The Lifespan of Spanking Sites

[web-ed]

Looks like another, and very substantial blog, has gone dormant. Years ago, Chross's Blog had become sort of a crossroads of the spanko community with its weekly links to various other blogs (and CSR) being followed by hundreds or thousands of people. I was never as dependent on Chross for referrals as, say, Erica Scott was (as we discussed on this thread recently) because CSR normally comes up high in the search engine rankings and because there are many other sites with links to us, but there is no question that when Chross referred readers to CSR the numbers went up considerably and I was grateful for the links. I don't expect to see 20,000 - 25,000 visitors per month again any time soon (note - this is a different and more demanding number than mere "hits" which don't mean too much these days).

There hasn't been anything on his "main" site for about 6 months now, and although there is still some posting on the Bulletin Board it appears quieter than it used to be. It has been several years since I had time to sign on to it, and apparently Chross converted it to phpBB (which is what runs this board) some time ago. In that conversion process some things appear to have been lost - I can't sign in or even request my password any more (I'll guess it's because phpBB can't decrypt it from whatever the old board software encrypted it as), and it appears from a user complaint that a lot of the older attachments don't show up any more (probably to the same kind of encrypt-decrypt problem).

Board conversions are tricky, and I haven't thought about the technical problems much since I wanted to convert The Artastic Forum years ago (you can read the story on the relevant thread). Either Chross's board couldn't be converted properly or it simply wasn't converted properly. Of course, since it's now phpBB, it could be moved over here relatively easily (I have plenty of extra data bases and it would only need 1 to hold it), but without the older attachments I'm not sure it would be worth the effort. Besides, it can pretty much go on the way it is for years on autopilot until something changes (e.g. a new version of PHP or MySQL isn't sufficiently backward-compatible for the old code to work) if that's what Chross wants.

The ranks continue to thin - but CSR and I are not going anywhere until God says so!

[Sweetspot]

Chross Spanking Blog was my go-to portal to all things spanking on the internet. No doubt that's how I first discovered CSR [Unless I got here through a Goggle search]. Long before I submitted material here I would send along what I could find to Chross. Since I didn't own an archive and didn't have clipping ability I would just link him to the pertinent page from the old Goggle newspaper collection. At that time it never occurred to me to use an archive to discover old comic strip spankings I miss the blog and I miss being "chrossed". Whatever Chross is up to now I hope he is content and happy. I thank him for his years of expert devotion to his excellent blog. The last discovery I made that I sent to him was in December 2015. He placed it in the blog a few months later. In that case I found it by Goggling and since Chross seemed pretty excited about it when he posted it I assume it was never before on a spanking site. It was the cover of Red Star Weekly #2014 from 1969 and the words red and star seemed highly appropriate.

Red Star Weekly .png (1.07 MiB) Viewed 11238 times

[web-ed]

Women with a "wild streak" must always be tamed - and we know just how do to that !

Another good find, Phil - I don't believe I've seen this anywhere before, although I do know of a couple of other magazine spankings that so far I haven't been able to get copies of. I'm going to do a series on magazine spanking (after we do one on newspaper spanking) and we should add this one toit.

[jimc]

It appears that there are going to be several sites that we have come to enjoy leaving us in January. Anime otk looks like it is running out of money and unless finds some money will close in January. I do not hold much optimism that the request will bring the relief as most times requests for cash do not usually bring the intended result and when Anime goes so does Handprints and several other sites that he has been funding. Chross has been back , but at a very limited role. I have not seen any updates from Richard Windsor, Cherry RED, Nik Zula and several other sites also have not updated in awhile. There have been some new ones every now and then, but it seems tobe harder to find them as many of the ones that posted new blogs have not posted in awhile either. Any thoughts? Have a great day
Jim

[web-ed]

I'm actually surprised that AOTK has lasted this long without further problems, Jim. As I wrote back in 2012 on the AOTK thread of this forum, "I remain skeptical about its long-term prospects, however - Ai is still asking for donations, which means that unless people come up with more money than they have in the past, or Ai himself is able to make up the difference between site costs and revenues, AOTK could go down again in late 2013".

AOTK's perpetual problem is that its costs are simply too high. I don't have the traffic at CSR that they do, but even so I'd probably be in trouble if all of CSR revolved around this forum. Forums require lots of overhead, because you're executing PHP and MySQL on the server side for every little thing that you do. At CSR, only this forum and the Comic-book spanking DB and the Humorama DB require the server do anything but supply the page code - we've got 1400 pages or something of pure, simple HTML that the visitor's browser can handle easily and which don't cost the web host very much on the server side. AOTK is all bulletin board, so the processing overhead is very high, and is the reason they have their own servers - an expensive proposition.

