rawTOP

You lost me. I'm not sure what feature you're referring to. Not sure what you mean by "contect" - content? contact? Are you talking about the "+ Create" feature near the top of the page above (on the sub nav bar near your user name)?

The background processes are complete. So any odd data issues should be taken care of now. Oh, and I've also remembered that Login with Twitter isn't working. I'll work on that tomorrow as well. Using the icon that looks like a paint brush near the top of the screen, choose a solid background – there are currently three to choose from, though I'm considering replacing the blue background with an image background. There's one that's almost black that should work well for you since it's high contrast. That should make things a lot clearer for you. If that's not clear enough, at the bottom of the page there's a drop down on the word "Theme". Click it and choose the Villain theme. It has no transparency, so should be more readable. You can also choose a solid background through a similar process there, but it won't have much of an effect since the text is on solid colors. Please let me know what works for you. I bought the Villain theme just for folks like you since you contacted me last time with similar issues. But then I saw that this theme (Chameleon) has solid backgrounds, so I was thinking Villain may not be necessary. On the desktop version Sign In is just below the logo. On mobile, you click the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines) in the upper right corner, and it's the first item in the panel that shows up. I'll have to investigate friends. I know this version works differently and during the upgrade process I was asked if I should create "follows" for all friend relationships. They recommended against it since there are implications to following someone and apparently people tend to react badly when it's done. Tomorrow I'll find out whether friends were preserved or dumped in the upgrade process.

Every time there's an upgrade I get comments like that from a small percentage of the users. On the whole, everything you're used to is there, it might just look a little different. If you have a particular issue that's confusing you, let me know.

Hmmm… 4 hours in an you guys are quiet about the upgrade. Hope that means you like it. I know the background image looks like crap on mobile. I recommend clicking the paintbrush icon and choosing a solid color background. I'll try to make that the default for mobile tomorrow. I'm drawing a blank on other things to fix, but I'm sure I'll come across them again soon.… But gonna stop for tonight and resume in the morning. Oh yeah, the background processes are still completing the upgrade. I'll let you know when they're done (if they're done before I go to sleep). At that point anything you see that's bugs you, let me know and I'll see if it's an easy fix.

As you can probably see, there was a big upgrade to the site today. For those of you who know a bit about the web, the underlying software has gone from IP.Board v3.x to IP.Board v4.1. v4 was a complete rewrite, so the code is now much more modern (which is a good thing – means fewer problems down the road). The theme (which controls a lot of the look and feel) was also changed. You can change the background image with the little paintbrush icon in the nav bar just under the main nav bar. If the opacity of the page is a problem for you visually, or you're on a low-bandwidth connection, there are solid color options. There's also another theme available if you go to the bottom of the page that doesn't have opacity – just choose "Villain" from the theme drop down instead of Chameleon Dark. (Please say if you prefer that other theme – I probably won't renew the license when it expires in 6 months since the solid color options in this theme are probably sufficient). Please be patient today (Wednesday October 26). The upgrade is designed to let the site to get back and running as quickly as possible, which means a lot of the little stuff has been deferred and now a whole bunch of background processes are running to actually complete the upgrade. So you'll see a number of problems if you look closely, but by the end of the day they should be resolved. If you're having problems logging in and were one of the few users who had their user names changed, login with your "display name" not your original user name. Also, let me know what you guys think of the new chat room feature. It's limited to 5 users right now, but if you like it I'll buy more licenses. If you have questions about anything, feel free to post them here. Just remember that the upgrade isn't completely done until later today.

It's still on my to-do list. I started working on hookup sites, then realized I needed to work on my porn sites first. "Most" of the work is done on the porn sites. This upgrade is actually part of that process. I need to work on common logon and couldn't do that until I had this upgrade done. I'll probably start on the hookup sites April of next year or so (maybe sooner). And Cumdump Network and Public Urinals (similar idea, only for piss pigs) will be the first ones to get done since they're simpler than a full hookup site.

