Originally I had thought about just shutting down the imageboard, as I mentioned in a blog post earlier this year. Even after turning off anonymous comments, the damage in reputation had already been done, and without better board software the ability to properly moderate the board just isn’t there. So I’m shutting the server down.

The imageboard, as well as the unmaintained image forwarding will go down first. Radio and IRC will stay up till at least the end of the year, longer if they actually still get used. They’re much lower resources and maintenance so I don’t mind keeping them alive.

I suspect the heavy users will be disappointed, but I also know there just aren’t that many of them. There was a fair amount of consistent traffic (~3MB/s) but I feel without the ability to maintain it correctly it’s not worth keeping.

Hopefully most everyone will understand, and moreso I hope if there really is a wish for an imageboard that someone will start another, and start it out right with Danbooru so it can actually be moderated. Shimmie is terrible, guys.

In all, thanks everyone for being our users over these past couple years. I still love the MSPA community and I know everything will go just fine without us.

- AndrewNeo

From Pesterchum Radio‘s blog:

6 months. 26 Episodes. Battles waged. Hearts broken. Members of the music team haunted. Shrine Maidens eaten. It all comes down to this, a final battle for both life and death. Three men and guest Samm Neiland enter into deaths domain, broken, battered and cold, not knowing what awaits them at the other end. Join them listeners, tonight, at Skaia.net Radio at 8:00 PM PST, and watch as history unfolds before your very eyes.

Send what could be these four intrepid heroes final pieces of feedback tonight on Twitter, or e-mail us at PesterchumRadio@gmail.com, or our MSPA Forum thread, and our Facebook Fan Page.

- AndrewNeo

However, this leads me to what I really wanted to post. Some time this week (probably Saturday, Sep 3 to be specific), Solatrus will be headed to the datacenter with a RAID card to help keep us from running into any more hard drive problems. The day before, I’m going to move the Skaianet services back to the Linode (with a full 200GB of bandwidth, this time), and then we’ll perform the upgrade, which will involve a few other minor behind the scenes changes.

So, this is a little bit of an advanced warning that Skaianet might have a tiny bit of turbulence (we’ll have to change DNS again to point back at Linode) this weekend while we do some upgrades that should keep us from having any more intermittent downtime, which has been a pain in the butt for several months now. Since this is pre-emptive, I’ll try and make the transition as smooth as possible for you guys. I’m also debating setting up some (off-site?) place to talk about Skaia.net, especially because I see a lot of chatter inside image threads on the imageboard, which really isn’t appropriate.

Addendum: There are now ads on the imageboard, due to the amount of traffic we get, it’s pretty much the number one source for the entire server. I put them there to help, I’m just writing this to let you guys know what’s going on. If you click, it helps a lot, if not, we’re not going anywhere.

And feel free to send questions to the Pesterchum Radio Facebook page, their Twitter, or to their email for Bowman to answer!

Tune in on Skaianet Radio! I’ll be listening in with you.

A lot of the comments were arguing about the specific image in question violating board rules versus it being tasteful nudity (artistic). I was personally in the camp, that yes, it was a tasteful piece, and hardly inappropriate on its own. Now we come down to the problem that plagues the MSPA community in general: The children, and the trolls, are all underage characters. And as such, no imagery that can be considered adult works can be allowed on the board, for both moral and legal reasons. It really doesn’t get much simpler than that.

I still think it was a very well-done image. However, it had to be taken down. If the character in question was not underage, it would have been allowed to stay up, simple as that. I hope this addresses some of the concerns people were voicing on the imageboard. If you have any other questions about the removal policy, please feel free to email me directly, or post in the comments below.

I’m also happy to announce that Pesterchum Radio Live! will be a regular show on Skaianet Radio, however the details for when they will be broadcasting still need to be worked out. Stay tuned, and I hope you all enjoyed the show!