A kind word.

We’ve had a few complaints today about the tag that we’ve been using on some of our photos. We understand that tags are annoying and we agree, big tags are especially annoying. However, this is the time when we drop some knowledge on you guys: Running a fansite is pretty darned expensive. We’ve probably spent over $250.00 getting photos for you guys this year alone, and we’re only at the halfway point of the year. We don’t complain because we love Naya, we like supporting her career, and we like providing you all with photos. I regularly put in 15-20 hours a week on this site, between keeping scripts updated, finding new photos, looking for news to post, etc. and Marica is just as dedicated. Most of the time, we don’t even get a thank you and we don’t get any sort of credit on Tumblr when you make edits using photos you’ve found on the site (but that’s the name of the game). We encourage you to use our photos for edits because we like seeing the pretty things you make on a daily basis, and we’re sure that the things that Naya sees through twitter she is also grateful for. But what we don’t like is when we get photos and other fansites take the photos that we have paid for and cut off our tags or badly erase them in photoshop and put them on their site. When we tag with the little black tag, that is routinely what happens. We won’t drop any names here but there have been two or three sites in particular who are repeat offenders. Trust me, we don’t like using the big tag either, but it’s become a routine problem with our site that people steal our photos. If we got our photos for free, we wouldn’t care, but most of the photos on the site, particularly the exclusives, have been paid for. Handsomely.  The large tag is the only way we have of ensuring that our photos don’t get blindly taken and used in other places without any form of credit. The ads on this site do not bring us in any money. They go to our host, and that’s how we manage to have free hosting (otherwise it would be even more expensive to run this site). This is a good time to say thank you to Gertie as well. We appreciate everything FSO has done for us!

We have changed our large tag so that it’s smaller and hopefully less intrusive. We hope that this is a happy medium for you guys, and we hope that you understand a little more why you see tags on most fansites.