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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
April 15th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Does anybody remember when, back in 2013, I blogged about how Tumblr was blocking selected adult links, in particular ones to a clip-sale place called Extra Lunch Money? It was a prior restraint sort of block; you’d hit the post button and if the offending link was present, you’d get a cryptic red “there was a problem saving your post” response.
My prediction back then was that Tumblr would, when caught, claim that the prior link restraint was a glitch:
Beginning during the negotiation of the sale to Yahoo, Tumblr’s practice has been to disadvantage its adult content in silent and hard-to-notice ways, even when that content was fully-consistent with its fairly permissive community guidelines. What’s more, when forced to backtrack by public outrage after the big robots.txt debacle, Tumblr went to great lengths to pretend it was all a misunderstood and unfortunate technical error.
So my prediction here is that if the link-censoring initiative attracts enough negative attention, publishing these links will start working again and Tumblr will either say nothing, or explain that it was all just a glitch. But if this story doesn’t reach critical mass, look for the list of disfavored adult links to continue to grow.
I was right. That’s exactly what happened. The blocked links quickly started working again.
Fast forward to yesterday, when Lady Amalthea posted an alert on her Tumblr blog about a sort of prior restraint that she’d noticed in attempting to post links to various cam sites and clip-sales sites:
Notice that one of her examples of a link Tumblr won’t let her publish is our old friend from 2013, that Extra Lunch Money site. And also notice that one of the people responding to Lady Amalthea’s post says that the block on her other example (My Free Cams) is not new: “Tumblr has never let me link to MFC, btw. That’s not a new thing in case anyone thought it was.”
So I fired up my Tumblr test suite and decided to focus on those two links and (as a control) the top link on her list of links that were working as of yesterday, a link to the clip site Clipvia. So far I haven’t looked at the behavior of any other links, just these three.
What I found is that whether you want to call it a “glitch” or prior restraint, at least some of the link-blocking behavior is definitely back. However, it may indeed be somewhat glitchy; I found that the behavior was inconsistent (not reproducible) as to at least one of the test links.
The first thing I tried was to create a new “Text” style post for each of my three test links, which I created by navigating to the home page of the three sites, copying the URL displayed in my nav bar, and pasting it directly into the new Tumblr post page before hitting the “Save Draft” button. At first, the only link that generated an error message was the one from My Free Cams:
Although I was initially able to save more than one draft posts with the Extra Lunch Money and Clipvia links, subsequent attempts failed:
From there, I moved on to creating new “photo”-type posts. I would upload an image (the same in all cases), paste in the test URL, and attempt to save. In this case, I have not been able to get the Extra Lunch Money link to fail; it’s worked several times when I have tried this experiment:
However, my other two test URLs are not postable:
For my final experiment, I tried editing a post reblogged from someone else, and pasting in all three suspect links. In this, and several other experiments with reblogging, I was unable to generate the mysterious error message, and instead successfully saved my drafts:
My conclusion? If this is indeed a deliberate block of a set of blacklisted links, its implementation is glitchy, because the same link would sometimes post and sometimes fail to post for me. Its implementation is also glitchy across different post types and post actions. However, I don’t believe it’s completely random; there seem to be no reports of unpostable links outside this universe of sites used by camgirls and indy custom adult clips producers. I suspect that Tumblr does indeed have (and has had since at least 2013) a blacklist of not-to-be-published links. (This would even make sense if its use was restricted to protecting Tumblr users from malicious malware installers, to pick one obviously-legitimate use for a blacklist.) There might be an automated process (that’s gone wrong) for adding sites to the blacklist, or there might be a training-and-supervision issue that has let “rogue employees” add stinky adult sites to a list that was not intended for the restraint of adult publication. Given the way different attempts to post the same link have different results at different times, it’s even possible the blacklist is not universally distributed across all of Tumblr’s different server farms.
If enough Tumblr users report this “glitch” to Tumblr support, I expect that eventually the adult links they would like to publish will be removed from the blacklist, since the links do not violate any of Tumblr’s existing terms of service or community guidelines. That’s what Tumblr did last time, and they haven’t announced any new terms or policies (I checked).
Last time Tumblr was flirting with blocking selected adult links from publication, I wrote:
Tumblr is quietly and dishonestly hostile to adult content in general and to adult marketing and self-promotion in particular, even when that marketing complies with their community guidelines in every particular. Which is a nice intro to this morning’s sermon on The Catechism of Bacchus:
- Tumblr is, at the end of the day, a blogging service.
- As I’ve been saying since at least 2004, blogging services suck.
