Hey everyone. I'm Sieghard — the creator of this site. This is the first post in the new announcements section, so it makes sense to start from the beginning.

About 8 years ago I couldn't shake the idea of building my own rule34 site. The kind of site I'd actually want to use myself — fast, convenient, functional. It was just a pet project, nothing serious. Something for me.

What followed was a long road. Countless iterations of performance optimization, UI improvements, work on the user experience, system stability, backups, and a lot more. There were ups and downs — periods of real growth and rough patches — but over the years the overall trend stayed pointed toward growth.

I started as a regular developer. Along the way I had to become a UI/UX designer, a DBA, a DevOps engineer, a Linux sysadmin, and more. Not only because I wanted to grow as a specialist, but because the product needed it. This project is what let me grow as a technical specialist. When thousands of users started showing up, and then tens of thousands, I knew I was on the right path.

Enough backstory. Let's get to the point.

Discord

Very early in the project I needed some kind of "changelog," and a way to collect feedback from users so I could tell whether I was moving in the right direction.

If you join my Discord now, you'll see a lot of channels, but there are 3 main ones:

• announcements
• ideas-and-feature-requests
• problems-and-bugs

The names speak for themselves. And this worked for a long time — until I noticed that most of the audience doesn't even know the Discord server exists. For different reasons: some never saw the link, some don't have a Discord account. Over time, the reasons to do something about announcements kept piling up.

Why I finally decided to make a separate announcements tab:

• Not all of the audience is on my Discord server
• Discord has a post length limit, and I simply can't lay out my thoughts in full there
• Bare-bones media support — you can't put images inside posts. Same goes for any other content
• No comments under announcements (or I never figured it out). Either way, here you can comment on my posts
• Censorship. On Discord I'm very limited in what I can say
• And the most important one: if Discord changes its terms of service so that users have to go through some kind of verification, the entire reading audience just disappears
• Lately Discord has been hit by some strange wave of spam bots, so the channels have to be cleaned constantly. Thank you, DarkNik, for always moderating my Discord server.

How announcements work

The system works like this: I can write text in markdown. Here's an example — this very announcement:

I even made a cheatsheet for myself:

So the markdown text goes through a rendering and sanitizing process and turns into HTML. Which means I can do any customization I think is necessary.

For example: I can even embed mp4 videos as looping gifs.

As you can see, I mess around with AI image generation a fair bit. So in news posts I'll be adding images, so the text isn't so dry.

What's next?

The plan is roughly one announcement per month. Sometimes more often, sometimes less. I want you to know what I'm working on and to see that the project keeps moving. Sometimes I'll write about more than just the site's development. If you've read my Discord before, you already know the kind of substance I mean.

I'll keep posting on Discord, but it'll probably just be a short summary with a link to the main announcement here on the site.

My Discord server will slowly fade out — there's no real need for it anymore. As for feature suggestions and bug reports, I'll think about how to integrate that into the site itself. In any case, you can always find the contact us form in the site's footer.

I've moved the announcements from the past year over from Discord, so you can catch up on what's been happening.

The most important part

Actually, here's a small spoiler: my plans were a little different. Originally I wanted to write a big announcement on Discord about a new feature, and only then build the announcements system. But this feature matters so much to me that I decided to swap the order. First the announcement system, then the announcement of the super-duper feature.

So my next announcement will be about something genuinely important. About what I've been working on a lot lately. And I guarantee you — you're going to like it.

Take care. The next big announcement is coming very soon, hopefully within the next 2-3 weeks. Have a good one, everyone.

P.S. I'm a supporter of free speech, people's rights and freedoms. I'm against governments and corporations clamping down more and more, which is happening a lot lately. You can read more about this UK is done.