As you know for almost 2 years we have given half of our labor away for free on art sites, a page for them for every two pages our patrons were kind enough to fund. Despite several previous art leaks from our private server, we've continued along this same model for the sake of attracting the right kind of support from the positive (and overwhelmingly supportive) members of the art community.
We've had positive responses from most of our audience, both those happy to wait for the free pages and those who have been kind enough to help us up productivity and sponsor more of this project than we could have ever hoped for when we started.
That said, art thievery is always a problem in the furry community, and is even worse when your income (and the project) depends on the life-blood from sponsors.
Though some take a soft response to theft, the aggressive responses to the comic's delay for free release have forced a hard stance against this bullying and, honestly, very unnecessary insults, death threats and aggression for not bringing people more gay romance story than we can afford to give out for free. We have a five person team working on a dozen pages a month and that adds up in terms of cost to us all and work hours...
Once again, sadly one of our supporters fell to the peer pressure of the art sharing sites and published the pages for free, which always results in a drop in our sponsor intake and retention and badly hurts our team's income...
We're sad to announce that, as previously mentioned, we have had to increase the membership fee for new members to our private server as funded through Patreon and Swaggerdile contributions. We were hoping to avoid this, but since the comic has also progressed for a long time since we offered the comic membership, it means it's hopefully not too bad a cost for honest supporters, but will discourage re-applying thieves who have to pay for the content they've already taken.
Our basic membership fee (support threshold) will be $30 for new members only (nothing our current patrons have to worry about!), which will get you all 160 pages of the comic in higher resolution than you can see here, and 12 pages a month thereafter. That's less than 19 cents a page of digital download :)
We're sad to say that, due to the theft, uploads here will be slower while we try to recuperate our losses. We will be publishing an update here approximately every week, as opposed to the promised 6-8 updates a month.
As a further warning, team members have had success on other projects by closing off public versions of the comic altogether. We may be forced to consider this if abuse and thefts continue. I would suggest those wishing to support the comic to do it sooner rather than later, further increases in membership for new members and further delays to free pages are likely in response to further art theft and personal attacks.
As the community manager here on the art galleries, I wish to make two personal warnings. Drama here in response to the project manager's decision will not be tolerated, nor will attacks on other audience members or supporters. You will be blocked and reported. I also do not recommend members here go searching for the leaks: art share sites have been offering malicious downloads and unauthentic zips of harmful downloads to those asking for the comic, and have been notably harsh in pressuring thread members into being implicit in their crimes and losing their position on patreon and swaggerdile.
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7 years, 1 month ago
06 Mar 2017 05:08 CET
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