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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
May 19th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
The full implications of Tumblr making adult-flagged porn Tumblr blogs non-searchable, and hiding their content from the search engines, are only just starting to sink in for people.
For instance: if you have an adult tumblr, now you can’t even search your own blog to find an old post.
I’m getting panicky emails from people with huge adult Tumblrs, thousands of posts. Apparently internal Tumblr search has never worked well (you can search for one tag, or for blog names, but not for post content and there are no multi-keyword searches) and it’s impractical to scroll back very far in your own Tumblr dashboard. So they were in the habit of typing [keyword] [their own tmblr url] into Google, and hey presto! There would be the post they were looking for.
Now their blogs have a non-consensual robots.txt file that excludes Google, and all of those search results are gone from Google.
Worse yet? Tumblr blogs flagged “adult” aren’t searchable even with Tumblr’s own internal search. You can test this yourself. Log into your Tumblr dashboard, go to your settings, and make sure you haven’t checked the “Browse tag pages in Safe Mode (Hide content from NSFW blogs)” setting:
Unlike the one that doesn’t actually “allow search engines to index your blog”, this checkbox appears to actually work in the narrow sense that if it is not checked, you can search for blogs flagged “NSWF” within the Tumblr tag search interface. But this checkbox lies by omission. You’ve got the option to search tag pages of NSFW blogs (or not) but opting to search them does not let you search blogs that have the deeper-level-of-perdition “adult” flag.
My test for this is to search for a recent post at Wicked Knickers, which I used as my “adult” flagged example in the Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post:
The post we will be looking for in the Tumblr dashboard tag search has a time stamp of 9:30pm yesterday, May 18, and is tagged “ziegfeld” which makes it a nice handy and recent thing to search for.
We already know that Google no longer has access to the posts on an adult-flagged Tumblr like this:
So, what happens in the Tumblr tag search interface? If you’re logged in, this is what you see when you search for tumblr posts with the “ziegfeld” tag. The posts returned are listed in date order (most recent first) and dates are visible as tooltips on the live page, so I’ve added them in the margin with red arrows and white text. You’ll see that the Wicked Knickers post is not returned by the Tumblr search:
Interestingly, that logged-in Tumblr dashboard search result is displayed at a URL ( http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/ziegfeld ) that returns something very different (but still no sign of our Wicked Knickers post) if you navigate to it as a not-logged-in person:
Try it yourself if you’ve got an adult-flagged Tumblr blog. Log in and try to search for your own posts in the search box on your own dashboard. You will, sadly, fail.
So, what is to be done? How can you search your own Tumblr blog?
The answer is, quite simply, you cannot — not while it’s on Tumblr’s server behind their robots.txt that you do not have the power to alter or remove.
But, all is not lost. Be ye not in despair. If you could only back up your adult Tumblr blog — make a complete copy of it, on your local hard drive — you could search it there with any file searching tool. Or, if you have a web server of your own, you could upload that copy (mirror it) onto your own web space, where it would once again be indexed and searched by Google.
That’s all I got. It’s the only way. It’s also a very good idea, because eventually The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All, and because Anything Worth Doing On The Internet Is Worth Doing At Your Own Domain That You Control.
Your next logical question is “But how do I do that? How do I back up a Tumblr blog?”
It’s not a simple question. The answer isn’t simple either. But, it can be done. So, that’s my next post.
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May 17th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
As Tumblr users leave comments on my Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post, it’s becoming clearer that the new robots.txt that prohibits search engines from indexing adult Tumblrs is quite new. But nobody seems to know precisely why Tumblr is newly trying to hide all its adult blogs, and Tumblr still hasn’t responded to my inquiry.
Well, here’s a Time report that Tumblr is in talks to be acquired by Yahoo for big bucks. A potential acquisition like that would certainly explain the urge to scratch kitty litter hastily over the porn that made your system big enough to sell in the first place:
Internet icon Yahoo! is in talks to buy New York-based social blogging platform Tumblr for as much as $1 billion, according to multiple reports. At that price, Tumblr would be pretty expensive, given that it reportedly only booked $13 million in revenue last year, but the deal could still make sense for Yahoo! That’s because Tumblr is extremely popular with the 18-to-24 year-old-set, precisely the demographic CEO Marissa Mayer is targeting as she attempts to turn the purple-hued Internet pioneer around following a multi-year slump.
