Quote from: Cyber-Angel on March 12, 2007, 07:16:41 PM
Renderosity have had the password system on the galleries since I joined in 2003 and it is only recently since the redesign of the forums 2005/6 that they have required you pass word for the forums, even the chat room is now password protected.
Yes, I can't quite understand the change to password-protected forums. Almost every other such community allows at least open viewing; obviously open *posting* is a major spam risk. Open viewing encourages people to register by showing them what the community has to offer.
Quote from: Cyber-Angel on March 12, 2007, 07:16:41 PM
As to the advertising it must be remembered that Renderosity has an E-Commerce component to their business and I suppose that with a site as large and complicated as Renderosity, you have to have some way of paying for the large bandwidth required to run a site like that.
It's not so much the existence of advertising as the nature of most of it - scantily clad poser figures. It just gives it an unnecessary sexual undertone and I think it gives people the wrong impression of a lot of the content there. Many people I know don't take Renderosity "seriously" as a community because of the oversaturation of sexual content, even in areas of the site that have little or nothing to do with such products and services. It's mostly down to the advertising as the Terragen, MojoWorld and to a lesser degree the Vue forums and galleries largely avoid these issues, but the advertising remains, so this undesirable content is unavoidable.
In contrast sites like CGTalk, DeviantArt and many (perhaps even most) others generally maintain much more tasteful advertising, in addition to having open forums (for viewing) and publicly viewable galleries. Renderosity is not alone in its bandwidth and storage space challenges - CGTalk and DeviantArt in particular both eclipse Renderosity's registered and participating member numbers, I believe, and are thus likely to have greater storage and server needs. Yet both are much more open than Rendo at the same time, so it is clearly a conscious choice in their part, and not one I fully understand; certainly one I don't agree with.
- Oshyan