Discussion thread.

http://swfchan.com/patreon.shtml

After a two week testing period (old discussion here: http://swfchan.org/7666/) it's time to announce the Patreon on the rest of the site. With a bit of luck the ads will be gone from swfchan by this time next year. If you're interested in supporting me supporting the site head on over to the page linked in the previous post for details.

Nothing extravagant but it would be nice to have some sort of physical token I could parade around to show that I supported swfchan (whether people would be interested or not)

I'm very happy to say that banners are now gone from swfchan.org after this first month of Patreon!

A big thank you goes out to everybody that is supporting the site!

I've updated the patreon page here on swfchan with information on exactly how much money that was received this month. Turns out that in the end I actually get 85% of the pledged money into my bank account. That's not too high of a price to pay for being on Patreon, 15% is a pretty reasonable amount for fees when considering that it also includes PayPal's cut.

The global announcement on swfchan concerning the site's venture to Patreon has also been taken down. It remains to be seen if this will affect the number of new supporters coming in, hopefully the Patreon logo next to the swfchan logo at the top of every page is enough to catch people's attention.

I love to support all different kinds of porn (I predominately browse the "porn" section, so that's why I say that) so I'm really glad to see that's being offered here! My patreon account is almost solely for gay porn :P

It's been 9 days since I removed the global announcement concerning Patreon from the site and it has become pretty obvious that most people won't be clicking the Patreon logo next to the site's logo out of curiosity.

Therefore I've changed flash.asp to show a message below the GET FILE form that explains that swfchan is on Patreon and why (to remove the ads), as well as mentioning that you can get less captchas by becoming a supporter. The message will automatically become hidden after the visitor watches his first flash but this should help a lot to make people actually notice the Patreon page.

>>24478
Supporting porn is a noble cause, I thank you.

The star thing will happen as soon as a 10-bucks-or-more supporter lets me know that they want flashes on there so if you are interested you can tell me your 10 picks and I will start setting up star.swfchan.com. Just post links to the flashes in the archive with your desired file name, like this for example:
http://swfchan.com/2/6959/?all_your_base.swf

The "nag messages" that appeared for people blocking ads are now gone.

Big thanks to everybody that has donated, new and old! Especially the 32 USD and 25 USD supporters, you guys rock!

This month has been slow (to say the least) in support gain, without Mr 32 the second milestone wouldn't have been reached at all. 5 people decided to stop supporting and 5 decided to start. At least one of those that stopped never really started, they signed up and then dropped out before the first actual donation (why Patron allows this is beyond my comprehension, the logical thing would be to reserve at least the first donation to prevent abuse).

There's two possibilities as to why swfchan went +-0 supporters this month. Either there's simply not enough people that want to support or it's because possible supporters aren't aware of swfchan's Patreon. Since the first possibility is pretty discouraging I hope it's the second one. I might have been too modest in promoting the Patreon this month, a small one-time-only message in gray text below everything else just doesn't cut it.

Now there's a huge rotating Patreon cube floating up and down in a purple box right above the GET FILE form, with big colorful text that explains that swfchan is on Patreon and why.

It will still disappear after the visitor gets his first flash but now there's no way that people won't notice that the site has a Patreon. Of course this doesn't have to mean that more people will sign up during November but at least then I will know it's not due to people being unaware.

Just wanted to let you know! I never actually saw the "huge" (not really) floating Patreon cube before checking it out after reading through this thread, the header icon does draw some attention to it if you know what that icon stands for.
Also, I didn't not know this site was built by such a cool guy ;)

Troublesome to hear that you didn't notice that floating Patreon cube though, I thought for sure that would be enough to catch everybody's attention. Man I dunno what else I can do to ensure people at least know about the Patreon, without making it way too annoying.

Maybe I'll add some more whitespace around the cube so it stands out more? Making the purple background look less like a banner in shape is probably a good idea as well, I suppose people just filter those kind of shapes out of their mind. Have to think about this a little.

The last time I used swfchan before yesterday was probably 2 or 3 weeks ago. And then yesterday I clicked that Patreon icon in the header before actually viewing / downloading any files.

Of course I'm happy for swfchan, but I'm also thrilled to see that it is possible to use crowdfunding without both parties losing their anonymity.

