rawTOP

The problem with hosted services is that if they decide they don't like you, you'll lose everything when they summarily delete your account (with no warning). That's true of Tumblr & Blogspot. For example, neither allow ads on their sites and will terminate you without discussion if they find them on your site. If you're OK with that uncertainty, then personally I'd go with Tumblr. Blogger is fine, but it's not as cutting edge as Tumblr. Just the way Tumblr is structured you're likely to get a bigger audience more quickly. If you're serious about blogging, I suggest getting your own domain. I know Tumblr can publish to a custom domain, and I'm pretty sure Blogger/Blogspot can as well. But with your own domain you can also pay for hosting (cheap shared hosting at an adult-friendly host is sufficient) and use Wordpress. In this scenario you're in control of your data. You can have ads, etc. BUT you're sort of out in a wilderness and will have issues finding viewers. SquaredSpace is another service I'd recommend looking into. I'm not sure if they're adult-friendly though. But they have really great designs and an interesting feature set. In that case you probably would be allowed to have ads since they charge a monthly fee.

My bf and I talked about exactly that. We thought (briefly) about using AirBnB to bring in a little extra month, but then didn't like the idea of having to deal with straight people - we just wanted gay guys (or at least gay-friendly straight folks). But there was also the issue of trust. I'm not sure I want to give complete strangers access to my home. I've been wanting to make BBBH.com different than most hookup sites. I mean clearly the primary use will be for sex, but the "brotherhood" idea really speaks to the fact that there is a community behind all our fucking. I could add an AirBnB like component to the site, so guys could advertise that they have rooms available. And I've already been thinking of implementing the concept of trust on BBBH. There are sorta three ways to see someone on a site like that - 1) how hot/fuckable are they?, 2) how big of a slut are they?, and 3) how much can you trust/depend on them? I would start by designating a certain group of guys as "trustworthy" - they'd get to designate a certain number of guys as trustworthy. For every person who says you're trustworthy, you could designate someone else as trustworthy. The more people who vouch for you the more your trust score goes up. That trust score could be used for the AirBnB-like system. You could designate a minimum trust score for people to see your listing, etc. (since pictures of your home are pretty sensitive). Does that sound like a good idea? Or is BBBH.com the wrong place for something like that? If you guys say yes, realize it'll be late this year that I could get something like that up.

FYI - here are my stats for the past month… Google is driving 13.5 times more traffic to my sites than Big and Yahoo! combined (click to see bigger version of the image). There was a time a few months ago when Google was having issues and I tried out Bing and found it to be decent on some queries and not on others. In fact it reminded me a bit of the old Google. I mentioned to a friend of ours who's pretty senior at Google that I was liking Bing and (despite him being drunk at the time) he was deeply worried that someone like me would prefer Bing. He said there were some internal battles at Google over what type of content was getting ranked. About two weeks later the Google SERPs improved drastically and things went back to normal and once again Google was better. If you're really wondering if Bing is better, try BingItOn.com. Though it's blocked in some countries where their SERPs are pure crap. Most of the people I know say Google wins with 60+% of searches being better on Google. But my point is that even if they were roughly the same, you use the one that's willing to lose customers to defend your human rights. Bing now has a really high bar to jump to get me to use them.

AT&T (sponsor of the US Olympic Team) has also publicly criticized Russia for their stance on gay rights… Thumbs up for that, but it wasn't bold enough to be a defining moment IMHO. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/07/us-olympics-gay-idUSBREA160AX20140207 NBC (the TV sponsor for the US) was giving a fair amount of air time to coverage of gay issues - doing interviews with people like Billie Jean King where they talked about what's going on in Russia at the moment. Hopefully they'll keep that up during their Olympic coverage. I'd like to see Coke do something big and bold – their Superbowl commercial was nice, but they need to do more.

Severance agreements are pretty standard. They have every right to eliminate or outsource your job. So unless you have an airtight case it's probably best to sign, take the money and move on. There are cases where signing isn't the right thing to do, but they tend to have different circumstances (like someone I know who was fired for being a whistleblower - he made millions when he sued his company). Agreed!

