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honestly at this point if thell told me the sky was blue i’d walk outside to check

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"who wouldn’t...look to [tumblr/twitter/discord] to see what’s going on." I mean, where on cherp did it say there was a tumbler? And I'm SURE you've seen various people who don't want to associate their very public Discord account with Cherp. And then how would they even known there WAS a cherp discord, or what the link was? I only found CherpOfficial after Cherp was down for two weeks and I started googling it to see if other people were talking about it anywhere. I don't use Tumbler.

> How would they even know there WAS a cherp discord

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"Throwing insolent under the bus"? More like "Disclosed the reason why the site went down after it was appropriate for them to do so"

If someone checks the site, sees that it's down, and it isn't back up in a matter of hours/a day, I don't see who wouldn't be compelled to look to tumblr or twitter or discord to see what's going on. The case with the DMCA thing is that they thought the site would be down for MONTHS, if not longer, so if there was that one in a million person who just assumed that since they site had been down for a week, that it was never coming back at all, they would know that "No, actually, it'll be coming back, you can read up on what is actually happening on our socials and see what is going on."

"they didn’t even put up a fucking page on the site like they did when insolent dmca’d them." lol they didn't even do that for like a week until sometime after they decided to throw insolent under the bus (after building up a significantly angry hoard) and someone was like yo maybe you guys should put up some sort of page saying that the site's being rebuilt so that people that don't follow the social media/discord don't just think the site's down for good?

i don't thinking "throwing insolent under the bus" is a fair or accurate description of what happened there lmfao

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God. Tonight's shitshow has really been something. Honestly not surprised with the idea of a former dev doing whatever they can to being the site down. IK y'all on Cherpblr love to bitch about the staff and how unreliable the site is, but you need to understand that the site going down without warning isn't the fault of the staff. It's because the site is built on code held together by gum and shoestrings, and, in at least the past 2 cases, if not more, it was a deliberate attack to sew distrust within the users.

In hindsight, the name Insolence should have been a red flag /j

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Welcome to the Cherp Special Hell

Hello, everyone! We're here for a Fun Midnight Announcement™️. Just kidding, this isn't fun. Please buckle up!

So, reason the site's down - we got DMCA'd. Long story short, Insolent is Mad™ at some of the staff for personal reasons (we will not elaborate) and has decided to exhaust all resources she has to sabotage the site, so she sent Thell an email demanding the site be taken down. Unfortunately, it was formatted correctly and sent to the right place so Thell couldn't really ignore it. Her basic claim is that the site is running her code and she doesn't want the site to be running her code, so we need to get rid of it - that's why it's a total rewrite. Her code (with a few things Thell bolted on to make it work properly) is the backbone the rest of the devs built on so it can't easily be ripped out.

This is also why the announcement was so short, curt, and gave you all very little time - to be safe from DMCA as a host, you have to comply immediately. Thell had already spent two days researching whether she had a legitimate claim, so as soon as he figured that she did, indeed, have a case, the staff legally didn't have much time to warn you. Failure to comply properly to her request = loss of safe harbour = she could tell his ISP to disconnect his Internet, which means the site would never (or at least, not for a long time) be coming back (and also cripple Thell financially), so he basically legally just had to poke his head in and go "yeah, site's gotta go down", and our hands were tied.

On that note, while we're being transparent about things and letting the shoe drop on one matter, we'd like to address another - the 'freak lightning strike' that occurred on 9/15. We're also largely certain that this was Insolent's doing, based off the chosen date having personal significance and the fact that - aside from Thell - she was the only one with physical access to the servers that he hosts directly at any point in the past. We internally debated whether or not we should express this as intentional sabotage at Thell's behest, but there were some concerns at the time about being able to prove that it was her without a shadow of a doubt and again, concerns about a witch hunt.

What actually happened is what appears to be a code 'timebomb' which effectively wiped and bricked all of the servers that are within Thell's possession. This includes the server which Cherp was on - meaning that a VM had to be rebuilt from scratch, we had to salvage whatever backup had most recently completed that was not directly on the server and make due with it. Thankfully the code is in multiple places as we have several people who have copies - Keys, Hex, Thell, and TTMIYH. Therefore the site could be reconstructed with the remains of what we had (copies of the code and a separate backup uploaded free from the servers themselves).

