Bionicman76 said:

Well, at least a page or 2. The whole thing’ll take fuckin’ forever.

Around 3 - 4 hours by my estimation. I think I'm a slow reader. Although it's almost 3 AM and I'm quite sleepy so that's part of it.

Anyway, wow. 2 whole years. And no updates, ETA, really anything about what's going to happen with this, while prompts to upgrade to Gold are still littered around every corner of this site, core features like >2 tags are still locked, and the only other option is a considerable level of activity on the site in the hopes that you'll be noticed by a mod or admin and given a special promotion.

It's not so much annoying that there's no payment processor as it is that there doesn't seem to be any transparency on whether anything is being done about it. 2 years of radio silence is crazy. I read this entire thread hoping somewhere something would be like "hey so here's what we've tried, what we're not going to try, how things are going, how we might expect to fix this in the future" anything like that, but there's nothing.

And look, I appreciate the idea of promoting contributions, but I do not plan to use this site often enough to be worth dumping hundreds of hours into contributing. I just want to look up art occasionally. This site seemed to be the best curated, and one of the few places that actually takes an effective stance against AI images. So I wanted to be able to browse this site and was happy to pay the one time fee to remove the restrictions. But the hundreds of hours of my time required to do busywork I'm not really interested in doing just so I can unlock these features is worth WAY more to me than the $20 these features used to be offered for.

Having no alternative, no ETA, and little transparency is frankly ridiculous. Hate to have my first post on here be a complaint post but I also hate to join this site to immediately hit a wall in its features and for its proposed solution to have been broken for the last 2 years with literally no hint of it ever being fixed.

This thread could use an FAQ.

FAQ

Is gold back yet?

No.

What do I do?

Become builder.

It doesn't help that the new user experience pretty much funnels them right here.

They check out the site, they immediately bump into roadblocks as the website tells them "hey there's images you're not seeing because you don't have Gold" or "you can't use this many tags you need to upgrade your account!" and they all link to the buy Gold page, which doesn't work and the only thing it tells you is that Gold upgrades are temporarily(!) disabled.

Then the new user does one of 3 things. They either
-give up on it, considering the features aren't important enough to them to upgrade anyway. (Most people are inherently resistant to spending money.)
-become one of the poor souls we've seen in this thread that have mentioned refreshing the page occasionally for hours, days, weeks, waiting for it to come back, because they think its just a brief pause.
-look for answers as to what's going on, leading them to this thread where they see the problem has persisted for over 2 years, with zero answers about what's being done about it or when, or even if, it'll ever be fixed.

That's a rough first impression of the site and it's the impression that's given to every new user for the last 2 years and will continue to for as long as this site still links everywhere to upgrading Gold while it's not possible.

Believe it or not, the first impressions of blue users that, like you said, probably aren't going to contribute anyways aren't a huge priority for the site at the moment. We can all suggest alternative payment options as has been done many times, but the sole person capable of implementing a fix would be Evazion, and that would require a lot more time than he normally has in a day to devote to extraneous problems.

People have tried their best to give genuinely helpful advice on how to get promoted quickly, and for the most part have been met with indignation, entitlement, or both. The dead horse has been beaten so hard it's probably a pile of dust now, so understand that there are only two options: get promoted, or don't.

So then if Gold membership is an extraneous problem and not a huge priority for the site, maybe it's time to stop promoting it? 2 years without not just a fix but without any inclination of any plans to fix it is extremely silly for a feature that continues to be promoted prominently on the platform. "We don't care about the user experience" is... certainly one response to criticism of the poor user experience, but doesn't detract from the criticism.

For as long as a broken feature is promoted on the platform, you're going to have people asking about that broken feature. And as far as I can tell, that part doesn't need Evazion's direct involvement to fix.

John_Fantasy_XIV said:

We can all suggest alternative payment options as has been done many times, but the sole person capable of implementing a fix would be Evazion, and that would require a lot more time than he normally has in a day to devote to extraneous problems.

It's not an extraneous problem. Gold memberships were a primary source of funding for the site. There may be enough funds to keep the site afloat for now, but we're going to need to get money from somewhere to keep things running for the long term.

lovelydumpling said:

So then if Gold membership is an extraneous problem and not a huge priority for the site, maybe it's time to stop promoting it? 2 years without not just a fix but without any inclination of any plans to fix it is extremely silly for a feature that continues to be promoted prominently on the platform. "We don't care about the user experience" is... certainly one response to criticism of the poor user experience, but doesn't detract from the criticism.

For as long as a broken feature is promoted on the platform, you're going to have people asking about that broken feature. And as far as I can tell, that part doesn't need Evazion's direct involvement to fix.

I agree we should not be promoting Gold while it's down. It made sense to keep it up when it was thought it would be a short-term problem, but we've long passed that point now. A couple days ago, I saw a recent comment by a member suggesting that another member upgrade to Gold, apparently not knowing they were not available. Removing these would likely cut down on complaints from members who feel baited by the promotion.

viliml said:

FAQ

Is gold back yet?

No.

What do I do?

Become builder.

If we're going to include a FAQ, it should include basic information about the situation, what is being done about it, and what to expect for the future. Simply having decent information in one place could quell some of the complaints.

Where are people mostly getting information about Gold+ tiers? Would editing help:users to reflect that gold and platinum memberships are currently not available for purchase be helpful?

gfz said:

Where are people mostly getting information about Gold+ tiers? Would editing help:users to reflect that gold and platinum memberships are currently not available for purchase be helpful?