UPDATE: The upgrade will start late Wednesday morning. There will be a few hours of downtime during the upgrade. If you'd like to see what it will look like click here. It's not 100% like it will be, but it gives you an idea. At some point over the next few days I'll be upgrading the forum software that runs this site. I tried doing this a year ago and got stuck at one step in the process and then moved on to other things. I'm currently testing the upgrade process. With any luck things will work this time around. I know I'll have a few tweaks to make even if the upgrade works flawlessly – for things like banner ads, and I need to add a dialog where you agree to the terms of the site before entering. The new version is a complete, ground-up rewrite of the code. So some things will work differently than they do now. Based on comments of users of other forums, you'll probably like at least 90% of the changes. When the upgrade is complete, the site will look completely different since I'm changing the theme. The current theme wasn't intended to be as dark as it is – I went in and made substantial changes to it, plus I tweaked a few other things to improve the layout. The result was a bit of a kludgy mess that I've never really been completely happy with. The new theme is by a company that keeps on top of things and it should work great as-is (or with only minor changes), so I think you'll like it better. The default theme may be difficult to read for people with vision problems since it has text over a transparent background that lets a background image show through slightly. If you have problems with that theme, at the bottom of the page there will be an option to switch to another, similar theme where things should be more readable since there's no transparency. One other important thing to know is, if you're one of the (few) members who have display names that differ from your login name, you can only use your display name going forward. The new version is based on one name per user. Once the upgrade is done, I'll be working on Single Sign On with some new sites that I'm working on – first round is porn sites, then I'll be doing social sites & hookup sites. The porn sites are largely done (e.g. bbbh.com), and then I'll be working on the other sites next year.

More info… Eric, the head of Free Speech Coalition (who's leading the fight against Prop60), chimed in on an adult webmaster board and said the following: #1 is relevant because that's my situation exactly. The issue here is that documentation exists, but I'm not the one who holds it. Meaning I'm reliant on someone else to help me disprove the elements of the case, if one is brought against me. #2 is relevant because it means it will be very difficult to get my legal costs back. What that means is If Prop 60 passes I will probably block California users from accessing my bareback sites (rawtop.com, raunchyfuckers.com and breeding.zone, etc.. Meaning, if you want to continue to access this site, make sure it doesn't pass!

Here's a good, "Safe-For-Work" site that explains what's going on… http://DontHarassCA.com/

UPDATE: Based on the polls, Prop 60 will probably pass. So this is serious. Please do what you can to stop this ballot measure! By now you've probably seen the banner at the top of the page about Prop 60. Let me give you some background on what's going on… For years now Michael Weinstein of AIDS Heathcare Foundation (AHF) has been trying to stop bareback porn. He's also the person who tried to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the effectiveness of PrEP. He's done all of this with money that should have been spent helping people with HIV and AIDS. IMHO, he's not a nice guy. Anyway, after losing his battles in Los Angeles County to restrict shooting of bareback porn, he's now taken the lessons from that fight and gone statewide. He's got Proposition 60 on the ballot in November. For those of you outside the US or unfamiliar with ballot propositions – these are a form of direct democracy where voters pass laws. There is no negotiation on the language. It will require a 2/3rds vote in the state legislature and the governor's signature to fix it afterwards, or the courts can strike down the parts that are unconstitutional. However, in this particular instance the remainder of the law remains in effect if part is deemed unconstitutional. Given that it's framed as a "workplace safety" law, most of it will probably stay in effect. Prop 60 gets worse though… It makes it so any state resident can sue if the State of California doesn't want to pursue the case. AND the person filing the complaint/lawsuit gets a percentage of the winnings. In other words, if passed Prop 60 is free money for sleazy lawyers and anyone who wants to sue bareback porn producers. Actually, even condom producers are at risk if they can't prove that a condom was used. Oh, and anyone in the chain who benefited financially from the film can be sued – including porn stars. That said, the law only applies to videos shot in California. However, Prop 60 says that any video distributed in the state that doesn't clearly show condoms is presumed to be violating the law. So sites with bareback content will need to block the entire state of California since there could be lots of harassing lawsuits where people have to prove the video or picture doesn't violate the law. [And even that may not avoid all the potential lawsuits.] Producers who continue shooting in California will be royally screwed if this passes, even if they try to stop distribution in the state. Someone can steal their content, upload it illegally to a tube site that then serves the video to a user in California and the producer will have a lawsuit on their hands even though the video was distributed illegally without their consent. Also screwed are the "sponsors" who run the pay sites for the producer and distribute the videos. Because I'm at the end of the marketing chain, if things get really bad I might be able to protect myself somewhat by blocking/redirecting traffic from California. [No one really knows until there are cases settled by the courts on this.] As a result, if it passes, nearly all of my sites will block users from California. Actually, I'll be redirecting the traffic to Male Prime, my "Safe-For-Work" site. I'll have to refuse content from sponsors if it was shot in California after 11/9/16 and put disclaimers next to everything saying the content is exempt. If you're in California, PLEASE vote NO on Prop 60. And everyone needs to get the word out to their friends and family in California to vote No on Prop 60. AHF is spending $4.1 million to get people to vote YES (money most likely taken from the care of people with HIV and AIDS). So far the porn industry just hasn't been able to compete money-wise.