Why are we just now bringing this up? Because realistically, we still can't be 100% certain that it was Insolent, but given the facts mentioned in the third paragraph and now the DCMA it seems extremely likely. It appears that Insolent intends to continue to escalate and harm the trust that the userbase has in the site by forcing it down until she is content, which at this point we believe is the total end of Cherp.

This is to say the past two incidents were extremely unplanned, incredibly unprecedented, and were entirely and utterly out of our control.

There will be a FAQ underneath the read-more that I will update if we get any particular questions that haven't been answered.

Thank you all for your patience, and apologies once again for the interruption of service.

Q: What is a DCMA claim? A: A DMCA claim, also called a DMCA Takedown Notice, is a complaint made if someone suspects a website of copyright infringement. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a set of laws that exist to protect copyrighted content on all digital mediums. The DMCA says that, while an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is not liable for displaying information that infringes a copyright, the ISP needs to remove the material from their users' websites if they receive proper notice. A DMCA claim requires that hosting providers, upon receipt of an infringement claim, remove or disable access to any websites that are potentially infringing.

Q: You say you can’t be 100% certain the ‘timebomb’ was Insolent’s doing, so how do you know it was a malicious attack to begin with and not just some hardware/software failure? A: When it went off it deliberately populated a message that said ‘Timebomb lol’.

Q: Why weren't we warned when it initially happened? A: Because we did not want to cause panic in the event that she had no grounds; while she did write the majority of the original site code, Thell was researching to determine if it counted as "under my employ" or not, since she was being paid to write the site and had transitioned the administrator role to me as of 4/25/2020 which might've granted us some measure of legal clemency. By the time Thell had determined that she had grounds for DMCA and informed me, that meant we had to take it down Now.

Q: Why did you not tell us directly to begin with and opt to go with "complicated legal reason"? A: Despite the fact that the action is likely meant maliciously, we would rather not 'make a scene'. We do not want to cause a witch hunt for Insolent, but the rumor train is already making rounds and we'd like to nip that in the bud and also explain why our hand was forced.

Q: Why didn’t Thell/the staff see this coming? A: Because realistically, this was someone that Thell knew for a decade and a half roughly and trusted. Plus, we’re all adults and we would like to assume the best of people - we did not think that Insolent would go to these measures, but now we know unfortunately, and we’ve paid the price.

Q: What is being done going forward to prevent further malicious acts? A: Insolent no longer has access to the servers, physical, digital, or otherwise - when Thell rebuilt them, everything was redone from scratch. Additionally, when the rewrite is done, she will have no claim to the site. Anything above and beyond that is something we cannot anticipate, and we would not like to speculate on what the possibilities may be.

Q: Will we risk seeing this in the future if another dev quits where the site may be DCMA'd? A: No, there is legal and binding agreement between the current dev team that they are employed to write the code for a service and therefore cannot claim copyright effectively. We have not decided on the specific licensing agreement, but there is one being handled to prevent future issues.

Q: Does this mean Insolent was behind the cryptohacker incident? A: No, that one was legitimately Russian cryptohackers.

Q: So does this mean we have an ETA? A: No, we still will not be providing one, since as stated a few times we do not want to set an estimate and miss it.

So that's what's going on, and we'll answer questions about this as best we can.

Thank you for your time.

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Just wanna toss my thoughts into the ring on tags, cause I have nothing original to say /s

Seriously, I think I use tags in a different way than most other people? At least scanning over Tumblr. I only ever search using tags, and 99% of the time it's "playing cis female" and "looking for cis female" cause, well, I'm a lesbian, and I don't trust people on here to not fetishize trans people.

