hehe, I don't think it picked up to any great extent to begin with, there's click through traffic, and despite a growing user base I suspect it will stay small. I mean HHAH is "small" (compared to a catch all indexer, and its going to be), but if you want horror movies people have made it into pretty much the place to get stuff. My collection has grown so much because of the users, and its not just the same stuff, there's a lot of rare movies you can get, here too, there's a great effort by many of the users to dig up these awesome foreign and old movies that get totally swamped, or just don't get posted at the big sites. That's partly why HHAH was originally made, to a) increase the strength of the shares behind movies b) to increase the exposure of horror movies c) to help increase the quality of the released movies and d) to build a community around which these are the principles. It surpasses these
I'm not sure if big necessarily means better, I’ve been mod/admins of many ed2k sites and i know the bigger the site gets the more trouble you get and the risk of disinterest and lack of direction. Data sparseness some might say.
I never had expectations of, nor did I want, Sharereactor with any single part of HHAH, not even a shareconnector, or a filenexus. You might have noticed a trait with those one
Well its dead-donkey was around before shareconnector afaik, setup in late 2002, and populated with most content in 2003. its existed far, far, far longer than i expected, and covered so much more. Its lasted as i'd hoped, and i don't see it going away soon.
Database is relatively intact, the only time it was lost was when it wasn't possible to bring across the site from lycos to a paid host when it destroyed the database. So as far as ed2k sites go, its pretty old and has coverage.
The idea wasn't to become huge and implode, nor to force gimmicky spam, i'd like to think HHAH is tightly managed and structured to be as simple to get into as possible. The site is
completely open, there's always reactionary calls for a lockdown, restrict membership, but everything is open to those that don't want to register. I suspect if registration was closed across the site then that would force signups, but that's not really helpful, bulking up a user base of people that are encouraged to post spam. There's not really been a problem with that many a user, there have been some people that weren't helpful and though we were lax a couple of them had to be dealt with. I'm not really sure i'd classify a couple of them as even horror fans; it was more make the site bigger and add more rips (even if they aren't horror). There are plenty of sites with that aim, why bother doing it again?
I think that the acitve release thing is a point. I've noticed whilst there's butt loads of extrmely rare horror, and loads of awesome rippers and rips that people have come together to collect, often porting across the releases from big site doesn't seem to happen. I guess that's helpful, if a rip is seen elsewhere its brought over. I dunno why people don't do that at hhah. What i can say is that the resharing possibilities at hhah are very high which in itself indicates how strong a community the users have built
I think the point is, comparing a single selective topic site to a massive all encompassing site doesn't show much, and i've never been a fan of convergance ie. never liked SR style add a section and tack on another community, I think its good to port releases across seperate sites but keep focus on a specific topic. I've seen a number of sites branch out further and further, but then the knock on effect is that not everyones at the site for the same reason and you've just got lots of users but not really the tightness. I guess i could use fh as an example, not that its not huge or very popular, but i always get the feeling that the older members are getting a tad dissolusioned a tad. I'm pretty sure the mission statement has been ammended, so to speak. I think specialisation on movies would be great for the site. just like branching out here will probably increase the userbase but will lessen the whole site. That's why scifi and forum are different forums, making a new forum/category within hhah was simply not an option, and I think I can say this for certain, horror fans are not scifi fans. You get people who are both, I am, but I know some people just don't care for scifi overly. Sharing the database of users was the original inention, and whilst the usebase would grow, i don't think the community quality would.
There's a general slow down of all the ed2k sites, and I've been around a long time and this is definitely cylical. I guess that's why i merged with these two threads, and posted a link to that old topic on hhah, all by d0c posting about the dead site
Traffic is still high, bandwidth consumption slowly edges its way up every month. The technologies have a lot to do with sites of this nature, as does the forced registration and signup, and the spareness and coverage of the site.
Maybe i was completely wrong in hhah's inception as a genre site with no consideration of broadening/tacking on other deviations in the horror site ? Dispite the sub domain status, scifi this is, its essentially completely different and is hosted here because of server convience. Dead-donkey's not going to change even if people think it was the wrong approach in creating the site. I still think its the best options for sites to find a subject and stick with it rather than to go for just overall general coverage.
Of course if you think you can bring more scifi fans on board, then by all means advertise in your signatures or rant and rave, or leave as d0c has chosen to do (again).