MLKSHK Shutting Down

Hi, on April 1st, 2017 we’ll be turning off the ability to upload files to MLKSHK and the ability to view posts without being signed into your account. At that point we’ll provide a method for downloading all of your files to your computer. MLKSHK will continue to serve files until May 1st, 2017.

It’s no longer possible to keep MLKSHK up and running at a level that is above “not-on-fire”. This is too much work for us.

It’s been fun! We love all of you and when you think about it, it’s like we got an extra three years, much more than we expected. So thanks for showing up every day and uploading great images and being such a friendly place to be.

There’s a lot of rotten and rotting communities out there, and MLKSHK was never one of them. That’s got nothing to do with us and everything to do with you.

wave emoji,
Andre & Amber (& Brad & Ann & Aaron & Joost & Ivan & Mark!)

Subscriptions Are Back

Hi there. It's been about 9 months since we last updated you on MLKSHK and subscriptions. I am posting today to let you know that we are BRINGING BACK subscriptions so we can all contribute to keeping MLKSHK around for ourselves.

If you can't wait get on over here http://mlkshk.com/account/subscribe !

THE CATCH is we need to have between 250 and 300 active subscriptions to keep the site going. If we can't reach that goal we won't be able to keep the site running. :\

So let's give it a shot! We'll publish the subscriber totals in the next few days so we can get an idea of where we stand.

We can do it!

Unless we can't!

MLKSHK!

Subscription Showdown

Hi all,

You _may_ have received an email from Amazon telling you your Simpleform, LLC (MLKSHK) subscription had been canceled. If you have not, and are an Amazon subscriber, you eventually will.

The folks at Amazon shut down the subscription service we were using because they have a new subscription service and who needs TWO subscription services? Definitely not Amazon. It’s like when you reach for a chip and you grab TWO chips. Amazon was like, “Whoa, I certainly don’t need two chips, I will look like a gluttonous multinational corporation, so I will put one back in this bowl right after I lick the salt off.”

And you may recall Tugboat was also a MLKSHK subscription provider, but they too shut down on the 1st because Facebook bought them. Facebook again. You fools. :shake_fist:

So currently you have no way of paying for your MLKSHK account.

Brad is working on a solution. It will be done soon. We will not only let you know when it is available we will bug you until you give us money. (But nicely!)

It’s all going to be great.

—Andre, Amber, Brad and a really pricey EC2 instance.

MLKSHK 2014

This was a weird year. We thought we were shutting down, and had made all the arrangements to do so, but then Andre got a job where they were fans of the site and it started to seem less of an urgent thing to do. Clearly the community didn’t want us to go.

So we decided to stay. We took care of some small problems that were annoying us the most. We accepted some help from our friend Brad Choate. Anything done on the site since June has been Brad—hell, this entire list was generated by Brad and a few hours in MySQL. It would never have been possible without him. Thanks, Brad!

Our list of stuff to do is still quite long. We need to shore up the spam problem. We need to make subscriptions easier to understand. We definitely need to fix that image rotation problem and do some post-processing of images to keep them from chunking up the scrolling in your browser. We feel pretty good about getting that stuff done in 2015 and a whole lot more, so keep those subscriptions current!

Thanks for sticking with us, and now on to the lists!

Top 10 Most-Liked Posts

#1 "Today is a good day :)" - 127 likes

Ah, MLKSHK is saved! Word came down in May that MLKSHK would be closing in September. Fortunately, sanity prevailed and this post captured the tweetstorm announcing that it would not, in fact, be shutting down. AWESOME.

#2 "MLKSHK" - 120 likes

Another meta post. We're glad to be around, too!

#3 "Happy 83rd Birthday Aunt Gladys" - 113 likes

Happy birthday, Aunt Gladys! This post snuck in at the last minute to grab third place for 2014!

#4 "Pilgrimage..." - 105 likes

MLKSHK is a community site, so it's going to reflect both highs and lows as an expression of its members. We're glad for both. RIP, Uncle Tom.

#5 "Soccer ball droid has no time for anyone's shit" - 98 likes

The new Star Wars trailer is out, and so it is time to par-o-day! Ugh. OK. Good one, @mathowie.

#6 "Yay" - 97 likes

Yet another celebration that MLKSHK is still up and running. From that list, we've done 2 of the 3, so not bad! (Total profile image view counts are still stuck.)

#7 "Dog Philosophy" - 95 likes

THIS IS AMAZING!

#8 "That time I saved mlkshk.png" - 94 likes

Hat tip, @dakotasmith.

#9 "I'll miss you all. Thanks mlkshk!" - 92 likes

A fantastic (but premature) MLKSHK retrospective post.

