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Exactly! We will get STIs. The question is whether we seek them out and intentionally give them to others. There's a huge difference between unintentionally getting and spreading them and intentionally getting and spreading them.

I should also mention that the earliest these changes will go into effect will be this fall. And it's possible that Mastercard will change the new rules to accommodate hookup sites before then.

I should add that the sites I'm developing will be free sites. The only site that will take credit cards will be a store where you can buy t-shirts, sex toys, etc. My strategy is to operate on a shoestring. What I've found running Breeding Zone is that you guys are my greatest asset. It's really about creating a community and having the community take care of itself. The "I just joined the site and I'm upset I can't send 100 messages a day" mindset comes from paid sites where you pay for the right to do things. On this site and even more so on my new sites, you'll earn the right to do things. There will be a points system where you get more rights and perks the more you help the site – posting high quality content, reporting things to moderators, etc.

This is just a heads up since we all depend in one way or another on hookup sites and apps which in turn depend on paid memberships… Mastercard is changing the rules (and Visa is sure to follow suit). In the near future any site with adult content will now have to… 1) Validate the identity of all users who upload content. This means you will need to upload government ID to every hookup site/app you use and they will need to validate that the ID is authentic and belongs to you. 2) Require anyone uploading adult content to obtain and maintain WRITTEN consent and age verification for each person in the image. This means to upload a picture of your dick or your ass you'll need to sign a form consenting to both having the picture taken (even though you took it) and having it uploaded (even though you uploaded it). And you'll need to sign a form verifying your ID at the time the pic was taken and save a copy of your ID in your files. You then need to maintain those documents for as long as the pic is on the site. If the pic contains another person, then you need all those documents for them as well. Now it's possible the sites could require that you be the only person in the images you upload and that they have you digitally sign consent and age verification documents at the time of the upload (you will already have uploaded your ID). But what if they have data breach and a hacker gets all that information? Do you really want your name, address, etc. made public along with your X-rated pics? Unless you have an exposure fetish that's sorta a nightmare scenario. This means paid hookup site/app memberships are a thing of the past. That may sound great, but the sites/apps depend on that revenue. And the new rules require they do a lot of work - verifying your identity and verifying the legality of each image you upload. I don't see how they can survive. At a bare minimum they'll stop sponsoring events, membership prices will go up (to cover the additional staff needed to comply with the rules and the members who leave their sites/apps). It's not going to be pretty. For years now the credit card companies have dictated what adult content you see. There is adult content that's legal that they don't approve of that you never see. There's a literal war going on against porn and it's the cause of all these changes. It started a few years ago with states like Utah passing measures saying porn was a public health hazard. (There's no scientific evidence to support that claim). And then they progressed to claiming that all sex work is "sex trafficking" (when that's not the case at all). Then they went after PornHub for enabling sex trafficking when Facebook's issues with sex trafficking are literally like a thousand times greater. (PornHub had major legal issues, but they were with piracy, not sex trafficking.) Then they appeared before legislators in Canada (where Mindgeek is headquartered) trying to get the owners of Mindgeek arrested. (Mindgeek owns most of the straight porn industry, including PornHub, as well as significant parts of gay porn - like Sean Cody, Men.com and Reality Dudes.) The law enforcement folks who were called kept repeating that they're not aware of any laws that were broken and hence couldn't arrest anyone. Then there were calls by the most extreme agitators to actually kill the owners of Mindgeek. (Which sounds a lot like one of ISIS' "fatwahs"). And now the (under construction) home of one of the owners of MindGeek just got burned to the ground by an arsonist, which means the calls to kill the owners need to be taken extremely seriously. In the middle of all that the anti-porn folks have been pressuring Visa and Mastercard to be stricter with adult content. MindGeek deleted 80% of the content on PornHub, XTube, etc. just to please Mastercard. And now Mastercard is going further and getting stricter with adult content. The straight folks don't really care what happens to hookup/dating sites. Most of the dating sites on the straight side of the business are fraudulent (none of girls actually exist - they're all chat bots). And the few legit ones could probably go PG-13. But that's not the case with LGBT+ sites. We're not going to join a PG-13 site. The bottom line here is that sex and porn are political. The reason why I had a very hard line against the pro-Trump folks last fall was because they're the ones going after porn and the gay community. The whole anti-porn thing is wrapped up in the QAnon belief that there's a huge amount of child sex trafficking. The hysteria over that is what's driving all this. I have a niece who feels like she needs to wear a gun on her otherwise her kids will be snatched at any moment and sex trafficked. She's college-educated and both of her parents are scientists. It's just bonkers. But the point is politics matters. Who you vote for matters. Whether you vote matters. Whether you write your elected officials matters.

