Blogheal

5 years ago today; Paheal was created by 2 guys sitting in a computer room in their college while they should have been working hard to get a good education and live structured, wholesome lives. The following is a short story chronicling the birth of Paheal and the reason it still stands here today 5 years on.

I (wiiaboo) did not come up with the idea for paheal nor did I have much interest in the concept. The Idea was thrust upon me by my good friend Rokoo (listed as co-creator in the staff). Rokoo and I went to high school together and subsequently enrolled in the same college and ended up in the same class. I had always tipped away at developing several websites and started off my internet life creating shitty little Dragonball Z fansites. This was back in the day when Anime was first making an impact on the western world so you can forgive me for being a bit of a tool. Actually no, fuck you, Dragonball Z was awesome, suck my balls. Anyway… Before paheal was what you see today, it was actually an Imageboard very similar to 4chan. At the time of its creation there were maybe 5 or 6 English speaking imageboards on the entire internet so paheal quickly carved out a small corner for itself and began to pick up steam. Long story short, a “famous” furry artist got mad we were hosting his content and got Paheal shut down. This was back in the day when web hosts would collapse at the first sniff of a DMCA.
Side-note: If you are wondering where the name “Paheal” originates from. It was a shirt that Rokoo would often wear in College featuring a Mage from Ragnorak Online with the words “Pa HEAL!!” written on it. Pa HEAL!! basically means “Heal please” in some language or another. Tagalog I think.

In the aftermath of the demise of the Imageboard I abandoned the idea of using paheal for anything else. That is until Rokoo came to me with the idea of hosting a gallery for rule 34 content. I was sceptical and lazy as fuck so I didn’t really want to put in the effort to make it. I was a pretty self centred asshole so generally if the idea wasn’t mine, I didn’t think it was worth my time.
Either way he eventually twisted my arm into creating paheal and so I set out to work. I was originally going to do with the Danbooru script but because I really didnt have a clue about Ruby on rails or.. well pretty much anything at the time I went looking for a simpler more familiar piece of software. Thus I found Shimmie and thus paheal was born.
Rokoo had a CRAZY amount of rule 34 all ready to go and so the first 2000 or so images on the site are all uploaded by him. Word of mouth eventually spread the site around and it became more popular than I could have ever imagined.

So here I sit, on a toilet on the edge of europe taking a shit and writing this blog post to celebrate 5 years of a porn website. Today me, rokoo and some long suffering friends of ours will be celebrating with dinner,  champagne and smashing a few golf balls into the Atlantic Ocean. Its been a turbulent but wonderful 5 years. So here’s to 5 more.

Cheers
– wiiaboo

It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing the “retirement” of Titanium from paheal.

Paheal is many things. It is a collection of porn, a disturbing armpit of the internet, it is a great community, a close-knit society of like minded individuals who are as weird and wonderful as the content they upload and it is a place where the rights of the artist are upheld in a friendly and timely manner. But paheal would be absolutely nothing without one man.

My relationship with Titanium started many years ago when the site was still in its infancy. A regular on the IRC he always seemed to have intuitive and intelligent suggestions on how to deal with site matters and he did more than his fair share of tag fixing and reporting. He was a natural fit for moderation. Over the next 4 years he became someone that I relied heavily on, someone the community relied heavily on. He shared my outlook on how to treat artists and he contributed way too much of his own time to make our community run as smoothly as it could. I felt I gained more than a moderator, I gained a valued friend too.

But all good things must come to an end and Titanium has informed me that he will be stepping down and moving away from the site as, due to personal reasons, he cant contribute any time to the site anymore.

I’m sure you will join me in wishing Titanium nothing but the best for whatever the future holds for him and thanking him from the unfathomable depths of my heart for all the tireless selfless work he has done to make paheal what it is.

For me he is paheal.

Thank you so much Titanium and good luck.

– wiiaboo

I intended to write this post on New Years day but for a blurry tirade of alcohol fuelled revelry and the days of recovery that followed. I hope you all had an agreeable Christmas and that Santa Claus brought you many wonderful gifts and the dizzying heights of joy and wonder filled your beautiful young hearts.

2011 was another interesting year for Paheal. Our early attempt to gather funds to make necessary server upgrades was thwarted by the cruel dictatorship that is Paypal and they are still holding our funds for another 3 months!
However things are about to get a lot better around here and this I can promise you. I recently purchased a shiny new server and we are hard at work getting it ready to lighten the load on our main server. Its been a long time coming but financial restraints made it hard to commit to new hardware until now so forgive the long wait.