#10 "Best design nerd Halloween costume ever" - 92 likes

Top 10 Most-Commented Posts

#1 "MLKSHK Shirts!" - 107 comments

These turned out great. Thanks to everyone who bought one!

#2 "We need to do something." - 59 comments

We posted this ahead of the shutdown announcement out of frustration. Things are getting better. Thanks for the support and encouragement!

#3 your ui - 57 comments

Wherein @artwells starts striving for more.

#4 Save mlkshk! - 34 comments

Mission accomplished.

#5 Stealth for Sale - 32 comments

Shirts went on sale and there was much rejoicing.

#6 "My porn name would be Bourbon Fatty" - 32 comments

You can learn a lot from this post.

#7 "14.5 Years" - 31 comments

@amypetty lost her dog Dora. We're glad MLKSHK could help in a small way.

#8 yup.jpg - 30 comments

#9 "Pilgrimage..." - 30 comments

#10 "my furry best friend, companion and confidante... "NUNYA"... passed away today after 17 years of amazing friendship" - 30 comments

Another post about loss this year.

Top 10 Most-Saved Posts

#1 "Soccer ball droid has no time for anyone's shit" - 47 saves

Another award snagged by @mathowie.

#2 "Saved for nom nom nom later." - 43 saves

A handy guide for making a variety of homemade hummuses. See, MLKSHK can be educational, too!

#3 "Future Uses" - 36 saves

Chicken warfare.

#4 "Pasty Folding" - 35 saves

Another HOWTO post on something.

#5 "For so much future use." - 34 saves

You are all weirdos.

#6 "Twenty Five Two Line Jokes (with no attribution)" - 33 saves

#7 "C8H10N4O2" - 33 saves

Guess what the molecular formula for caffeine is?

#8 "How to store your groceries" - 33 saves

#9 "Bob's" - 32 saves

#10 "in case you were wondering" - 31 saves

Top 10 Most-Viewed Posts

#1 "let's get this party started" - 263,033 views

Muppet chef has a lot of views to be thankful for.

#2 "5 minutes" - 151,241 views

I think this must be someone's forum signature.

#3 "Into the Clouds" - 97,111 views

#4 "Moon-Knight-1-cover.jpg" - 94,972 views

#5 "fireplace" - 88,146 views

#6 "grumpy-cat-summarise.jpg" - 79,731 views

#7 "seeing spots" - 45,493 views

#8 "groovin"

#9 "Windows" - 36,872 views

#10 "2fhZ6jZ.gif" - 36,243 views

Thanks for making 2014 a great year for MLKSHK!

Subscription Fixes and Changes

I have two things to tell you:

First, since July 2nd there has been a bug with paid subscriptions. If you purchased a subscription between July 2nd and today (July 31st) and your account does not show a paid  icon please let us know by emailing [email protected]. I am sorry about that. But happy to say we finally figured out the bug.

Second, we are trying out a lightbox for users who are not subscribed but who have viewed a number of pages. If you’re paid you’ll never see it. But if you are not paid and you use the site a bit then you will see a message letting you know you can become a subscriber.

It looks like this:

Thanks for using the site and BIG THANKS for being a subscriber.

MLKSHK is Open

We want to tell you that MLKSHK will not be closing! And not only are we not closing but we are going to be doing some good stuff in the coming months. We appreciated all the nice things you tweeted and mailed to us, and we realized just how special this site was to so many of you. To turn it off would be a big loss. It’s a pretty special place.

We made list of the three most important things that need to get done in the short-term. They are:

1. Fix the image counts. They are not the least bit accurate.
2. Fix the speed. There is a lot of stuff we haven’t done in the past 3 years that we are going to do. Mainly some database work to root out some of the slowness, but also upgrade some pretty old services that have been chugging along for four years.
3. The third thing won’t make much sense if you don’t understand how things are organized on the back-end, but it’s a big overhaul of how files are received and moved into the CDN. I wanted to mention it just so later I can point to this post and say, “we did that other thing I was telling you about before and now we are very happy.”

Also, Amber is designing t-shirts! Click the image to go vote for your favorite.

And, she already sent an order for stickers to the printer. These are going to be nice, die-cut, vinyl stickers and she ordered a hell of a lot of them.

So that’s it. A short post. Thanks for sticking with the site and not turning off your subscriptions. We’re going to have something to announce around those after the items up above get done.

Yay!

 

MLKSHK Shutting Down

LOL, Nope!

When are you shutting down?

September 1, 2014. It’s a Monday.

Why are you shutting down?

