Why, after over 20 years is the pornolizer being switched off?
Well, I am doing it for a few reasons, and it really does conflict with me in my heart. I love running something that is being used the world over for childish entertainment.
Pornolizer, at the last check before removing all telemetry from the code, was handling around 7,000 unique visitors a month, handling 110,000 requests through the translation service. This looks good, and these are some of the numbers that get marketing airheads all excited about ad revenue. I could do it myself, but that would make me out to be a hypocrite. I have an adblocker. If people didn’t overdo advertising on websites, I would not have to use it, and I am sure people would just do the same when visiting the site.
Secondly, The Pornolizer seems to have become the go-to resource for porn websites to refresh their content. A good 60% of the hits are from automated systems that run pages through the converter for it to rewrite any textual content.
Thirdly, and finally, I have gone as far as I can with Pornolizer. It does what it’s designed for. I’ve re-engineered it from C# to PHP, to Java and to Go. I tried writing it into Rust, but by jeez, that was hard work which I gave up on (It all works, but recreating the DOM for output wasn’t done). So from this, I decided to opensource the code. When Pornolizer was written in php, I released the Pornolizer Core as a composer module, and more recently, released the Go version of Pornolizer on GitHub.
Hephaestus, the server that runs the docker container that handles the pornolizer has been scheduled to take Pornolizer offline at 00:00 on the 1st January 2022.
As for the future? Well the domain is nice and old, so i’ll hang onto it for a bit, unless someone else decides to have a go at running the Pornolizer. Let’s just see what the future will bring.