Milovana.com

StupidBoy18 wrote:I consistently notice a decline in the quality of teases/amount per day on this site. It also doesn't help that the site never seems to be maintained. Exhibit A. Just updating the tease of the month. It's still on October 2015, and I know some admin will randomly comment to this forum post claiming admins have lives and can't constantly be here, but it would require logging on 1 time per month to simply change that.

Sincerely,
A Disappointed User.

I agree. We should all get our monthly membership fees back! Especially those of us that do not contribute to the tease pool.

My initial reaction was, "Why don't you write some teases?" I checked and you did. I remember your teases and they were really good. Although they were several years ago, they were good. Thanks for your contribution. Please consider some new ones. Again, they were really great.

It is easy to dismiss your comment, because it is negative and unconstructive. This is my go to site and I appreciate the efforts of the admins and members. Certainly numbers tell a story, but I don't have time to determine the trend of teases per week, or ratings. I am not sure how much value there is in tease of the month - the critical part is having great teases every month. The recognition is a bonus, and serves more as a boost to those teases.

However, I won't dismiss or argue with your comment. I think it is valid to feel that it is in decline and I hope that you shared to inspire others and effect positive change. The more teases, the more interaction, the more feature, the better the site. No doubt.

I have not found a site I like better. As you did, I provide my highly subjective opinion that this site is awesome.I have enjoyed several recent teases, and recent forum games. I followed the week long tease of Mistress Summers and thoroughly enjoyed it. Iana's Maze is fun, repeatedly. And, I can't fail to thank Della for her efforts to run an amazing multi year game, and I love to see others running games by Quiet Linda and SexualChoc, even when I don't participate. There is TeaseAI, GuideMe, and other initiatives to develop cool new tease applications. I am impressed by the forum conversations, especially those started by Cruel Natalie. In addition, there is the chat, which I occasionally try to use, but find a bit overwhelming and scary (my issue, not those on it). There is a diversity of content and, in my opinion, a steady to growing number of active users that make this site great.

I don't provide this to simply dismiss or argue your point, but to encourage people to connect and engage in the way that works best for them. The more the merrier.

StupidBoy18 wrote:I consistently notice a decline in the quality of teases/amount per day on this site. It also doesn't help that the site never seems to be maintained. Exhibit A. Just updating the tease of the month. It's still on October 2015, and I know some admin will randomly comment to this forum post claiming admins have lives and can't constantly be here, but it would require logging on 1 time per month to simply change that.

Sincerely,
A Disappointed User.

I don't think the site's going anywhere, as I posted in a another thread my only concerns would be financial ones and that the site doesn't end up costing too much with needing extra storage space.

However there are several things which I'd say are more irritating rather than problems. Like you said the TotM hasn't been updated past October (even thought the polls have been going ahead) and one minor but annoying thing for me is that the copyright at the bottom of every page still says "2006 - 2013"

They are things that make it look like the site isn't being looked after, although it certainly is, SSL was added in June last year, even if the copyright notification wasn't updated. Personally I'd be ok with a yearly update, just to fix any bugs that had come up during the last year, and maybe add a new feature or something if there's time.

Also I'd like to know why the emails stopped working, at first I wondered if someone had tried to hack the site and failed, breaking it in the process, but with the admins apparently not being around we wouldn't know if it was something malicious or just a bug..
(A good reason for using a separate email address for NSFW things and different passwords on different sites)

Miker wrote:Furthermore, I don't think one can argue it's been "in decline" when the site's top number of users (nearly 1800) was achieved a little under two weeks ago on January 21st.

Clearly, despite it's problems, it's still growing, it is very difficult to argue with 1796 users online at once..


In the "Why is it free" section (bottom right in the footer) it says this:

We recently (November 2009) started running some ads and it currently covers part of our hosting expenses. In the future we hope to add some other revenue sources with the goal of fully covering our costs. If we ever manage to generate a surplus it will go into things that help the site such as development of new features or maybe some advertising.

Again I think donations could be a good idea..


After a bit of digging, I think I've found the owner's Twitter and GitHub, I won't be posting any details as:
1) For me at least, it's quite unethical to post someone's personal info online. no matter how easy/hard it is to get.
2) I don't want the guy being pestered with loads of emails / tweets.
3) There's a chance I could be wrong.

But yeah, the words I would use to describe them is "very very busy" with commits most days of the year and 950 total last year.

Overall I would say yes, there are things wrong with the site, but:
1) It's free
2) As Miker pointed out, it's certainly still growing.
3) As Kree said, there's still a tonne of content to go through. Even if new content does slow down, there's still so much past content to go through, both with webteases and all the stuff on the forum, it hardly matters.
4) If the GitHub page is seraph0x's, then he's certainly been far too busy to think about Milovana, and now that I think about it the only time he didn't post commits was in June, when SSL was implemented on here. Adverts only pay for part of the costs, I presume the rest is at his expense.