So, obviously, knowing that, it's clear why I'd like there to be check boxes for what sort of relationship(s) you're looking for in an RP, similar to AO3. All too often I'll stumble across a prompt that's got female tagged on both partners, but it turns out the person is just looking for M/F stuff, but doesn't care who's who

And obviously I know it's hard to code shit. This, like the rest of my blog, is all opinion.

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Just wanna toss my thoughts into the ring on tags, cause I have nothing original to say /s

Seriously, I think I use tags in a different way than most other people? At least scanning over Tumblr. I only ever search using tags, and 99% of the time it's "playing cis female" and "looking for cis female" cause, well, I'm a lesbian, and I don't trust people on here to not fetishize trans people.

So, obviously, knowing that, it's clear why I'd like there to be check boxes for what sort of relationship(s) you're looking for in an RP, similar to AO3. All too often I'll stumble across a prompt that's got female tagged on both partners, but it turns out the person is just looking for M/F stuff, but doesn't care who's who

And obviously I know it's hard to code shit. This, like the rest of my blog, is all opinion.

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there is no better feeling than connecting to a prompt in a fandom with, like, 3 total and knowing youre almost certainly going to make someones day

Dude yesss. I love knowing I'm makin folks happy.

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Love how, despite Cherp's anonymous nature, there are still people who are, like, known for RPing specific things. I am, or at least was one of those people (I don't get as many responses to my prompts and haven't seen the one or two prompts mentioning me in a while) (I'd specify more, but I think that'll get me banned)

Anyway, shout out to that one person who only ever RPs Moira for all their different kinks.

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More quality is expected, plus I feel like there are more people willing to dom on Cherp than there were on Cherub

I miss Cherubplay. Back in the day all I'd have to say is "I will play as top" with the world's sloppiest starter and I'd literally wake up with 10+ connects, maybe I'm in the wrong fandoms now but it's just so slow... :,(

HFGHFG

I guess maybe Cherp expects more quality? I'm not sure...

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I tend to bump the prompts I'm most interested in every 5 days, but if there's a prompt that I'm just flat out not interested in anymore, I will draft or delete them.

Do people connect to old prompts? When I see a nice prompt that's like six months old I assume the author mustn't want to play it anymore otherwise they would've bumped it.

I get some on occasion! I always welcome it because like, if I haven't bumped it, it doesn't mean I don't want to play it. It just means compared to others I might be vibing with right then and there, I might not bump it.

Though you also need to understand I personally have a RIDICULOUS amount of prompts.

I have a problem.

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Me: Oh, yeah, go ahead and take your time. I'm in no rush

Also Me: Oh my God they haven't responded in a day they must hate me and they think my writing is awful

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Anon you've GOTTA name names now

There's this really cringy fandom I just got into... not gonna name any names... but I swear all the NSFW roleplayers for it on Cherp are like thirteen, most of them are just so fucking bad

-

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I don't use Discord anymore and if I did I probably wouldn't want to join anyway because Cherp's an anonymous site and Discord isn't

It isn't anonymous, but literally no one will know what you're doing in there. For all they know, you could be the one person who only RPs wholesome, SFW stuff.

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What are some of y'all's writing pet peeves?

Mine is an overabundance of phrases like "the blonde" "the dark-haired man" "the white-haired boy" etc. Nevermind the fact that technically men would be called 'blonds' or 'brunets' because the English language is bullshit and etymology is witchcraft, but nothing kills my desire to reply to a thread faster than terms like "pinkette" and "ravenette".

JUST USE A PRONOUN OR THEIR NAME PLEASE.

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I never understand the people complaining about joining the Discord. Like, just do what I do and mute all the channels except the update related ones. No one is forcing you to check it. And like, where else are you expecting to get updates when the site's down? The site? And they have a Tumblr. too, it's not like you can only get updates on the Discord. Plus, it's much easier to directly interact and ask questions through the Discord server.

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Cherp ain't even been up for two years

Fr tho, how long do your roleplays usually last? 'Cause I'm starting to think it's almost impossible too keep it long term, given it takes too much energy and most of us have enough responsabilities. Unless you two are fine with waiting and have plenty of communication...

When cherp first came out I had a roleplay that lasted like two years