[redruggers]

Last night's "Message from the VoyeurWeb Team states:

So, today, after 4-weeks of down time, we go live and return VW to you, the true people who own VW. The happiness we have in being able to tell you this is truly indescribable.

Many hours of work remain to be done on the site whether it will be apparent to you or not, deep scars were inflicted into the database by the thief which will require a little while longer to fix. We have realized that a “feast” is long overdue after this long 4-week starvation so we have decided to open up RedClouds, HomeClips and FunBags FREE to all VoyeurWebbers for a period of time until further notice.

As a longtime contributors with about 35 videos in the HomeClips database (all copyrighted to us), most of which won prizes, we are presumably among those "true people who own VW."

We object in the strongest possible terms to opening the member sections to free access, not only to all VoyeurWebbers, but to all internet users -- including malicious software designed to harvest precisely such databases -- for any period of time whatsoever. We were outraged that Igor reposted our material on another site without consulting us, but at least it remained behind a pay wall.

Our submissions to HomeClips have all been made with an assumption that they would remain behind a pay wall in order to reduce widespread piracy and access by minors. The same is true for many others who submitted to the explicit pay sites. This may be something that the current management of VW did not understand when deciding to open these sections. Consultation with contributors and members could have prevented this misunderstanding.

Much of the damage may already be done with regard to the mass theft of this material, but we implore you to prevent whatever can be prevented by closing these sections immediately and reopening them only after you have reestablished a membership and member log-in system.

We will be requiring you to take down all of our submissions immediately unless these concerns are addressed by Monday evening.

[trinityxxx]

I couldn't agree more with Redruggers.....my thoughts exactly. Well said my friend.

VW crew please stop the free feature and try to protect your loyal contributors.

[FAQ]

List each specific URL to VW for removal.

The violation of trust is a huge deal to many. Some contributors posted to VW with faces hidden, but to RC with faces shown. To VW, they had plausible denial if someone they knew suspected recognizing them. Now, their children, family, friends, pastor, neighbors, employer, and the leech down the street will see them with a simple link spread through their personal networks.

I agree, had Kathy, Ghost, or Diego even suggested such an idea on this BB anytime in the past four weeks, they would have learned what the contributors desired. This is totally different from the VW we knew for the past several years. Ideas were discussed. The BB community was given the opportunity to be the sample polling data.

Now, the "owner" calls a Board meeting in private, and decisions are made without contributors' input or knowledge. Seems Corporate Voyeurweb has arrived.

[shadowrydr]

List each specific URL to VW for removal.

Faq, do you have any idea how retarded that statement is?

Some people posted indiscriminately on RC for years on end. To even suggest they should have to request each and every URL be taken down is the height of arrogance.

Now I know you have been a Igor butt kisser of the highest order over the years, but Igor ain't even here man!

[DarknLadyJedi]

List each specific URL to VW for removal.

Faq, do you have any idea how retarded that statement is?

Some people posted indiscriminately on RC for years on end. To even suggest they should have to request each and every URL be taken down is the height of arrogance.

Now I know you have been a Igor butt kisser of the highest order over the years, but Igor ain't even here man!

It's the same thing over at VC, you have to give them the specific URL even though it was taken from where you originally intended it to be. And if you were not a member of RC or HC at the time they went down yyou have to pay in order to look for your pictures. Especially in the HOF.

[shadowrydr]

List each specific URL to VW for removal.

Faq, do you have any idea how retarded that statement is?

Some people posted indiscriminately on RC for years on end. To even suggest they should have to request each and every URL be taken down is the height of arrogance.

Now I know you have been a Igor butt kisser of the highest order over the years, but Igor ain't even here man!

It's the same thing over at VC, you have to give them the specific URL even though it was taken from where you originally intended it to be. And if you were not a member of RC or HC at the time they went down yyou have to pay in order to look for your pictures. Especially in the HOF.

An abject lesson in posting things on the internet.

[FAQ]

List each specific URL to VW for removal.

Faq, do you have any idea how retarded that statement is?

Some people posted indiscriminately on RC for years on end. To even suggest they should have to request each and every URL be taken down is the height of arrogance.

Now I know you have been a Igor butt kisser of the highest order over the years, but Igor ain't even here man!

It's the same thing over at VC, you have to give them the specific URL even though it was taken from where you originally intended it to be. And if you were not a member of RC or HC at the time they went down yyou have to pay in order to look for your pictures. Especially in the HOF.