It's easy to complain about stuff, and I admit I was going to complain about all the little things that don't work, but the more you think about it the more childish and selfish it sounds. We get everything on here for free, it's not like it's a bad deal.. We get all the 5611 teases on here and all the CH vids and all the other stuff people post in the forums and it's all paid for by seraph0x.

I hope this is the last thread on how the site is dying or whining at the admins..

Hmm, I just noticed the first tease listed on the site "Hidden nipple tease" only shows up if you view them 20 per page, on anything else it disappears, that's one bug too far, I think I'll join someone43 in asking for my £0.00 back, any currency should be fine..

StupidBoy18 wrote:I consistently notice a decline in the quality of teases/amount per day on this site. It also doesn't help that the site never seems to be maintained. Exhibit A. Just updating the tease of the month. It's still on October 2015, and I know some admin will randomly comment to this forum post claiming admins have lives and can't constantly be here, but it would require logging on 1 time per month to simply change that.

Sincerely,
A Disappointed User.

Oh look, here comes a random mod to tell you exactly that...

Others have put it just as well as I could have done, the site continues to grow. Quality of teases is subjective - if you think you can do better, write some more teases. TOTM is an ongoing problem and commitment, for a dwindling number of VOLUNTEERS. And to compound that, the software that helps run TOTM has an issue. It's frustrating yes, but it will be sorted when Phox gets a chance.

I'm here pretty much every day. A lot of my time here is dedicated to clearing up after spammers, or tackling people who would like to scam our users. i could stop doing that important stuff and begin the long process of manually updating TOTM if you'd like though. But I'd also like to spend some time enjoying what the site has to offer too. Teases, chat, the forums. So somewhere, somethings going to have to give.

The site has a couple of issues, sure, but pissing and moaning about it ain't going to change anything. If you don't like the teases being put out lately, the power to do something about that is in YOUR hands. A few years ago, there was another quiet period for teases, so I got together some tease writers and put out a series of teases together. There's nothing stopping anyone else doing the same.

It's the users that make any website what it is. The more people put in, the more people will get out.

wait isn't the site free? Someone mentioned membership fees but I thought it was free.

Instead of bitching I think we should be supporting the owners and admins. If you have something good & free maybe it would be best to figure out how we can contribute. Getting busy for a few months is easy.

anyhow I'm happy to help any way I can. But I also think everyone can afford a little (even a 1.00) per month to help offset cost and time.

CruelNatalie wrote:wait isn't the site free? Someone mentioned membership fees but I thought it was free.

Instead of bitching I think we should be supporting the owners and admins. If you have something good & free maybe it would be best to figure out how we can contribute. Getting busy for a few months is easy.

anyhow I'm happy to help any way I can. But I also think everyone can afford a little (even a 1.00) per month to help offset cost and time.

The site remains a free place for us all to explore our fetishes, and as far as I'm aware there are no plans to change this. I do think donations through something like Patreon may be an idea in the future though, but that's something for Seraph0x to decide.

I think we should revisit the Patreon idea. I know I'd gladly pay a couple bucks a month to ensure the site stuck around and was able to accept new registered users.

Is anyone in touch with Seraph0x? Has he been made aware of this idea? Banquo, can you shed some light?

Here's how it would work as I see it: Someone sets up a Patreon and hands it over to Seraph0x, who either takes the money made himself and commits to keeping the site adminned, or disburses it to one or more people to admin the site on his behalf.

There are some very vibrant communities here doing some amazing work (like what's been happening with Tease AI, for example), but without the ability to inject new blood into the project, it's destined to eventually die out or move elsewhere, either of which would be a real shame.

Miker wrote: >Furthermore, I don't think one can argue it's been "in decline" when the site's top number of users (nearly 1800) was achieved a little under two weeks ago on January 21st.

Actually, that was Jan 21, 2015 - sooo ... two years ago.

Actually, that's an interesting statistic - that means that this site reached the height of its popularity two years ago, and has either stayed at the same level, or more likely, has had a decline in traffic. Now, lets consider why ...

