[oberon3]

I've been lurking here for the past 12 years or so (That being the oldest RC pic I think I have).... so take this in the spirit it's intended, from a long-time supporter and from someone who knows where this site came from, what it turned into, and what kind of place it has been over the years.

I've been skulking through both sites, and in fairness, I'll post this both places.

One week into this fun little mess, it seems to me that it's time to take score. I judge the contestants as follows.

1. Never mind who actually owns what for trademarks, domain names, hardware. If loyalty counds, who do us oldtimers remember starting the VW movement and helping grow it to where it is?

2. Which side has a functioning website, one week later, and seems able to continue to provide us a home for our activities?

Since neither side appears at this point to have access to or be putting up a lot of recognizable archived content from the past, and neither side has presented any details of legal proceedings to do so other than threats, content potential must be judged on other factors.

3. Which site appears to have the most recognizable VW members contributing / posting at present, and which do we judge most likely to provide a home for the atmosphere we used to enjoy?

4. Do the current 'faces' talking for VW, or those talking for VC, represent what we've come to know and be comfortable with?

5. Which side appears to be working with their contributors to improve things rapidly, or viewed differently, appears to have an effective response to the current situation and be holding up to what they have said will happen?

6. Which side appears to have its priorities placed most correctly?

7. Which side appears to be most trustworthy with your data / cash?


On those criteria, I judge the contest to date as follows:
1: VC
2: VC
3: hard to call yet
4: VC
5: VC
6: VC
7: Neither - there are a lot of questions we need answers to.

Sorry, VW crew. I've been giving this a chance, and I've been waiting for improvement...and I'm still here, lurking, but anyone with one eye can see the score is VC:5, VW:0 after a week of this. If things don't change soon, I think the writing is on the wall.

[oberon3]

Also, let's summarize my take on the situation to date (but briefer than TheGeneral's informative history).

VW started off simple, and grew into a complex beast of multiple related sites over time. Somewhere along the way, the commercial porn industry crept in, and various affiliate programs tried to stick their nose into things, in various different ways. Some of them were non-intrusive, some not so much (like the much-despised MFF).

For the past year I've seen a steady decline in the quality of service at VW / RC / Homeclips, NOT due to members who continue to be awesome, but it seemed to be a ship without a captain, increasingly so.

Reading between the lines of all the fluff and BS in what both sides have posted, I get the following impressions.

Somewhere along the way 'Igor' and 'Whoever else had an interest in VW / RC' had a falling out.

From what's happened over the past week, it seems Igor took the original vision of RC / VW and anyone with programming talent to make it work with him, leaving public faces at VW who just don't seem to know what it was all about, and are treating it like any other adult site.

There seems to have been some shady business in how the split happened, which leaves it hard for many of us to trust the new site / Igor fully, and leaves the status of monies already spent in limbo.

There seems to be a total lack of an ability to resume business as usual or fix the things that were frustrating many of us on the RC / VW side.

I personally don't feel this is any kind of a ploy to get us to spend cash both places... I'd call this one a split in the family.

What I'd really like to see from both sides is a non-bs statement of vision and intent. There has been too much 'this place will be awsome' and 'the other side sucks' confusing the issue. The real issue is... there's a split. Deal with it. What can we expect in the near term, mid term, and long term for concrete, actual action, and goals?

[sepafun]

I agree with you 100% oberon3.

Another issue that seems to have developed is that apparently now a "moderator" must "approve" the posts to the BBs here. A few replies I entered hours ago have yet to appear.

If we users can't be trusted to talk amongst ourselves, what does that say about the future here.

Censorship is one of the first signs that a repressive regime fears it has lost control of the masses.

As an FYI, I entered this comment at 5:06pm EDT. I wonder if/ when it will show up.

Added the following:
Ah! I see they posted it with the date / time of SUBMISSION, not when they actually got around to reviewing and posting it, which was 11:54pm...6 hour lag time, it sure will be hard to have a fun active thread if that is what we can expect on the VW BBs now.

