- Creation date: 2007
- Technologies: PHP + MySQL + HTML
This was the third and final version of Subir-Fotos.com ("upload-photos.com" in English), building upon the original 2006 version and the 2007 update. It featured a refreshed design and continued to offer user accounts for managing and sharing pictures. Unfortunately, this would also be the last ever version of the website.
With thousands of new pictures being uploaded every day, the task of moderating the content became overwhelming and very time-consuming, and that issue was made even worse by the fact that the servers were down or almost down very often – I had no idea how to get more capacity, so the website was constantly dying of success.
Story time: How I (accidentally) created a porn website
Interestingly, I didn't shut the site down because it was losing money, as it was actually making a decent amount. And I definitely wasn't scared of legal repercusions because of copyright or anything else – internet was much more wild, permissive, and unpoliced back then, so that wasn't really a concern (plus, I wasn't even eighteen yet!). The trigger came when my mother told me that some family members were concerned about the kind of explicit content "I was" uploading to my website.
Of course, I never uploaded such content; only other users did, and only when I wouldn't manage to remove it in time (again, trying to go through thousands of pictures a day to delete the unallowed ones wasn't easy, especially when half the pictures would fail to load due to the servers being at capacity). But this was 2008, so most people of a certain age still didn't quite grasp how the internet worked: to them, if something was in my website, I must have put it there myself!
The thing is, the site had become too wild due to my patchy moderation. You would go to any category of pictures, such as "nature", and you would often find some spicy photos that would give you a portrait of "nature" (human nature, to be exact) that didn't quite match what most would have expected to see in that category.
Eventually, the above even resulted in Google banning the usage of adverts on the website for 30 years, which forced me to look for alternatives, most of which would pay significantly less generously.
Despite all this, I could have decided to keep the website going, as it was still generating a decent amount of money every month. But given that most of my revenue was coming from Tutoriales-Gratis.com anyway, I simply decided to shut it down to avoid further headaches.