It’s like I said in The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All:
But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up” (for the VCs, for the advertisers, for the potential buyers, for somebody). A lot more porn tumblrs will go away when that happens.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
Note well: Yahoo itself is no friend to adult content. As early as 2001 Yahoo started hiding adult Yahoo Groups from its own directories and site search, making them very hard to find. And adult Yahoo Groups used to be (it’s been some years since I stopped paying attention) frequently deleted, seemingly at random and without any notice or hope of appeal, forcing the group members to reconstitute themselves on other services or in new, temporary, Yahoo groups. If Yahoo buys Tumblr, the adult Tumblr ecosystem is in for a rough ride.
Update:
According to sources close to the situation, the Yahoo board plans to meet Sunday night to decide whether to approve a $1.1 billion all-cash offer for New York-based blogging site Tumblr.
Update, via Violet Blue’s sex news:
If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn? (Businessweek)
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May 15th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
If you’ve got an adult blog on Tumblr, there’s a good chance Tumblr uses robots.txt to exclude the search engines from indexing it. Did you know that?
Two weeks ago in The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All, I wrote:
Who is next? My guess would be Tumblr. Tumblr is, of all the big platforms, perhaps the most porn friendly; there’s lots of porn on there and the Terms of Service do not prohibit it… But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up”…
And now, guess what? I’ve discovered that Tumblr uses robots.txt to bar all search engine access to blogs flagged as adult. If you’ve got an adult Tumblr, go look at your own settings. Do you see that first checkbox, the one that says “allow search engines to index your blog”?
That checkbox is a lie. It’s nicely checked, it’s not greyed out, but if your blog is flagged “adult” it’s a lie. Do you see the “Learn more about what this means” link under “Your blog was flagged NSFW” selector? It leads to this page, where Tumblr requests users to appropriately self-flag their blogs:
Please respect the choices of people in our community and flag your blog as NSFW or Adult from your blog Settings page.
- NSFW blogs contain occasional nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
- Adult blogs contain substantial nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
If you’re not sure if you should flag your blog you can leave it unflagged, but keep in mind that we might flag it later if we see a lot of mature/adult-oriented content.
To answer the question “What happens to blogs that are flagged NSFW or Adult?” Tumblr offers this handy chart. The key piece of information is the white space indicated by my red superimposed arrow:
That’s right — where the “Blog indexed by Google” row intersects the “Adult Blogs” column, we find a ringing silence.
Would you have noticed? None of the adult Tumblr bloggers I know ever did. I knew from my porn researching that adult Tumblrs tended to be poorly represented in Google search results, but I chalked it up to the sheer scale of Tumblr and Google’s growing bias against returning porn search results. Nope, I found out the truth in one stark moment of astonishment, summed up by this image:
Let’s click the “See wickedknickers.tumblr.com robots.txt page” link:
From me: Aghast. Fucking. Gulp.
In robot, that means, roughly “All robots: stay out!” No search spiders allowed. No Internet Archive crawler. The Wicked Knickers tumblr is there, but you have to know about it, or you have to be linked to it. You won’t find it in Google, you won’t find it in any other search engine that honors robots.txt, and when Tumblr decides to stop hosting it, you won’t find the pages in the Wayback Machine — it will be gone for good, lost to humanity unless somebody with the technical chops and outlaw sensibilities of Archive Team finds a way to archive it anyway, robots.txt be damned.
Wicked Knickers is just an example, one that has some meaning to me because it’s one of the first Tumblr blogs I ever noticed, and I’ve been linking to it since 2010. That’s almost 6,000 vintage erotica posts since January 2009, and none of those pages are in Google or the Wayback Machine. It was only when I twigged to that anomaly that I finally understood what Tumblr is doing to adult blogs.
In all the years that I’ve been preaching Bacchus’s First Rule (“Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own domain that you control”), I’ll confess that I never considered the power of robots.txt, or what it means to be putting stuff on an internet site where somebody else controls what robots.txt says. Not only do they control your visibility to search engines, they control whether history will remember what you said. That strikes me as a high price to pay for a “free” blogging platform.
It’s worth noting that there’s still rather a lot we don’t know about the Tumblr robots.txt blockade on adult Tumblr sites. Unanswered questions include:
- Does Tumblr have any flexibility on this? Would their support, if asked, remove or modify the robots.txt barrier in specific cases?
- When did Tumblr start using robots.txt to block Google from adult blogs? Has it always been like this, or is it a recent innovation?
- Why does Tumblr display the misleading checkbox that falsely implies that search engines can see flagged adult blogs?
- What is the actual reason for excluding adult Tumblrs from search engine and (especially) archive crawls?
In an unusual move for me, I actually reached out to press@tumblr.com, told Tumblr I was going to write this post, and asked them for answers to those questions. That was on May 11th. No response so far. If they ever do answer, I’ll be sure to update this post.
