Priv. Blogs / Clubs

Obviously there are still some obscurities concerning our private blogs and the different sections of the club. We have been asked some questions that we would like to answer publicly hoping to make the structure of our club a little more transparent for everyone. NEO has answered these questions for you:

Why are there private blogs and why aren’tthe videos uploaded directly to the groups of Grou.ps?

Neo:

There are different reasons for that. On the one hand there is the bad accessibility of Grou.ps. Their servers are regularly down. And on the other hand there are their consistent notices of error while uploading videos. Furthermore they’re constantly changing their rules.

We tried different providers in the past like Yahoo Groups, Bing and Facebook. But they lack features Grou.ps is offering. So Grou.ps is a good choice and, which is most important, they’re very tolerant concerning what the groups are used for.

Another reason is the activity of the group's members. In the past one could say that out of 100 at least 10 members have been active contributors to the group. That’s when it was fun to put all this work into the project. But during the last year there has been a change. More and more groups and public blogs appeared out of nowhere. To get one’s hands on good material nothing had to be done anymore except for some clicks to download the offered material. So the activity in our groups sunk from 10% to 1%. And it’s not only we who made this experience but we heard the same from admins of other groups.

That’s when we had to decide to either put an end to the Matrix Project or to find a way to activate members. We decided to find a way to motivate all of our members to contribute to the groups again.

By accident around that time one of our blogs had been deleted once again because there seemed to be a video of a minor posted. And so we discovered the possibility of having a private blog.

With such blogs there is no risk of being deleted as they’re not public. Only problem is that only 100 users can be added to private blogs. It’s preset that way by Blogger.com.

To get around the storage limits of Grou.ps and to motivate our members we decided on having several private blogs and club sections.

After the first year we can see that this has been a great success. During the past year over 2.000 videos have been posted to our blogs. Even though the rate of active members in the groups remained low we were very pleased with the activities in the private sections. This gave us the needed motivation to go on with the Matrix Project.

That’s why we ask those of you who have been invited to the private clubs to only post their stuff in there.



What do I have to notice if I have been invited to a private club section?

Neo: These are our rules. They’re necessary to minimize our workload and to simplify organization.

1. After you have been invited to a private blog we ask you to only post and upload to that blog. It will help to prevent the transgression of the Grou.ps’ storage limit.

2. When you upload a video please tag it with your group nickname. That’s important because from time to time we will delete inactive members in order to give active Grou.ps members the chance to become active members of our private blogs.

If you forget to tag your videos it might happen that you’re deleted though you contributed to the blog. Then it’s just not our fault but yours. Everybody is self-responsible to show his activity by adding their own nicks to uploaded videos.

3. We ask you to pay attention to the groups topic when posting videos. If a guy in a video looks really young it has to be uploaded to the Youngsters section. Some of our members only like to watch videos of guys who are at least 20 years old. So with the Youngsters section we followed that request. It’s the place to post videos of boys who might be under age.

4. You only get invitations for those sections you are active in.

5. When the limit of 100 members is reached inactive members will be deleted. That’ll happen every 3 months and we’ll start with members who didn’t contribute anything at all.

Why can’t I be invited to all oft he groups although I’m active?

Neo: The main group has about 2.200 members and there’s only 100 members allowed to the belonging blog. The Stickam Group has 60 members while there are also 100 members allowed to the belonging blog. And the Cam4 group has about 1.600 members with 400 invitations to the belonging blogs being available.

Everybody’s able to immediately see the mismatch between group members and available invitations. With the Stickam Group it’s the other way round. But that has to do with the higher standards for it which are only complied by few people.

The Cam4 section has 4 blogs with different themes.



It is hard to organize everything equitably and without putting somebody at a disadvantage. Though we decided that within the Cam4 section everybody is allowed to ask for multiple invitations. But if somebody has no postings in one of the sections he will be deleted even when that same person is highly active in another section. The sections have to be seen as separated if there are more requests than free spots.