After reading Null’s State of the Union Address concerning Kiwifarms, I have decided to do one for Onionfarms.
The E-Mail Issue: The E-mail registration issue resolved itself. Someone in the Xenforo community had originally helped with setting up an alternative email registration system through Amazon. However, Amazon rejected us. I’m only 100% sure it’s because of some of Kiwifarm’s notoriety has rubbed off on us.
Familiarity : I have gotten a little better handle on Xenforo and put in a privacy notice on people signing up. I have also made improvements on the color scheme with some of the styles.
Stability: We have been with HostGator for a while now. HostGator has pretty responsive to my concerns when there is a problem with the website though at times they tend to be a little slow.
I left GoDaddy because their policy on websites is that they need to be family friendly in terms of content. This was a proactive move and it was better to migrate voluntarily then get kicked off. I was actually considering HostPapa for our site because when I had communicated with them a while back, they said they did not have an issue with what we were hosting. We are protected from Denial of Service attacks through HostGator. Even though the website has been down a few times, it was due to technical problems. There has never been a single instance of Onionarms going down due to Denial of Service attack. We have automatic backups every 6 hours. I hired a developer (overseas from Pakistan) from a freelance site who was familiar with Xenforo to do this by writing code into the root file. His hourly rates were as reasonable as you could get.
Expenses: I had to upgrade from a VPS Plan to a Dedicated Hosting Plan. For now we have two hosting plans but the old VPS plan will expire this month. The Dedicated Hosting Plan is all paid up for 2022( a little under $1600). I got this at a discount so when the plan renews in 2023 at the regular price, I am looking at around just under $3000 for the year. What I am looking at is setting up shop on a site like Zazzle and selling promotional stuff like mousepads, coffee mugs and so forth to help cover costs in addition to cryptocurrency.
As for design graphics and stuff on the promotional items, we can always get a freelance graphic designer at a pretty good rate (particularly from South Asia – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and they are always eager looking for design gigs. It may or may not work, but it is a reasonable chance I am willing to take.
Content: I have recently put up a bunch of Twitter feeds from celebrities. The Twitter feeds are on pages that are clearly stated rather than forums. You cannot post on pages. The feeds are there as an informational source in case anyone is interested.
As for the cows, I have merged a few of the threads to try and “beef” them up and condensed some of them but if you have entertaining material to add, by all means you are certainly encouraged to do so.
There is also another category that I am looking to expand and that is General Public Figures who have been verified on social media (most notably Twitter). People who are verified on Twitter are prominent people in the public eye. They may or may not be lolcows or celebrities but they are public figures. I want to expand this in the same way I want to expand the cows. As for the political cows (i.e. heads of state), I am kind of undecided on this, but I may expand them as well and put them in with the General Public Figures.
In sum, what I am looking at in terms of people content is maybe 40% in the Cowsphere (lolcows and their associates) 35% to 40% in the General Public Figure Section and 25% to 30% for celebrities ((both classical and internet celebrities (i.e. bloggers)) and historical figures. As you may be aware, I am looking to expand the userbase
These percentages are simply off the top of my head. It is by no means cast in stone. The percentages serve as a kind of checks and balances on the content so hopefully we can broaden our userbase (I am still figuring out how to do this) while still being able to gossip about our favorite lolcows while avoiding the pitfalls that Kiwifarms has fallen into. I look forward to 2022 being a productive year and I hope you will to.
Happy New Year Onions.
