Discussions pertaining to the longevity of CH accessibility

[high_octane]

This is a dedicated thread to discuss the most adequate methods for ensuring the preservation of Cock Hero media. All contributions and ideas are welcome. As you may or may not be aware, some of book_guy's Mega Sharing Zones have seen better days... They have served this community well for numerous years, but they are not guaranteed to last forever.

Anyway, this thread was inspired by this exchange from the Mega Sharing Zones thread:

Perhaps we should all work together to figure out a new, more robust solution.

This would be a good topic for a new thread. My own solution (Internet Archive CH Library) pretty much failed for a number of reasons...

We need a solution where:

• everyone can contribute

• the content is decentralized

• the downloads are easily locatable (all on one page)

• the content is sortable (but that is a nicety)

Furthermore, I'd like to give a big screeeeeeching to zingg2 for his tireless efforts in creating torrents for each and every CH that is released nowadays. You are a cock hero of epic awesome proportions, my man!

Let's continue the discussions here.

[high_octane]

Here's some information from the Mega Sharing Zones thread by cockherolover:

We need a solution where:

• everyone can contribute

• the content is decentralized

• the downloads are easily locatable (all on one page)

• the content is sortable (but that is a nicety)

What you are describing is a solution which we already have i.e torrenting. We even have a proper pinned thread for that. It's not up-to-date now I know but still... It's just a question of someone taking it over just as doremi did recently with the HD downloads thread. What you did not include in your list of requirements is:

• resilience and longevity

One of the most famous examples in this community is the recovery of boob's Fake Tits Lovers Series (in their original quality of course). There were torrents for that series but they are already long dead. I had those CHs in my private collection, but unfortunately I have lost them as well. There's a tiny chance of recovering them if I find my old RAID matrix... but this is another story...

What I'm trying to say is that in my opinion we need some kind of a hybrid centralized and decentralized solution i.e peer-to-peer and client-server. While I am a true believer in the power of peer-to-peer decentralization I've seen it failing in the long term as well. I remember I was excited for the Joost project a p2p IPTV streaming solution based on FastTrack network, the experiment to add streaming capability to Bittorrent protocol (forgot the name of the project from the top of my head) or a peer-to-peer YouTube like solution PeerTube. But all of these solutions really didn't grow (only stayed on some kind of experimental level). Dead public torrents for CH files I have already described as examples are also an example of non-recoverable loss, but I'm sure there are many more. CH torrents on Empornium are more healthy because of the incentive system, but are not accessible to everyone, so not everyone can contribute and take advantage of that.

But all that rant is not in vain as I would like to share a solution just to start a discussion of how book_guy's sharing zones could be replaced. It's not a great solution but some of you may be inspired to give better ideas. I propose to take a look at Freenet. It's a peer-to-peer sharing platform for content, but I think it's more robust overtime. The content stays on the network as long as from time to time someone accesses it. In a few words it works like this: if you access the content you take part in sharing it at least partially. What I mean that this content stays on your local hard drive and other content from Freenet as well, but you have no idea which content you share because it is encrypted and distributed in parts among users of Freenet. This is what makes the content resilient and gives longevity. The minus of it is that you have to install Freenet software and there have to be enough users of this system to work properly, because if the content is rare it works very slowly. Hell it works slowly even for popular content as it has to retrieve it from all over the Freenet. I haven't yet researched if storing of large files such as CH videos is viable there... Just an idea that maybe is worth exploring.

Another thing to consider in client-server solutions, why rare video content disappears, is that ultimately someone has to pay for storage space and bandwidth, and I haven't seen lately revolutionizing technologies in storage space. Especially now in COVID-19 reality we are all competing for internet resources. Even NetFlix and YouTube have reduced bitrate for HD videos to save bandwidth.

Now on the more positive side, I think what we have achieved in this community: a cyberlocker, torrent and streaming environment is quite healthy, but a bit challenging to maintain overtime.

[doremi]

Subscribed!

Imo, no single solution is possible nowadays, as none are perfect. Downloads rely on an elusive host and torrents rely on a permanent connection and storage. All we really have is each other's. Quoting myself:

We need an archive club. Would Discord be good for that?

Knowing that a few people keep a copy of specific productions, and their prefered data exchange technology would be a big help. As for myself, I have a 'few' productions, but not all of them.

[zenetix]

I have over a terabyte of Cock Hero videos and my collection definitely doesn't contain everything. Depending on who you ask, "Cock Hero" includes things like Fap Hero, Red Light Green Light, RPGMaker games, etc. I think it would be good to have a yearly archival torrent that includes all the obtainable CH content created in the preceding year. Ideally, this would be in addition to the sharing zone. These would be large files, but we would be talking gigabytes rather than a single master torrent containing terabytes.

Also, yes, major props to zingg2 for consistently posting torrents.

[Xardas]

RPGMaker games

Wait, what? The are cock hero RPGs now?

[zenetix]

RPGMaker games

Wait, what? The are cock hero RPGs now?

Pretty much. One of the forum members - mortimer - made a few and I'm aware of a couple others made prior to that. viewtopic.php?f=25&t=21796

[smutreader]

But this also raises the point of whether or not every CH deserves to be preserved. I think there are some that definitely need to be preserved due to the universal appeal and high quality and aesthetic of the production. But do they all? Are all CHs are created equal? Does it ultimately become the job of either the producer of the video or the fans to preserve most of them?

