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The Sex Blog Of Record
Thursday, August 8th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Reports are coming in that Tumblr has begun (or ramped up) a crackdown on people who use Tumblr for adult marketing in ways that seem consistent with Tumblr’s community guidelines. Remember, those guidelines say:
Don’t use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing. Spam doesn’t belong on Tumblr.
Now comes word (and I’ve confirmed it) that there’s at least one adult link that you simply are not allowed to type on Tumblr. (Actually, you can type it, but then your save/publish button won’t work…) A link to this appeared in my Twitter feed:
Post Yahoo acquisition we’ve had several Extra Lunch Money (ELM) related Tumblr blogs removed (with no explanation given) and we’ve heard from other websites and sellers who’ve had their Tumblr blogs taken down as well. While Tumblr has always removed blogs (which they are completely within the right to do), we’ve noticed something more troubling. Tumblr is censoring links to certain adult websites from being published. Which adult website? Namely, extralunchmoney(.)com.
Wait. What’s ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
ELM is a marketplace for amateur models to sell their own hand made adult movies, pictures, and more. It’s like Etsy, but a LOT naughtier.
How are they censoring ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
If you try put in any link with “extralunchmoney(.)com” Tumblr will not allow you to save the post so you can publish it. Instead it will say “There was a problem saving your post” which is Tumblr speak for you’re not allowed to link to this website.
Even worse, you can’t even type out the word “extralunchmoney(.)com” in a post without using parentheses. You’ll get the same “There was a problem saving your post” message.
Go ahead and try for yourself.
So I did. I created a brand new Tumblr blog and, as the very first post, I tried to save this:
Wow. So then I changed the “n” to an “r”. Extralurchmoney.com (the place to buy and sell your zombie-themed goods?) saves just fine on Tumblr.
Back to the report:
It’s also not limited to posts. If you want to update your blog side bar to say for example “I help run this site called extralunchmoney(.)com” you’ll get this “error” (lie): “Your settings may not be valid…”
If you take out the reference to the link then magically everything works ok again. Rather than specifically saying “Sorry, you can’t post links to that site”, they present the problem as a vague technical issue…when in fact it’s CLEARLY an issue with the domain name. But, from the looks of it, Tumblr wants to hide that fact.
Why are they blocking ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
We’re not 100% sure, but it’s probably due to the adult nature of ELM (Tumblr if you’re reading this and we’re wrong, please let us know). The end result being thousands of ELM sellers and supporters being restricted from freely posting what they want to their Tumblr blogs. Which somehow seems like the opposite of valuing “creative expression.”
ELM does not have an affiliate program, and nothing in Tumblr’s community guidelines prohibits self-promotion or adult promotion as long as it’s neither deceptive, nor spam. Of course Tumblr does not define what it means by those terms, but nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that a sneaky and dishonest blanket ban on publishing a specific adult URL is consistent with Tumblr’s methods. 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 am also hearing reports that Tumblr is more aggressively deleting blogs that are being used for adult promotion, even when that promotion seems consistent with the community guidelines. In addition to the mention in the blockquote above of “we’ve had several Extra Lunch Money (ELM) related Tumblr blogs removed”, there are similar reports from the world of camgirls:
As of this morning, my tumblr – hellenlefay.tumblr.com – no longer exists. One minute it was there, the next it wasn’t. I tried opening the dashboard and it said my blog had been terminated, and I could contact support if I didn’t know why this happened.
Um, of course I had no idea why this happened! If you’ve ever stumbled onto my tumblr, it’s very obvious I’ve put quite a bit of time into the design and content. I wouldn’t intentionally do anything that would get me removed! In the recent past I updated my blog to be listed as NSFW, even though I only post pg13 pictures, just in case I was reported for being considered adult content but not listed as such.
So, why was I terminated? Not warned, not suspended, but my entire account deleted?
Spam and affiliate marketing.
This is the reply I received from Mathieu inTumblr Support:
We’ve terminated your Tumblr account at hellenlefay.tumblr.com for spam or affiliate marketing. Per the policies you agreed to when creating your account, Tumblr prohibits such activity.
Don’t put deceptive links or dubious code in your posts. That includes using Javascript to inject unwanted ads in blogs, or embedding links to interstitial or pop-up ad services. Don’t use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing.
Let’s break that down to address each point. First off, I typically post 1-5 posts per day, so that’s hardly spam. It can’t even be argued that I’m spamming other people through their Ask or Fanmail boxes, because I rarely use them. Or mine. As for affiliate marketing, that is not something I’ve ever gotten into. I truly admire the girls who put the effort into running a successful affiliate system, but really really really I can’t, so no affiliate marketing on my Tumblr.
