rawTOP

SO… I've been thinking of launching a porn & sex-friendly social media site, but was trying to get my new porn sites finished (there are several, but bbbh.com is the one you guys would be most interested in). I'm actually "close-ish" to done with the porn sites. They're complete enough that I've moved all my porn blogs to the new platform, as well as all the commercial videos on my tube site – Raunchy Fuckers. But I still have at least a couple months of work before they're done enough that I can work on something else. I've been thinking about what comes next – I was planning on working on hookup sites next, but I could work on the social site instead, so I spent a while today thinking through the issues of doing a sex-friendly social media site, please give me some feedback on what I'm thinking… First off, the reason why other people aren't doing it is because of the legal issues. Tumblr got in trouble for child porn, but there's also prostitution and sex trafficking issues as well. (For the record, I'm fine with folks being prostitutes – if it's what they want to do, but the law isn't in most places, and I have to be compliant with the law). Those legal problems are far bigger on the straight side than they are on the gay side. So for starters I'm thinking if I do a social site it will only be for gay male and trans masculine content. The moment you try to appeal to straight guys (and trans feminine appeals to them), you up your problems about 10 fold. My experiences with the straight portion of this site were crazy. Just a fraction of the overall discussion on the site, but 95% of the big problems (including a call from the London police). I'd rely mostly on community moderation – much like I do on this site. You guys are excellent at reporting spam and other stuff, and this site wouldn't exist if it weren't for @drscorpio doing so much moderation (I need more guys like him! Any volunteers?) I've been trying to formulate some type of credibility score for users for my new sites. So people who've proven they can be trusted can do more. In this case the "more" they'd do is moderation so problem content can be axed from the site quickly. The other big issue for Tumblr is that mainstream advertising doesn't mix well with adult content. Even though experiments have shown that adult sites can be quite profitable for selling mainstream products, none of the brands want their ad appearing next to porn. And there's A LOT of money in mainstream – FAR more than in porn. Verizon bought Tumblr from Yahoo! last year and I think Verizon's trying to figure out how to get rid of the porn thinking that will make the site more profitable. Getting banned from Apple's app store was the perfect excuse for them to do what they wanted to do all along – ban porn. Problem is no social site has flourished after getting rid of porn. Getting rid of porn (after allowing it) is always a sign of weakness and decline. In terms of how I see the site functioning… There'd definitely be both pics and text. On the text side I'd have two fields – one shorter (160 to 255 characters), and one much longer. The shorter one would be visible in timelines, but when there's more you could click through to a blog post. Pics would be limited to 4 static per post or 1 animated gif. The question is videos. I'm actually thinking of launching with no (or limited) video capability. I definitely don't intend to be a tube site with long user uploads – but that wasn't Tumblr either. When I get to the hookup sites I'll permit video uploads there within the context of people sharing videos of their own personal sex life. But too often on the tube sites people are just uploading videos they think are hot and not thinking about the legal ramifications. The gay porn industry seems to accept that videos that are ~2 min or less are "promos". I haven't heard of producers complaining about the 2:20 videos on Twitter. Ultimately allowing ~2 min video uploads is probably where I'll wind up, but I need to do it carefully. Tumblr allowed 5 min videos (though they said no new porn videos a few years ago because they were taking too much bandwidth), but that was pushing the limits of "fair use" and definitely not OK with some producers. One other option is video embeds – like MyVidster has. In that case they don't host the videos – they're just hotlinking via other sites' embed codes. BUT as soon as I put a page from someone else's site in an iFrame on my site (which is how embeds work) all sorts of undesirable things can happen. I'll definitely let users embed anything that's on one of my sites, but I know they're gonna want more than that. But beyond that – expect all the standard social features (with some twists) – likes/favs, reposting, conversation threads, etc. So please let me know your thoughts – how do you think a site like I described would do? Is a gay site too restrictive? What are your thoughts on videos?