In other words, because some women don't seem to like anal sex, you may lose your right to have anal sex. It starts with porn and then the sodomy laws come back. And this is not just happening in the UK, apparently quite a few countries are waiting to see what the UK does so they can mimic it. And not just conservative Muslim countries – "regular" countries too. If you're in the UK stand up and be counted!

In about a month (end of April) I'll be looking to hire a blogger. Ideally that person would be located in Central/South America. The reason why I prefer guys in that location is because 1) unlike Asians, they're more or less in the same time zone as I am, and 2) unlike Americans and Canadians, what I can afford to pay lets them have a a very solidly middle class lifestyle in that area. That said, what I'm looking for in a blogger is: Mandatory: Available at least 20 hours a week. 30 hrs/week is preferred, and if you need full time I can keep you busy with other types of work. Mandatory: Near native command of English including sexual slang terms not taught in school. Mandatory: Mastery of an informal/conversational writing style. Mandatory: You should be people person who's good with names and faces and someone who follows celebrities and porn stars. ("Fan boys" make the best bloggers). Strongly Preferred: A broad interest in gay porn. You should see the appeal in everything from barely legal teens to hot daddies, and vanilla sex to piss and fisting. (If this is the only thing you don't have in this list, still contact me – I may need someone who's into what you are, but I'll only be able to offer you part-time work). Mandatory: No hardcore drug users. If you drink a little too much and do a little weed here and there – no problem. But beyond that you should be able to count the number of times you use harder drugs each year on your fingers (preferably on just one hand). Access to a reasonably fast, reliable Internet connection. 5-10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up would probably be the bare minimum you could get by with. It's also important that you're comfortable working alone, from home. Some people need the interaction of a busier, communal work environment. Given that I'm looking for a people person, this may be an issue. You'll probably need other social outlets to compensate for the solitary nature of working at home. If you're interested, send me an email (info@studio3x.com) and introduce yourself. Attaching a resume is a big plus.

I've been putting a lot of accounts back to "Validating" forcing them to redo their email validation. The reason is I'm getting cryptic bounces from their mail servers rejecting the emails. I've checked and the server I'm using to send email is NOT on any email blacklists. When I checked into that particular error code (554) I see that some mail servers use that code if they think the message is spam. In other words, the server isn't blocked, but the particular message is blocked. That means they're analyzing the contents of the message and decide they don't like it and think it's spam. This is happening on email validation emails, so we're not even talking about racy emails. They just don't like Breeding Zone. So, to say the least, when you have to provide a "valid email" that means one that we can get messages through to. If your email host doesn't like sexual content, or just has a thing against Breeding Zone, then that's not a "valid email" for the purposes of this site. And specifically this seems to be happening with Microsoft-owned email services – hotmail.com, outlook.com, etc. If you can white list emails, then add support@studio3x.com to your list.

Looks like it will be BBBH Men then… Less than a quarter of the votes are for #TeamBBBH

Long story, (you can skip this paragraph if you want), but a couple years ago I bought bbbh.com. If you've been on Twitter you've seen the hashtag #BBBH which stands for Bareback Brotherhood. Anyway, I had first planned on putting a hookup site on BBBH.com. Then I thought I'd consolidate my bareback porn stuff on there in addition to a hookup site. Then I realized that if I ever wanted to charge for anything on the hookup site that it couldn't be on the same domain as my porn stuff. Credit card companies are picky about documentation for porn, and I'd be using stuff as an (authorized) third party, so I wouldn't have direct access to documentation on models, etc. So that meant I needed to put the hookup site on a different domain. In other words, the porn site can do significant promotion of the hookup site, but the hookup site can't have porn on it (other than say banner ads and a simple link to the porn site). SO… that means the porn gets the .com since I want the .com to have the broadest amount of content. Bottom line I'm considering two domains for the hookup site and I want to know which you think is better / stronger long-term branding: BBBH.men / BBBHMen.com / @BBBHMen or BBBH.team / TeamBBBH.com / @TeamBBBH My personal opinion is that Team BBBH sounds like more fun, but that can be a good thing and a bad thing. I worry that the whole "team" meme will die out over time. Right now things like #TeamBottom and #TeamTop are popular, but I don't know how long that will be true. I worry in 5-10 years Team BBBH will sound outdated. In contrast "Men" is a term that won't go out of fashion. But using Men makes the site seem like it's for older guys. I'm not sure if young guys will be attracted to something that's branded 'men'. But that may be appropriate since guys get more hardcore as they get older. Thoughts?

