Month: September 2024

I like interfacing with AI from time to time. I asked ChatGPT: “What is a web administrator’s worst nightmare” and it replied by saying: “When they realize they’ve accidentally deleted the backup of the backup!”. Well, I concur. But I know of an even worse one, which curiously links ChatGPT’s response to today’s matter of discussion.

The web administrator’s worst nightmare is running out of space.

Temple Of Goo has been pushing out a lot of content ever since its establishment back in 2022. We are able to release material in a very consistent fashion, to the tune of an average of 5/6 releases on a weekly basis. Each one of them, especially the videos, can take up a considerable amount of space.

What do I mean by space? Every file that is uploaded onto the web takes up virtual space. The latter is not free, and when it is, it comes with limitations, such as restrictions on the amount of total Gigabytes one can use to upload material.

The Temple has already encountered space issues in the recent past, as detailed here. These problems are now more present than ever, due to a huge influx of releases which are shared by our precious contributors.

Of course I’m not complaining about people caring so much about this little project that they decided to get in touch with us so we can share their precious material with the Goo Goo Dolls fans from all over the world. I am actually humbled and honored to be of service. Having a lot of stuff being offered by people for other people is amazing and motivating, both for me and for the entire community interacting with the Temple.

However, it comes at a price: space.

The blog generates zero revenue, and so far it costs around $500/year to run. I am more than happy to yell at my own wallet to spit out the money to keep it alive, however there are other expenses I don’t feel like I should afford (as things stand out currently) to justify my investing in upgrades. One of those upgrades is space implementation, such as more Gigabytes at my disposal to share material. If the situation were different, with higher revenue and a (wayyyyyy) higher amount of daily visitors, I wouldn’t have to write this notice to you all. Yet, here we are.

As of now, virtual space for releases relies only on free accounts (Mega, Google Drive, etc…). Like I said, these accounts come with limitations, unless they get upgraded to a Premium status, with higher bandwidth and, especially in our case, way more space for content. During the past few weeks I have been struggling in terms of where to storage releases, to the point that I now am forced to ask contributors to adhere to the following rule, moving forward:

Contributors are kindly asked to verify whether or not the release they want to provide to the Temple, be it an audio concert, a video clip, or a full video performance of a show, is already present on YouTube. In case the content is already uploaded on the aforementioned platform, please refrain from sending it to the blog.

Hence the Temple, from now on, will only share what is not yet available on YouTube. I decided to impose such limitation in reference to the YouTube platform only, because it is the most popular and utilized one. This means, if what you want to share with us is not present on YouTube but it actually is on a similar website, like Vimeo, we will be happy to process it through our blog.

For the blog itself, you can also consider this a way for the latter to improve its uniqueness: it will only provide stuff that is not available elsewhere.

Contributors are therefore required to search on YouTube for a previously uploaded version of the release they feel like sharing with us, and forward the latter to the Temple only if nothing is found on YouTube. Needless to say, this limitation only applies to audio and video material, but not to pictures. Not sure whether or not a release you have is already on that platform? You can always get in touch with us and we will perform an accurate analysis for you.

I am actually the first one to advocate for what I like to call “backups” of stuff that is already present online, because you never know… If it disappears, at least there is another copy in place. Sadly, unless things change in the future, this approach cannot be taken anymore, at least not by the Temple.

Our amazing contributors have sent some stuff our way in the past, which is currently in a queue and being processed as time goes by. Some of those releases are already available on YouTube. To honor their important efforts and spirit of sharing with other fellow Gooers, I will post all of the queued-up content until the queue runs out. This is a particular case because rules where different back when they kindly forwarded their releases. The new rule is, however, active as of this moment, so any future release from today onward will have to pass the check mark discussed above.

I am sorry to have to impose such limitation, but unfortunately everything in life has limits, including virtual space for our beloved Goo Goo Dolls releases.

–Temple Of Goo staff