[DarknLadyJedi]

Also, let's summarize my take on the situation to date (but briefer than TheGeneral's informative history).

VW started off simple, and grew into a complex beast of multiple related sites over time. Somewhere along the way, the commercial porn industry crept in, and various affiliate programs tried to stick their nose into things, in various different ways. Some of them were non-intrusive, some not so much (like the much-despised MFF).

For the past year I've seen a steady decline in the quality of service at VW / RC / Homeclips, NOT due to members who continue to be awesome, but it seemed to be a ship without a captain, increasingly so.

Reading between the lines of all the fluff and BS in what both sides have posted, I get the following impressions.

Somewhere along the way 'Igor' and 'Whoever else had an interest in VW / RC' had a falling out.

From what's happened over the past week, it seems Igor took the original vision of RC / VW and anyone with programming talent to make it work with him, leaving public faces at VW who just don't seem to know what it was all about, and are treating it like any other adult site.

There seems to have been some shady business in how the split happened, which leaves it hard for many of us to trust the new site / Igor fully, and leaves the status of monies already spent in limbo.

There seems to be a total lack of an ability to resume business as usual or fix the things that were frustrating many of us on the RC / VW side.

I personally don't feel this is any kind of a ploy to get us to spend cash both places... I'd call this one a split in the family.

What I'd really like to see from both sides is a non-bs statement of vision and intent. There has been too much 'this place will be awsome' and 'the other side sucks' confusing the issue. The real issue is... there's a split. Deal with it. What can we expect in the near term, mid term, and long term for concrete, actual action, and goals?

Wow, really well put. Especially the last paragraph.

[MadisonWI]

I, too, have been here in one form or another for over a dozen years. Like many, I have also been suspicious / disappointed in how this whole mess has been handled.

Neither side has posted any substantiation of its legal claims.

Both sides have resorted to unprofessional name calling in their "official" statements, that have left me with the opinion that both sides are run by a group of children.

Both sides appear to share quite a bit of blame. If a theft of data occurred, the other side is certainly guilty of allowing it to happen (and allowing a supposed individual to claim quite openly to owning the site for many years without correction).

But at the end of the day it is all going to come down to which side treats members with respect and provides the content those members pay for. I've already decided that I won't be switching over to VC, but have yet to make up my mind as to whether I'll be continuing my memberships with VW when they expire next month.

I have been completely unimpressed with VW's "official" statements and its "spokesperson's" unprofessional behaviour. I don't care what you think of a former employee (thief or not) you don't make a point of refering to them as "puny" in official statements... grow up.

Oh, and let's not forget that over a week later, there's still no content. It should have taken less than a day to get the site back up with new admin usernames and passwords to prevent further theft. If you want to redesign the site, go for it, but at least get the old site back up first. It is called business continuity. Every day that your site is down, you will be losing members.

[oberon3]

Here's VC's comment on the technical aspects of getting things back up and running, for interest's sake, and in response to why neither side seems to be running the base site they had previously:

"Fuck boobytraps. It is much more simple than that! The good old VW had probably around 1 million lines of coding. We started with around 200k with VW 2.0 in 2005...and then just added: VW contributors lounge, cross linking from VW to RC/HC, and and and....it was a nitemare at the end.
Now: The people who hijacked the URL and show under VW right now don't have a single line of code. What they have is a frozen version of all the sites from 9th June, thats it. Why is that? Because the code was with the 3rd parties...and is still with the 3rd parties. I can ask them to re-activate it right now, but there is no point in it, because the base architecture of the programming code is outdated and adding more and more shit to it won't help the case.
The underlying code and base architecture of VC is based on 2012 technology. You will see very soon an iPhone version, Android upload pages and god knows what. However today you see less features..ok...give it less than 3 weeks and you will see more features than you ever saw on VW.
Promissed!

Igor"

[oberon3]

Wow, really well put. Especially the last paragraph.

After reading your posts, however, I realize that what mine was missing was the wet bikini shots to really focus people's attention in

[DarknLadyJedi]

Wow, really well put. Especially the last paragraph.