If anything I'm thinking about making it so that people need to hide the Patreon message themselves by double-clicking the rotating cube once (without the need to actually visit the Patreon page of course, I'll remove the current link from the cube if I make this change). That way it really is guaranteed to be noticed by everybody since it will stay there until the visitor read how to get rid of it.

I haven't decided if a double-click is too much to ask for or not, might be too bothersome. But it would ensure that even people that filter out parts of a webpage will see the Patreon message, eventually.

>Flash format
...
yeah, forget about that

fyi, I still use a square monitor with 1024 :P

Of course some manufacturers make retardedly high pixel density 1920x1080 10" netbook screens, but those are the really unusable ones. Software DPI scaling is still a relatively new thing and often lacking.

>>25605
Hey, I too I would still use my old huge 5:4 1280x1024 LCD for retro gaming... if it hadn't died recently. :( And nowadays it's cheaper and easier to buy yet another 1920x1080 monitor than a quality 1280x1024 one.

Thanks to all of you for another month of support! We didn't reach a milestone this time but at least things aren't going backwards yet. As usual I'd like to give extra thanks to Mr 25 and Mr 32!

And a Happy New Year! Thanks to all of you, extra thanks to Mr 25 and Mr 32! No milestone this month either, 180 is hard to reach. We're still not going backwards though, last month I got $112.69 and this month it was $121.92.

It seems like Patreon has made changes to how the total pledge amount is displayed on user's public profile. Right now I have the following written in my account: "Total pledged $129.00 from 22 patron pledges". But on the public profile it says "22 patrons $117.21 per month", so they now seem to display the amount that the creator actually gets. I think I preferred it the other way around simply because it looked nicer, even though doing it this way could lead to larger pledges since people will see exactly how much their own pledge added to the amount actually received.

I think I accidentally deleted two 5 USD pledgers as well... They were listed as "declined" on my list of supporters so I thought they had stopped pledging and deleted them... But if I look in the log I apparently had 139 pledged for the month of December, not 129 like it says now. Uh-oh! Apparently they had upgraded their pledges to 5 USD and due to reasons unknown were listed as declined in my list of supporters. Guess it was because their old pledges got "declined" but it doesn't make sense to list them as such since their new pledges went through. I'm sorry, come back! ;__;

Thanks to all of you for another month of support! Extra thanks to Mr 25! Unfortunately Mr 32 decided that the previous month was his last as a supporter so this month we went backwards, actually reversing the previous milestone (which is the third one, about the "please consider unblocking" nag-messages). I've decided not to re-enable those though, it's just too sad.

I'd like to give extra thanks to Mr 32 one last time, in these last couple of months you've donated more than most other supporters will do even if they stay for over a year and I really appreciate that dude. Only Mr 25 have donated more (with a steady lead). Naturally this doesn't lessen how grateful I am to everybody else, you're all awesome, I just wan't to give recognition to this fact in case he reads this.

Boy, the fourth milestone turned out to be really hard to reach I tell you what. Although surely that just means it will feel even better once we're finally up there, won't it?

I'm much obliged to you all for another month of support! There's another one donating 25 bucks now, extra thanks to both of you! Looks like he might have appeared before the end of the previous month actually but must have not shown up in my "Patron Manager" for some reason. This month we've recovered from last time's dip and as faith would have it we're back to exactly where the total amount of patronage was at the end of december, according to the payout logs.

Thanks to all of you who have donated! This month we went backwards two bucks. Hey, at least it wasn't three bucks. Extra thanks as always to the two Mr 25 patreons!

Thanks to all of you who have donated! This month we went forwards one whole dollar. If the trend continues we'll be back to February in just another month! Extra thanks goes to the two Mr 25 patreons.

This month we gained 0 patreons and dropped 1, meaning back 5 bucks. Reaching the first big milestone of 256 USD (no banner ads on any domain) sure was harder than I had hoped. On the 7:th September of last year in this thread I wrote, "with a bit of luck the ads will be gone from swfchan by this time next year". Now it's just the summer that remains and with not even the banners gone it looks like a lot of luck is needed, not just a bit.

As usual I'd like to thank the 25 patreons that I've got, with extra thanks to the two big ones.

One five bucks donor lost but thankfully another one increased their pledge by four bucks so there was just a one buck drop this month. Big thanks to all of you donating, especially the twenty fivers!

