Time waits for no one: A much delayed news update.
Just to give everyone a heads up - work is about to resume in full pace within the next few weeks as I won’t be heading back to Japan for at least another 3 months. It’s been a long delay, but I’d like to extend my sincerest thanks to those who’ve donated, and often such gratuitous amounts to the project. There have been a few especially notable users who have donated significant amounts which I feel obliged to give notable recognition to, should they desire for such. Once I’m able to gear things up again I’ll be emailing all of you who have donated to thank you personally and collect necessary information to flag your accounts for some very notable extra privileges and features planned, and additional access to some yet-to-be-announced proof of concepts that will tie into the Sagubooru project.
Recently, I decided to temporarily restrict the source code from being publicly available - I want to reassure everyone that this project is, and always will be open source, however with some fundamental changes to the API and client that’ll be coming shortly, there will be very short-term temporary obvious security holes which I am expecting while I implement permissions and privacy. During this time I will have local backups of all content and sandbox the API while removing the user tables to protect privacy as a secondary measure (These holes will only be visible through the API source, and should be sufficiently obscure in the short period required for testing). Additionally, anyone who has signed into their accounts since the beginning of the project will have had their password automatically changed to a secure hash with a random seed stored in the database. Previously the seed used for the password hashes was private to Danbooru, but is now publicly known and a theoretical risk. Anyone who is known within the community that wishes to have access to the source code may do so by contacting me for a Trac account.
I’m looking forward to once again begin serious work on the project and hope to have development moving as rapidly as it was before, and would also like to reassure everyone that even while the donation pool has been used, due to the significant interest and prior donations I will continue funding the project on my own for as long as necessary. While future donations are always sincerely appreciated and will warrant recognition, rest assured that there will always be funding for the project. I would additionally prefer to avoid having to resort to advertising wherever possible, I share your disdain for it. Should there come a point again where bandwidth runs the bill into excessively large amounts ($1000+/mo), text only ads from google will be utilized, if not local content related sponsors. Sagubooru still has an extreme amount of interest with daily hit statistics still well above several million hits a day, split almost evenly between North America and Japan, with Europe and the rest of Asia constituting the rest of the traffic. This makes it important to plan bandwidth utilization carefully during development and avoid unneeded interest, else we end up with a $10,000 overage bill before being prepared.
If you have any concerns, questions, criticism, or additional ideas you’d like to see implemented for the project, please make yourself heard!