- This is Bacchus’s First Rule and it remains the rule: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.
- You will be tempted to ignore The Rule because of social media network effects.
- You may even feel forced to ignore it, because you can’t get enough attention on your own platform.
- When you disregard the rule (and everybody does, even me who wrote it) you will get burned.
- Count on it. Plan for it. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
Nothing has changed since I wrote that.
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February 27th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Now that Google is spinning down the porn raid sirens and walking their shit back from last week’s announced intention to forbid “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video”, it’s worth paying some careful attention the language used today by Jessica Pelegio, the social product support manager at Google. From her title, this sounds like the woman who is the boss of the people who will be enforcing the policy, so her understanding of the policy is likely to be supremely relevant. And in her announcement, she writes:
“We’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.”
The emphasis is mine. “Our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.” What, what? Does Blogger even have an “existing policy prohibiting commercial porn”? Quick, let’s go look, and snap a screenshot before it changes:
The key sentences for our purposes are:
Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content. For example, don’t create blogs that contain ads for or links to commercial porn sites.
Strictly speaking, this is not a “policy prohibiting commercial porn.” One of the biggest categories of adult blogs on Blogger/Blogspot used to be a (what we would now consider to be Tumblr-style) constant flow of commercial porn, posted without links and purely for the amusement of the poster. You could squint and interpret the URL watermarks on commercial porn photos as “ads for…commercial porn sites”, but Google never did this (that we know of). The existing/current policy simply doesn’t prohibit commercial porn, though it might be said to prohibit porn posted with commercial intent. Does Jessica Pelegio think about the policy with that much nuance? Her phrasing today suggests: not so much.
But while we are parsing words, let’s fire up the Wayback Machine and have a look at how this “existing policy prohibiting commercial porn” has been phrased and characterized by Google since June of 2013 when Google dreamed it up.
Stepping back through time, we discover that between October 23, 2014 and November 6, 2014, they added one clarifying word: “ads or links to commercial porn sites” became “ads for or links to commercial porn sites.” Ads (in general) became ads (for commercial porn sites) so this narrowed the scope of Google’s prohibiting examples. Trivial, but cool. (At the same time as this wording change, Blogger added the current stern language prohibiting attempts to circumvent the interstitial adult warning.)
That takes us back (without any other changes I can discover) to the infamous June 30, 2013, when the current policy was implemented. (Here it is in the Wayback Machine on July 5th, 2013, so you an see for yourself.) Here’s the big announcement from then:
What Pelegio now calls a “policy prohibiting commercial porn” was then described as a new policy prohibiting blogs “which are … displaying advertisements to adult websites” or “currently has advertisements which are adult in nature.” That seems quite a bit narrower than the “policy prohibiting commercial porn” Pelegio now considers it to be.
For completeness, let’s compare the language before June 30, 2013 to the current policy. “Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content” has not changed; that was been the policy since the earliest appearance of the policy page in the Wayback Machine on January 7, 2012. But before June 30, the prohibited example was “For example, don’t create blogs where a significant percentage of the content is ads or links to commercial porn sites.” The big policy change in June 2013 was going zero-tolerance on the ads and links to commercial porn sites — no more insignificant percentages allowed.
So, just to be clear: up until today, Google has always allowed commercial porn on Blogger/Blogspot, as long as that porn was not posted “as a way to make money on adult content.” Noncommercial use of commercial porn was fine, and before June of 2013, so too were de minimis links to commercial porn sites.
If the social product support manager is planning to “step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn” when there currently is no such policy, for safety you should assume that either the policy will be changing or that the enforcement will hew to the manager’s view of what it means even when that’s not what it actually says. Neither is good news for the future of adult blogs on Blogger/Blogspot.
Sure, let’s all heave a sigh of relief that the March 23rd deadline is no longer looming. But don’t get complacent. If you’ve still got adult content on any Google property, get it out while you still can. Verbum sapienti satis.
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February 27th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Shortly after midnight last night, Google’s Social Product Support Manager Jessica Pelegio posted this semi-retraction of last week’s equally quiet announcement of the #Pornocalypse come to Blogger (Blogspot) blogs:
Hello everyone,
This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.
Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an “adult content” warning page.
Bloggers whose content is consistent with this and other policies do not need to make any changes to their blogs.
Thank you for your continued feedback.
The Blogger Team
This is good news. You might even say it means Google is listening. But I think we can all take away from this a much clearer sense of Google’s corporate direction on adult material.
