Patreon + Server Upgrades

Community Posts
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Update:

Quick update on all the existing Patrons. Apparently it was set so it only subtracts the amount on the 1st of every month, which is a bit odd because I’m sure most of you would have expected for the amount withdraw immediately.

Anyhow, it’s changed now to subtract monthly on the exact same day you subscribe, meaning if you subscribed on the 5th of April, it’ll bill again on the 5th of May.

This does not apply retroactively. If you prefer this method of payment, you’ll have to awkwardly resubscribe. If you don’t care either way, the amount will get subtracted on 1st every month, and not before then.

News

Hey! It’s been a while since I made a big post, I think the last one was in Christmas or so. But today I return with big news for the site. I’ll also be pinning this topic globally for a while to make sure that everybody has a chance to see it.

Server Stability

As some of you may have already noticed, we’ve been dealing with quite frequent slow-downs recently. While we’ve more or less dealt with the email problems by now, the realization is slowly kicking in that perhaps the server just isn’t fast enough to handle all of us.

Now, as to the exact reasoning behind this… that’s really tricky. I can give you a very elaborate technical breakdown, but I’m sure to most people it’ll sound like gibberish, so if any of you want to talk details or happen to know a thing or two about server hosting, feel free to reach out to me in DMs.

All that being said, I’m upgrading the server. At the end of the day I’m not sure if that will solve the problems, if it doesn’t I’m ready to accept that our provider is bad and migrate, but for the time being I’d like to avoid another migration (and I’m sure so would you).

Patreon

Now, as you could tell from the title, that’s not all, I’m also setting up a Patreon, as previously discussed in our community vote.

Now, please bear in mind, this is entirely optional. You don’t have to subscribe. I’m not saying “please pay or I won’t upgrade”, I’m saying that I am going to upgrade and bear the full monthly cost of server and domain by myself, but you are welcome to help chip in.

It’ll be fully transparent, I want everyone to know how much money goes in. Whatever’s not covering the server bills will be put aside for community events such as giveaways or, if we ever get there, merchandise. It’d be cool to have Fluffy plushies, but that’s an expensive endeavor, so don’t get your hopes up for a while.

Please mind your budget. Don’t subscribe if you have no disposable income. I was extremely hesitant to ever setting this up, and if it wasn’t several people nudging me, I wouldn’t have caved in. I know how predatory some of these systems can be, and how there can be a “Fear of missing out”.

I don’t want that.

I set up four donation tiers, the lowest being $1, followed by $5, $10 and $20. There’s no inherent rewards being tied to any of the tiers, because again, I don’t want to reward the idea of spending money, however I do want to show a proper appreciation, so I’m going to do semi-regular shout-outs to the top subscribers as is commonplace.

Patreon urged me to create some sort of reward structure, but I tried to keep it as simple and vague as possible. As such, technically $20 Patrons get to make feature requests that we’ll try to incorporate, but please bear in mind that’s not exclusive, and my DMs are always open for suggestions regardless of whether or not you pay.

Donations & Ads

On the subject of donations, I know some of you don’t like subscribing on Patreon and would much rather simply donate. That’s understandable, but a bit harder to regulate, so while I can try to set it up, for now Patreon was easier because I already had an account. In the meantime, you can just opt for $1 monthly instead.

Likewise, I didn’t enjoy the idea of subjecting the userbase to seeing ads. Not having ads has always been something I enjoyed about browsing the site, and I don’t want to sour that experience or urge people to pay to get rid of them.

Instead, I’d like to perhaps set up user-based ads instead, something that advertises events or merchandise of our community instead. We’d have to look into some plugins and set it all up, but I’d prefer that over the generic sex ad nobody wants to click anyway.

tl;dr I’m upgrading the server and you can choose to help me pay it or not, thanks for reading, here’s the link

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I’d rather pay this than an OSRS subscription I never use. Happy to chip in.

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Community ads for commissions might be cool. We’ve got some folks who do those and do really good work.

I hope regular ads won’t b become a necessity. I don’t want to see sex ads for sure, and I don’t want any trackers.

Hopefully we can keep things humming along :slight_smile:

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I’ve gotta be honest, I have some concerns about this.

Now, legally speaking, what we do is in a grey area, isn’t it? Seeing as fluffies are (loosely) based on a Hasbro IP, and Hasbro has been very protective of its intellectual properties in the past. Remember the Fighting is Magic debacle?

I assume that Hasbro has been ignoring us up until now because none of us are making a lotta profit off what we do. (I in particular would have over a dozen companies’ lawyers lining up to literally sue me into oblivion if I started making money off my stories. They would sue me so hard that I would cease and desist to exist.)

And let’s face it, we’re lucky that we haven’t been curbstomped by lawyers yet, considering how… graphic the content we produce can be. It’s not the kind of thing Hasbro would want the public to associate with their IP. Especially not MLP’s intended target audience, that is, children.

So I’m a bit worried that this kind of thing might end up attracting unwanted attention. That it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Hasbro turned a blind eye to Fighting is Magic, but only until the big bucks started getting involved. I know this Patreon is purely for keeping the server running smoothly, but I’m trying to look at this from the POV of a soulless, joy-sucking, bottom-feeding leech-- I mean a lawyer.