Deceptive links or dubious code – anything I’ve ever posted has been extremely obvious about where the link goes. For example, if it says “Clips4Sale”, guess what? It links to c4s.com/53691, which is my Clips4Sale page. Shocker! The only sort-of-sneaky code I had done was when I put in endless scrolling and disabled right-clicking on my photos. ;) The last point, about using deceptive means to generate traffic, really threw me… I guess showing my butt is a deceptive way to increase traffic?
The main purpose of my tumblr was promotion – I posted photos of myself and links to my websites. My posts were PG13. I was tagged as NSFW as a precaution, because hey, I have some hot friends who post some very hot photos, and I like to reblog them once in a while. I linked to my profiles on other sites, both on my tumblr blog and in my posts.
My entire account was terminated without warning or suspension.
This isn’t just happening to me, it’s also happened to a couple of my camgirl friends. They were terminated without warning as well.
If you’re a camgirl (or really any adult industry person), be aware that tumblr can and will remove your entire account if they don’t like what you post or where your links go.
This, too, is not new. Tumblr has a long and unsavory history of deleting adult blogs (and for all I know, non-adult ones) it deems too commercial, even if they don’t violate the community guidelines. The best explanation I’ve got for that is that they’ve got an extremely broad and flexible definition of spam. Which, if they’d be explicit about it instead of sheepish and deceptive and piously “we value your freedom of expression”, would be no problem at all.
But they’re not. They are 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.
Update, some hours later: The “extralunchmoney.com” string can now be published on Tumblr without a problem, or it could when I just tested it. I do not believe it was a glitch but if Tumblr ever acknowledges this trial balloon, I’ll betcha they claim it was.
Updated update: It’s official, Tumblr support said it was a glitch. As I predicted. “Looks like a glitch on our end was causing the problem, but now it’s fixed.” Pretty strange “glitch”, though. My guess is that they’ve got a shit-list of unpublishable URLs, which are supposed to be genuine bad actors. This would make sense, to stop a malware link that’s going viral for instance. The “glitch” here would be that a legitimate URL got put on the list, I’m guessing. If they are ramping up enforcement of affiliate spam and somebody got overzealous or had poor training, it would explain this outcome. That would also explain why the camgirl sites are getting slammed; those links they use to direct people to their camming sites look a lot like affiliate links in structure, even though they aren’t actually affiliate links in function.
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Tuesday, June 11th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Recently I became aware of an ironic lapse: the most succinct statement of Bacchus’s First Rule that exists on the internet is to be found in a two-year-old tweet on somebody else’s server. Doh!
By embedding the tweet here, I am trying to live by my own Rule. A side benefit is that I’m putting it somewhere that’s easier to find and link to. It’s true that the embedded tweet still depends on access to Twitter’s servers for styling information, but the text will still be here if Twitter’s servers go away. (By “here” I mean “on my server for as long as I have one” and subsequently in whatever archives of ErosBlog may persist.)
I should note that sometimes these days I phrase the rule a little bit differently than I did at first. The “at your own domain” phrasing comes from an era when search engine optimization (SEO) loomed larger in my thinking. Why create content that will generate search traffic to another domain instead of to your own? But focusing on the domain name can be somewhat misleading.
One reason is that in these modern times, search engines can’t be trusted to reliably send traffic to web locations that aren’t in their corporate-partner data-silo complexes, especially if the content is disfavored, like dirty porn or instructions for downloading stuff. SEO has become a mug’s game for the most part; it’s necessary but not sufficient to guarantee your web presence. You can’t disregard it entirely but it’s a will-o-wisp that will mire you in the swamp if you make it your guiding star.
But that’s actually a side issue. The core of the problem with putting your creative output on free blog hosting services and what we’ve come to call “social networking sites” never was maintaining visibility; often, the social networking sites will send you more traffic than you ever could hope to get on your own. No, at the heart of the problem is control. And for that, you want your own server more than you want your own domain, because the server is more important to your own control and (if you want it) long-lived web presence.
Your “ownership” of a domain name is anyway a somewhat fragile thing; a domain can be fairly easily taken away by litigation or state action. The two things you can actually control are your files and the server that hosts them. What gives your web presence its best hope of permanence is you being the owner of your own server or, more commonly, being a lessee of server space from some commodity hosting provider who can be instantly replaced when (if) they stop respecting your prerogatives. If you keep your files in order (fresh backups!) you can get new server space in under four hours; hosting businesses are highly competitive and eager for your money. So now I tend to state the rule this way:
Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.”
2022 update: Never build your house on someone else’s land.