I'm a VIP donator over there, but I'm simply not in a position to help any more. Anyone who would like to help will find instructions on the AOTK home page. They have a Patreon account these days.

What's up with Chross remains a mystery. I suppose that as he reached 40, life's responsibilities began catching up to him. (When I started CSR I was older than Chross is now in semi-retirement!) Technically his site isn't that complex, but he probably had to spend a lot of hours visiting spanking sites in order to find worthy weekly links. He's still doing some updates, but I can't sign on to his discussion board any more and as we mentioned a while back, all the old attachments seem to have been lost when he converted to phpBB. My guess is that he'll stick around for awhile at his new, reduced posting frequency.

Richard Windsor is a little older than Chross, and he's still around and in fact still researching old photos at his own expense. He doesn't post as frequently as he once did, but I predict he'll be around for some years yet.

I used to communicate with Dave over at Cherry Red every once in a while, but it's like everything else - no time to keep up the correspondence. I don't know what the story is there.

Nik Zula was doing at least one cartoon per week for a long time, and I'm not surprised he couldn't keep up that pace. He must have been the most prolific living spanking cartoonist during that period. I have a few of his cartoons saved up for later posting in the CSR Humor Gallery (where a few are already posted), but since all his stuff is available on his own blog I never made it a priority to reprint them in CSR. He still does a new cartoon every now and then, so we may hope he'll continue at this reduced rate rather than leaving the spanking world altogether.

Having written all this, I see a pattern (with the exception of AOTK, which is purely financial): we're all getting older! And as life makes demands, it becomes harder and harder to commit the kind of time it takes to run a spanking site. Having said that, I'm still not going anywhere until God says so , and CSR is going to be around for a long, long time yet if I have anything to say about it. (I'd still like to have an apprentice to take over the "family business" when the time comes, but that is a subject for another day). I can't produce the amount of updates I could back in 2010, but I'm still doing one per week (with a lot of help) which is what I started with, and of course we now have our Resident Artists' contributions and those of other readers here on the Forum.

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

YES I Miss the old Chross blog and hope to log in one day! you`re doing a Fantastic job WEB-Ed with CSR finding spanking in comics old and new and searching for great spanking drawings Keep up the good work and THANKS!!

[web-ed]

I thank you very much, Butch. I'm doing my best, and of course I'm getting a lot of help with the content side these days.

[web-ed]

One of the major events in the history of personal web sites was the advent of Tumblr: it tended to supplant the blog, which itself had supplanted full-feature web sites like the CSR main site. Now Tumblr sites to me were a disorganized mess: photos jumbled together without explanation and with useless information tacked on at the end - "So-and-so reblogged this from Tumblr-site-x" - and there have only been a couple of spanking-related ones I looked at once per week (I don't have much time to look at other sites), but they certainly seemed popular.

But now Tumblr has apparently issued an edict: No NSFW (Not Safe for Work) sites allowed. I don't know what motivated this change in policy; was Tumblr so naive that they didn't realize if you put an internet platform out there, a large part of it is going to be devoted to sexual material? I also question their business acumen: do they think they can grow as a business by cutting off affiliates and driving away readership? I"ll get back to this question in a moment.

There are, of course, alternatives to Tumblr, and some spanking sites are leaving for these greener pastures: see this article on Business Insider. So if your favorite Tumblr-hosted site disappears, see if they left a placeholder behind with their new address.

Why did they do it? I have to think this is coming from the management of Verizon, which when it purchased Yahoo! in 2017 assumed ownership of Tumblr as well. (Only five years ago Yahoo! bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion(!). Business decisions like that are probably why Yahoo! had been on the edge of bankruptcy until Verizon purchased them. Ah, the wisdom of highly-paid CEOs!). Tumblr's CEO had this to say:

"As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve ... we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets."

Apparently users of adult content are not among the groups Verizon is concerned with. The terms "demographics" and "cultures" suggest to me that Verizon is planning to make further inroads into Asia, but I admit that's only a guess. The Chinese communists banned internet pornography some years ago, and one can only imagine what backward Islamic societies think of Western porn.

Fortunately, none of this affects CSR. I never did implement RSS feeds here, and I don't intend to in the future, so what happens to various Tumblr sites is of little concern to me. (I really should do something about our Links Page, I suppose, but I still dislike RSS). But if your favorite Tumblr site moves, now you know the probable reason why. As American citizens, we should make a mental note that other countries cannot be allowed to control the internet as they all believe in some sort of censorship, and we should make sure our illustrious "leaders" don't enter into some stupid UN treaty that requires internet censorship.