Smart people who are still using Google’s services for adult content distribution will now, of course, stop doing that. The next time, consequently, there will be less outrage and less backlash. Which means that when Google finally does move to delete the tens of thousands of moribund adult blogs that it threatened to delete this time, only cranks like me who see that material and the links to it as socially valuable will complain.
Note also that this announcement’s breezy summary “our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn” is substantially more broad in scope than the actual policy as of today, which prohibits making money on adult content but which is fine with just posting (for your own enjoyment) as much commercial porn as you want:
Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content. For example, don’t create blogs that contain ads for or links to commercial porn sites.
Don’t be surprised if that wording changes, or if blogs full of commercial porn posted for fun start to disappear. Bets on whether the URL watermark on a commercial porn photo will start being treated as “ads for” commercial porn sites? Of course we’ll never know, because these deletions will not be accompanied by specific reasons, fleshed-out policies, or any meaningful human review or appeal.
But yeah. The Google porn raid siren has gone quiet again for now. Come out from under your desk, breathe a sigh of relief that the bombers aren’t coming on March 23rd, and then move your shit somewhere safe before the next time the damned porn raid sirens go off. Or as A.V. Flox puts it rather more eloquently at Slantist:
We tell ourselves “once on the internet, always on the internet,” like maintaining content is a trivial thing. But it isn’t a trivial thing – at any time, the company that you rely on to keep your content for free could change their policies, or get bought out and change their policies, or decide they want to go public and change their policies, or simply go under and take your content with them.
The longevity of data requires more intent than this. My advice is to seriously consider migrating to a self-hosted site if you can. If you can’t, make sure you export your data with some regularity.
Think of this as your 21st century reminder of a duck and cover drill. DEFCON has gone back up, but the Cold War on adult is far from over.
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February 26th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Subtitle: How To Tweak Your Robots.txt File So That The Wayback Machine Will Show The World What Google Refuses to Display
One of the reasons the adult internet will take such a hard body blow when Google makes sexually explicit Blogger (Blogspot) blogs forcibly private on March 23 is that in a single moment they will break millions of links around the web. As Violet Blue puts it:
When Google forces its “unacceptable” Blogger blogs to go dark, it will break more of the Internet than you think. Countless links that have been accessible on Blogger since its inception in 1999 will be broken across the Internet.
What’s your reflex response when you follow a link and find it broken? If it’s like me, you immediately click the link on your bookmarks toolbar that takes you to the WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/web/
The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive’s crawling robot are powerful tools. Like all powerful tools, exactly how they work is sometimes obscure. Here are the basics: The IA crawler bot crawls the web, visiting as many pages as it can manage. And it stuffs those pages into the huge databases of the Wayback Machine, where the pages are preserved for all time, or anyway for as long as the Internet Archive can manage).
Preservation, however, is not the same as sharing and display. Some of the pages the Wayback Machine has in its databases are not displayed to the public. The reasons for this are covered in a complex FAQ, but for our purposes it’s enough to understand that sometimes when the IA crawler bot encounters a robots.txt file on a domain, that robots.txt file in effect tells the bot to go pound sand while pissing up a rope. And when the bot finds such a robots exclusion request, the bot politely backs away from the crazy person and (supposedly) refrains from capturing the current version of the pages. (See also: ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE)
In such a case (for reasons) the Wayback Machine will stop displaying any of the pages “protected” by the robot exclusion request. Any user requests will get this ugly red error instead:
That’s so even if the IA bot has been to these pages a hundred times and has years of history in successive snapshots of the pages. If the robots.txt exclusion is present, the Wayback Machine refuses to display any of that old crawl data.
But note carefully what that explanation (and the Archive.org FAQ) does not say. The Wayback Machine does not display those old pages it still has in its database — but it certainly does not delete them from its database, either.
The Internet Archive and The WayBack Machine are not in the business of deleting shit. I take it as an article of faith that they for damned-skippy-sure never delete anything just because of a few lines in a robots.txt file.
Nothing on a website is there forever. That includes obnoxious robots.txt files. And when the robots.txt files go away, suddenly those old crawled pages become visible again. I actually saw this happen after Tumblr reversed itself in 2013 and at least temporarily stopped forcing a hostile robots.txt file onto its adult bloggers. The hostile robots.txt files stopped being so hostile, so the Wayback Machine could once again display the old pages that it had crawled and displayed upon request prior to Tumblr imposing the robots.txt files.
Consider now an adult Blogger (blogspot.com) blog that’s already private, because the owner chose to make it that way. Here’s the robots.txt file that Blogger displays by default:
There’s a good chance (if only because Google hasn’t telegraphed any planned changes to the functionality of its private Blogger blogs) that this same exclusionary robots.txt will appear for every sexually explicit Blogger blog that is forcibly flagged “private” on March 23.
