Empornium

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Empornium is a BitTorrent community focused on the sharing of pornographic media files.

Contents

[edit] History

Empornium was founded in August 2003 by the pseudonymous Sazaraki, who at the time moderated the adult forum at Filesoup. It started as a small website and supporting BitTorrent tracker for a very small number of people to share pornography. The Empornium community has since expanded to approximately 938,000 active users (December 2006), and continues to grow. Community members now use the Empornium site not just to swap files, but as a portal for more social activities, as evident by the popularity of the forum and IRC channel on WhatNet (irc.whatnet.org #Empornium). Empornium is ranked as roughly the 1338th most popular site on the internet (June 2006), according to Alexa.

Prior to August 2005, the Empornium site was hosted on a pair of rackmounted PCs at Niuhi Hosting in the United States, with bandwidth donated by an Empornium member. That is when Empornium partnered with a banner-network, Targetpoint. Shortly after the acquisition (August 2005), the entire Empornium site was moved to the Netherlands and is currently hosted in the same domain as several other prominent sites in the Warez/computer file piracy scene, notably:
The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

On July 5th, 2006 a new site design was introduced and some site features have been made pay-only. Namely that's the signup process for a 7-day-trial and the use of an advanced search engine. Quite a few of the top contributors and some (former) admins have been upset by this move and decided to leave the site.

On July 7th many members have reported that their account have been deleted, most notably for recommending users to the new cheggit site and bad mouthing TargetPoint. There is also a belief that accounts have been deleted so members will have to pay to make another one. The user forums have been down since late July 6th, many believe it is so TargetPoint can erase all the negative discussion about the 'new' empornium and discussion about the "mass exodus" to cheggit. Additionally, the number of registered users as reported on the front page ballooned from 450,000 to over 800,000 in a single day (July 7th). While its possible that these are genuine new registrations, it is also possible its another means of portraying the new site/ownership positively. The forums were shut down the same day, claimed by TargetPoint to be for maintenance. On the same day the following message spammed the torrent pages on Empornium explaining the loss of mods and owners:

Before TargetPoint, Empornium was run by saz,
Beginnings of TargetPoint Control
Saz made a choice to take on investors. By taking a partial buy-in from Targetpoint, the goal was to use their resources to make the site better with better servers, a complete rebuild and a potentially wider audience. This contract gave TargetPoint a lot of legal control over Empornium, including control over the domain. The first thing they did was to put additional ads on the site, which was gernerally acceptable as they didn't get in the way nor cause problem with using the site. Pushing the Big Cheese Out On Empornium, TargetPoint started making bigger decisions about the site, and started to lock down and control the site more, adding more advertisements and other such things. Saz hadn't been the sole owner of the site since the initial deal, but only now did that become a problem. After the move to .nl, he no longer had any control over what TargetPoint did with the site. They put up more and more ads, and changed the site to add yet another page for ads to be placed. They also did nothing to stop the extreme slowdown of the site, from zippy 1-2 second page loads by now slowing to over 6 seconds. Saz and the other admins were not consulted on any changes that were made.
In early 2006, TargetPoint built a site called ImageFap - an image hosting service that is also filled to the gills with ads, very different from the commonly used image hosts named HideBehind (previously http://pleaseeat.us and imagehero), Fapomatic and JPGHosting. TargetPoint added a permanent link to the top of every Empornium page, linking to ImageFap as the host for images on Empornium.
In the forums, TargetPoint threatened to ban anyone (including admins) who badmouthed TargetPoint in the forums. Many threads were deleted mentioning the problems with TargetPoint and ImageFap. The information on this is fuzzy, but the general consensus is that saz deleted the newer threads to keep some users from being banned, and that TargetPoint employees deleted the older threads mentioning TargetPoint in a bad light.