This month we went minus two donors and plus two donors. However the two that left were $10 patreons so it still meant minus 15 bucks in total. One of them left a message explaining why he had to stop though, that's always nice to know. Anyway, big thanks to the 24 patreons still around and extra big thanks to the big two!

(Though I will probably only pledge like 3 months or so, if that is okay with you)

>>38441
I'd be happy with any amount of time, thanks!

I ask because when i try to register for a Gold Account it says "There's no pending account for that e-mail."

I pledged yesterday.

Edit: Looks like they have an API now. That's good, I'll look at using that instead of my own when I fix things. Afterwards this shouldn't happen again.

That marks the end of year one on Patreon. This month brought 114 USD by 27 donors (3 deleted their pledge during August and 6 added their pledge). Big cheers to you all, especially the big two 25 USD patreons!

It's not marked as a deleted pledge yet but I can see that one of the 25 donors are missing in the current list of active donors, which means that he deleted his pledge after this month's payment was processed. Thanks for your donations during this time man!

As many probably have noticed I've started doing a new thing 2 weeks ago: Asking for supporters on Patreon directly (twice per month via the global message at the top of .com and .net). Just so happens that the message is up again today. I got the epiphany after hearing a YouTuber explain that it simply wasn't enough to show people that you have a Patreon, you have to actively ask them to pledge. Seems to be working; five of those six supporters last month was gained while the message was up. One so far duing today's message (>>38887). Update: Ended up as the only one today.

I certainly won't expect five new donors every time the message is up, an increase of one pledge each month would make me glad. It's been a tough year, the highest we've been at is ~125 USD in December 2015, March 2016 and May 2016. Between those months the amount dipped and it's been going down ever since May to last month where it was at 103 USD.

It started to feel like the first big milestone of 256 USD was never going to be achieved. That makes this month's increase to 114 USD feel like more than 11 bucks, I'm very pleased that the global messages are doing something. It's a bit early to be optimistic but in these days of dwindling interest in the flash format you gotta be happy for what you get! Maybe an ad-free site can be possible after all?

Such were the events in Sicily.

Thanks to all of you who has been donating, new and old! Especially Mr 25, as usual.

Edit: Looks like the other Mr 25 who I wrote about last month didn't go away, he just changed his amount to 5. Thanks for still sticking around, I appreciate it.

I have a decent leftover of computing power on one of my root's.
I could donate that. :D

Looking forward to the October report.

Last month one guy went out and another went in, both at 5 bucks. So in total money-wise nothing changed from september. It looks like the global message I talked about in >>38890 only worked wonders once, it'll keep appearing twice a month though since it should still do more good than harm.

I've removed a reward at tier 10 USD: "You can pick 10 flashes to be permanently hosted on star.swfchan.com, which allows hotlinking (optional). I reserve the right to veto certain flashes though, for example redirectors. Veto can be carried out in retrospect." My reasoning for this is that nobody has been interested in that for over a year now and at this point it feels like it would be a hassle to set it up for just one guy if somebody does come along and wish upon a star.

But I've also improved a reward at tier 1 USD, we're going from "No ads on flash.asp while signed in" to "No ads on the whole site while signed in". I didn't have it like that before due to the reason "can't remove ads from the whole site since there are so many static pages" but thanks to some cross-domain JavaScript trickery I've now been able to disable all ads no matter where they are. This includes banners as well as popups. Non-donors might be glad to hear that this should reduce the amount of pops you get as well, at least a little bit.

Thanks to all donors! Especially Mr 25, who's still around.

We can't really influence peoples available finances.

And since it's impossible to recruit for this site, well...
I know, I've been trying since merely mentioning SWFants would net you an almost guaranteed instaban on niggertits.

Fuck you.

Admin, please let us know if there's any chance to get the patreon back.

Hm, "suspended". I mailed them yesterday and asked what's going on. No response yet but I don't see how thebackers.club is breaking any of their rules.

I asked before setting up my account if it's OK to indirectly request support for other sites by linking to my Patreon, even though that Patreon has nothing to do with those other sites. I even said those other sites may have clean and adult content mixed together. The response was quite straightforward: "That sounds completely fine to me :) GO FOR IT". Not much room for interpretation.

They sent a payment of 92.62 USD before disabling my account. I'd like to thank everybody for this month's support! Perhaps the very last one. Extra thanks to Mr 25, I can't log in to confirm that you're still around but by using a bit of math it looks like you are.