So, if you have a sexually explicit Blogger blog right now, there’s a good chance it’s in the Wayback Machine already, in whole or in part. (You can check: go here and paste your URL in the box.)
Now let’s fast forward to March 24th. Suppose I notice some old ErosBlog post that links to your Blogger sex blog. I click the link and it’s now broken, because Google has forcibly set your blog to “private”. If I ask the Wayback Machine to show me the old page for the broken link, I’ll get the ugly red error. But the Internet Archive still has that old page in its database. And someday, when things change, the Wayback Machine could theoretically serve the old page once again. (Google might change its policy. The Internet Archive might change its policy. Google might have gone bankrupt, or sold the Blogspot.com domain to America Online. The Internet might have changed beyond all recognition. The horse might even learn to sing, we can’t know.)
From a practical standpoint, this fact that the old pages of your blog are still in the databases of the Internet Archives — but barred from public display — doesn’t help us much. But if you feel that your sexually explicit blog is a legitimate part of the cultural history of the early 21st century, it matters rather a lot. Because your blog is not lost to history — it’s just lost to those of us who are interested in it right now.
(Yes, I am assuming that the Internet Archives will be successful in preserving and transmitting its data — our data — into the deep future. That’s by no means assured. If you have oodles of spare money kicking around, giving them some of your oodles would no doubt help assure it.)
Thus this post is, in part, a “don’t panic” message about all the sex blogs that are about to disappear from the internet. I called it a “hard body blow” at the top of this post, and it is. But it’s not a fatal blow. Yes, it will break a ton of our links and create a big dark hole in our adult internet. But it won’t, if the gods keep smiling on Brewster Kahle and his people, disappear those old blogs forever.
But I wouldn’t be well over a dozen paragraphs into this huge wall of text if all I had to say was “don’t panic.” Here’s an interesting thing that I just discovered about a blog on Blogger: Google currently allows blog owners to set the contents of their own custom robots.txt files, even on blogs flagged as private.
You can log into your adult Blogger blog right now and set a custom robots.txt file. If you want the Internet Archive to keep displaying archived pages once Google breaks all your inbound links, set it like this under Settings – Search Preferences – Crawlers and Indexing:
It can’t hurt anything, and it might mean that all your broken links can be “repaired” by people who encounter them. They will just paste the broken link into the Wayback Machine and be served a copy of the page as it used to be before Google went insane.
Will it work? Well, we don’t know for sure. Google could easily impose a uniform and restrictive robots.txt file on its adult bloggers after it forces them into “private” mode, by ignoring the custom setting or by removing it from the Blogger interface altogether. But — by design or oversight — Google might not do that, either.
If this trick does work, it means there will more traces remaining available to the public of your years of explicit sex blogging. And people who are bitterly disappointed by broken links to your stuff will have at least one useful thing to try.
Hopefully you’ll be taking more direct action too, like migrating your blog to private hosting. But if you can’t spare the resources to do that, this custom robots.txt change is a little thing you can do that may help a little.
P.S. If you have some technical skill and want to take a more proactive approach to saving our erotic cultural history, Archiveteam (these are the folks who saved Geocities, who also want you to understand they are not the Internet Archive) seems to have taken the news about Google’s erotic blog freakout as a sign that Blogger in general is no longer to be trusted. Because they have now announced they are “downloading everything”. This is great news, but it’s a project of epic size, and they can always use more help.
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December 18th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Photographer and cinematographer Hywel Phillips is the visual genius behind Restrained Elegance, which I have long considered to be the best and most visually striking of the bondage photography sites that strive to produce pornography and art simultaneously. He, along with his wife and model and business partner Ariel Anderssen aka Amelia Jane Rutherford, are some of the people Spanking Blog calls “porn producer heroes” as they continue to make fetish porn in Britain subsequent to the “latest round of bat-shit crazy UK censorship laws.” In an excellent long-read post yesterday, Hywel cataloged the whole constellation of challenges facing people trying to be adults and to do adult business on the modern internet. He begins:
The internet is no longer a safe place to be an adult. Puritans and authoritarians are closing in from all directions: state censorship, financial censorship and corporate censorship. This sounds like paranoia, but it isn’t. Here’s why.