I just did a big delete of profiles that asked to be deleted – probably about 200 of them. I'll be doing them in batches going forward, so do not expect your profile to get deleted quickly - it could be months before your profile gets deleted.

I've upgraded the forum software and the theme (user interface package) for the site. I don't know if that will fix the problem. Please let me know if you continue to have problems. If you do continue to have problems I need very precise steps to take to reproduce the problem since I really have no clue what you're doing when you encounter the error (there are multiple areas on the site where you might upload an image).

How can a 6 year old take dick up his ass? Is that physically possible? I mean take a look at what 6 year old boys look like on Google Images… I'm just not seeing it. Or rather, it would be rather massive physical abuse to even try what is being suggested (major bleeding, etc.) [And to be clear – do not even think of posting pictures of young boys on this site when the topic goes in directions like it's going right now. Porn and kids don't mix. I linked to a neutral 3rd party, Google Images – that's about as much as you're allowed to do on topics like this.]

This is one of those rare times when Dr Scorpio and I disagree. I probably would have questioned it as well. I've reversed SlutTony's infraction. Just as a case and point… Ryan Cummings… Clearly he gets A LOT of loads, but there are times I'd swear he counts the number of times dick is inserted into his ass rather than actual loads. I mean, I'd love it if his numbers were real, but I'm highly skeptical. But at the same time even if he "only" actually got 400 loads in a month when he said he got 1144 (to take January as an example), he's clearly in a class where the difference is somewhat immaterial. So yeah, I question it, but at the end of the day it's a difference without a distinction.

I just want to clarify that I'm doing deletions every few weeks. GDPR gives me up to 90 days to do deletions (and only some of you are covered by GDPR). Deletions do not happen automatically or even quickly.

This morning I also found a major reason why pages were loading slowly. I'm giving it 24-48 hours to see if it speeds things up for you guys. Fingers crossed!

Emails should now be working. I doubt the missing ones will be resent, but going forward you should be getting the emails you're expecting…

I think the main problem was videos. The software is supposed to block video uploads, but that constraint isn't working properly. The software running the site does resize the photos and there's a max size and the resized photos will probably be under 250K. So photos are probably safe. Though it's possible the size I was looking at when I did my deletions was original upload size, not the size after the photos were resized.

To be clear… Two changes were made last week – an upgrade to the server OS to enable HTTP/2, and an upgrade of the software that runs the site. The leaderboard issues and the email issues are forum software issues that are a bit out of my control. Presumably there will be a "dot version" upgrade that will iron those problems out. What I'm most interested in, in this thread are the general performance issues – how quickly pages load. I've looked closely at Google Analytics and I'm seeing a 3.7s slowdown overall in home page load times (125% slower), and just loading the HTML for the home page is 62% slower. I've made my host aware of the problem. We'll see if they can fix it. And when they fix it, how much better it gets. So page load times is what I'm working on – site functionality problems I'll look into later.

IPv6's main advantage is more addresses. But I have the IP addresses I need, and IPv6 maps to IPv4 addresses, so it's not like people can't access my site because I'm on IPv4. IPv6 has some theoretical advantages, but I can't see them making a significant difference in my site performance. So I don't see the need to support it.

I just want to say a huge thanks to all you Aussies who just chimed in. It wasn't the technical details I was hoping for, but since there were so many of you, it's just as good. Apparently, my host still hasn't completed all their tweaks, so please continue to monitor the speed and let me know your thoughts.

All true, but I have zero interest in being the test case. Escorting just isn't that important to this community. I'll let someone who's closer to the issue fight the fight. (And those fights aren't going so well – e.g. RentBoy & Backpage).

Long story, but I've been taking a closer look at things and realized some of you were using this site as a tube site and uploading videos. That increased my bandwidth and bandwidth costs (since files like that are served via a somewhat expensive CDN). I deleted all images/videos that were bigger than 250Kb, but that messed up something and now the Galleries section isn't working properly. There are a number of things that have to happen before it gets fixed, so it may be a week or more before everything works properly again. But going forward – don't upload any videos or images >250Kb. The software should stop you from doing this, but it's not working properly (another thing that needs to get fixed).