After reading your posts, however, I realize that what mine was missing was the wet bikini shots to really focus people's attention in

There is an edit function, add them in!

[oberon3]

Wow, really well put. Especially the last paragraph.

After reading your posts, however, I realize that what mine was missing was the wet bikini shots to really focus people's attention in

There is an edit function, add them in!

Well, yes, but all of mine would be old recycled RC / VW content. There's no fun in that :>

[oberon3]

Well, VC has ponied up some comments with respect to their vision / plans... so since it's pertinent here, I've reposted from VC without comment:

To Rugroller,
I am glad you showed up on VC BB and I know you were one of the best contributors to Homeclips.
Regarding manual processing: There is no manual processing on the vids. The Logo "********" is a feature of the player and not put on the clip source itself. If any clips now shows any other text on it, it must have been on submitted source files (at least thats what I was just told by the three people dealing with the video compressing and formatting).

But that is really of minor importance. The real important issue is:

You submitted your content to Voyeurweb. What and who is Voyeurweb? Is Voyeurweb a person/company which was one one of the networked VW-parties and was only responsible for billing and money distribution and nothing else? Is Voyeurweb the person, who hijacked the domain name registration access and then pointed the Voyeurweb.com domain to a little server by Godaddy?

Or: Is Voyeurweb a combination of
- the Voyeurweb community (the viewers and contributors) plus
- the former Voyeurweb-network of persons and companies which worked all together to make it happen
- the Voyeurweb "spirit" ?

I believe the 2nd answer is the correct answer. The entire former VW networked partners (with the exception of the person/company who rerouted the domain name to what you currently see under that domain) believe the same. You, and many others submitted your content to the former VW network and the former VW network published your work under whatever URL was the proper one, like for example HC. (It was stated on for 15 years on the VW upload page). Due to the hijack of the VW URL and much more (explained in my letter) the parties who actually altogether handled the content, the operation and almost everything else but billing of all of the former VW sites, believe that proper URL at this time is VC. The billing company does not own a single server, not a single line of coding, not one byte of content and did not operate any internet network lines and did not even pay for those.

And there is much more from the legal point of view, which I cannot explain in public due to obvious reasons.

Having said all that, I am kind of surprised that you did not notice yet that persons who have locked out the other ex-VW-parties from the domain registration and rerouted all viewers who expect to reach the real VW when typing in voyeurweb.com have nothing to do with the former VW: They contradict themselves all the time. The spirit, rules, censorship, type of language, style, titles (director??), decision finding (board meetings??), libel, slander and and and: That was never VW. On the other hand you find all the 15 years of the key elements which made VW at VC now! The only remaining "little" missing piece is to point the Voyeurweb domain to VC and to then rename VC to VW. The first legal steps into that direction have of course already been launched, but don't expect that to happen overnight!

And here is why I am glad you brought all this up: I know contributors need to be better informed. During tomorrow's "legal" hour VC will bring up exactly this point and suggest to the VC'S lawyers, that a legal firm should email all former VW contributors and explain the situation to them plus link to a form, which allows fast removal. Let's see what they say.

However already right now VC has no problems with fast removals - thats common sense. Simple email VC under webmaster and copy and paste the URLs in question. So far VC received 28 removal requests and 19 of them were revoked after the contributors had more time to look into things and to understand who is really who....

And one more thing: I am kind of puzzled by the things I am accused by the other side to have taken with me: First they said I took the payment databases, 2 days later they stepped back from that allegation. Later they said I took the email databases, all the million lines of programming (I think they stepped back from that too), the entire content. Next what? The secretary of Mr.Ego and his Rolls?

Nah..I did not take any of these, zero. Neither did any 3rd party as far as I know....


Last not least: I would be very happy if you would email me to further discus this issue. There is much more to say about this, but a) I am not a friend if public "dirty laundry" and leave that to VC's lawyers which are working on the VWLeaks documentation b) was basically advised by VC lawyers to my shut big mouth a little bit for now until they finished a bunch of legal steps.