Happy 3rd Birthday Catbox! + Catbox LTS

もう一回！

Thanks again to Pettankon for the art. This one is gonna be long, so skip to the important part if you want.

What another year! While not a whole lot changed with Catbox, a lot of stuff has been brewing in the background.I should first address the silence as far as statistics and updates to the site. I’ll come out and say it outright - I fucked the statistics up. During a server migration I didn’t configure Apache correctly, and now I’m reeling in it with a log file that’s absolute garbage. I also started my first year of college last year, and between that full time, a part time job, and sleeping, my schedule was pretty full. HOWEVER, I have still managed to make smaller changes, like the ability to check every file on your view page, so you can delete or add them to an album. You can also sort by oldest/newest. There’s been a whole host of optimizations to the back end code as well (reminder i made catbox 3 years ago, and it was my first website). I also enjoyed all of your End of Year 2017 Poll responses. Sifting out the meme responses, I got some actually valuable insight into how people feel about Catbox and it’s current standing.

But where are the big changes?! They’re coming soon! I have a lot of things I’m not satisfied with about Catbox. Some of the things I plan on changing/reworking (while maintaining the API as it is) are:

• Albums - They look horrible right now tbh, and I can tell a lot of users are confused on how to add/remove files from them.
• Overall UI Redesign - Not incredibly high on my list of things to do, but the UI as it is right now feels dated. Using the dark theme is better, but things are still a little weird to use (why did i use bubble borders?)
• Thumbnails - I’ve been combating disk space issues for the longest time, but soon™ I’ll be able to overlook them. That means I’ll be able to thumbnail images, saving both bandwidth and load times for albums and the view page.
• Temporary File Storage - This is a VERY big maybe. I’ve always kind of disliked temporal file storage, but the amount of files I’ve seen that are simply “upload to share with friend, then forget about” are immeasurable.

The Important Part

And the biggest announcement I have - Catbox LTS (Long Term Support)! I’ve decided to take the plunge and personally invest in Catbox (as if i wasn’t already ;v). I’ve bought a 12 core, 24 GB RAM 16 TB Dell R420 to be used as Catbox’s primary server. As such, Catbox will be colocated! What does this mean? That means I get to drive down to LA to give someone my (very) expensive piece of equipment, and they’ll give it power and an internet connection! How will this affect the costs of running Catbox? In the long term, it will actually be cheaper than my current plan of hosting. You can see how much I’m currently paying on Patreon, but after moving to a colocation plan, the cost of Project Lain will go down, but the price of actual hosting will go up. The real winner here is my sanity. I won’t have to worry about disk space issues (by my calculations) for 3 years. Which by then I should be making 6 figures, and if i’m not i’ll pretty much kms. Jokes aside, the Catbox LTS will ensure your current files, and everything you upload in the future, will be safe and reliable.

As always, I want to thank not just my Patreon supporters, but users who have used Catbox despite the hiccups I’ve had. Catbox is my baby, and it’s my ultimate goal to see it through as a successful, simple file hosting platform.