Single point of failure
Hey everyone.
I'm really glad I can write to you again.
The site has been through all kinds of problems before, but this time was different.
On August 13th, in the middle of the day, every single site suddenly went down without any warning. I checked my email right away and saw that my domain registrar had banned my account, taking every domain offline with it. The registrar massively overstepped its authority and decided to troll me.
In the end, it took me about a week and a half to get everything back.
The very next day I bought new domains and moved them to a more reliable registrar.
Here are all the domains, just in case. These backup domains are here to stay, so save them somewhere. They're just mirrors.
| Main domain | Mirror |
|---|---|
| rule34.xyz | rule34xyz.xxx |
| rule34.world | rule34world.xxx |
| rule34vault.com | rule34vault.xxx |
| furry34.com | furry34.xxx |
The emptiness inside me

I can't even describe what I felt the day it happened. In that moment, it seemed like everything was lost. Everything I'd built had just burned down. Eight years of work and growth, gone. I cried the whole evening. Something died inside me.
This is more than a project to me. It's part of who I am. It's the thing I genuinely love working on, where I get to grow as an engineer.
Here's the thing: the servers with all the data were fine. The code was fine. Everything was in place except the domain names. But losing the domains means rebuilding the site's audience from scratch: Google indexing, traffic, all of it. That can take years.
Even with the domains back, it will still take a long time to bring users and advertisers back. The damage was done either way.
There are a lot of you

When it all happened, I saw just how many of you there are. So many people were writing in the Discord community asking what was going on. People messaged me directly to say they were sorry and to ask what happened.
When I launched the new domains, people started showing up the very same day. Within a couple of days, traffic was already at 10-15% of what the original domains were getting. That meant we weren't starting from zero. We had a serious head start. By my estimate, recovery would now take around a year instead of several.
Later I saw threads popping up around the web, on Reddit in particular, asking where the sites went, with other people sharing links to the new domains.
Long story short: our community is getting big. In one week, the Discord server grew from 9k to 15k people. Here's the link, by the way.
Wrapping up
I'm glad it's behind us. I can finally get back to the work and start shipping new features for you again.
By the way, I'd already started writing an announcement before all of this happened, so expect another one within a week or so.
I'm glad we're back together. Come here, let me hug you all.