That's not surprising and in line with what I'm seeing in my testing. In the US the page load times seem to roughly similar in the US (wouldn't surprise me at all if it was faster in some places – especially as you get closer to Atlanta where my server is). But when you get to Europe the old way is a bit faster, and when you get to remote places like Australia, South America or South Africa the page load times double and initial page load times are so bad it will turn away visitors from those places. So basically I'm going through all this to keep 5-10% of my visitors happy. At times I wonder if it's worth it. Especially when I can't get any people from those places to chime in on a thread like this which is all about their needs…

My hosting company created one problem while fixing another. I'm frustrated with them, but it will be fixed shortly.

Mexico is close to data centers in the US, so if there are issues they’re different than the ones I was looking to examine. Basically in networking the two problems are latency (caused by distance) and packet loss (caused by network congestion). I’m mostly looking to figure out the effect of latency, but am mildly interested in packet loss. The upgrades to the server could actually make things worse for people on poor internet connections with lots of packet loss. Mexico is close to the US so latency isn’t an issue, but packet loss might be an issue, so feel free to run the test if the instructions make sense to you, but I still need results from Australia or South America.

I need the help of one or more of you who are in far-flung places like Australia, South America or Asia. This is semi-technical, so if you can't figure it out, thanks for trying… Hopefully someone else can figure it out and give me the feedback I'm needing. Open some browser that you haven't used to access this site. Right click anywhere on the page and you'll hopefully see something like "Inspect" or "Inspect element". If it's not there you may need to turn on developer tools up in something like a tools menu (depends on the browser what that's called). The window that comes up will have a bunch of tabs. Navigate to the one that says "Network". Enter the URL https://breeding.zone and you'll see every file that makes up the page scroll across the window. At the bottom of all those lines you'll see a summary line. I need to know what you see on that line right after the page stops loading. It will give one or more times in seconds (or milliseconds), and an amount transferred (probably in KB or MB). And please let me know the label that's shown on each number. (e.g. Chrome shows two times "DOMContentLoaded" and "Load", whereas Firefox only shows "finish"). Then reload the page and make note of the numbers again. (It should be faster since some of the stuff will be cached by your browser). Then just tell me what browser you got the numbers from, your country, the browser you were using, and your type of internet connection (upload/download speed, if you know it).

Ah. I see the problem. The URL of this site is http://breeding.zone NOT http://www.breedingzone.com or http://breedingzone.com. However, those URLs should work and redirect, so I'll get that fixed. [See, full error messages really help!]

I just tested on 3-4 browsers can't replicate the problem, but I've had problems recently with the encryption certs for some of my other sites not renewing properly, so it's completely possible that it's happening. In order to ask my host to fix it, I need more details. Has anyone else encountered the problem? What exactly is the URL you're putting in? And what exactly is the error message? In my testing I accidentally put in breeding.zone. (notice the trailing period) and that gave me a "not private" error message. But when I typed it correctly it worked fine.

The Tl;DR version: A number of changes are being made to the server this coming Tuesday starting at noon. It would help a lot if you could make note of how fast pages load now and then after the changes are made. I'm especially interested in how the changes impact users – especially those on cell networks and those outside the US – Europe, Australia, South America and South Africa. The longer, technical version: Right now my server does not support HTTP/2. My hosting company will be upgrading Debian (the operating system) so it can serve pages using HTTP/2. And currently I'm using a CDN to serve many of the images on the site, but my cache hit ratio is only 80%. After the server supports HTTP/2 I'll be ditching the CDN and images will be served directly from the server. The slightly less technical version: Right now things like images are cached on edge servers around the world so people who aren't near my server can load them faster. But when the edge server doesn't have the image (20% of the time), it takes longer to load the image that it would if the person hit the server directly. And the way my server currently serves files can be really slow for people who are far away from my server (in Atlanta). My host will be doing an upgrade that allows the files to be served differently (HTTP/2) which should reduce the penalty of being far away from the server. So bottom line – people in places like Australia will be able to load pages nearly as quickly as people in the US – in most cases – if there's network congestion between the server and the user then things may actually be worse than they are now. So people on "dirty" cell networks are of particular interest. After Tuesday this will be the thread where you can tell me whether things have gotten better or worse. I'll need to to know: your location what type of device you're using what type of Internet connection you're on