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November 26th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
You gentlemen will appreciate how rare it is to ejaculate (while awake) without any stimulation of the penis. But it is possible, especially when the prostate is being pressed upon properly. This pair of animated .gifs show how one man does it with a dildo up his ass and some careful athletics:
Hands-Free Masturbation And Ejaculation
2019 update: This link originally went to Tumblr, and broke in the Great Tumblr Pornocalypse Fire of 2018. Fortunately, the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine had preserved a copy.
November 26th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Wow. I just got the new video iPod. Of course I didn’t get it just for viewing porn, but I’ve got a sex blog thing going on here, so I had to try that out.
Unfortunately, the iTunes store doesn’t sell any worthy porn. No worries; like lots of folks, I’ve got a ton of accumulated little porn clips on my hard drive that I’ve downloaded over the years. Lots of it is 320×240 (the dreaded “postage stamp” size) and doesn’t look like much on a computer screen viewed from twenty-four inches away, but on the stunningly vivid iPod screen held a comfortable distance in front of your face, it ought to look real good. So I’ll just bung my video clips into my iTunes library and get busy viewing, right?
Alas, no. There’s a slight flaw in that plan — video formats. The iPod accepts only two formats; video on the PC comes in many different flavors, virtually none of which match what the iPod wants. You want a good explanation for that, talk to a video geek; I don’t pretend to understand it. There are ways to convert, but they don’t sound easy. I Googled the problem and the “best” solution seemed to be to buy expensive conversion software and then expect to wait a long time as each bit of video gets converted properly. Sorry, but I don’t want it that bad.
So how am I gonna get porn for my iPod?
Fortunately, inspiration struck. You’ll have noticed I’m always posting pictures here that I downloaded from the alt.binaries erotica newsgroups on Usenet; the service I use for that is GUBA, a cheap and friendly sort of search appliance for the Usenet visual content that’s otherwise very difficult to find and download. (If you know how to download dirty movies from Usenet without GUBA, you probably already know how to convert all your files into iPod-friendly formats too, while baking a savory peach pie with your other hand.) Maybe GUBA (I thought hopefully) would have some iPod-friendly dirty movies?
Ding ding ding ding ding! Jackpot. It turns out that GUBA is riding the crest of the iPod porn wave; they have recently added a filter that converts almost all of the video on Usenet into iPod-friendly format, so if it’s been posted to Usenet in the last couple of weeks, you can download it iPod-ready. That’s a LOT of porn, folks; the bigger groups (like alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica) can have 2,500 or more video clips (or even whole movies) at any one time. And there are a metric buttload of different porn groups — one for every imaginable fetish.
When it comes to finding and downloading, nothing could be easier. Just pick your flavor (say, nude celebrities from alt.binaries.multimedia.nude.celebrities) and browse the videos — they make it easy with full-screen “contact sheet” style previews, or you can watch online with a nifty streaming Flash application. Here’s a clip of Halle Berry getting naked and nasty (in a good way) in Monster’s Ball (members-only link, will expire in a couple of weeks):
All you have to do is hit the “iPod Download” button. Once the file’s on your hard drive, import it into iTunes and it will be added to your iPod the next time you synch up. Easy as pie!
Better still, every newsgroup on GUBA has a nifty “subscribe to Feed in iTunes” button at the top of the page:  When I clicked that, I downloaded a .pcast file that loads into iTunes and sets it up to download new movies from the selected group as fast as they appear (bandwidth permitting, and you can eat a lot of it this way). An endless gusher of porn, shooting from the hose faster than you could ever hope to consume it. (I could dirty up that metaphor if you liked.)
None of which would matter much, except for the fact that (just like everyone says) watching video on the iPod is an unexpectedly pleasurable experience. The screen is bright and vivid, the details are sharp, and when the iPod’s in your hand, it naturally gravitates to your most comfortable viewing distance. In many cases, it’s actually quite a lot better than watching the same movies on your computer screen. Plus, you can take the iPod somewhere more comfortable (or more private) than your computer desk, if you are so inclined….
I bought my video iPod to have an iPod, thinking the video would be a mostly-worthless gimmick. Boy, was I wrong. The Nymph (who loves music videos) took one look over my shoulder and began pleading with me to let her play with it — the video is that pretty. At this rate, I may have to buy her a second one!
Update from the future: Apple invented smartphones, killing video iPods deader than the Dodo bird. Meanwhile GUBA pulled a #pornocalypse and got rid of all its porn, trying to compete with YouTube; it was dead and gone in eighteen months. Now this post is nothing but a quaint historical artifact. But The Nymph enjoyed that video iPod for many years, in truth.
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