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Saturday, June 11th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I’ve noticed a sharp uptick of attempted blog comment spam in the last couple of weeks … it’s long been a high-volume problem that I keep to a dull roar with electronic countermeasures, but just recently the number of attempts that get through my ice into my moderation queue has jumped from maybe a half-dozen a day to maybe a hundred. Another order-of-magnitude jump like that and I’ll have to start looking into getting better ice.
Thus was I in a receptive mood to be entertained by Franklin Veaux’s Welcome To Web 2.0 essay and flowchart this morning, in which he discusses how easily new whizbang web enterprises tend to stumble and die under the weight of bots and spam:
So it is with companies like Flavors.me and Box.net, started with equal parts naïveté and hope. I didn’t know about either company until I started getting pharmacy spam advertising URLs on their servers, and discovered with a quick Google search that they’re overrun with it.
Right now, as I type this, Box.net has about 40,000 Russian pharmacy redirectors living on its servers. I have a bit of a soft spot for Flavors.me, because I wrote them an email to let them know they have about 3,800 spam pharmacy redirectors on their site, and actually got an email back from a person who, according to her company profile, went to the same little liberal arts college I went to in Florida…but they still haven’t got a handle on the situation. I’ve been checking over the past few days, and the number of spam redirectors on their servers is, according to Google, increasing at the rate of about ten an hour, which probably means there’s a whole lot more that Google isn’t finding.
So in the efforts of public service, I’ve created this handy-dandy flowchart detailing the life cycle of a hot new Web 2.0 startup…
But what really caught my eye was his comments about would-be social-network host Ning. You remember Ning, right? I blogged about it first in 2008 when they threw all the adult social networks off their servers: Ning To Adult Social Networks: Bugger Off. And then again in 2010, when they evicted all the non-paying customers (that is to say, pretty much everybody) that were originally at the heart of their (if I may use the phrase charitably) business model: Fucked By Ning — Again.
What I did not know was that even as they were busy evicting all the people that foolishly trusted them enough to build sites on their “free” platform, they had already been pwnd by spammers. A day after that last blog post of mine, Franklin Veaux wrote this:
Recently, I found a spate of malware spam advertising URLs hosted on a Web site called nashville.net; the spam promised all sorts of free sexual delights if I would but go to such Web addresses as
www.nashville.net/profile/3nz5lxzvocvcd
and
www.nashville.net/profile/jetttoland59
and so on.
I did some poking around on Nashville.net and discovered that it has been compromised like a Senator with a gambling addiction; at the moment, it’s hosting somewhere around 4,200 phony profiles, all of which are redirectors to sites that try to download malware.
…
So I decided to be a good citizen and drop a line to the owner of nashville.net, and his Web host, letting him know he’d been massively breached.
That’s when things got interesting.
The Web site nashville.net is a “community site,” a small niche social networking site hosted by an outfit called Ning.
Parsing input: nashville.net
Routing details for 8.6.19.68
“whois NET-8-6-19-0-1@whois.arin.net” (Getting contact from whois.arin.net )
Found AbuseEmail in whois abuse@ning.com
8.6.19.0 – 8.6.19.255:abuse@ning.com
Using abuse net on abuse@ning.com
abuse net ning.com = postmaster@ning.com, abuse@ning.com, abuse@level3.com
Ning is a personal social networking site founded by the guy who started Netscape, Marc Andreessen. It basically lets you create your own mini MySpace or LiveJournal or whatever you like–a small social networking platform aimed at whatever niche you want. It’s had a checkered past, and has struggled to make money; three days ago, Ning announced that it would become pay only and would cancel its free services. It also fired 40% of its staff.
But that’s not the really interesting part.
The really interesting part is that it looks like all of Ning, with all the social networks and online forums it hosts, has been pwn3d from balls to bones.
A search for some of the exact words and phrases used by the virus redirectors on nashville.net, one of Ning’s social networking sites, produces 1,060,000 results…and as near as I can tell, they are all on Ning.
Update to 2011: A year later, Ning is still pwnd. Franklin Veaux again:
…[T]hey get pwn3d, like the has-been startup founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame called “Ning.” Ning was supposed to revolutionize social networking. After burning through all its capital with virtually nothing left to show for it, Andreessen bailed, and it is now little more than a shell for Russian virus downloaders, as I’ve mentioned before. The virus droppers I talked about a year and two months ago? Most of them are still active. Lights are on, but nobody’s home.
