Do you download? Sure you do! There are so many nice ladies on all those great websites - who shouldn't want to make his harddisk happy with them! Do you try to get as many of those gals as possible and you're downloading as fast as your hardware is capable of? Ouch, do you know you are a leecher and some webmasters perhaps might hate you for that? You don't? You do not believe this since you paid for membership? I do and we'll discuss this!
To make two confessions right at the beginning - I do download and I do try my best to get as much as possible - just like you. Since I did this for more than ten years now and thus was subscribed to more than 1200 adult sites I think I know what I'm talking about.
To get the whole situation you should understand first that there's no such thing as free stuff - even those sites which do not have the intention to make money (which I consider to be a small minority) have to earn some money to pay the bills for server and bandwidth use. You believe smut should not be paid for? Well, understand that you either have to concentrate on promotional offers like the TGPs or you have to steal!
Knowing this it's much easier to understand the position of the webmasters. They will love you sincerely if you keep a subscription alive and won't use the site that much - you are paying but not causing costs! Most websites do not pay strictly by the bandwidth that's been used by members but a base price including a given quota of bandwidth in giga- or even terabytes. So it's clear: as soon as too many users are downloading too much the limit might get exceeded which increases the cost of the site - webmasters will do their best to prevent this - at least if the number of subscriptions is not big enough.
But that's not all: Most webmasters fear copyright violations by downloaded and re-published stuff such as in newsgroups and file sharing services. Ever noticed the warnings on some sites? They furthermore fear that the content might get shared with other users thus reducing the number of possible subscriptions. And thirdly they want to keep the load of the servers low to make their usage as comfortable as possible without causing them costs.
What webmasters however fear (and fight!) most is the sharing or hacking of passwords. It's obvious any download quota will quickly be exceeded if a site is massively used by lots of unauthorized users, so this leads to a substantial damage very fast and is thus (correctly) regarded as theft. I have experienced a few times during the last years that websites were closed down because of this and twice I lost legitimately bought passwords by hacking attacks - luckily not by attacks on my system but directly on the site-server. So I started to protect myself by using randomly generated usernames and passwords unique for each subscription I have. Since the pressure by hackers and smut-for-free-guys is still very high, webmasters also have to protect their sites. They use systems like Pennywize, which first blocks a username at once if it is used twice at the same time from different ip-adresses and secondly automatically watches the download behaviour and download quota of each subscriber. If you download stuff manually, normally nothing should happen, but if you get too active these systems automatically block your account depending on a given amount of Megabytes you are allowed to download per day. They might also automatically change your password. Sometimes such systems are badly or viciously configured. I once made such an experience with the site of Alexus Winston, which had a download limit of only 50 MB/day. I then had a 1MBit DSL-connection meaning I could reach that limit within only eight minutes! Since there was nobody on the site to direct my complaints to (or perhaps was thinking the measurement was alright) this subscription was money for nothing - a site that will never receive any payment from me again!
On the other hand the total blockage of downloads is rated as very bad style and very user-unfriendly. I personally (and all other reviewers of Adult Reviews too) would rate a site low if it was to block downloads completely. Luckily this happens rarely, my last experience was with the Belladonna-site around two years ago. Its content was weak but its protective measures were top! This site was a shame for a top Pornstar like Belladonna - perhaps that's the reason why a complete rework is announced now! I considered it really a poor joke when they wrote that they did this due to picture-redistribution - and I was looking around and found (obviously bought photo-series because of the better quality (!!) ) on lots of other adult servers!
Stay tuned for next part where I will mention tips that can make surfing adult sites easier.
- Uli
Your guide to better porn!