[Sweetspot]

Thanks for the lowdown, you answered a question or two about what happened to several sites that had gone missing from Tumblr and also provided me with a lot of information on the subject of the business side of the internet.

[willjohn]

I think you will find that it would be more likely to be Christian fundamentalists from the American Bible Belt that would be objecting to nudity.

[web-ed]

Thanks for the lowdown, you answered a question or two about what happened to several sites that had gone missing from Tumblr and also provided me with a lot of information on the subject of the business side of the internet.

Glad to be of some help, Phil. Today I noticed a couple of sites that were still there but you have to get to from your Tumblr Control Panel - what a pain!

I think you will find that it would be more likely to be Christian fundamentalists from the American Bible Belt that would be objecting to nudity.

That's possible, Willjohn, but it would mean Tumblr is lying about its reasons for taking this action (yeah, that's conceivable - CEO's do lie, don't they?). We never did find out what caused DC Comics to tighten its editorial standards back in the 80's; someone must have complained, but who? I want to avoid being too political on CSR, because there's certainly enough political shouting back-and-forth out there already and because I don't want to alienate any of our readers whatever their political views, but if I may crack the door open just a bit I think this scenario is unlikely for the following reasons:

1. Christian fundamentalists do not have much influence over American culture, to put it mildly. Hollywood and Silicon Valley openly sneer at socially-conservative Americans, who are not quite so backward as their portrayals in the media would suggest, so why would Verizon change Tumblr's policy on their account?
2. The policy is aimed not just at NSFW material (nudity, sex, spanking), Tumblr is also targeting "Hate Speech" (not notably a concern of social conservatives): "Don't post content for the purpose of promoting or inciting the hatred of, or dehumanizing, individuals or groups based on race, ethnic or national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, disability or disease."
3. There's a lot of money to be made in China if you play by their rules and grease the right wheels (i.e. Communist Party officials and higher-ups in the People's Liberation Army), so China is still my #1 suspect.

If I hear anything more, I'll report on it. Let's just hope any good spanking "blogs" that were on Tumblr find a new home.

[willjohn]

Every Conservative lives in fear that somewhere on Earth somebody is having a good time.

[web-ed]

No, Richard isn't hanging it up just yet, fortunately. But in a thought-provoking post, he discusses the changes that occur with the advancing of the years and contemplates giving up his blog in the future. Here are his post and my response to it:

For the first time yesterday when I was planning my upcoming trip to Japan I thought about this blog. I’m coming up on my 13th anniversary and I have the site until May. For the first time ever it started to come to me, how much longer will I keep doing this? My overall interest in spanking has virtually disappeared and it isn’t a passing phase, it has been like this for the last three or four years now. Whereas at one time I would think about spanking 24/7, I’m at a point now where I barely think about it at all. The interest is still there, but unfortunately my interest now focuses entirely on what I enjoy. That is probably why the spanking party scene is one area where my interest has really taken a hit. It’s not a knock on anyone other than myself, I’m the one not moving with the times.

I’m pretty sure that it is my age, even though I am only 56 years old, but I also think that having lost my entire family has also had a profound affect on me. It’s the whole mortality thing, there is still so much that I want to do in life and there are far more yesterday’s than there are tomorrow’s.

Richard - these are some complicated questions that I don't think can be answered in a short space. Both "The Lifespan of Spanking Sites" and "Spanking Party Burnout" are topics I've addressed on the CSR Bulletin Board, and even so I don't think they've really been discussed enough to disgorge the complete answers. You and I and Spankboss probably have the three oldest non-commercial spanking sites that come immediately to mind, and we've outlived countless others already. (Yours and his are the only others I even have time to look at any more). I'm a little older than you (first spanking given in 1965!) so I'll try to offer some thoughts and encouragement.

To begin with is the obvious fact of our age. Spanking, along with other erotic concerns, is going to be most important to young people. You remember how it was - and how difficult it was to procure spanking material in the pre-internet age! But of greater significance than how hard it was to find good spanking stuff was our own youth which made the idea of actually spanking a female about the most exciting thing imaginable!

But that's a long time ago now, in human terms. I hate most colloquialisms, but part of our present ennui is simply "been there, done that". I have no idea how many women I've spanked, paddled, and caned over the years, and I doubt you do, either. We're not kids wondering what it would be like to smack some girl's fanny, we've actually done it! And done it enough so that we don't really need to do it any more.

Then there is the effect on spanking of the non-spanking aspects of growing older. We are at a time when we are enduring the accumulated loss of loved ones and youthful dreams, when the end is in sight and things that once were possible aren't even remotely feasible any more. Next to all that, spanking must shrink in importance somewhat.