Retarded or not, it is the only means to get proper action.

You are assuming every instance is cross referenced that All VW has to do is enter your name, and magically, the content disappears. It simply does not work that way. You have to make easy on VW to find your content. Or you can wait and see of the dozens of content pages that half were originally found, then you send another request, and they find half of the rest. Maybe six months later, they finally get rid of all of the content you wanted gone "immediately."

[DarknLadyJedi]

Since VW came back up I have gotten emails from three different contributors all basically saying the same thing.
They posted to pay sites to allow some form of protection towards the content they were posting.

While I applaud VoyeurWeb for recognizing that they needed to do something I now feel that the opening of Redclouds, Homeclips, and Funbags in such an unrestricted manner is a bad idea. Especially in light of what Canada is currently experiencing with Justice Douglas.

I believe that if VW wants to provide a free trial membership to these areas it should at a minimum do so by making people register, even without a credit card. Providing some form of protection in the form of captcha software would at least slow down the more basic bots. Forcing a $1 membership fee for a select amount of time would do much more for providing safety and security for these areas.

[Ghost]

we shall take your concerns to vw management.
also pls note that this is only a beta test for the sites ... and services rendered now are only temporary and stands just for a few more days... until the final touches are made to the site and back to business as usual.

[Sherlock]

Seems like this IS business as usual!

[cerebio]

Hi all,

In this continuing drama, the board style templates have been messed up and anyone who was using a different style template can no longer log in to the board. It's a catch-22, they need to log in to change it and they can't log in because of it. This also makes it rather difficult to make this known other than by e-mail to the admins whose responsiveness has been .... less than adequate perhaps.

Rug Rollers (aka Red Rugger due to purgatory) are unfortunately among those who have this issue. Hence he has suddenly gone quiet. He has however been in e-mail communication with VW and has now asked me to post the following.

Cheers,
cerebio

---------------------------------

KATE -- Nothing has changed this morning! No further news from you. All pay sites are freely accessible. The only word from admin on this issue in response to the scores of concerned and outraged posts on the BB yesterday is Ghosts bland statement on the TRUE PEOPLE thread that "we shall take your concerns to vw management," but you told me you already took it to your boss last night and they were deciding what to do about it. So is this the decision then? Do nothing and hope the storm passes?

I also got an absolutely moronic reply from Ghost about this myself -- it's clear he doesn't have the faintest clue what is going on. Is there something wrong with him?

And I seem to be somehow blocked from accessing the BB from my userid -- there's no "banned" statement, just "General Error -- Template path could not be found: styles/subsilver2/template." Am I being silenced again? At least my threads haven't been erased.

Anyway, this is my limit. I told you, this stuff is being harvested and indexed by the minute. I will be sending take downs myself and advising everyone else I know to do the same unless I hear differently within an hour. I will also begin pursuing other legal channels to get this shut down, because I am not confident that my take down requests will be honored.

RR

[Jammer]

The following is copied from "The other site's BB"...I thought it might be of interest to many here...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As of right now, none of the new VW or RC pages are showing as indexed on Google or Bing. I am not at all sure (OK, I am really just guessing), but I think I recall reading once that in Google a page does not go into the index until it is spidered twice, so there may be a window during which if RC is closed, the pages will not go into the index.

Since people are arguing about just how much of a barrier membership is to spreading pictures over the web, I did a quick check of some private show monthly winners vs redclouds regular monthly winners from about a year ago, using a random picture from the contri (using the monthly winners pages, now uncensored at VW).

The sample size is definitely not big enough to be certain, but Google images was only about 3/4 as likely to find the RC picture elsewhere on the web vs the VW picture. Whereas the PS were almost always scraped from the page (probably by a bot as there were many repeat offenses by the same site) at least half of the copied RC pictures were clearly posted by the model or I strongly suspect actually were published on the web first.

So I I would guess that the membership roughly triples your chance (or better) of your contribution not ending up roaming free. I suspect a closer look would increase that ratio even further.

[vegasdom]

First we had the stupidity from the Admins. Providing us with great entertainment as they made broken promise after broken promises of a bigger and better VW. When the smoke stopped, we got the same old thing. But now the entertainment of it all has shifted to the contributors.

"Do This Now or I will Seek Legal Action" As if they know how or where to start because just posting that statement shows they don't.

FAQ was correct. The legal (in the US) procedure for demanding a take-down is to list each instance of "violations" - You have to prove its your picture and where it is posted.

