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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.

I'd like to point out that posting asking for your profile to be deleted is a sure fire way to make sure it DOESN'T get deleted since I'm only going to be deleting profiles with no posts. I'm really tempted to give these guys infractions for not reading the thread and wasting everyone's time.

It depends on what you're saying. Mentioning that the place exists is fine. Giving a physical description of the place is fine. Recommending that people looking for trans escorts go there, is not OK. In other words, if the NY Times wouldn't put it in their travel section, then it probably shouldn't be said.

Are you talking about escorts? Yeah, they rely on just a few sites. But given that escorting is legal in some significant areas in the EU, I can't see EU-based sites being shut down. But the sites need to be hosted in the EU and owned by EU companies/citizens to be safe. And given that the US has never forced ISPs to block particular sites, and has no "national firewall", it means that if a site is up in the EU it can service the US. Bottom line, escorts (even ones in the US) should always have at least a few sites they can use.

Sorry, but you're flat out wrong. This site is owned by Studio 3X, Inc. a New York company that I own. Websites are subject to the local laws of the visitors to the site. Legally, the site goes to the visitor. The visitor does not go to the site. This was a gray area back in the '90s, but was pretty quickly cleared up. Given that I get traffic from pretty much everywhere, my sites are subject to the laws pretty much everywhere. I'll ignore the laws in places like Uganda and Iran, but I can't ignore the laws in the EU, Australia, etc. Many countries have reciprocal law enforcement agreements with the US. Where you host doesn't make a difference, other than the fact that if you're servers are seized or monitored it needs to be done by an agency with jurisdiction where the server is located. And you don't seem to understand hosting in the cloud. It means you have a physical presence in many countries (e.g. more countries that can seize/monitor your servers). All the cloud services I know host in major countries, not non-extradition countries) because big powerful countries have the best Internet connections. So additional points of legal exposure. The EU is way harsher on privacy issues than the US (from the perspective of a webmaster). The US is far more focused on the needs of the corporations that run sites, not on the privacy of the end user. You're also wrong on what's going on with UK age verification. All websites globally will have to comply with the UK age verification law or they will be blocked to users in the UK. My mention of hackers are because a hacker will come on a site and pretend to be a regular user. They'll probe for "soft spots" in your code. And then hit you with a major attack on those soft spots. If they ask for their data to be deleted prior to launching the full attack and I complied, then I have no data on who they might be. Which is why I can't and won't comply with the EU law that says I must delete the data when requested. I have a responsibility to my community of users that transcends my responsibility to any one user, IMHO. (Oddly, I'd think that's a concept Europeans should understand – they're all about the community being more important than the individual.)

Eh. Not really. My company is a US company subject to US law. I would have to reincorporate in Europe, probably move to Europe, and only host out of Europe. But there are laws in Europe that are problematic as well. (Like, do Europeans really need warnings that a site is using cookies? ALL sites use cookies.) Actually I'm subject to the laws wherever my visitors are located, which means I'm subject to all laws everywhere. So I'm going to have to comply with the UK's age verification law when they finally figure out how you actually have to do to comply with it. But more concerning are the privacy laws out of the UK and the EU. They conflict with my ability to keep my sites secure. A hacker in the EU can demand that I delete everything I know about them from my server. I'm not willing to delete data on people who may be hackers. Hell, I'm not even OK with deleting data when it's disruptive to the flow of conversations on the site (which is why I generally don't delete your accounts here). And then there are countries, like Uganda and Iran, where this site is just flat-out illegal. So there's a whole spectrum of laws that I'm subject to, but only certain ones do I take seriously. And even of those there are a few where I probably never will be 100% compliant because they just go too far.

This thread is locked. Please continue the discussion on the new thread… Escorting Do's and Don'ts

OK. After SIX long days, I think I've done enough to avoid problems with FOSTA/SESTA. Here's a brief run-down of what was done: The section on female escorts was made non-viewable. All members who said they were female were reviewed. About half were junk accounts and were deleted. All gallery images were reviewed and galleries with female genitalia were removed and infractions were given. All uses of the word 'escort' were reviewed. Judgement calls were made. Many threads and posts were hidden, others were edited (if changing a few words could bring it inline and not change the substance of what was being said too much), and others were left alone (mostly fiction and off-hand remarks). All instances of 'adultwork', 'rentboy' and 'rentmen' were changed slightly to break the links. The calendar was reviewed since escorts were posting ads there. A few people were found to be spamming the calendar and were given infractions. Going forward we will be giving infractions for inappropriate references to escorting. What's Allowed: Clearly fictional references to escorts and escorting. References to you having been an escort in the past. References to singular times when you hired an escort in the distant past. References to the fact that someone was an escort in the past (with no implication that they're still an escort). Discussions of the problems of being an escort (e.g. STDs, drugs, etc.) References to escorts and escorting in the sexual health section of the site (e.g. "I just hooked up with an escort and I'm worried about…") What's NOT Allowed: Mentions that you're currently an escort. Discussions about how you're thinking of being an escort. Mentions that you recently or regularly hire escorts. Mentioning that you want or intend to hire someone for sex. Requests asking where you can find the escort profile of a pornstar, or mentioning where to find escort profiles for pornstars. Asking if a pornstar escorts. Mentioning profiles on escort-only sites, or suggesting people visit escort sites. Gray Areas: Encouraging others to escort. OK: "You're so hot guys would totally pay to have sex with you." Not OK: "You should put an ad on Rent Boy – then you won't have so many money problems." Mentions that certain pornstars escort. OK: "Yeah, I saw that he was escorting a few years ago, not sure what he's doing now." Not OK: "Yeah, I saw an escort ad saying John Doe is coming to Miami next week." So basically if it facilitates or encourages escorting, it's not allowed. But escorts and escorting exists, so there are legitimate discussion of the topic. This is a sex forum and when money and sex mix, it's still OK to talk it over.

November comes. There's a change election, and things return closer to normal. But this bill had strong support from the Democrats as well. I don't think they realized how bad it was. Or they knew, but didn't want opponents saying they didn't do what they could to stop sex trafficking. But I'll say it again… VOTE! And on a regular basis give your feedback to politicians – especially if you're in a red or purple state!

Yes, the database on the server was unresponsive for about an hour. My hosting company didn't say what caused it. But no unusual bandwidth or anything.

Yeah, the term whore is often used interchangeably with slut, so not an issue.

I'm sure you can find some site somewhere that still has all the profiles for female escorts in Bangalore! lol

You guys are continuing to give good feedback. Thank you! Long story short… I bit off more than I could chew. I'm focusing right now on the porn sites that were part of my plan. I'm close to moving over all my old porn blogs, and moving over and expanding my gallery site. The porn star pages are coming along nicely. And I've spent a lot of time on tag pages – moving toward a more conceptual structure where for example "big dick" and "big cock" are the same thing, and then you can drill down into "huge cock", or "big black cock". And I'm working on pulling in new content so the sites have fresh content on them. Then I'll migrate my tube site (Raunchy Fuckers) – it has some old code on it that is holding me back from upgrading the underlying software on my server. I'm guessing the porn stuff will keep me busy until mid-summer, then I'll turn my focus towards the hookup sites. I've got bits and pieces done. I'll probably deploy some really basic profile pages even while I'm working on the porn stuff (since I need profile pages for the porn sites). And topic-based chat will probably get deployed in the next couple months. And there's a place database that I'll probably deploy and ask some trusted users to help improve with local knowledge. Actually, reading your feedback has inspired me. There's a point in a long project where you wonder if what your working on will still be relevant when get it finished. And your comments make me think, yes, it will be. And that really does help keep me going. Thanks again!