It looks like help:users does have a note about that. But any time someone's on a page with restricted stuff, there's a link to upgrade to gold (unavailable at the time of writing), and a link to the wiki about censored tags which also talks about upgrading.

I just copied the same note from the help:users page to the censored tags wiki. Maybe it will help people struggling with the angst of being unable to spend money.

lovelydumpling said:

It doesn't help that the new user experience pretty much funnels them right here.

They check out the site, they immediately bump into roadblocks as the website tells them "hey there's images you're not seeing because you don't have Gold" or "you can't use this many tags you need to upgrade your account!" and they all link to the buy Gold page, which doesn't work and the only thing it tells you is that Gold upgrades are temporarily(!) disabled.

Then the new user does one of 3 things. They either
-give up on it, considering the features aren't important enough to them to upgrade anyway. (Most people are inherently resistant to spending money.)
-become one of the poor souls we've seen in this thread that have mentioned refreshing the page occasionally for hours, days, weeks, waiting for it to come back, because they think its just a brief pause.
-look for answers as to what's going on, leading them to this thread where they see the problem has persisted for over 2 years, with zero answers about what's being done about it or when, or even if, it'll ever be fixed.

That's a rough first impression of the site and it's the impression that's given to every new user for the last 2 years and will continue to for as long as this site still links everywhere to upgrading Gold while it's not possible.

Yeah it's a bit annoying because I much rather get multiple tag search by just paying for it. Becoming purple requires a huge amount of time and effort, while I make 20 dollars in like half an hour of my day job and I could be doing fuck all in a meeting. I hope they sort the payment stuff out long term, but if they can't it is what it is.

Why don't you guys simply accept a direct payment through whatever payment processor and grant the buyer's account access?

This is literally a "shut up and take my money" kind of situation.

UselessBunny said:

Why don't you guys simply accept a direct payment through whatever payment processor and grant the buyer's account access?

This is literally a "shut up and take my money" kind of situation.

This entire problem happened because of payment processors refusing to work with them because of the content of this site.
And if your idea is to accept money under the table without saying what it's for, that's also a fast track to getting banned from the platform (if not outright illegal, because the goods and services option exists for tax reasons afaik.) This isn't a private invite-only forum, so it wouldn't be hard for them to find out what's going on (anyone can report it.)

Also, opting for direct payments instead of goods and services means there's not much buyer or seller protection— buyers can't be guaranteed refunds and sellers can't be protected from chargebacks, which can be expensive.

All in all, doing it the right way is important.

There *are* lots of suggestions in this thread for other payment providers who are known to work with adult content, or going for a crypto donation type deal, but we've not heard any official response as to whether these options are being considered or why not. That's what frustrates me the most, we're left completely in the dark about what's being done about this issue.

Just found this thread lol. Crazy it's been two years! Why not just remove or raise the tag search limit? Limiting it to 2 tags is needlessly restricting. It makes sense if you want people to upgrade to gold (I wanted to!), but that hasn't been fixed and I doubt it ever will. If it does, you can reintroduce the tag limit!
I don't care about the gold-only content, or anything else. Even just 3 tags would make a huge difference lol.

HornyHippo said:

Just found this thread lol. Crazy it's been two years! Why not just remove or raise the tag search limit? Limiting it to 2 tags is needlessly restricting. It makes sense if you want people to upgrade to gold (I wanted to!), but that hasn't been fixed and I doubt it ever will. If it does, you can reintroduce the tag limit!
I don't care about the gold-only content, or anything else. Even just 3 tags would make a huge difference lol.

Your answer is forum #135331

lovelydumpling said:

This entire problem happened because of payment processors refusing to work with them because of the content of this site.
And if your idea is to accept money under the table without saying what it's for, that's also a fast track to getting banned from the platform (if not outright illegal, because the goods and services option exists for tax reasons afaik.) This isn't a private invite-only forum, so it wouldn't be hard for them to find out what's going on (anyone can report it.)

Also, opting for direct payments instead of goods and services means there's not much buyer or seller protection— buyers can't be guaranteed refunds and sellers can't be protected from chargebacks, which can be expensive.

All in all, doing it the right way is important.

There *are* lots of suggestions in this thread for other payment providers who are known to work with adult content, or going for a crypto donation type deal, but we've not heard any official response as to whether these options are being considered or why not. That's what frustrates me the most, we're left completely in the dark about what's being done about this issue.

Really now?

You are telling me that a direct transaction between my personal account and the personal account of the admin would make, let's see, Paypal, track down what this website is about? There would not be even a trace to begin with! It's a private exchange for all they know or care about.

I get what you mean by buyer or seller protection but that's a risk people should be willing to take considering how taboo this shit is, honestly. I would even go as far as to say society SHOULDN'T tolerate this kind of thing to be frank, I don't really see an issue with it being an underground thing, that's how it's supposed to be, really. We don't want or need attention to it, no need to start some kind of crusade for our rights to look up degenerate shit, it's fine if people don't get or accept it.

Buyers shouldn't expect a refund for a one-time only purchase and the seller shouldn't bother with refunds either if the person gets banned or whatever, I think that's an obvious thing to have in mind when upgrading your account given the context we are in.

I suppose the owner has more than enough money to burn on this website to get nothing in return so it's not really necessary to have it funded (even though it apparently was in the past?), but recently another booru I used to visit shut down and the main reason must have been an unnecessary financial strain to keep it up and I don't even have a way to contact the owner to say thanks for his work, while over here I'm unable to help.

Also, for the "just become a builder, bro" people: oh come on, the process to be promoted is manual and how can we even expect to have our contribution recognized when there's THIS shit going in the dark for years now? There's no trust.