If Patreon has a problem with thebackers.club I hope they will allow me to change my account to be about The Swiff Army Knife instead. It's 100% clean since it's only a tool for editing, swfchan is just the host site of that project. Then I can make official reward tiers to increase how much money the host gets every month, which in turn will be used by the host to pay for stuff, which reduces the number of ads required on the host site. As long as I remove all ads from http://tools.swfchan.com/ it'll be completely non-adult and the Patreon page will be directly related to it. I can even make a custom layout for that page if they want, in case the header is a problem. In fact I'll do that right now so it's prepared.

Patreon hasn't responded to any of my e-mails so far. I can't believe they just disable accounts without warning and then don't give any explanation to what's going on.

There was spam advertising SWFchan aggressively and m00t ended up being so pissed that he made an autoban for it.
Haven't used that shithole since 2011 or something, so no idea what Facebook v2 - Now with dickgirls and cuckoldry! is up too these days.

Basically my comment was a smartass version of "I've been here since the beginning, and recruiting never really worked"

Also, there are more people visiting this site, than here on .org and I can't think of anyone not being able to spare 3 bucks a month (apart from homeless furry porn artists maybe?), that would help obviously.
It's less about recruiting at this point, more that people already here regularely (think of ALL the furry porn) would step in collectively.

>I can't think of anyone not being able to spare 3 bucks a month
Hence my point about controlling peoples finances, I'm sure the ones donating are already giving what they can.

>more that people already here regularely would step in collectively.
I don't know how that's gonna happen.
If they are regulars and haven't donated yet, they don't care.

I'm afraid this is the end of the line. Patreon sent me an e-mail some hours ago telling me that my account has been removed, one week after they told me it was suspended. They've completely ignored all my attempts at contacting them, even though they provided a link in the e-mails telling me to "reach out to them" if I believe the action was taken in error.

If >>41677 is still around I'd be very interested in seeing exactly what you told them. It's ridiculous that a single complaint can completely shut down an account without the owner being given the reason why and without him being allowed to defend himself. This poor experience reminds me of a long video made by Eli the Computer Guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irqSC7izVPE) in which he describes his experience with Patreon after his account got hacked. Long story short they didn't really act as if the issue was serious. This is how Patreon conduct business?

There's actually no hard proof I have any connection with that Patreon account in the first place, I could just be some guy pretending to be the owner. What if I now start to pretend being the owner of some other account, can we get it shut down with a single complaint as well? Their automated e-mails are a bit annoying for my taste as well, saying things like "Woohoo - you just got paid!" like they are my buddy instead of a huge company. It's a little like the smiley in Window 10's blue screen. Keep it formal where formal's due, please. What's with doing these things on Saturdays anyway, don't they have regular business weeks or do they always deal with suspension and removals during the weekend?

Unrelated but another odd thing about Patreon is their guidelines that says "Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. Think of the policy as allowing 'R Rated' movies... but not porn. In keeping with our strong commitment to safety, we have zero tolerance for content that sexualizes children in any way. The glorification of rape and sexual violence is also not ok". But after a quick look at https://graphtreon.com/all-patreon-creators (select "NSFW only") it doesn't take long before finding porn. Not art, not "sexual expression" or suggestive imagery, just plain porn.

I wouldn't be surprised to find loli in some of the top accounts either and there's plenty of "glorification of rape and sexual violence" to go around. What's the difference between "sexual expression" and the hardest of the hardcore porn anyway? When exactly does rape become "glorified"? Those guidelines were obviously written very vaguely so that Patreon can get away with whatever until people start complaining about something. Then Patreon will claim they didn't know about whatever and suspend the account in question (presumably without the owner getting any chance to defend himself). I'm not saying they need to crack down upon porn artists here but either allow porn or don't. Cowering behind words that mean two things at the same time isn't right. Just be clear and allow it already, it's not like they will make it forbidden now when they are making so much money from porn.

It all started out just fine but I'm very disappointed over how Patreon has turned out. If they had just replied to me in the end, human being to human being, I wouldn't have been this disappointed. You don't just accuse someone of something and walk away! It's possible that another company will come around and do what Patreon does, only better, but it'll probably be hard now because most donating people are locked into Patreon. I did a quick search for Patreon alternatives and it became clear where the money is. It'll probably be extra hard for me to try another service since I'm picky about Anonymity, something that Patreon actually did provide on an acceptable level.

