Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area

This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.

Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.

Rules for General Chat

• Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.

• Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.

• Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome

• Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment

• Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.

• Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)

• If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.

• Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evolving

In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way

Rules For the rest of the Site also accessible on the sidebar.

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Yesterdays General Chat

https://blog.catbox.moe/post/821058172332769280/removing-idle-uploads

I am going to keep this update short, but try to justify/give as much background as I can. Beginning July 6th, 2026 and applying retroactively, files uploaded anonymously that have not had a download/hit in over 2 years will be removed from Catbox.

Catbox has been running for a little over 11 years now, and as such has accumulated what I can only call cruft. Prior to the introduction of Litterbox (and even still to this day really), many people use Catbox as a dumping ground for their script outputs, junk data shares, etc, without considering that this is a free/community funded service. This has lead to an intense amount of data (currently 66 TB) that has not been accessed in over a year, potentially more. Normally the ebb and flow of Lain would keep the idle/active files balanced, with increasing usage, and the exponential increased cost of hard drives due to AI datacenter expansion, I’m forced between a rock and a hard place: put thousands of dollars of my personal money towards additional storage space, or begin culling. And if you think the “thousands of dollars” is an exaggeration, below is the standard hard drive I purchased September 2025 for Catbox servers:

And, since I would really not like data loss, I purchase 2 of these drives for parity. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I don’t have $1,968 to drop every 3 months (about how long it takes Catbox to fill up 20 TB)! Before the prices for everything sky rocketed, I could handle $800~ every 3 months. Before you say something, yes, I have looked at the refurbished market as well - their prices are similarly dismal.

So, now that the justification is out of the way, I’m sure there will be some blowback for this, as I’ve always positioned Catbox as “a filehost that keeps your files until the heat death of the universe”. Perhaps that was my teenage nativity. For reading this far though, you get the special info: the files that are removed will be going to single-layer (non redunant) storage. They will no longer be accessible on files.catbox.moe. If there is a file that you found on a forum post from years ago that has been culled, feel free to email me, and I can pull the file back into the fold.

It sucks that it’s come to this, but with the ouroboros of money that’s happening in the AI bubble, we can only hope for a very sharp needle to blow it up.