I agree with most, possibly all of what @BootmanLA said. But just to answer your question and elaborate a bit more… There's an entire section of the site, the Testimonials section, that's all about how reading stuff here has changed guys' behavior. If you fantasize about something long enough you're gonna want to do it. I'd rather this site not be what gets that ball rolling when it comes to chasing STIs and progressing to AIDS. I can't stop it completely, but I can starve that fire of some of its oxygen. And like BootmanLA said - guys who didn't go through the AIDS crisis are woefully uneducated about HIV/AIDS. Hell, even the ones who did go through it weren't so enlightened when it came to accepting the efficacy of PrEP. Simply put, too many young guys don't understand the difference between HIV and AIDS. This comes from the fact that most heterosexuals don't understand the difference either, and sex ed in too many places doesn't explain the difference in effective, memorable ways. I'm hoping my drawing a line and saying fetishize HIV all you want, but don't fetishize AIDS will raise awareness that there is a huge difference in being HIV positive and having AIDS. People need to hear that message. And lastly, the whole "let's spread STIs and get AIDS" mantra is a huge ticking time bomb for the gay and poz community. If it gets widespread we'll lose the support of heterosexuals, our legal rights will regress, and funding for HIV/AIDS research will dry up. And it's possible that funding for care/support of people who are HIV positive will be curtailed. When I categorize the STI/AIDS fetishes as "harm to the community" I can't stress how much that is the root of the issue. I want nothing to do with it, and don't want this site associated with it.

BTW, I moved your thread to the more general sexual health section since it wasn't specifically about bareback fucking. [And note to others - messing up with thread placement in the sexual health forum will not earn you an infraction provided you post a genuine sexual health topic. Despite ARD's comments to the contrary, sexual health has always been important to me. We can be pigs and still care of our sexual health.]

"ARD" made some disparaging comments on Twitter about Breeding Zone… During the discussion (which I give him high marks for keeping civil) at one point he essentially said I was out of touch and should ask around. So that's what I'm doing. Please answer the questions above. Those questions are at the heart of what ARD is complaining about. Your profile name will be visible because this is about real life and what you're willing to stand for (even if it's standing for something behind the comfort of a fictional profile name). Even when the #bbbh hashtag was born there was a disagreement over whether "The Bareback Brotherhood" was just about breeding and the exchange of cum or whether it was specifically a poz thing. The current disagreement is similar to that disagreement except the stakes are higher this time around.

It could be used for ads for clinical trials of HIV medications, etc. It could also be used by conservatives for whatever message they want to sent us perverts.

Google is changing things and migrating away from tracking individual users to putting you into a general classification group based on the sites you visit when you use Google Search, etc. The new group-based system is called FLoC. You can opt out of it by setting your browser to block 3rd party cookies. But most of you either won't know how to do that or won't get around to it. SO… I've changed the configuration of my sites so none of them will be used in Google's FLoC calculations. This is something I doubt any of my competitors are doing for you. But I actually give a shit about your privacy. [I was also one of the first to set up HTTPS, and probably one of the only sites among my competitors to set up HTTPS in a way that your ISP or company can't spy on you - all they can see is that your visiting Breeding Zone (that's mostly unavoidable at the moment), not the specific URL or contents of the page.]

What are your stats (height, weight, age, etc?) Maybe a pic?

There is a member group that restricts access to chem sex threads.

You're in the "Senior Members" group. They're membership groups, not discussion groups.

^^^This^^^ is correct. If you see something that violates the rules of the site, report it. There is no limit on the number of things you can report per day. But the scenario @boy4dad described wasn't necessarily rule violations - they were scenarios that were appropriate for downvoting - "low quality" posts. But to boy4dad's question - downvoting can be abused just like upvoting, which is why both have the same limits. So if you see a rule violation, report it and only downvote it if you feel you've got spare votes for the day. Save your votes for stuff you like or low quality content that isn't necessarily a rule violation.

Ugh! I really have to get busy programming. The solution to all of this is that when you do any post it should ask you if it's region-specific and let you specify a precise area. I've been using Geonames for years now (for other purposes) - it gives hierarchical relationships between geographic regions. So for example I could say my post was about "Mount Morris Park" (the neighborhood I live in), and that would automatically associate it with Central Harlem, Harlem, Upper Manhattan, Manhattan, New York City, New York State and the United States. My idea is that it will run though a quick series of questions that, when answered, means that no one will post in the wrong area accidentally (so fewer infractions will need to be given), and things can be categorized in different ways so they appear in multiple, relevant places. But of course that's not possible with the software that currently runs the site. When I finally migrate stuff you'll lose some features and gain others, but hopefully it will be better overall. But what I described is probably still years away, unfortunately. There's a lot of other stuff that needs to come first.

The change has been made.

The key phrase in what I said was "own or have a license to use". In the example you cite, the person posting probably didn't own or have a license to use. Yes, the photographer has rights (especially if the photo is taken in a public place), but the moment the photo is sexually explicit the model has significant rights as well. So using the example at play here – if the photo of Dietrich was taken on a public beach in the US and he was in a bikini and didn't have a visible penis line (so not sexually explicit), then Dietrich has not right to request a takedown (AFAIK). This is because Dietrich doesn't own the photo - the photographer does. This is why I specifically mentioned watermarked publicity photos from porn sites. They're a form of advertising/marketing for the porn site, and the model probably signed a release acknowledging that they might be used in embarrassing, untrue, fictional contexts.

In addition to what drscorpio mentions, the key to getting the regional forums to work effectively is to mention your area in the title. FAR too many posts are have titles like "Looking to get fucked" and you have to click into the thread to see where the guy is. Basically adding your location to your title achieves the same effect as having more sub-sections. But getting people to figure that out is easier said than done.