What does this mean? Well, in the next week or so all the slowness and capacity problems the site is plagued with will be a thing of the past. We are working out a roadmap to keep the site on its feet and in top health for as long as possible and to fix all the little software problems we deal with on a daily basis.

It’s been a difficult year for a lot of you this year. The world seems to be descending endlessly into some level of generally accepted madness and there are a lot of ordinary decent folk out there suffering. One of the largest threats to our freedoms of late is this corrupt piece of shit legislation that you all know as SOPA.
By now you all know what SOPA is and how damaging and oppressive it is so you dont need me to tell you here. But I will tell you that SOPA could very well lead to the demise of paheal if the powers it grants “copyright” owners are wielded as carelessly as those same “copyright” owners used to wield the DMCA before ISP’s got wise to their bullshit. SOPA is a perfect example of why modern Democracy is simply not Democratic and everyone here at Paheal vehemently oppose it in every way possible.
The world is changing and this blight is an example of how stupid and backward the people who run our societies are and how easily led they are by the big corporate entities that have their cock in the ears of the power people. I dont know why but whenever someone mentions SOPA I think of this passage from the conqueror worm by Poe:

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Woe.

So even Edgar Allan Poe seemed to be against SOPA! If thats not argument enough to stand against it then I dont know what is.

Anyway now im just being silly. Needless to say you can say goodbye to the old sluggish Paheal and welcome a new fast, slim, sleek and working Paheal. Once we sort out the stability issues we can start looking at implementing some long needed software upgrades and the like.

As always its a pleasure to have you and I do cherish the contributions our wonderful community have made to Paheal over the years. This place simply wouldn’t be without you, yes YOU! The guy or gal reading this. Thank you very much for your support and continued interest in the world of obscure cartoon pornography. And for those of you of an un-determined gender, Shine on you crazy Diamonds.

Much love and tidings for the coming year.

– wiiaboo

TL;DR: New hardware, faster site, no more 502’s, fuck SOPA, thanks for being here.

WE’RE BACK! Clear your cache if the site is still redirecting you to here.

Once again paheal is hit with misfortune. This time its a combination of a bank kicking me in the balls and the subsequent server provider doing the same.

Working on it. Paheal will be back in a few days MAX though it could be up a lot sooner. This post will be updated when I have new info.

*UPDATE*
I’m being told that everything will be back online by Monday. Until then there is always Rule63 and Cosplay.
The issue is the bank got scared and untrustworthy of the payments I have been making to my server company due to the current crisis with the banks in my country. Instead of actually calling me and discussing it with me they chose to just block any more payments out of that account until I provided proof that im not some Nigerian scam artist (which I obviously secretly am ). They never told me that my previous payment wasnt made to the server company.. server company never contacted me about the lack of payment and chose instead to suspend services until payment was recieved blah blah blah. I got it all sorted out today and everything should be back to normal by Monday. Weekends not being considered a “business day” is bullshit. I blame society. Obama.

-Bismarck
P.S. Come hang out on the IRC in the meantime. You can find us on rizon at #rule34 or at this convenient chat applet too. Just enter a nickname, replace #Rizon with #rule34 and connect. Toodles ~

*UPDATE #2*
Also once the site gets back online within a week or two we will be moving to new hardware. No more 502 errors and no more site slowness. Guaranteed. We are also going to be bringing on some coders to improve the code-base and implement some much needed features.

So if you have any ideas for new features for paheal. Send me an email to administrator@paheal.net

*UPDATE #3*
Site will be back in moments. Just need the DNS to propagate across the internet. Stay tuned.

Site will be down for at least a day.

Site is broken temporarily. Doing everything we can to fix it. Hang tight and things should be back soon.

I will update this post with more info when I have it.

Thanks,

– wiiaboo

UPDATE #1:

As always you can get short updates from us on our twitter (@rule34paheal) and also join our IRC channel on rizon #rule34.

Also cosplay and rule63 are still up so If you need a place to hang out till then, they are available.

UPDATE #2:

Actually I am going to address a few things in the comments.

