There are a few reasons we want to do this, and it's been well considered for over a year now, weighing out the pros and the cons, and we're very aware it may not make some people happy.
I'm gonna try and shed some light on it here, as to why we made this decision.
- Not very woman friendly: We do not like the reputation that we have right now that we are a site that people just come to, to jerk off. This scares off the ladies, and the ladies that do stick around (compliments to you girls!) frequently get approached by guys just thinking with their dicks instead of their brains. It's very depressing. Most of you don't have that much contact with the girls of the industry. I'm privileged to actually have a lot of contact. But I always hear the same from them. And it never feels good to hear the most gorgeous girls get turned away from visiting our site.
- Not adult entertainer friendly: Imagine if you're a lady in the industry. And you want to have some information about surgery, or anything that matters on our forum. So she comes here, and then sees people sharing her content with other people. It doesn't just scare her off, it makes her furious, and we will get takedown requests for this. So far, we've been defending people's posts because it was hosted off-site and it would not violate the law. While we damn well know that this girl is losing income because of this, and our goal of TPB has always been to help and support these girls. It doesn't look right if we allow illegal content to be shared.
- Google pagerank: Google rates your page in a sense with a pagerank, going from 0 to 10. Pornsites can never get a higher ranking than 1. Our intent is that girls looking for information about surgery will be able to find us through Google. That won't work when we're dangling on the bottom of the search results. So again: our goal to help girls is failing because of the porn content.
- Google Adsense: Advertising is impossible to us as long as there's porn on our site. We've already had our first strike warning from Google.
- Moderating broken content: Loads and loads of porn (illegal content) that's hosted elsewhere receives takedown requests all the time. Numerous, and numerous threads are just pure crap now because all the pictures are taken down. Which would take years for us to clean up. Our future intent is to host this on-site, so nothing would be taken down anymore, the pictures would always remain here, as long as fair use applies.
- Moderating DMCA Takedowns: We get numerous takedown requests which takes a whole lot of our time to deal with, and it's always about the porn section. So far we've always defended it, but it just feels weird that most of our effort goes into something that we never intended on having.
- Leechers: Our forum is full of leechers. Most of the visitors contribute nothing, but do cost us money. We're very fortunate that the people who donated to us to keep us going. I cannot say thank you enough for that. But realistically, they're paying to cover for the leechers. We would much rather repay our thanks in another way.
Also, it's not just about explicit content, it's about illegal content even more so.