Urgent update about links (Patreon)

Hello everyone, this mokujin reporting that we had to deal with yet another cloud service takedown. 

If you've been subscribed for some time you may know this is not the first time this has happened.

Regardless, I was already moving my content to other services so no major damage was done this time. By now all animation links have been restored BUT, there has to be a change in the way I post them from now on.

Let me explain:

The situation started in 2019, when someone seems to have taken a hate boner for me and my content, ever since then, back when I innocently used to share links publicly, got a couple of my cloud services taken down, at first I suspected that it was just copyright claims because of the characters I used, but after some time, I started to getting clues it could have been a very specific group of people or just one person. Personally, I couldn't care enough about their reasons, nor I would stop sharing content because of these people, that was never in my mind. But the danger is there non the less.

To avoid it, I started to limit the sharing of my links to only here on patreon. Now I highly doubt this person would actually subscribe to me just to report to my content, that's absurd. So there was only one other way they could've gotten access to my links, piracy.

Now I'm aware piracy has always been a thing, my personal opinion about it is that's not as harmful as it looks, to be honest the only reason I constantly used to change links and update them was to be fair to all my subscribers, so yeah I constantly updated links to my animations just for you guys, It's not fair for you to be subscribed to get access my content otherwise. And regardless, 99% of my content is public anyway, my models, animations all get public versions eventually. So these people are just doing it for the sake of doing it. Again no hate towards that for just existing, (I even had subscribers confess to me that's how they found me to begin with, so hey, thanks for coming around <3). 

But if that was the only issue, which seems to have been for a while. I would've been more at ease with how things are. 

Sadly, these people seem to be using that access to my links to give take down notices and mass reports of my content. 

So far, the only service I had no issue with has been gofile, so I continue to use it for now, but you never know how those sites can go in the future.

But how they do it? Sites like Mega, Pixeldrain, mediafire and even dropbox and gdrive seem to use simple bots to collect the take down reports people give them, meaning that if something gets reported enough times, it'll be taken down without a doubt.

Some sites give you the chance to fight these but most of the time is pointless, some pages like mega and pixeldrain won't even get back at you, all these people need is a vpn, so they can report things with multiple IPs (I was even shown this by a creator live on a discord call) and sometimes multiple emails (Not even that for some sites). 

So yeah, as a creator that shares content, I have all to lose here. For every takedown, is a waste of time re-uploading content, and putting it back on the site. That's time I would have love to be spending in animating and making models (this whole deal took me 3 days by the way). So I have to do something about it.

My options are:

Make my own site: 

I've seen and been recommended this by multiple creators. Basically I could make my own website where I'll store the links and it can be only be accessed with a patreon linked access only. I'm not 100% leaning into this yet, but I'm considering it, and I'm aware of how it's done and that it works fine for some of my mutual creator friends. So it's a valid option.

Discord Server exclusive access content:

Basically just share the links on a discord server dedicated to this patreon page, again, this is a valid option and I'm aware many of my content creators use this. BUT, personally I have many reasons for why this won't work for me. At least with my current schedule. 

I don't have the time to curate a server (with so much hacking happening on that platform after all, I won't be able to be on it 24/7), I don't wanna ask anybody to do it for me just yet (sorry no mod requests from me), and even so I'm aware that discord content links can be leaked too on certain websites, so it's pointless and it will just require more work to keep the links updated. But more importantly,  I just don't trust discord lol.

And finally, the option I'm going for now is:

Centralize links in archive folders:

I know it sounds absurd, centralizing links could get them taken down more easily but no, not really. 

I always had my archive folders available for everyone, those of course got leaked a couple of times too, but, it's easier to keep those links updated that way instead of every single post I make, I will of course also keep them updated from time to time, but, that way I will be able to manage and sort my content more cleanly too.

I will try this method for now. The sad true is that regardless of what I chose to make, I will have to make you guys take extra steps to get access to my content from now on. Which sucks I know! But, that's the only way to keep my content safe. If it was just leaks and re-posting, I could deal with that and do what I've always done, but having years of my content being in danger to be taken down was a no go. I had to do something.

From now on, I will post the links to the archives on every post I make, I will also try to at least share a public sample using an alternative account to give an idea to how things will look like to you. Which is another extra step but it's necessary. I'll understand if you feel like this is pointless and you don't wanna stick around anymore because of these extra steps, but regardless, just know I appreciate the support you keep giving me, all I do when it comes to uploading, keeping content links safe and updated is for you guys, is the least I can do. 

I hope we keep can enjoying this ride together and I certainly hope I can go back focusing on just making my content now.

Cheers!