What they would see is money going into the wrong person’s pockets.

Maybe I’m worrying about nothing, but I’ve seen a lot of fan projects and the like get shut down by lawyers, and I don’t want to see that happen to FC.

And I know that there isn’t really a better option. A server costs money to run, you’ve gotta get that money somehow.

I’m just saying… be careful.

I think I’ve said something like this before, but I feel like it needs reiterating. We’re on pretty thin ice, guys.

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This is pretty much covered under parody law, actually.

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Yeah, but Hasbro has an army of lawyers, and we don’t.

They’ve got money to burn, and we don’t. If the admins don’t have enough money for the server, they don’t have enough to lawyer up.

No matter how unlikely it is, if they take us to court and lose the case, the legal fees will be a bigger problem for us than they will be for Hasbro. Haven’t big corporations done that kind of thing before?

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Thanks for chiming in. Now, while we might have origins in the MLP universe, Fluffies as a whole are so far removed from MLP that if we didn’t all the origin company “Hasbio”, you’d have a hard time knowing that’s where they come from.

If anything, there’s something to be said about distancing us from the association, by renaming some of the canonical references to the origin. No more “Hasbio”, and no more “MLP Fluffies” etc. That’s a conversation to have for sure, but inherently I’m not worried.

To be more precise, it’s not illegal to sell a written work of fiction containing characters that have a resemblance to an existing one, if said characters are a “mere vehicle”, that is, characters that are not original or unique enough to be a separate work of authorship. Characters that are used as a means to tell a story, rather than be their own unique entities.

In the grand scheme of things, that means that using “fluffies” isn’t illegal at all. What’s illegal is making a story about “fluffy fluttershy”. The concept of a fluffy pony, let alone one as disfigured as the average fluffy, is not copyrighted.

Parody law would not cover us, actually. It’s an easy mistake to make, but parody law is pretty hard to justify if it extends past parody, which our fluffies do. It started out as parody, but has since broadened its horizon well past it. Additionally, parody law is much harder to enforce if you are monetizing it.

It’s a slippery slope between what is colloquially considered “parody” or “derivative”. I would argue in some sense, depending on who wrote the story, it’s one or the other, but derivative works aren’t necessarily copyright infringement if they differ enough from the original.

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If you do decide on that, you might have to increase the edit limit.

I mean, considering how many times just one creator uses the word “Hasbio” in their works, that’s a lot of edits that’ll need to be made. We already had to deal with that regarding a certain animal rights group.

But the issue here isn’t necessarily what’s legal, or illegal. Again, if Hasbro DMCAs us, and we try to contest it in court, we just can’t win that battle, even if we know they don’t have a leg to stand on. We don’t have the resources for a lengthy legal case. Hasbro can win this by attrition.

And this website is hosted in America, isn’t it? Need I say more?

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All parodies are derivatives works.

Since I am not a expert, I referred to Lott & Fischer’s website which hosts an artical on parody as a legal defense vs, intellectual property theft.

“In order to be successful as a defense to infringement, trademark parody must have been handled correctly.
The elements of parody are:
i) an original host work;
ii) the original host work must be famous and/or known to the particular target audience;
iii) the creator of the derivative work, the parody, must take only so much of the original work as necessary to bring to mind the original host work; and
iv) the derivative work which conjures up the famous host must result in a new, original work.”

It’s likely the fluffy fandom would fail on the third point, so you’re right, it wouldn’t be covered by parody necessarily, though that is entirely subjective.

But if they were so inclined to do that, we would see them cracking down on any artist with a fanbase who puts fan art behind a Patreon paywall.

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That’s just a general rule that’s true for anything. I doubt we’re large enough for them to bother doing that, but also if we’re careful enough moving forward, it shouldn’t present an issue

The website is currently hosted in Germany.

All parodies are derivative works, but not all derivative works are parody, that’s what I was trying to say.

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Fair enough, I misread.

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Only on FC can a conversation about members willingly assisting the funding of keeping the lights on turn into a sperg attack about international copyright law.

I’d say never change but I wouldn’t be honest with you or myself.

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If you think we’re in the clear, I trust you on this. You’re the captain of this ship now, I’ve gotta trust you.

Certain people might think I’m whining about nothing, but again, I’ve seen a lot of innocuous things get swarmed by lawyers. I know how to recognize a pattern.

I mean, Disney gets pissy when a daycare paints Mickey Mouse on the wall. Is it really wrong for me to be concerned about this? I just wanted to help.

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Look at it this way, at the end of the day, the only person getting sued is me.

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True, but we’ve all got a stake in this.

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Touch – and I cannot stress this enough – grass.

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take even a cursory look at wiki about parody laws. fuck fluffies are just a vague concept of a genetically enginerd toy made by a corporate conglomerate nothing about fluffies is even close to mlp outside of them being referred to as horses. so don’t worry hasbro is not coming for the money sink that is fluffies

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there will never be enough grass to fix nobody

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