Thïs is á wéird character test…

Turns out I'm having to upgrade the old version of the software to the latest (dot) version. That was just done. Now I'm having to change the database to UTF-8 (a technical issue related to how it stores strings with things like accented characters). I'll be testing that soon, so there may be issue that crop up in the testing, but I can revert back if things don't look right. THEN I can start looking into upgrading to IPB4. But it's Friday afternoon and I'm getting tired and out-of-town guests are about to arrive. So we'll see. I'd like to get the test environment up today, if possible.

FYI… I'm starting to work on a site software upgrade. I'm not sure how long it will take. It's rather major. It would be lovely if everything went smoothly and I was able to get it done today. But something tells me that's not how it will go and I'll actually just start testing things today and the full migration will happen early next week. This is just a warning that if you see anything odd happening – that's probably the reason. And when I do the final migration the site will be down during the upgrade – probably for hours. Oh, and when I'm done the site will look completely different. So don't be confused by that. When I have a test environment up and running I'll suggest you login to it and try it out. Any bugs you find can get fixed before everyone is encountering them. And for those of you who are wondering about the technical details… I'm upgrading from IP.Board 3 to IP.Board 4. IPB4 is a complete ground-up rewrite, so it's a major upgrade.

The meth head who contacted me claimed to have access to money. He was a little incoherent, but it sounded like his father had made quite a bit of money illegally and put it in his name. But then again, he was so high when he'd contact me who knows what the truth is (could have been a fantasy he made up in his head while he was high). But the point is, someone with money and a knowledge of illegal activity, could probably find a hacker to hire – even if he's high on meth half the time. I also had a Russian guy contact me wanting money for the attacks to stop (he posted above), but the attacks didn't always correspond to the times he specified, and I figured, even if he was the attacker, it was cheaper in the long run to pay my host to deal with it. As soon as you know they'll pay up, they'll do it again.

That's right, getting HIV these days means you will probably live longer than your neg counterparts. Hard to believe, but true. http://www.hivequal.org/hiv-equal-online/say-what-how-an-hiv-diagnosis-can-lead-to-a-longer-life But to be fair the increase is probably due to having a closer relationship with the healthcare system due to frequent checkups. So neg guys on PrEP should do even better than poz guys. But the point is that there's no longer need to fear HIV. Yes, it's a hassle if you become poz, but it doesn't need to kill you. And of course, it only applies to guys who get into treatment in a timely manner. So getting tested regularly is critical as is getting on treatment before your t-cells drop below 350 (which usually happens about 2 years after infection). This also makes HIV criminalization rather absurd.

It's been over 24 hours since the last attack. I suspect the hacker has moved on to easier targets. Search has been re-enabled, as has member registration. Both were turned off the past few days since they're a common point of attack. I'll turn them back off if the attacks resume.

Given that the server was attacked 5 hours after this message (not 12), I can only assume it wasn't posted by the real hacker.

There was another attack this evening, but I think we've got it under control. This time it was a different type of attack that was specifically aimed at Breeding Zone.

This was far more than what a script kiddie could do. Whoever did this had access to a botnet of zombie computers. There were two attacks. One lasted about an hour. The other about 40 minutes. But everything is back to normal now.

There was a huge DDOS attack on the server earlier this evening. I usually run around 45 Mbps out and at one point apparently the UDP traffic to the server was at 12 Gbps (that's a pretty huge attack) – though as you can see in the graph, it averaged to a somewhat lower number, but it was still quite substantial. The traffic to the server is now being filtered. That should take care of it. Hopefully the filtering won't have to go on for long since it could inadvertently block "good" traffic. While the filtering was being set up there was some downtime. I apologize for that, but it was unavoidable. Whoever attacked me, I'm not really sure what the point was. Since I don't know who it was, I don't know why they did it. Hence, what was the point of doing it in the first place? It's not like the attack managed to get a point across. There was a meth head on Twitter who hit me up a week or two ago. He'd start by complimenting me but then wind up with vague threats of a lawsuit or something. But he was so incoherent I didn't take him seriously. Other than that there have been no substantive negative incidents lately, so I honestly don't have a clue why there was an attack today. I mean years ago when people really hated barebacking, I'd see the point, but now bareback is mainstream and with PrEP there are tools for neg guys to protect themselves from would be stealthers and the like. So I really don't understand the timing of the attack at all. Moving on…