Yet through all that we've kept up our sites longer than many others who are younger than we. That probably means something. I still want to do CSR although personal commitments make it more difficult now after fifteen years, and I don't see myself giving it up. Perhaps you'll find it's the same with this blog - you may post less than before, and very probably spend less time searching for spanking photos, but when 2022 rolls around you decide you've still got a few things to say about spanking. And if not - well, nothing is forever, although I would seriously like to find a disciple to carry on for me with CSR after I'm gone.

O.K., I know that's rather a lot and we have gotten into some of these matters in the past, but I don't think we've said that much about the aging process as a factor in a reduced interest in spanking. Does anyone want to express an opinion on this? Go ahead - that's what a discussion forum is for, after all.

[web-ed]

It looks very much like we're going to lose two true stalwarts of the online spanking world, Richard Windsor and Doc Ken. Richard has indicated he may give up his blog after December of this year, while Ken (Spanking Minnesota) was actually going to quit this past December but was prevailed upon by his readers to continue a while longer. It's worth once again inquiring as to why people quit their spanking blogs.

I think age is part of it. Ken is now in his mid-60s while Richard must be in his late-50s, and as we get older a lot of things happen, none of them good. I think both men are in good health, but Richard has lived through the deaths of his immediate family members and that certainly changes one's perspective. Spanking, and I think erotic concerns in general, seem a lot less important than they used to when you start losing people you were close to. This change in perspective would probably occur even if you're lucky enough to reach your 60s relatively unscathed, and will certainly occur if you're not.

I'm in the same age group as Richard and Ken, and apart from the aging process I've been deeply affected by the times we live in. The Wuhan virus certainly caused some problems, and the reactions of various governments have made things probably a hundred times worse. God help you if the lockdowns cause you to lose your job or business, because you're not finding another one right now and you can't sue the government.

Somehow the politicians and bureaucrats who inflict all this misery upon us never seem to lose their jobs. I wish all those prescribing lockdowns were forced to forfeit their salaries until such time as they realized that maybe depriving people of their livelihoods isn't such a great idea after all. (I lost my job the last time government decided to "help" by forcing banks to make loans to unqualified borrowers, resulting in the financial collapse of 2007 and subsequent depression.) And so just as things were finally starting to improve, government has kicked us in the teeth again, and the darkness of statism is descending all over the world. This was happening before the virus, but the temptation to oppress the people while pretending to "flatten the curve," or "beat the virus" - how about getting rid of the common cold while you're at it, guys, as if the government's gun could stop a virus from spreading - was too great for politicians to resist.

The resulting economic catastrophe has been papered over by a complicit media and the government printing money with nothing to back it up - the people, not the government, are the source of all wealth creation - but very soon it will be impossible to ignore. (Although there is a sudden push to end the lockdowns now whose timing is very suspicious). What does all this have to do with spanking websites? Well, who's got time to think about spanking when just surviving is going to be tough for many of us? I don't want to retire from CSR, but I could conceivably be forced into it.

So with Richard and Ken looking like they're going to retire, and me hanging on by the skin of my teeth, will the younger generation come to the rescue? Stay tuned for Part II.

[web-ed]

Part II - the Future.

My last post was pretty depressing to write, so let me begin this one by reaffirming that I'm not going anywhere if I can help it. But eventually the older generation does pass away even if it isn't obliterated by an all-powerful state, so what is the future of spanking web sites?

In writing about the future of spanking parties recently (see The State of Spanking Parties Today), I pointed out that the younger generation hasn't shown much interest in spanking parties, and I will suggest here that they also don't have the social skills to keep them going. (I can't tell you how many times I've seen two young people sitting at the same table not talking to each other but simply twiddling with their smart phones. If they have any social skills, and many of them complain of loneliness, they're certainly not on display.) Is the same true of web sites? It's hard to see these mis-educated young people who seem to be endlessly posting trivia (or worse) on social media - and doing that is a long way from real socializing - suddenly becoming more socially adept and organizing spanking parties, or more interested in presenting classic spanking material like Richard Windsor's photos or CSR's comics, that they probably regard as ancient history.

I don't have the time any more to look at other people's spanking sites except for Richard's, Ken's, and Spank Boss's (The Spanking Blog). Does anyone know of any good spanking sites being run by the next younger generation (say Chross's, and he himself has pretty much retired) or by the next generation after that (people now in their 20s)? Is there hope for the future of adult spanking?

[willjohn]

Nick Zula has not been active lately. The last cartoon of his I saw was from May last year. Perhaps he is still doing cartoons on commission. Hope he is OK.

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

Things looks pretty rough for spanking