I’ve felt for a long time, and yammered to anyone who would listen, that building your website on a “free” platform provided by somebody else is a terrible error. The incentives are all wrong, and your trust will, inevitably, be betrayed. What’s semi-new to me, though, is Veaux’s insight that these platforms — especially the newest, hippest ones with the fewest hard-eyed security professionals on the payroll — are, as they become the unwitting and/or hapless hosts to web parasites, likely to founder under the parasitic burden, becoming the web equivalent of a caterpillar full of wasp larvae. And that provides another reason not to use them, also: because once they turn into what Google calls “bad neighborhoods”, your content there will tend to be penalized in search results because of its virtual proximity to the virus downloads and penis pill spam.
Saturday, April 17th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Remember when Ning.com threw out all its adult communities, back in 2008?
Ning To Adult Social Networks: Bugger Off
Well, I used it as an example in support of my broad premise that anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing with your own domain that you control. Free services will inevitably screw you, one way or another.
Just last month I got caught up in a bit of a twitstorm just last month when I questioned the wisdom of using Ning.com for an adult bloggers co-op, earning me a number of huffy and defensive responses. A central theme of those responses (which I cannot link because the person promoting the co-op has since “protected” their tweets) was the point that Ning.com was free, whereas setting up your own social networking software might be expensive, complicated, or difficult.
I hate to say I told you so, but…
I told you so. From Ning, a few days ago:
Hi,
Today we made some changes at Ning. I want to share with you the email Jason Rosenthal, our CEO, sent to all Ning employees:
Team,
When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.
My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.
So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.
As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.
I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months.
We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus.
Thanks,
Jason Rosenthal
I know many of you will have questions about this announcement. We will share detailed plans within two weeks.
I feel confident that this change in direction will be very positive for our premium service customers because Ning will be 100% focused on delivering the features and services which benefit you and help you achieve your goals.
I will be here to answer your questions and respond to your concerns. However, today I am focusing on my team, so there may be a delay in my responses.
Thanks,
John McDonald
VP Advocacy
(Bold emphasis added by ErosBlog.)
It’s not that I blame Ning. Business models based on giving stuff away and then arm-waving your way to profit are failing all over the place. It’s just — this sort of thing will destroy another whole bunch of communities who don’t manage to raise the cash for the paid service or figure out a way to “transition off of Ning”. And it was predictable. Better, in my view, to set your stuff up in a way that can’t be easily destroyed by sudden shifts in other people’s shaky business models.
I’ve taken to calling it Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.”
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Thursday, May 31st, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been saying for years that blogging services suck. I said it in 2004 when LiveJournal destroyed a vintage erotica journal that I liked. I said it again in 2006, when, you guessed it, LiveJournal started threatening to suspend users for posting pictures of nipples.
Well, I’m saying it again.
Of course it will come as no surprise that I’m saying it — again — because our old friend LiveJournal (that outfit makes a wonderful bad example!) deleted a bunch of journals for posting dirty stories that management didn’t like.
“Our decision here was … based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what’s not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online).”
This is not a censorship issue (it’s their sandbox and their rules). This is not a rights issue. This is a no-brainer “poor stupid fuckers spent years of their lives writing their shit on a blog service that could, and did, turn them off and delete all their posts” issue.
“We felt there was not a reason for these journals to stay online.”
Why in the name of Odin’s enormous penis would you put your creative efforts at the mercy of someone who had the power to say that, and make it stick?
Dude, don’t do that. It hurts.
And it hurts to watch.
I’m telling you for the third time:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
Aw, hell, I’m going to say it again for the kids on the short bus:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
And this is for my slowest reader, the guy who is sounding out the words with his finger touching the computer screen, which he can’t see very well because of all the pizza sauce and popcorn butter that gets on there when he does that:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
Are we clear?
Also, let me be clear: Livejournal is just the bad example here, not an especially bad service. All blogging services have the power to screw you over. The potential screwage is inherent in the nature of what they do.
Use your own domain. (Your registrar won’t care what you write.) Buy your own hosting. (Your host won’t care unless you post something that’s actually illegal.) Own your own shit. Don’t put yourself in the position to be messed with by somebody who can say “we felt there was not a reason” for your blog to be online.
There are other good reasons to own your own shit. We live in the era of the global microbrand. If you do anything creative, your brand identity is tied to your domain, the place where you publish all your creative stuff.
What? You don’t have a domain? You’re still putting all your shit up on a domain somebody else owns? You’re using your stuff to help them build their brand? WTF, HAVE YOU NOT BEEN LISTENING TO ME?
OK, I’m done ranting for comic effect. But I’m not kidding about this stuff. Blogging services still suck. Get your own domain. Control your own shit. Build your own brand, for you. And own it. For you.
You’ll thank me later.
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