William Higgins' theories on website security

Someone mentioned William Higgins in another thread. This reminded me of something in one of his newsletters written about two years ago. He was on his annual visit to the United States and meeting with the owner of Badpuppy. He wanted to know what Badpuppy did about security of their website. Well the owner of Badpuppy simply stated that we do not like to discusss that topic with outsiders. So Mr. Higgins goes on to complain about what he termed as “security” and his solution to it.

Well in all honesty it had nothing to do with security but with membership retention. He complained that they had many members that joined, spent a great deal of time of downloading all their content and not rebilling at all or only for a short period of time. His solution, besides his existing method, was to greatly reduce the available sets currently on line to his members. Sets would be taken off-line and others would be put on-time for a limited period. Additionally he had a premium sercharge per set in order to download zip files of the sets.

Now while I am not a personal fan of Mr. Higgins (I actually had some sort of professional relationship with him in the mid-70s before he was run out of town), I am not personally attacking him but using him as a concrete example for my statements. I find that he is not alone in the world of paysites attempting to limit their members to their content in order to get more rebills.

Two of the most common methods used by owners of paysites are throlling bandwidth and non-user friendly navigation. Have you ever been to a site where a smaller image of say 480x600 at 72 dpi takes as long to download as a 768x1024 at 300 dpi? I have been to sites where it takes a couple hours or more to download a set of 50 images – not those huge sized high res ones either. The other most common method is to slow the surfer down by either opening directly to the images or to html pages without any form of navigation. User friendly navigation from image to image just gets the surfer the content faster. Most sites which use these methods also employ sending a do not cache command with the thumbnail gallery pages. Thus the surfer usually must wait for the page to reload all the images or at least the one he/she wants to see next before moving to the next image.

Now rest these might be good methods to get additional rebills, the surfers do not like them. They want their porn fast.

Before continually on with this topic, I would like to hear some opinions/comments from you guys.

I think such methods are short-sighted. Forcing people into any situation usually only makes them bitter. Wouldn't you rather have your customers saying, "Great original content, downloads quickly, updates every Monday."

I would.
Dzinerbear

Yeah I wouldn't say I agree with that approach to retention.

I think you'll alienate more surfers than win them over.

I also think that as more and more people transition to DRMed videos on their sites, it makes coming up with sneaky schemes like that obsolete. DRM is the way of the future and it's around today.

Glad to hear that you guys agree with me on this.

I was actually a bit worried about this thread after I went back and reread it. I just typed it in the forum's own form and did not proof it. My mind works so fast and many times my brain is far beyond my fingers even though I can type over 120 WPM on a computer keyboard. Seems like I completely left out whole sentences. Need to slow down or write it in Word and proof it first.

Basically I was talking more about photo galleries verses video. Personally I don't brother too much with video as most of what is out there has been rather small in formatted size. Some really good high quality videos are coming out now especially with the new wave of "reality" sites so I might start downloading them.

As for videos in plugin sites -- I find that most of them are of such low quality, grainy if viewed larger than the original less than 300 pixel width. These are what turned me off as I would rather run down to the local dirty bookstore and rent a video or dvd.

Oh I forgot - I must think you are right on Dzinerbear. Just far too many webmasters out there who are more concerned with that almighty BUCK than customer satisfaction. This attitude has actually harmed the industry. You know that the process of conducting the survey, we found hundreds of sites that haven't updated their member's areas for months and in three cases over two years. (But I plan to start a thread on member's content area - quality, updates, frequency later on when I finish reading my latest pile of completed surveys regarding this subject).

Just remembered -- I have also found so many paysites that fill their member's area with sponsor links on html pages with their content. One webmaster actually promotes ACMovie and ACGold sites. Now I am sure that does not tender many rebills -- but then again his sites are crap - small images, very old content. But the front end promises thousands of "original and exclusive" models (Mostly older Ounique sets which are not exclusive and hardly original after being available for a several years).