Still TBC I'm afraid!
I still have the clips, it's just that they are no longer in the store. I did hear back from C4S. Basically, they put in place a new compliance system in 2021 which now means that all models now have to have full profiles uploaded (with their documents) and these profiles need to be attached to every new clip. At the time, they said that they weren't going to ask stores to go back and retrospectively do this for all of their past clips (since some of us had been there for more than a decade, with thousands of clips already uploaded).
It seems that now they have decided that they are going to do that after all. In March, they introduced a review process where they were starting to review older clips and asking producers to update them to meet the new requirements. Since then, they've ramped that process up dramatically and largely wiped out content from pre 2021, forcing producers to update and resubmit their older clips. They've apparently done this without notifying people directly, meaning that I lost over 2000 clips in a couple of days without even being made aware of it. The clips can be re-added but it means searching out the documents for every model, updating the listings and re-submitting each one for review. This is no easy task with models that visited years ago - in some cases, I can't even recognise the models from their ID and in others, documents may be lost for good through damaged hard drives, moving locations etc. In any case, the task of re-submitting thousands of clips is just not likely to be achievable, even if I had all documents to hand. I will probably do what I can to restore some clips, but I may also look to create an archive of older content on my members site and just keep C4S on for the new releases. This would potentially be a big win for website members at least, but I need to look at the feasibilty of it.