As for you "owning" the picture in question, again, in the US, gray area about true copyright protection unless you filed the pics with the US copyright office, its easily disputable...

Than we have the big one "Now all the pics are getting harvested by troll-bots" - Have you gone on to any password trading boards or forums? Any torrent sites?? With about three keystrokes, you can have a valid membership to almost any site. The troll-bots have been there, done that before the melt-down..

For me, its a great time to peek in and see what I missed. The people I remember, the great stories and all the changes. A fun time I know will soon end. Than maybe I will buy a membership because I know now whats in it...

[MrCuke]

If all the content of the pay sections have been readily available for free, then why the curiosity regarding the pay sections now? You shouldn't have missed anything - you could have seen it all already with just three keystrokes!
Obviously this is total Bull on your part - even if some of the content was available, certainly all of it was not. And it is now much easier to get to then even your "three keystrokes". Which means it will be copied and distributed much, much, much more freely then may have been done when it was behind a login screen.
I totally understand the feelings of the contributors. They had at least a modicum of security when all their pictures and videos were behind the membership login. Now, everything is fully exposed. Certainly NOT something they signed up for when they made their contributions.
Also, as a paying member - I feel ripped off. I paid my money to get access to these sites with their exclusive content. Now the very people I paid my money to are letting everybody at it for free! So I've been ripped off! I'm sure there are others that feel the same way.
Certainly, there are those that will take advantage of the free access. What a wonderful marketing idea! I'm sure the movie companies will soon be following suit - by releasing their movies on the net - free for everyone to see before they release them into the theaters! What a great idea! Of course the theater version will have a couple of extra scenes that you what get on the net version!
Brilliance! - NOT!
Most of those people that take advantage of the free access will never drop a dime on the sites when they become pay access only again. Why should they? they already saw most of it for free!
Finally, this is a complete betrayal of many of the contributors. Even if you don't think it is - all that matters is that they think it is a betrayal. Which means they will never contribute to this site again.
So who looses in the end - all of us Voyeur webbers - that's who!

[DarknLadyJedi]

As for you "owning" the picture in question, again, in the US, gray area about true copyright protection unless you filed the pics with the US copyright office, its easily disputable...

Digital images have not had to be filed since 2002 update to the Berne Convention.

[FAQ]

As for you "owning" the picture in question, again, in the US, gray area about true copyright protection unless you filed the pics with the US copyright office, its easily disputable...

Digital images have not had to be filed since 2002 update to the Berne Convention.

True, you own your images from the moment you snap the camera shutter. But to collect monetary damages beyond any real loss, you need to register your copyright. It is quite simple, and you can do it after the fact as well. All you need to do is submit a DVD with thumbnail images, and fill out a form with copyright.gov - many submit a collection for the year or quarter to limit the charge per order.

[Administrator]

Hello everyone,

We will be taking the members area offline for funbags, redclouds and homeclips in the next couple of hours.There is a cluster server migration in progress and we should have everything back to normal by tonight while we get keep trying to better your experience here. The pay pages and the tours are on a few server left that need to be gone through. We are working on this right now.

Thank You
Diego.

[Jammer]

Now that the explicit areas are back under protection, are you going to consider offering free, short term trials to current users that are not members?

[swill]

I had been a member for years but my membership had lapsed, now I can't find an option to join. hopefully that will be fixed soon...

swill

[mastersam]

I learned about RC many years ago from the images dumped regularly by? in UUNET.

The idea that because the sites are briefly open this will then be of great interest to the search engines is very, very funny.

Maybe we should start offering tin foil hat folding video classes. That's going to get a lot more traction.


It's interesting because FetLife uses scripted images so it's much more difficult to copy, one would have to do a screen shot. Search engines can't see the script, just the meta data.

That's another site using the BBPHP, actually inspirational in the sense of I've always wondered what the point of forum software was in a commercial sense. Sorry :ugeek:

Basically anything downloadable on the Internet can be shared. Humans are the source of the migration, not search engines. If someone wants to pull all the images, they sign in and run a script that indexes the site and pulls in all the images. A log in does not stop that. They then can create a site, say I don't know, let's just call it ********? :shock:

Sam

[CLOUZEAU]

Since it's been up again, I didn't notice any update.
Links are broken most of the time
Site is unavailable from time to time
Redcloud is still open (I read it's been closed for a while)

I wouldn't call this a success, a mere step forward :roll:

[KaneOZ]

Homeclips seems to be down right now - is that right or is it just me?