One: Site admin absent. No updates to the site, bugs not being worked on, ongoing maintenance concerns ...
Two: Quality of content declining. This isn't conjecture, it's fact. Here's why - the teases have always followed a cyclic pattern, meaning the content of the teases varies widely depending on the general interest of the users on the site at the time. This can be evidenced by reading up on the TOTM winners - you will notice varying themes, but if you take a look at the TOTM winner against other teases in the same month, you'll begin to see a pattern emerging. So when I say the quality of the content has gone down, that is simply an illustration of a smaller number of overall authors on the site, meaning the few active writers tend to get "stale" over time, because they tend to follow the same patterns overall. Diversity really *is* the spice of life.
Three: TOTM is a manual process - someone logs in, uses base statistics to choose the five "best" teases that month, based on rank, number of views, etc., and then uses the template for the month before to create the poll. It's not difficult, but it is time consuming, and frankly, boring. I believe the TOTM author also has to have a specific permission set so that they can tag the winner with their TOTM badge. It *does not* require special software ... I don't know where that came from.

So, you've got a site that is run by volunteers, who are only capable to make limited changes to the forum due to their permissions being set rather restrictively. There are two admins, one of whom hasn't been active in over a year, and Dark has been, well, dark for more than two or three. You have an increasingly stagnant content pool for teases. You have a chat feature which is pretty basic, and has consistency issues (keeps crashing). Is it any wonder why people think maybe this site is dying?

Now - how do I know all this? Simple - some years ago, I was also an admin on this site. My username/handle was Indigo™. I had been active on this site for years, and had managed to work my way up to the level of a co/admin. Shortly after, Seraph and I had a disagreement on how to handle a particular user who set out to cause trouble wherever possible, and in the ensuing argument, I made a judgement call to remove my content, and ultimately left. I do, on occasion, stop in to see what's new, and chat with a few old friends. Many of the former user base from this sites' heyday have left - something that I find sad. I had run the chat, I had run the TOTM polls, and ultimately, the site for a brief period, so I have a pretty good idea of the statistics behind the scenes. And I can tell you with confidence that ultimately, this site is doomed to failure. Either the site admin Seraph will no longer be able to fund it (more likely), or he will no longer be motivated to do so (equally likely), or the site will eventually suffer a catastrophic failure to its database (least likely). With posts on here encouraging users to post photos (that, coincidentally have tens of thousands of posts), the database is growing exponentially, and will eventually reach entropy, without maintenance. Frankly, if someone wants to save this site, the best thing they could do is come up with a workable business model, and buy Seraph out. Find a way to generate some sort of income so at least the thing can be self-sustaining, and then get some interested people on-board to manage and maintain it. That's the only way this site will ultimately survive and flourish. Just my two cents.

One last thing - my hats' off to the folks that do their best to keep this thing alive. It's difficult. It's time-consuming. And ultimately, there's very little in the way of reward for the effort. I am thankful for their efforts. So should you all be.

There are plenty of us still lurking, taking care of the spammers that occasionally get in, and generally doing little things to improve the community. Don't lose faith, my friend. We all can keep this site running -- and you've done a great job in the past with your teases doing just that.

Hey MrFire, it's good to see some green posting! Would you mind taking a look at and addressing my previous post? Thanks.

Turn off your ad blocker and check out what is advertised. It might be worth it and supports hosting expenses

Sisyphuster wrote:Hey MrFire, it's good to see some green posting! Would you mind taking a look at and addressing my previous post? Thanks.

Thanks. Asking me to address your -- frankly not novel -- idea is not really moving the ball forward here. The site is running fine, so long as the users continue to contribute. I don't have insight into Seraph0x's business plan, rationale for funding the site, or any of that information -- all I can say is that we, as a community, can continue to drive this site forward by contributing in the way each of us can.

To be honest, I don't even understand your idea. Why would money help inject blood into this site? None of the folks writing teases are getting paid, and frankly, your suggestion of a few bucks to do so isn't really going to move the ball forward on that subject. Let's not get distracted by any of that: this site has been working fine for many many years, based on the submission of user generated content created by all of the amazing members here. We support this site for eachother.

The site is running fine, so long as the users continue to contribute.

Apart from the fact that nobody has been able to join the site since 01 September 2016, chat keeps crashing and often relies on somebody having set up an alternate chat site elsewhere, TOTM not having been updated since February 2016, and various other issues which arise from time to time.

We all understand, I'm sure, that this is a free-to-join site, and run largely on a voluntary basis. We also understand that seraphox has other, more important, commitments. But to many, it does have the look of a site which is stagnating, and likely enough ultimately dying. It's perhaps the best tribute to the site that the community continues to exist here despite the problems. But it would be unwise to pretend that nothing is wrong.

It was quite interesting to read throught all of this. Do you think someone trustworthy should be named an and given required tools to get rid of the mentioned bugs (as long as he is capable to) ? Like Seraph0x's right hand for the time being.

And what caused the 3-day crash of this site ?

Is it time to set up a new site? I know it's not that easy, but the practical reality is if the overall site admin has got no time for this site, nor will they hand over the power to anyone else, maybe it's time to shift.