A change on Video Links for 2023 (Patreon)

Hey Gearheads!

Every now and then something unpredictable happens with file links and they just either kick the bucket or become invalid for one reason or another.  Maybe the file needs to be updated, re-uploaded, there could be server issues, it could be flagged or any other number of random occurrences.

If you haven't noticed this happening in 2022, great!  That means I was fast enough to compensate for this happening, but it happened a lot and many of you comment on the affected post, on discord or reach out to me directly when it happens.  For the record, the last 2 are the best ways.  Commenting on the post is quick and easy, but I have to remove the comment because once the problem is fixed someone could come to the post and think the problem is still there otherwise.

Over the years I've tried tons of different methods for storing files and looked into even more.  We've used the Japanese storage tstorage, Patreon direct links, Mega, One Drive, Google, Hosted on the Website, Wetransfer, GoFile, Catbox and a few other randos.  At the moment we're using Sync since they offer competitive rates for a large amount of storage, are far less likely to randomly pull content like Google and Mega and don't have the hard stop bandwidth limits the other services have either.  We still use a paid Mega tier as a backup with a complete copy of the archive, but once it reaches the size limit we'll re-evaluate the main and backup options.

So, now that we've covered the background, this is what will actually change.  Instead of individual links we'll be using 2 main links.  A current month link and an archive link.   Both will live in the Pinned Archive post and that post will be linked in every release going forward.  Essentially, it'll just add one additional click to download the most recent content and anything older than that would be best suited for archive view and the website still serves and the best way to preview all available VR videos.