in a senseless war. I can't do anything but feel powerless and sad about what is happening over there, and hope every single one of you can avoid the war and make it out alive.