The history of the promotion of the torrent render for 3ds max

Almost two months have passed since the release and a month since the publication of the first article on the Habr “History of creating a torrent render for 3ds max” . All this time I released updates, improved the system, talked with users and figured out what to do next. And since the current situation is very different from my original plans, I think I need to talk about the promotion process.

Russian-speaking users

A hundred-odd render-nodes got over this “post-release” month, and there are already more than 300 users just registered on the tracker. Daily online reached 10 nodes, while I put my work on the render, people apparently decided to gain a rating as soon as I tired of betting - online went into a sharp decline. Of course, users put their own jabs, but there was no smell here, so that everyone always had something to render. Nevertheless, I think that everything is in order with our community, unlike ...

Foreign users

Topics about torrender were created in four foreign forums, including scriptspot - the main resource for macroscripts on the Internet. In a month I received only one answer in one of these topics:

I haven't given the system a try (I don’t have much need for render farm-esque rendering these days), but provided that it works as described, that's an exciting prospect especially for the "little guys".

And nothing more. Zero. The topics have left the front pages, we can assume that the English-speaking community has completely ignored the torrent. On our forum, the situation with foreigners was commented as follows:

For comrades "from there" the word torrent is associated exclusively with piracy, so there is nothing surprising. torrender for legit audience is unlikely to have any success at all. And you look and the negative will pour.

I didn’t agree, it couldn’t be that all foreign 3d speakers were so zombie with the mantra “torrent is bad”, so as not to understand that torrent is just a technology, but after such a zero reaction for a whole month - probably still the way it is. And so now nothing will be done specifically for foreign users. But after the Russian release, I was advised to connect kickstarter, venture capitalists, go to Silicon Valley, but in the end, that's what it is. Sorry, I was even going to translate some pages of the tracker from English into Russian in order to finally concentrate on Russian-speaking users, but so far I'm just too lazy.

Pirates

The torrent didn’t ignore the tutorial either, someone (by the way, Russian-speaking), who had already broken one of my scripts, posted a link to the torrent project there and hinted that due to the weak protection of the client (the scripts really break by one or two hackers today) Use a slightly modified version for phishing. But this topic also did not receive much enthusiasm, just one answer:

that's pretty smart. The more you render, the faster your scenes will render ... if that's how it works ...
wish there was something like that for cinema. Would be sweet.
if you need security you should have a budget for render farms. But for personal projects this would be epic.

As a developer, I can confirm that yes, there are no tricks against such a modified client, you don’t even need to break the PHP tracker part, but I don’t see the point of rewriting the client from a script in C ++ for the sole purpose of improving protection, because it is still unclear how much the project will be in demand among Russian users.

Future plans

I will work on promotion and social engineering for protection, so that the system is self-regulatory, I will introduce a reputation for users, so that they can evaluate themselves, legalize themselves, identify “phishers” and the like. And so that there is always something to render, I’ll introduce automatic generation of test scenes, but of course all this will take some time. We will be on guard, we will wait (s) m / f "Treasure Island"