1. This is my (Titanium’s) fault.  I tried to enable the Favorites extension.  It apparently conflicted with the scoring system.  Then one of the disks failed.  I honestly don’t know why it screwed things up so royally, but it did.  The disk is rebuilt, but that error remains and apparently it’s more involved than just unchecking the Favorites box.  Wiiaboo and others are working to fix it.
2. This is not related to money issues.  The extra ads have taken care of that.
3. This was not a hack or other attack.
4. We aren’t moving to TPB afaik
5. The site won’t turn into OhInternet (or will it… muwahahahaha)
6. Your comments don’t appear right away because the blog things 99% are spam.  I will go through daily and approve non-spam comments.

UPDATE #3:

A few of you have mentioned the Tweet I (Titanium) posted on July 5th.  Based on the info I had then, I thought it would only be a day.  We thought that after the disk was fixed, the error would be easy to resolve.  It wasn’t/isn’t.  We are getting closer.  Please be patient.

In other news, this is a conspiracy to get more users on rule63 and cosplay and to weed out the unfaithful.  The site will run faster with less people… </sarcasm>

UPDATE #4:

Wiiaboo says it will be about 48 more hours.  This is an estimate.  (Posted at 3:00 PM on 11 July 2011)

UPDATE #5:

We’re back!  http://rule34.paheal.net/post/list

Ok before I say anything I want to make it clear that I didnt want it to come to this. This site has, for 4 years now, stood by itself under its own weight without much problem. I was ALWAYS against the idea of asking the users for money but sadly its just what needs to happen now.

You will notice a widget on the side bar. Basically what we are asking of the community is to help pay for 3 months of hosting (3 months would actually be around $2800 but I rounded it up). The current advertising money will go towards getting the necessary hardware upgrades we need to keep the site running smoothly. What will happen once those 3 months are up? Well, I am going to try to find a way to make the site sustainable financially again. 3 months is plenty time to figure this stuff out and i’m confident that I will never have to make another donation drive like this again.

So if you can spare a buck or two here or there then we would greatly appreciate it.. anything at all will help. Im not expecting to reach our goal but if we can even make half of that I will be very impressed and forever in-debt to the user-base.

Thank you.
~ wiiaboo

THE PROBLEM:

Paheal is losing money and at the current rate will be closed in July.

We currently make about $700 a month in revenue.  The site costs €600 ($850) a month.

Ad revenue has been way down in the past few months.  We apparently lost a major advertiser, but Etology (the ad company) won’t tell us who.  One of the main problems is that most advertisers are unwilling to work with a site that has content like ours (in other words, loli/shota*).  This is one of the reason other sites have removed their loli content (e.g. e-hentai, aerisdies).  Furthermore, as most of you know by the massive amounts of Bad Gateway Errors, the site is more popular than ever, but we are making less money than ever.

CONSIDERED SOLUTIONS:

• We have considered trying to find cheaper hosting, but alas the majority of cheap hosting is in the US.  The site owner Wiiaboo (aka Bismarck) does not wish to host in the US due to legal issues around loli/shota*.  Similarly, Canada and Australia are out of the question.

• We have also considered donations.  Again, Wiiaboo is “vehemently opposed” to that idea saying:

“I dont ever want the site to be in a position where it has to ASK for anything.  This site is basically run by the users and thats how it will always.”

Agree or disagree with him, I don’t care.  He pays the bills and he makes the decisions.  Thus donations are not an option.

COMPLICATIONS:

We are in the midst of a “change of guard”.  I (Titanium) will be going into a semi-retired status soon due to that strange thing called “real life”.  There will be new admins and possibly a new owner soon.  While this doesn’t necessarily impact the financial situation, it’s another layer of shit on the manure pile.

SOLUTIONS (CALL FOR HELP):

So, given all of this, we are humbly asking for useful ideas and suggestions from our users.  Because the blog site filters out many legit comments, please use our email address (staff *at* paheal.net) with “Sugggestion” in the subject line.  Any leads on good advertisers who are known to work with “questionable” sites like ours or good professional hosting** would be appreciated.

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*For past conversations on loli/shota and legal issues, see http://rule34.paheal.net/wiki/Notes

**Past hosts have been troublesome in that we have “unlimited” bandwidth, but they shut us down for using too much processor time.  Please note that offering your own computer to host Paheal is appreciated but not tenable.

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EDIT: I will not say this again.  Loli/shota are illegal in the US.  Do some research.  We are NOT going to be the ones who challenge the law in court.

Julian Assange is clearly the love child of Bill Maher and Silas the albino from Da Vinci Code