question for everyone

This should have gone in the General Discussion section.

Before efiction 3.x I didn't have members set up at all. My website is generally an archive of just my stuff (with a few exceptions. Those exceptions are gift fics from friends). So my focus has never really been to grab as many member/readers as possible. If they stumble upon my site cool. If not, it's okay too. I do have a pop up warning on more adult related stories, but I've never gone through the lockdown procedures that some do. Which is also why members are really needed. But this time around I figured meh, why not?

Despite explaining that members can't post stories in the submission rules and a few other places, I still get email from some asking why don't they see post stories in their account info. But I guess this question is better suited for some who run large sites.

              Exactly but it depends upon the day or time or it closest to topic you preferred.

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Indianapolis Web Design

other than getting the satisfaction of having more members on your site, is there a true advantage of having more members? if you get more members, does it affect your bandwidth, webspace, increase your chances of downtime, etc?  i just turned on the 'age of consent' and 'registered users' for all the stories rated 'r' and 'nc-17' b/c one of my members was concerned about posting her stories b/c it's such a public forum. i don't want to turn away potential visitors either, but the muse of my website is an actual real person and therefore limiting access to stories of ratings 'r' and above seems like a good idea as to not offend people.  although i think fanfiction is great b/c that's how we, as writers, show that we're passionate about something.  i know this is not entirely a support question, but it's somewhat a support question. thanks.

It also depends on the kind of fanfiction site you are running. I've seen that with the Jonas Brothers fanfiction site, or some of the twilight sites, if you have tons of teeny boppers on your site it would definitely affect your bandwidth and web space, where as even an archive with 100+ members like the Silent Hill archive that I host ( http://silenthill.fan-fix.com), it barely uses over 100MB of space and less than 500MB of bandwidth a month.

As for downtime, it would depend on the amount of resources being used, I know that Kali had to pay more for VPS (virtual private server so that there would be resources specifically for the JB site). If there are hundreds and hundreds of users on at one time, then it would certainly start to affect resources. Some hosts state in their TOS how much load your site should put on the server. However, bandwidth and diskspace are fairly cheap now a days, it's finding a quality host that is a hassle. Bigger name companies don't always give you the best support, and because they oversell their resources are already limited, causing problems for other people that are hosted with them even if they aren't using a lot of resources.

We've recently hit 14,000k members at the Jonas Bros archive and the only thing it's given us is trouble. Our adult stories are only available to registered users (with an age statement) for obvious reasons. Maybe forcing registration will drive away a few members, but it's better than getting shut down.

Our database is large and unwieldy. We're using massive amounts of bandwidth, our CPU usage is through the roof, and we're now paying $200 for a dedicated server.

With a huge archive, your main concern is the CPU usage.We were on an 'unlimited bandwidth/space' plan with Dreamhost and as soon as we used too much CPU they shut us down faster than a kiddie porn site. (Then they tried to charge us $800 for an unreliable and poorly configured VPS service that had half as much CPU/RAM as our current dedicated server) All shared hosting will start shutting you down if you take up too much of the server resources.

Yeah I wouldn't recommend DH for a site that uses a lot of CPU resources, I ran into something similar with them with one of my sites. But I'd say for small archives, they're fine.

Kali, did you switch to a different VPS provider? I would recommend SliceHost, or RapidVPS. DH screwed me over on billing too.

We use InMotion, but we're on a dedicated server. For the very brief period we were on VPS they did fairly well.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

I agree. Personally, I don't give a -(bad word)- if they register or not. I run the Harry Potter FanFic Archive site at www.hpfanficarchive.com. There are 843 members at this moment.

There are potential problems with having so many registered users.

• I discovered that the provider does not allow to send more then 500 emails per day. So, if you would have - let's say - 2,000 members, and they receive notifications, that would mean that many will never receive the notification and you personally receive 1,500 errors in your admin email account.
• If this problem continues longer then a week, the provider can remove your web site (they will think you spam)
• So many users means bigger database. Some providers restrict the size of the database.

From the perspective of me personally, why should I maintain all those users? The Harry Potter FanFic Archive site contains mainly adult fics, but I do not allow to have restrictions; everyone who visits, can read what ever they want, what ever their age.
Placing restrictions and ask the member that he is adult is such a stupid thing to ask. My son of 15 years old and he claims that he is 18 at all of those websites. I wonder who you are fooling? Them, yourself or all those people who claim you protect our youth against ...
On the other side, authors must be registered in order to add their fics into the site. Personally I think that is enough.

I ran for years the Writing Center III before with more then 9,000 registered users before the website-provider stopped suddenly and disappeared. When I merged with the HPFanFicArchive, I did not make any effort to get more members and I removed all restrictions.

This policy means that I receive about 6,500,000 page views a month. 2% of the visitors are under the 15, 28% is between 22-35 years old! And thank G-d that they don't register.

Wim

Placing restrictions and ask the member that he is adult is such a stupid thing to ask. My son of 15 years old and he claims that he is 18 at all of those websites. I wonder who you are fooling? Them, yourself or all those people who claim you protect our youth against ...

That would be 'The Law' for 1,000, Alex.
When you've got the kind of traffic we've got, you're more than just a blip on the radar. You can be damned sure The Mouse knows the JB archive exists and we've been contacted by them before.

I don't give a damn if a 12 year old reads porn, but I've got to protect our butts against legal issues. Aside from the whole 'distributing pornography to minors' thing, irate publishers and such can (and sometimes do) get your site shut down.

(There's also that whole keeping our advertisers thing. Most advertisers are hesitant to publish on a site with adult materials that doesn't properly protect them)