Here are the e-mails in full that I sent to Patreon in preparation of my account last year, for the record. Maybe they will prove useful for someone, but then again, maybe you can't trust their support to relay accurate information?

>[SENT] "Buffer Projects" (in lack of a better subject)
>Hi! I'm running several sites, some of them clean and others that are mixed (have both clean and adult content).
>Would it be alright if I created a Patreon page to fund one of my clean sites and state that "eventual overflow will go towards various other projects or be reserved for future hosting bills and development costs". Then I promote this one Patreon indirectly from all of my sites, asking people to support my other site.
>The Patreon page will only mention the clean site in question, the Patreon page will be fully safe for work. The clean site itself won't have any mention of any other sites.
>I don't see why doing this would be a problem since the Patreon page will be completely honest but I just want to check with you guys that you agree.
>[RECEIVED] ** Your request (44340) has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email. **
>Patreon Staff (Patreon)
>Aug 12, 10:26 AM
>That sounds completely fine to me :)
>GO FOR IT
>Best,
>Patreon
>[SENT] Glad to hear that it is allowed, thanks

I explained what I was going to do and I made it clear here on swfchan that you were supporting thebackers.club and the guy that runs it, which also happens to run swfchan. It sounds shady as fuck, I can agree on that, but they said themselves it was allowed. Had they just been willing to talk with me this past week I would have been perfectly fine with changing what the page was about, to The Swiff Army Knife. But they didn't even hear me out. If thebackers.club was even the problem, I'm just guessing here, have no idea. (I've changed http://tools.swfchan.com/ back to the way it was before btw, little point in keeping the changes mentioned in >>41949.)

So what now? Banners will return on .org, which was the only big milestone we ever hit. I'll wait with it until January though. The "please unblock the ads" nag messages might return but not right now. I dunno if they ever really did anything, maybe I'll experiment with it in the future but they will remain off for now. The "gold accounts" for supporters will disappear, I'll wait with that until January as well. The "auto-skip" feature will become available for everybody though, there's no reason not to do that.

A final thank you to all of you that has donated one time or another over this year, you've made me feel appreciated! We'll see if donations return. Have a Merry Christmas guys and lets make flash even greater than it already is in 2017!

Don't know what drama rides them again, but there IS a "rule" on https://www.patreon.com/guidelines calling for "Authenticity".
Maybe that backersclub site was just too obviously a "scam alert".

Well, no matter what, that army knife is even a better cause for a patreon. Make it legit, remove ads (from there only) and it should be fine, right?

Now just to check .....wowzers!
Breeding Season packed the bags!
Because
>The art director ... has been conspicuously absent lately.
Yeah. LATELY. Guess what.
Turned out the guy was working on other projects while still cashing in hueg amounts of the patreon.
Shocking, amirite?

Happy Holidays everyone! God bless humanity!

You also asked why the account was removed though and I'm at least glad they don't post such sensitive information out in public. As much as I want to know the reason myself finding it out through a public twitter post would have really taken the cake.

I really don't see the reason for refunds at all, it's not like I've been dishonest to any swfchan supporters and even if someone legitimately donated to support thebackers.club then they certainly haven't been scammed - I am the operator of that site as well. This is troubling because PayPal isn't a real bank, they have been known to drain money retrospectively, freeze money, refund money 5 months after shipments etc. They can do almost whatever they want and who knows what Patreon is whispering to them?

>Gotta make that new Swiff Army Knife Patreon soon, Ants.
That was the plan but right now after the way they have treated this situation I really don't want anything to do with them. I'm sure my PayPal e-mail address is banned in their system as well, otherwise their account removal wouldn't really do much. But I dunno, maybe I'll try again next year or the year after that if I can't find any better alternatives. Or maybe ads are enough? They suck though. There's always the lottery.

Good luck with that lottery thing ;)

>>42277
Wow. I guess at this point it's safe to say that patreon has been more of a curse than anything else.
And all of that just because of some angry douche!
Internet at its finest, neither the good nor the bad are spared. Or the ugly.

And there I thought that patreon was kinda a good thing.
Feels very badman that they already crossed the line to cooperate bullshyte in such a short manner of time ...
Welp, time to get that account deleted! (as if)

Welp, looks like it's time to delete my patreon account, and tell everyone I supported exactly why I'm doing this too.