There’s really no way to summarize the post for you; all I can do is commend it to your attention. Although his post ranges much more wildly, he covers (and shares) many of the concerns I have hash-tagged #Pornocalypse when discussing corporate discrimination against adult materials, adult businesses, and adult-oriented web traffic. He even touches briefly on what I used to call Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet, or as Hwel puts it:
First, don’t rely on any service where you are not the direct customer. Don’t blog on blogger, get a little bit of web space (ideally hosted in country with protected speech), install WordPress and do it yourself.
I’ve stopped harping on my “rule” because social media have made it… not less essential, but perhaps less sufficient? Despite numerous software efforts and projects (which Hwel discusses in passing) there’s still no good self-hosted way to enjoy the network effects of social media. And that lack makes my notion of pornocalypse all the more chilling, since every big web property and social media silo eventually seems to reach that point in the corporate life cycle where it appears sensible to start banning all the porn. Before the internet, we lived in a world where you could not be heard unless your message was acceptable to corporate sensibilities. The World Wide Web changed all that, but now, corporate social media and squeamish search engines are taking us back to those bad, bland, and puritanical old days.
But now I’m rambling. Hwel does not ramble. Check his post out.
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December 14th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Is this what privilege looks like? If so, yum!
From a vintage postcard found at Wicked Knickers. [Wicked Knickers was an awesome Tumblr once, before all its links went dark behind a #pornocalypse-driven adults-only forced login. Broken links now retained on ErosBlog for historical purposes only, and in case they are healed in future by social, political, or economic change. Clicking not recommended.]
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November 12th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a new thing for ErosBlog: offering a Kickstarter project for your possible support.
This morning I got a cold request on Twitter from somebody I did not know. Dude knows me, though, at least well enough to suspect this would tickle my fancy for vintage erotica:
It turns out that Justin O’Hearn is an grad student whose academic specialty is Victorian-era dirty books. (For which the academic term turns out to be “clandestine publication”… who knew?) This gives us a common interest that makes us kindred spirits, quite possibly to Justin’s great chagrin if he only knew it.
His project is rather fascinating and utterly worthy. Apparently there’s a famous dirty book (Teleny) whose famousness in part stems from a somewhat controversial partial attribution to Oscar Wilde. Another portion of what seems to have been the same text was published as Des Grieux some years after Teleny. Just two copies of Des Grieux are known to exist, and almost nobody has seen them because they have been in the hands of private collectors. One of those two copies is up for auction at Christie’s in less than a week.
Justin’s scheme is to raise money via Kickstarter so that he can (a) buy the copy of Des Grieux, (b) transcribe and edit it, (c) publish a scholarly edition of it, (d) use it in his PhD dissertation, and (e) donate the original to the British Library when he is done with it.
Justin has successfully done this sort of thing before, publishing a new edition of Letters from Laura and Eveline, of which only one copy was previously known to exist. And he’s already raised pledges for more than a third of his goal from 17 backers as of this writing.
I have long been fascinated by obscure pornographic works. (My particular mania is bringing them into the electronic domain, but it’s a lot of work if you do it right, so I’ve only gotten one of them all the way to the e-book stage.) I believe surfacing rare pornography for broader public access is important work, culturally and academically. I wish Justin’s project all the best, and encourage you to support it, if you’re so inclined and have the resources.
Normally that would be the end of my post, right there. But we live in the era of the #pornocalypse.
Kickstarter is one of the many corporate entities that’s on my shit-list for its vague-but-hostile approach to adult projects of any kind. As I read their rules of prohibition, this project is perilously at risk of being terminated by Kickstarter because it “involves” “offensive” or “pornographic” material. Justin himself unabashedly states that Teleny was obscene when published, and although few have seen Des Grieux, it seems unlikely to have a greatly different character. Is it “offensive” or “pornographic” by Kickstarter’s standards? Well, good luck answering that question; Kickstarter is careful to leave itself maximum discretion by unhelpfully refusing to define its own terms. This is the modern version of “we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody” under a veneer of obfuscatory dishonesty. But the #pornocalypse corporate trend is to shy away from anything even faintly pornographic, especially if somebody complains or if the project attracts media attention (as this project may be doing).
Fortunately Justin’s Kickstarter pitch projects oodles of academic probity and carefully avoids using the words “pornography” or “erotica”. So there’s a chance he’ll pull this off without getting his Kickstarter yanked at the last minute. I won’t deny, though, that my heart climbed into my throat when saw that he plans to be bidding on the Christie’s auction the day before his Kickstarter actually closes. If Kickstarter decides to screw him in the last 24 hours after he wins the auction, he could get financially screwed real hard. Let’s all hope that doesn’t happen.
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