[edit] The New Look

Recently (July 5, 2006) Empornium was completely changed by TargetPoint. The entire site design was changed, and by appearance the main goal of this design is to maximize ad coverage, in a layout not unlike ImageFap. The decision to do this and the decisions on how it should look and work were made without any warning to the users, and little warning to admins or moderators as to when it would happen. Months before this, a TargetPoint employee told the IRC channel about the site redesign, but no such warning was given when things actually changed. This broke various aspects of the site, including 3rd party search tools, uploader descriptions (which depended on the site's layout), some of the IRC bot's functions, and many many other tools that were made for Empornium that depended on the layout (such as aNemia's tEMPlator). The site was also modified so that links in comments (usually to image stills of videos, called "screens") would redirect through a webmonkey.ws server.

The takeover by TargetPoint angered many of the people that posted in the community and as a result they decided to fight back by alerting everyone who contributed to Empornium about the takeover. The objective being to sink as many torrents as possible making it unattractive (no abundance of content) for new members to pay Targetpoint's fee to join.

See also: deviantART's hostile takeover: a story of good PR resulting in a successful coup.

[edit] Cheggit

Main article: Cheggit

Cheggit is a break off BitTorrent community from Empornium, opened to the public in July 2006. Membership is free and it was started because of the changes made to Empornium by TargetPoint that many users didn't feel suited the type of place Empornium was.

[edit] Community

More than one million people have registered at Empornium since its inception, but the current active membership is just over 800,000 users, as of July 9. 2006. The high rate of attrition can be attributed to a policy of maintaining a "share ratio," meaning that users are required to upload nearly as much as they download. Another effect of this ratio enforcement is that at any given time, approximately two-thirds of the site's membership are actively uploading (seeding), resulting in high download speeds in comparison to a typical BitTorrent tracker.

There are rewards in form of status that you can obtain by simply being involved with the site. The beginning rank is perv. After substantial posts and site involvement and notice by members in the form of a forum page, a perv can be promoted to Good Perv. Good Pervs are allowed to use HTML in their posts and are given an avatar on the site and forums. After a lot of sharing and time spent with the site and notices in the forums one can be promoted to Smut Peddler. Smut Peddlers are given special notice in the torrent lists with a yellow backing making them stand out among the blue Perv and Good Perv Posts. The only people higher than Smut Peddlers are the "Pron Kings of teh Pr0n." They are the site administrators.

There are strict policies against hateful speech. Empornium does not tolerate any form of bigotry. However, breaking the site rules or being particularly obnoxious can earn you the uncoveted "Dumbass" or "Hungarian Cisco Fucktard" title, with appropriate avatar.

Adult material is available in a wide range of categories including Straight, Classic, Softcore, Amateur, Homemade, Lesbian, Gay/Bi Male, Anal, Boobs, BDSM, BJ/HJ, Ejaculation, Piss/Puke/Scat, SheMale/TS, Other Fetish, Asian, BBW, Ebony, Latina, Mature, Anime, Comics, Pictures, and Porn Games.

The administrators of Empornium maintain a strict policy on the nature of uploads; the following is an excerpt from the rules page:

  • No underaged. None. No photos, no videos, no drawings, no anime, not even so much as an audio file of a minor. Even if it's not on this list, and it involves a minor, it's still an instant ban. If you post obviously underage media, I will do everything in my power to bring you to your local constabulary. If the age of participants is marginal, do not post it. Any discussion of underage participants will get the poster banned.
  • No animal porn... that means people fucking animals and animals fucking people. Animals fucking animals belongs on Discovery Channel, not empornium.
  • No Snuff. [real or staged]Again, I will do everything in my power to bring you to your local constabulary.
  • No necro. A tangent of snuff. Sick.
  • No true rape. Again, sick.
  • No child birth. This i just don't get.
  • No executables. This is a media site. Games are the only allowed executables.
  • No audio files or written material (text stories). Without getting into hair-splitting over what's acceptable and what's not, it's all banned. Use Google if you really want this kind of stuff.
  • No mainstream movies, TV shows or music. No Hollywood movies/clips, even if they have adult content. Stick to porn plz.

[edit] Empornium Technology

Several tools have been created by developers who are also members of the Empornium site:

  • A Mozilla Firefox search extension
  • An HTML torrent description generator for uploaders
  • An Empornium Sidebar for quick access to various areas in Empornium

Empornium itself is a small cluster of LAMP systems. On top of the LAMP base, Empornium uses:

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../e/m/p/Empornium.html"