| Alright here's the thing. When I first built the board for swfchan.org back in 2011 the .com part of the site had a somewhat decent amount of visitors each day (there's for sure more today), so I expected at least some activity on the board. But it was slow. Dead slow - there were almost no posts here at all. That's when I truly realized that 99.9% only come here to browse quietly for porn, having no interest in creating an actual community where people talk with each other. I knew the percentage was high but that the board practically stood still for months surprised me, despite my efforts to get the ball rolling. The percentage became even more obvious when I built the what's popular page a year later, the non-porn flashes has nowhere near the views of those that were of a more naughty character. This is still true to this day. So all that time programming and writing rules etc was practically for nothing. The true "swfchan community" would remain on 4chan's /f/, it seemed. I thought that allowing more flashes to be online at the same time, accepting much bigger swf uploads and grant more uploads per day from the same IP would muster at least some kind of usage on swfchan.org but people just didn't really want another board. Of course the far from fast server at the time didn't help but today the server has much faster hardware and the board hasn't seen much change in activity. Though eventually, over the years usage of swfchan's board started to grow. Even if only a little, sometimes discussions and new content actually pop up here. However the boards are still standing still most time of the year. Truth is that more than 75% of the flashes ever uploaded outside of /fap/ was done so by yours truly. Usually whenever I feel like sharing a flash I put it on /f/ but every now and then I remember that I actually have a my own board and think "let's throw it a bone". What I'm saying is that there's no fun in spending time fixing a board with no users. I know that there's a pain to report a post, I know that there's no moderation going on. I probably shouldn't reveal it but I actually don't have any mods or janitors at all - it's just me here. I had prepared a system for mods, which I later discovered needed much work to be good, but why waste time doing that when there's so little activity here that I can basically see everything that's going on myself just by glancing at .org's front page? There's nothing overwhelming here, no help needed. Except of course when I forget to check the board for a day and miss out on some bad posts going on. Whoops! I thought about making community-driven moderation, with votes and older users being able to control a bit more than newer users but again it boils down to why waste my life programming all of that when there's so little activity to moderate in the first place? So why haven't I banned Soldier_of_FAP yet and cleaned up the board? Because without all that spam the board would look the same as it did last week. At least there's some activity going on now, right? Maybe it's not 100% quality content but it's rotated content damn it. It's something that can give someone a reason to actually visit /fap/, to make him check if something new has happened more often. It's sort of an investment to maybe make the board more interesting and in the long run get more posters. Lurkers are fine but without posters a board is just a static page. Besides, I actually do have an anti-spam system implemented. It's the health percentage that controls what threads that gets deleted first, regardless of how old the thread is. As stated on the FAQ page --and I realize that page and the rule page is just too long blocks of text that nobody reads-- you can start 4 new threads on each board every 24 hours, otherwise you reduce the health of your already existing threads. As you can see the Soldier_of_FAP threads all have a health of 1% which means they should get deleted before other threads with higher health. The problem with this is that the system was designed with board activity in mind. Right now there are so many threads with 1% health, because they are so old and the board has stood so still, that the Soldier_of_FAP threads will still remain. I know the system is flawed but why bother tweaking it when all that happens is that the board just becomes more static. Besides, it's not something that's broken exactly, it's working as intended (as far as I know, hah! Since there's not ever been that much activity here I haven't truly seen it operating in its intended environment). It's the algorithm that needs changing and I'm reluctant to start digging in old code to adapt the system for a more realistic slow moving board. Don't get me wrong, I'm of course happy for every one of you posting here. It's fun to read and see what you are uploading. I'm also not whining or complaining that there's not much activity here because I know that doesn't magically come by itself. I'm happy for the posts the board get, though it's not enough to motivate me to dig deep into its mechanics at the moment (imagine building a car that you know nobody will drive and you get the picture). However there are some things I have to get around to fix some day whether I like it or not; some old threads are not getting proned even months after they have expired and posting has been disabled in it. There's also something wrong with the JavaScript on the boards, some features has stopped working (maybe because of added security in newer browsers or maybe because of some mistake I've made when changing the code elsewhere on the site). Bugs like that needs to be squashed, eventually. What all this adds up to is that the problem isn't exactly that Soldier_of_FAP is uploading a lot of flashes on the same day, it's that there's not enough activity on the board to make his new threads less valuable. Even if they are just short loops they have weight because they actually make the board active (though I wish his flashes had better file names, many times the post's text body is a lot more descriptive and that doesn't help when doing a file name search). Had there been discussions going on in the rest of the threads on /fap/ --and if all of those threads weren't so old-- the system would just have deleted Soldier_of_FAP's threads after a while due to poor health compared to thriving health of other threads. Don't worry about the flashes ending up being archived, that's what swfchan is for! There's so many flashes here and new ones are added each day that nobody will really notice another brick in the wall. There's plenty of resources to go around and I really don't want anyone to think twice about uploading their flashes here, no matter what type they are. | 