American companies (like mine) are technically bound by EU laws like GDPR. But it's difficult for the EU to penalize a company that has no presence in the EU. That said, I do try to generally comply with GDPR. Data is encrypted when at rest, account deletions are possible, etc. However, if a person uploads an image they own or have a license to use, there is no way GDPR applies unless they ask us to take it down claiming it contains personal information, and we fail to do so. We do remove personally identifiable information from posts when a person can prove they're the person in question – so that's a non-issue. In most cases, no. If it's a watermarked promo image from a porn studio, those are intended to be spread around. The watermark is advertising and porn studio model releases typically warn the model that the image/video may be used in contexts that they find embarrassing or offensive. If it's unwatermarked and shows personally identifiable parts of the body like a face or distinctive tattoo - then you might want to report it if you're reasonably certain the person who posted it doesn't own the image or have a license to use it. But please DO report it if you believe it's "revenge porn" or child porn – those are both totally prohibited since they're illegal.

Also, don't forget that you're liable for copyright infractions. Do not upload pictures that you do not own or do not have a license to use. Images watermarked with the porn site that originally featured the video are generally safe - they're promo images that are meant to be distributed. And thanks to Google Images a court case has determined that "hotlinking" images (e.g. using "insert image from URL") is OK as well. That said, often those URLs break over time and they create an unsightly mess. And remember - just because "you found it on the internet" does not mean it's "public domain"!

Getting infected while on PrEP is so rare that if it happens to you your case will probably be written up in a medical journal. Most of the cases that are reported turn out to be situations where the person was positive when they started PrEP (the doctor did an antibody test rather than a viral load / RNA test). There are literally about a handful of known cases of it happening when the person has been taking PrEP as directed. For all practical purposes it's impossible. It is possible for a strain to be meds-resistant for Truvada. But apparently the mutation is unstable/fragile and the resistance goes away fairly quickly. Which is one of the reasons why Truvada was chosen for PrEP.

Good points. That said, nothing is foolproof. Members should always think about what information they're putting out there. Making most of this site open to Google drives home that point. On the security side I do what I can. I implemented HTTPS before most other sites. I encrypted personally identifiable data "when at rest" before the vast majority of other sites. I've now set up "HSTS" and CAA DNS records both of which work together to ensure that your ISP or employer can't eavesdrop on what you post here. When ESNI is usable, I'll implement it. I've urged people to use DoH (DNS over HTTPS). And so on… But even with all that, I can't say things are bulletproof.

Just to set your mind at ease, my understanding is that you have to get up to roughly 1,000 to infect someone (who isn't on PrEP). So at 200 it's unlikely you were a danger to anyone.

One final, and I think very clear way of summing up the new policy… ALLOWED: “joining the club” / becoming part of a tribe / helping someone achieve that goal — without harming anyone else in the process. BANNED: wantonly spreading disease, illness and death (aka morbidity and mortality) with no regard for others. The caveat being that PrEP means “gift giving” of HIV is not banned because people who don’t want it can protect themselves. And one last thing I’ll add… The things that are banned are harmful to the poz and gay community. If the trend/fetishes were to grow beyond the current, small group of mentally unstable drug addicts, you would see an increase in HIV criminalization, increased stigma and discrimination, and reduced funding for HIV/AIDS and gay causes in general. We can’t afford to be our own worst enemy.

The term "guest" is used in a few instances. First, anyone browsing the site who's not logged in will show as a "guest". These are real people who may or may not be members. They do not have the ability to post on the site, except in the Tips & Tricks section. They're allowed to post there because it may be a case were a member is having problems logging in and that's the best way for them to get to the bottom of their problem. Second, "crawlers" / bots will show up as a guest (because they don't log in). Googlebot and Bingbot are two examples, but there are others. Third, when accounts are deleted their old posts will show up as "Guest TheirOldProfileName". These people aren't on the site any more. At the core of the original question seemed to be the fact that large parts of the site are open to the public and anyone can see the content in that area. That's just the nature of the site. If you're not comfortable with that, then don't join the site. If it's particularly access to your profile page that's bothering you, simply don't put personal information in your profile. Use a handle you don't use elsewhere, etc. Also, never assume just because you posted in a members-only section of the site that your post will stay members-only since it may be moved to another part of the site that's open to the public. Also, in a few years the content on the site will be moved onto new sites that I'm developing. Things that are currently members-only may be public on those new sites. The biggest example of this is the poz fetish content - it will be moved to PozPigs.com and made public.

The rules were made a bit tougher as of yesterday. Please read the following… In short, STD fetish is now banned because it harms the community. And the kind of AIDS fetish that glorifies becoming sick and/or dying is now also banned for the simple reason that I don't want this site used to promote that level of self-harm. DO NOT QUESTION THESE NEW POLICIES IN THIS THREAD. THEY'RE NOT UP FOR DISCUSSION. You will get an infraction if you do question the policies – they're explained a number of different ways in the thread linked just above. However, you may ask if something you're planning on posting would violate the policy.