This is one reason why I'll be turning off Breeding Zone chat and replacing it with chat on a variety of themed sites. (Bareback, poz fetish, chem sex, oral sex, etc.) But I probably won't get to that for a couple months.

The EU has passed a law called GDPR which is forcing me to allow account deletions (click here for a very detailed explanation of the law). The law goes into effect in a bit over a month. The software that runs this site makes it cumbersome to do account deletions, which is one of several reasons why I haven't been willing to do them in the past. But I've found an add-on utility that makes the process somewhat easier. To delete your account do the following: Login Click on your user name in the upper left corner under the logo, then choose "Account Settings" from the drop down. Choose "Delete My Account" in the sidebar on the left side of the page. Fill out the form for why you want to delete your account and click "Save". Wait a few days for a moderator to do the deletion. But before you delete your account realize what it does and what it doesn't do… Deleting your account will get rid of your profile page. Deleting your account deletes the data we have on you (email address, IP addresses, etc.) Deleting your account will stop all emails from Breeding Zone (though you can do that already in Account Settings). Deleting your account does NOT delete your forum posts. Deleting your account does NOT delete images you post to the gallery section or images you post in threads. If we notice that you have gallery images we'll delete them, but don't count on it. Deleting your account probably will NOT delete your blog posts (I'm waiting for a test case). Deleting your account does NOT get rid of references to your profile name. In fact quite the opposite – it makes those references so difficult to remove that we will ignore any request to remove them. Changing your profile name is the best way to get rid of references to your profile name. After you delete your account there's basically no way for you to prove authorship of anything that's left on the site. Hence we will ignore any requests to delete or modify posts unless they contain identifiable information, and in that case we will only edit out the identifiable information. I'll update this with more details once I do a few deletions and understand the process more completely.

I have locked this thread and hid a lot of the discussion. The comments asking for profiles to be deleted were pointless. We don't delete profiles. Just turn off notifications, delete details from your profile, and walk away… Just as a reminder we're happy to remove any personally identifiable details such as addresses or phone numbers – just use the report button under the post and a moderator will take care of it. At some point in the future we will delete abandoned profiles that have no posts associated with them, but those are the only profiles we'll be deleting. Any emails to support asking for a profile to be deleted will be ignored because there's nothing more to say than what's been said above.

Nope. That won't work. They also just passed the CLOUD Act which makes it quite easy for them to get certain data off servers that are outside the US. The US wanted data off a Microsoft server in Ireland. Microsoft refused and it's currently gone all the way to the Supreme Court. But the government is asking to send the case down to a lower court for reconsideration now that the CLOUD Act has passed. One of the big porn lawyers has said on an industry forum that he thinks data is actually safer in the US. The issue isn't the move to a foreign server. That part is easy. The difficulty is closing my business here, moving somewhere else, reincorporating, getting citizenship in the other place, and then renouncing my US citizenship. That's horribly complicated and just not going to happen. And the EU isn't a lot better. Look at what just happened with the elections in Hungary, or what's happening with porn restrictions in the UK. Canada is an option, but with their close ties to the US, and the CLOUD Act, etc. I'm not sure it's much help either. FOSTA/SESTA does nothing to help women. Just ask any female escort or pornstar. It actually makes things worse.