[doremi]

But this also raises the point of whether or not every CH deserves to be preserved.

Do I sense a bit of CH Shaming?

Does it ultimately become the job of either the producer of the video or the fans to preserve most of them?

I say the fans because a backup sheme can't rely on only one solution/person alone. Problem is which fan backed it up? And again, this is not good enough if backed up by only one fan. As for everyday work on computers, backups need to be stored in several offline locations.

[high_octane]

But this also raises the point of whether or not every CH deserves to be preserved. I think there are some that definitely need to be preserved due to the universal appeal and high quality and aesthetic of the production. But do they all? Are all CHs are created equal?

*gasps loudly*

The goal should be to preserve and archive all CH media, even the ones that are less renowned. Let's face it, not one person here has the same list of favorite CHs as another; it's much too subjective. So in the spirit of archiving, yes, all CHs are created equal and should each be given an equal opportunity to be preserved for posterity.

Does it ultimately become the job of either the producer of the video or the fans to preserve most of them?

It's definitely the job of the fans here. In particular, the fans who are interested in archiving CHs. Although, maybe the creator is also interested in archiving their CH... well, I guess it's anyone who is interesting in archiving CHs, then.

EDIT: I'd like to elaborate further on an earlier point I made: this must be performed as a collaborative effort. Relying on a single person to archive all CHs is destined to fail for a number of reasons.

[cockherolover]

I have over a terabyte of Cock Hero videos and my collection definitely doesn't contain everything. Depending on who you ask, "Cock Hero" includes things like Fap Hero, Red Light Green Light, RPGMaker games, etc. I think it would be good to have a yearly archival torrent that includes all the obtainable CH content created in the preceding year. Ideally, this would be in addition to the sharing zone. These would be large files, but we would be talking gigabytes rather than a single master torrent containing terabytes.

Also, yes, major props to zingg2 for consistently posting torrents.

This is a great idea, while I'm able to cherry pick the videos I need from a multi-video torrent, the only concern brought up already by some community members here is that those big collection/yearly torrents could kill the individual torrents released that year: Cock Hero Collection - Request for Missing Vids Thread

We need an archive club. Would Discord be good for that?

You do run a CH database Discord channel already, don't you ?

[zenetix]

I have over a terabyte of Cock Hero videos and my collection definitely doesn't contain everything. Depending on who you ask, "Cock Hero" includes things like Fap Hero, Red Light Green Light, RPGMaker games, etc. I think it would be good to have a yearly archival torrent that includes all the obtainable CH content created in the preceding year. Ideally, this would be in addition to the sharing zone. These would be large files, but we would be talking gigabytes rather than a single master torrent containing terabytes.

Also, yes, major props to zingg2 for consistently posting torrents.

This is a great idea, while I'm able to cherry pick the videos I need from a multi-video torrent, the only concern brought up already by some community members here is that those big collection/yearly torrents could kill the individual torrents released that year: Cock Hero Collection - Request for Missing Vids Thread

That's a valid concern, but I think it could be mitigated. I'm curious to know what people think about incentivizing people to upload/archive material. I'm loath to bring up monetary donations, but there are non-monetary "prize" options. Forum awards/flair, custom banners, a custom erotic audio prompt, etc. Thoughts?

[doremi]

We need an archive club. Would Discord be good for that?

You do run a CH database Discord channel already, don't you ?

Sure! Why not! Right now, its use is to report new updates of a project currently on the ice.

[bobwalter]

Well you could always have a website that stores all the videos in some kind of DB/Index. The problem then of course comes down to DMCA issues, so you'll have to find a country/provider that doesn't care about U.S. DMCA orders.


There are a few technology methods I would use to keep things "private". Such as limited access, encrypted files, and an invite-only style (but super restricted, probably more so than Emp.

[smutreader]

The best solution I can think of is to have a community google drive folder. If we were to set up an account through the community and everyone here who wanted access had to pitch in 1 dollar a month or something like that. We could easy afford a 10TB drive which costs 100$/mo. Then creators upload to the drive and everyone has access to it. A few stipulations: creators should probably get a discount for creating but they should also have to have reasonably sized files following certain limits on GB/hr of content. Thoughts?

[Qnub]

We need people that have gigantic harddrives and collect all the CH that were made. These people then can distribute those CH on demand.

I think a good approach would be a monthly or quarterly upload of CH that are requested by the community, have a forum where people type in: Need CH "xy" and then at the end those requested CH will be uploaded on a specific day/week. They can be made public because we expect them to be removed anyway. That way, everyone can get them but they would be delayed, obviously.

We either have public sporadic uploads that everyone can access for a short time, or permanent uploads that are behind closed gates and need "passwords" to access. I think throwaway uploads are the better approach because handing private uploads and passwords etc. can be tiresome, plus they can still be compromised and taken down. Having monthly uploads of requested CH is much easier if we have enough uploader that collect all the CHs.

As time moves on, uploading big files get less and less of a hassle. For example currently I have 40mbit upload, 2 years ago it was just 10mbit. So, in the end these files merely become minutes to upload, rather than hours.