We have some Good news and some Bad news and need your help...

[Adina P]

We have some good news and bad news about DoodleKisses.com.

The good news is that we plan for DoodleKisses.com to continue on happily supplying us all with our doodle addiction.

The bad news is that the company that runs our website platform recently increased prices exponentially based on site data storage. They did this with very little advanced notice so we have a very short time to make some changes. Our choices are to either pay the new fee with it’s over ten-fold increase in monthly costs OR decrease the amount of old data we have stored.

We are choosing to decrease old files we have stored. Mostly because we think we can do this without any real difference in how you experience DK. We will be making a few changes to decrease our site data storage and we need your help in the next two weeks. Our goal is to remove 5 GB of data. To put this in perspective, it’s about 1% of what our site contains. We will keep you posted on our progress. The main culprits are videos and photos.

Deleting discussions is not something we will be doing as it has almost no impact on the amount of data stored. Words and discussions just aren’t big files! We plan to do this reduction in phases where we only move on to the next phase ONLY if we have not decreased our data storage sufficiently with the actions thus far.

Phase One: Ask members to remove redundant / old photos and videos that you have uploaded. We don’t want you to remove your good stuff! We just want to remove files if you have multiple similar images/videos, etc. If we reduce enough here, we’re done!

Phase Two: If we need further cuts, we will dig deeper with your own personal cuts. Again, we really don’t want to remove anything useful or good. Just old extraneous stuff. Start identifying old and low quality images/videos from long inactive members and removing those.

Phase Three: We as admins will remove videos and photos we see as extraneous.

We’ll keep you posted on how we are doing. Thank you for your understanding and help!

Adina & Clark

[Linda Ferguson]

I haven't been on this website in a long time, but with Adina's email started looking at the site. OMGosh, now I know why I stopped . . . . I could spend all day looking at the photos. I only had 16 photos on my site (no music or videos). I deleted 6 of those, but added 5 current photos. One down. Just wanted to thank you for working so hard on this site and for all of those precious doodles out there for adding so much laughter and joy to our lives. The photos say it all.

[Cheryl and Finnegan]

I understand the high cost of data storage.  Just finished going through photos on my page and I was able to delete almost 3 pages of "will never be missed" photos.  I'll bet a lot of members--like me-- just haven't made the time to do some "housecleaning." No videos to delete but I'll dump some music too.  Thanks for this great site.

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

I went through all my pictures - huge photo hog!  I deleted about 800 pictures - left Gordie, Simon, and all my other family dogs who have passed on.  I need to make another pass through in a few days and re-look at my 'must haves' because I know there are still too many.  I used to make albums of dog playdates with pictures of all the dogs, now I upload them elsewhere and post the slidshow link.  I tried F's album delete and now have made a mess of my albums but I think I will be able to edit and create  new albums with leftover pics.    A very positive note in revisiting my pictures is that my old pictures were soooooo bad. I have learned a lot and have a much higher standard for quality now - of course I have a much better camera.  But as a point and shoot girl, I can still see lots of improvement in my skills - thanks photography group!   

[F, Calla & Luca]

Nancy, the album delete didn't work anyhow. The pictures still remain. I see so much improvement in all our pictures and the photography group has been so important for us all :-)

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

 I figured that out, F.  but only after making a bit of a mess.  Sigh!!!

[Cheryl and Finnegan]

Nancy, that's one of the reasons it was pretty easy to delete a bunch :) 

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

Nope, Cheryl, it seems that they go out of the album and into the general photos, so you have to do it individually anyway.

[Ally Harney]

I am new to site but it is invaluable to me. Is there a way to join this group and website you can have to pay $10 or something like that? I would have no problem with that being all the information I've gotten a new doodle owner

[Adina P]

I appreciate the thought, Ally.  Our goal has always been to keep DK "wild and free" so we don't want to charge members for membership.  We have an optional subscription if anyone wants to say "thank you" but it isn't, and we don't ever want it to be, a requirement.

[Ally Harney]

I will contribute today. Maybe put this out to the membership. It is such valuable information .

AN idea , maybe anyone joining from today on has to pay a small fee.  Others would be grandfathered in.

[Adina P]

Thanks Ally.  We bring it up from time to time but don't like to be too pestery.  At this point the up-till-now costs have been manageable.  It is only the new pricing structure that we fell into because of our data storage that was an issue.  It is 10x more than what we were paying.  So we prefer to reduce data.

[Jarka, Monty & Auggie]

I have not been as active here as I was in the past. I'll get better. Now off to cleaning up my page. :-)