If anyone still want to donate there's always the possibility to buy an ad over at Project Wonderful:
https://www.projectwonderful.com/advertisehere.ph p?id=63728

I tried that several years ago and it didn't work out but the account is still around if anybody wants to do it. Just let me know how much you want to donate and I'll raise the minimum bid of one of the ads to that amount and voila; just like Patreon. Well, almost...

Appreciate the interest in supporting swfchan guys! I've been meaning to get a new monthly donation service going during the summer but I've been playing around with something else as of late. Haven't really settled on any service either. These things are hard for me, took a year just to finally sign up with Patreon. I've been leaning towards https://gratipay.com/ (if they even allow non-open source stuff since I don't really have any of those projects) or https://liberapay.com/ (though they want identity documents at 1k EUR/year). Have also looked at https://ratafire.com/ but they have a strange site layout and few users. Then we have https://www.tipeee.com/ which is basically a "French Patreon" if I understand things correctly. And now there's also https://hatreon.us/ that might be what I've been waiting for depending on how stable they prove to be.

Is there anyone here that has actually used one of these on the receiving or giving end? Or a different one?

>>48726
I haven't done Bitcoin in years now but if you want to send over a fair amount it could be fun to try and convert them to SEK as an experiment. There's always a chance you're one of those early adopters with more BTC than he could ever spend! I've read that the blockchain split recently so you can double spend. ('ω')

I wrote a long-ass post describing a pipe dream of a peer-assisted delivery method based on a pure javascript client for a torrent-like protocol to help non-profit websites cover their hosting costs with seamlessly integrated p2p instead of resorting into the usual methods of begging, ads and/or selling user data... and it turns out THIS SHIT ALREADY EXISTS!

https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

SWFANTS YOU GOTTA LOOK INTO THIS SHIT, IT'S ORGASMIC

>I usually try to build my sites to work without JavaScript too.
That's great and I appreciate it. You could have old scriptless http downloads as the fallback. In fact, that's how it's done in the webtorrent FAQ example of peer-assisted delivery:
>One of the most exciting uses for WebTorrent is peer-assisted delivery. Non-profit projects like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive could reduce bandwidth and hosting costs by letting visitors chip in. Popular content is served browser-to-browser, quickly and cheaply. Rarely-accessed content is served reliably over HTTP from the origin server.
You know best what content to serve via P2P, most popular swf files or something else, like making users seed whatever flashes are already in their browser cache for the swfchan domains. (This way the p2p network won't use any of users' download bandwidth, excluding minimal protocol overhead.)

Checking out how other sites have implemented webtorrent could be a good starting point for you, might be something that's close to your potential use case.
https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent/blob/mas ter/docs/faq.md#who-is-using-webtorrent-today

You see, the issue with P2P solutions like the swfchan mirror thing you had (or sadpanda's H@H network as another example) is that they take too much effort. Even if it's just downloading the client and keeping it running. Unlike sadpanda, you don't have a large enough *dedicated* userbase to make that kind of approach viable. The average/casual user doesn't care enough to go through that even if they would be willing to support the site through p2p. People are lazy creatures especially when it comes to internet services, they want their shit with zero hassle. If everything runs automatically in the background of end-users' browsers, most will just leave it running while they're on the site. Especially if opt-out takes even a minimal amount of extra effort like reading a news post. You would get a huge p2p network compared to the swfchan mirror experiment.

All in all, despite my excitement I don't expect this sort of thing to magically eliminate the need for ads on swfchan, but it could really help with bandwidth.

Was nice to see that E-Hentai's Hentai@Home had succeeded in becoming a working distributed network, I didn't know it existed until late 2013 (a year after I shut down swfchanMirror) but H@H has been around since all the way back in April 1st 2008. Late happy 10th birthday H@H!

As for saving bandwidth on swfchan I use CloudFlare for the most popular flashes in the archive (35-40% of the gets) and all of the flashes on .org are served through CloudFlare. It's a really simple and free solution that works well. I don't think it would be worth the work to implement anything else for swfchan right now, especially if it exposes visitor IPs. Five years ago I would probably have jumped right on it but today I find I'm not as inspired as I once were. Currently have several ideas I want to explore but have trouble getting started.