What Will Become Of Toyhouse?

im kind of neutral? i dont have high hopes for this place, but im hoping it doesn't go away any time soon.
for now, im trying to move things to other sites as much as possible, JUST in case. But I don't think the site is going anywhere, at least not for awhile.

I do not have high hopes for this website. A lot of my tickets have been unanswered - one (regarding a minor with nsfw art! Which is actually fucking illegal, so I assumed they'd answer it ASAP) has been bumped 4 times and is half a year old. I often joke that, "the ticket won't be answered for the next 5 years - so until the minor is 18 and they can't do anything anymore." But looking at the abslute state of this website, I wouldn't be surprised.

I already did the jump to different websites, refhseet.net to name it.

The only thing that is holding me onto th is the active community.

I'm not all that worried, though I'm working on doing a long-overdue full backup of my OCs this weekend anyway. As long as people keep up premium, the site'll stay up, and they used to fund it out of pocket anyway. Mods aren't completely missing like some people like to over-dramatize, but they do have bad priorities when it comes to tickets. Cy The admin obviously still fixes bugs pretty quickly though, since the site was down basically overnight Australia time, while they were asleep.

Also what the heck do kickstarter projects have to do with this site? If you're talking the site itself, it's not a kickstarter, it's in beta. Closed beta, in fact. It works exactly how it's supposed to work, barring very rare bugs like what happened yesterday. It's a very well done no-hard-limits storage website for characters that has a lot of neat features (css, bootstrap, automatic watermarking, lots of privacy options, and even a forum which is 100% unneeded for the storage feature). I've been here almost six years; we've never had an outage quite like this one before. Also see that 700+ user count at the bottom? It used to max at 250 or so and the site would completely shut down; this site has grown immensely for such a niche hobby. 

99% of the issues this site has is because of awful people doing awful things. Minors thinking they're special and "mature enough" to handle NSFW things, scammers being scammers and getting banned and coming back. This is an issue on more than just th; look at the problems on da, instagram, twitter, and tumblr, with TONS of equally bad complaints and even worse harassment happens. DA and tumblr both have really bad porn(bot) problems, instagram and twitter have terrible harassment. We just have dumb minors and dedicated scammers, which go across allll those sites. Scamming, tracing, and OC thievery is unbelievably common on amino, too. 

The biggest problem is that the mods don't have an actual mod-panel to be able to bring in new mods. I'm 99% positive the admin account is all four of the admins behind the same wheel. Can you imagine letting someone outside their circle of trust behind that account and something going terribly wrong because of it? I don't blame them for not adding anyone new behind that account. I do think they need to work on that mod panel and do some thorough checks/tests before anyone becomes a mod, which is notably difficult for a site with this size and this hobby.

I'm going to ditto what I said sometime before. This site is getting too large for the mods, and until the mod panel is done, I feel like they should stop generation of invites. But is TH doomed? No. 

Currently, toyhouse fills the niche of a character storage site, and despite its flaws fills it rather completely. 

Even if a site with better modding and functionality comes along I'm not sure how many people would actually move over, given the sheer effort of transferring all the character images and data. And that's not even going into profile coding, which people would need to invest into again. 

Right now, there are no sites that can even function adequately as a substitute. Perhaps Weebly, but I don't think I'm the only one who is too weak and lazy of even consider making my own site. Refsheet lacks too many functions though it is usable if you are happy with a rather bare-bones storage site, and Notebook is targeted at an entirely different demographic. 

And let's not forget community, the bane of everyone that's tried to make a DA v2. People go where others are, and especially for people well-known enough to have a standing, it would be hard to convince them to set up in an entirely new place. Even if TH has flaws, the transfer costs are too high. 

(Yes, the community is . . . special. But people live for interaction and favs apparently, and posting into a void won't give you any.)

Any attempt to build a "better TH" will go the way of all the "better DA"s. Unless it is really that much better, but it's hard to imagine someone putting that much work in and for what? What profit would they get? Or perhaps another hobbyist would build a site? Would they really be willing to put in so much work for what would be a tiny community, at least for the first year or two? And who's not to say it wouldn't just be trading one site's problems for another? 

The best I could think of would be a site built around a different niche; roleplaying maybe, since TH's rp functions are lackluster. Then they'd be in a different niche and get a different community, but would still have character storage functionality, and won't just be compared to TH all the time. 

Anyway tl;dr, where would you even go? 

Pepperly Cy's not working on the site anymore, afaik. There's just one admin left. But yes, the site outage happened at around their bedtime. 

Im just gonna echo what @Pepperly said. Most of the site's issues is community based, not bugs (eg: Fav farming, minors lying their age to access NSFW. Both of these aren't site bugs) and outages like this are common on all sites & toyhouse is no exception. This was just one of the worst outages & happened at a time when people are already fed-up with the mods.

I have 0 plans to leave toyhouse, the site has way more features than other storage sites. I just think people are blowing this situation out of proportion. It's ok to feel anxious about it, but I think it's also important to remember outages are common and it's not gonna doom the site. 

Also I'll note for refsheet to be careful because the site lacks a report feature, there's a LOT of unfiltered NSFW, and partially because everyone's panic-moving the site's pretty laggy rn.

216th

Thanks for the clarification;;;
I'm going to double down on my "freeze invite creation" comment, oh boy. :,D

Pepperly . . . yeah. But that would make the existing invite codes or placeholder accounts suddenly extremely valuable, and there is still and already the issue of people selling or trading codes, without them suddenly turning to gold. So . . . yeah they definitely need to hire more mods. A mod. Even just a gopher to sort the tickets will do. m( ._. )m

216th

Isn't that something we could use to chill the negative culture seeping in, though? If accounts are valuable, people are far less likely to make throwaways for scamming or try testing their luck with bannable offenses. If you know where to look, it's currently super easy to get a new code and almost as easy to get around IP blocks, but if more people have to actually value their accounts and not go "eh I'll just make a new one" and account hop as soon as they get caught, maybe it'll slow some of the community issues down.

I could suggest even "no new account creation" period, instead. It's a "closed beta" and can absolutely hardblock the creation of new accounts. There's been plenty of other closed-beta sites that would only let a certain number of people in, as it is, toyhouse's status currently a soft infinite, as there's people with hundreds of invites. 

//

(small edit: I wouldn't mind discuss this overall topic more but I'm going to be gone the rest of the day, so I guess this is my final chime-in)

I believe this site still has great potential and will not go anywhere. Besides, the site is still gaining more and more active users every day and way more people pay for premium features than ever before, too.

however, I do have lots of complaints with the staff. Like when was the last time users were informed of an update to the site? It’s been over a year. At least. And we never hear anything from mods or admins at all! Honestly, it seems to me that the users themselves do more moderating of the website then the staff itself.

I feel like staff should consider the option to open up the website to mod applications. I feel like it would help a lot if they were willing to add more new people to the staff from a list of trustworthy active members. Also, it would make the current staff seem less... alien in a way?

Pepperly I don't know . . . I feel like that would allow certain people to profit off the site too much. Even if you hardblock account creation, there's people with empty accounts sitting around that they could then turn around and sell. That's basically giving more power to unscrupulous people, and I don't really think that's worth the trade off =/

I'm not sure it would do anything for the negative culture, either. It might perhaps help with the scamming and rule-breaking, but not so much what's happened to the actual community culture itself. That would actually need mod enforcement and . . . yeah. Back to square one we go. 

Though not like this discussion would ever be read by the admin, so it's all theoretical really.