MLKSHK isn’t our primary source of income and it’s certainly not our primary focus. Despite earning very little from the site we still have to answer tech support, deal with spam, fix minor issues, fix major issues, keep the servers updated, sort out billing issues, and worry about the months we get linked on Reddit. Sometimes the server and bandwidth bill are more than we took in for the month—this is scary.

Will you sell it?

Of course! We would sell it to someone who will commit significant resources to it. Out of respect for the community we wouldn’t sell to anyone who we didn’t feel was a good fit.

Can I get all the images I shared in a zip file?

Yes! Click the link “Request Zip File Of All My Images” on your account settings page. It should take about a day to process your request if we don’t get inundated with requests. UPDATE: We are working with the Internet Archive Team to make sure they have everything they need to pull the site into their archive. 

What if…?

We appreciate the passion the users have for the site but there really is no other option than this. We explored many ideas for making more money but nothing worked for us.

I just bought a subscription, can I get a refund?

Yes. Please email [email protected] so we can figure out your refund.

Will my subscription be canceled?

Every subscription will be canceled before June 1.

Thank you to everyone who visited, bought a subscription, said nice things about us to your friends, and of course thanks for sharing.

Thanks also to Ivan Kanevski and Mark Paschal for helping us build the thing. And thanks to Chris Ereneta, David Barry, and Justin Williams for writing iOS code against our API. Also thanks to our advisor Anil Dash for helping us figure things out over the past few years.

Bye, and please keep in touch!
Amber (@amberdawn) and Andre (@torrez)

Bannerz

Hi everyone!

When we started MLKSHK one thing we wanted to accomplish was to create a place that could sustain itself free from advertising.

We failed! LOL ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unfortunately we now have to try out some ads. We dislike crappy ads and so we are looking to put ads that we like and approve of and that feel should be on the site. We’re going to be trying a few services out until we find one that fits. And if we don’t, well, let’s wait on that for now. (Takes finger off the red button.)

IF YOU HAVE A PAID ACCOUNT AND WE TOLD YOU THERE WOULD BE NO ADS ON YOUR PAID ACCOUNT: We can give you a full refund from the date of your last renewal. And if you want to continue to pay that is even better. But we fully understand if you feel like you no longer want to maintain a subscription and see ads. It’s cool.

But do know that we are at the point now where the site is not sustainable without another form of revenue. (Puts finger on the red button.) But we do have a few months to get this right. (Takes finger off the red button.)

So let’s see how this works, yeah?

We hope you’re doing well!

Amber and Andre

30 Popular Images From 2013

117 likes, shared by GroggyGrognard on 2013-05-01.

108 likes, shared by pongping on 2013-04-11.

107 likes, shared by vlz on 2013-02-11.

104 likes, shared by algernon on 2013-11-12.

101 likes, shared by ffg on 2013-10-07.

99 likes, shared by RoninKengo on 2013-01-21.

99 likes, shared by andre on 2013-02-28.

98 likes, shared by drewtoothpaste on 2013-07-25.

97 likes, shared by w1nt3rmut3 on 2013-09-27.

95 likes, shared by error on 2013-02-24.

93 likes, shared by jonbro on 2013-08-26.

92 likes, shared by falconwing on 2013-10-11.

92 likes, shared by taestell on 2013-02-11.

92 likes, shared by GroggyGrognard on 2013-12-03.

91 likes, shared by amypetty on 2013-08-27.

88 likes, shared by negatendo on 2013-07-30.

87 likes, shared by waa on 2013-04-28.

86 likes, shared by SuzyBrown on 2013-08-10.

85 likes, shared by falconwing on 2013-01-23.

83 likes, shared by Crisssy101 on 2013-11-12.

83 likes, shared by tclancy on 2013-06-29.

83 likes, shared by vlz on 2013-05-10.

83 likes, shared by keeprunning on 2013-04-23.

83 likes, shared by andre on 2013-04-03.

82 likes, shared by importantshock on 2013-11-21.

82 likes, shared by tom on 2013-01-01.

81 likes, shared by ffg on 2013-11-30.

80 likes, shared by eatpaste on 2013-09-08.

80 likes, shared by waldopepper on 2013-08-20.

80 likes, shared by zoot on 2013-03-03.

Posted by mlkshk at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 11, 2013

Fastly CDN

We switched image serving over to Fastly. What this means is image serving will be MUCH faster, but image view counts are going to be very lagged. I hope to have them updating within the next few days.

Posted by mlkshk at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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mlkshk

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We switched image serving over to Fastly. What this means is image serving will be MUCH faster, but image view counts are going to be very lagged. I hope to have them updating within the next few days.

Fastly CDN

We switched image serving over to Fastly. What this means is image serving will be MUCH faster, but image view counts are going to be very lagged. I hope to have them updating within the next few days.