I've always noticed that Google was the biggest driver of traffic to my sites. I just never could get the traffic other people talked about when it came to Bing/Yahoo! (which are the same – Big powers Yahoo! Search). My take on it was that gay guys just preferred Google to Bing. So the question was always "why do gay men prefer Google?" Besides the fact that Google generally has better results than Bing, Google is a huge defender of gay rights. These two stories today struck me in how different they are: Google’s “Olympic Charter” Logo Stands Up To Russia’s Anti-Gay Legislation Bing to Showcase Winter Olympics Data in Search Results So while Bing is all "Hip Hip Hooray" about the Olympics, Google is using the opportunity to protest Russia's treatment of gays. They're doing is in a very public way – even on Google Russia and in places like Saudi Arabia – so not just to a western audiences who generally support gay rights. When Ellen came out YEARS ago now, most of her advertisers dropped her. Volkswagen bought the ad right after she came out on her show, and they ran this ad (which given the context is an interracial gay couple in San Francisco)… I had had a VW as my first car, then switched to Honda, but every car I've bought since that commercial has been a VW. In fact VW dropped the dealership here in Manhattan where a sales person had called me a "fucking faggot". Dropping a dealer is a big deal (especially in a market like NY), and I'm sure there was more to it than my one complaint, but I'd like to think that my complaint didn't help their case when they tried to renew their contract with VW. There are moments which define companies for me. VW had theirs when Ellen came out and now I buy nothing but VWs. Travelocity was the first travel company to feature gay couples in general audience advertising (back when it was a big deal to do something like that), so I still use them when I book a flight. And today Google had their moment. I really could care less that Rachael Zoe pushes Bing. Google is the company that is willing to lose customers to defend us. That means something.

When I was a kid there was a woman at church who was blind from diabetes. We'd go over to their house pretty frequently and she'd cook for us. As she was going blind she learned the position of every ingredient in her kitchen - it was pretty amazing. Her bread pudding was incredible. She even had a kitchen fire at one point, and managed to put it out herself (though she called the fire department to make sure it was really out). After a while the swelling in her legs got really horrible and disgusting. A few years later, different church, I had this woman who was like a big sister to me. She and her husband would take me on vacations with their family, etc. She had Type 1 diabetes. She was constantly checking her levels and giving herself shots. It was a ton of work on her part - definitely not easy. But I think she was scared shitless of going blind, etc. So yeah, there's definitely a dark side to diabetes. I think it's gotten easier since the 70's/80's when I was around it, but I imagine it's still pretty rough.

The user is trying to avoid the $2 fee for canceling his account. He said he was 32 years old when he signed up.

Did they say your porn was the reason you were fired or are you just guessing that's the reason? What sort of job was it? Guess you need to find a more accepting place to work. I know Dawson was a chemist or lab geek or something and his employer knew and was fine with it. They didn't think it had any bearing on his work. And that's in conservative Boston! You'll find something, but that's a huge bummer.

Right… You'll be able to pick the neighborhood that's displayed for you. You could pick 'Grammercy' or the more general 'Murray Hill'. In terms of location, it wouldn't map you, but it would show that you're <1/2 mile (10 blocks) away from the person. There's a lot happening and a lot of people within a 1/2 mile radius in NYC. But if you went to say Boxers (to pick a bar that's sorta close), it would show you at Boxers and people who are close to you could see "<100 feet". But big deal - anyone who's that close is also in a gay bar (most likely). Unless you live over a gay bar it shouln't be an issue.

They're called "collars" and they have a very specific meaning in the BDSM community. It means your owned by someone. It's not just a necklace. I know when I see it on a bottom I don't approach because I probably should have the permission of his owner to fuck him. That said, Draven Torres wore a collar in a recent scene and he's not owned by anyone. In his case it signified "pack membership". So the meaning is changing a little, but collars are not something you wear casually.

Initially it will just be an estimate of as-the-crow-flies distance. Walking/driving distance is possible with Google Maps integration, but that's not a high priority feature at this point. I'll be able to pull in BZ posts into BBBH. The software behind BZ is a bit of a nightmare to customize. So pulling BBBH into BZ probably isn't going to happen.

Actually, Geolocation for desktops is surprisingly good (80% of the guys who tried it out said it was at least "reasonably close" and 55% said it was dead on). So you don't need a smart phone to use what I'm building. Given that 20% do have issues with location accuracy you'll have the ability to specify where you're located. That means you can do what bearwww does. But unlike bearwww I'll never map you (except for Cumdump Network which is opt-in). In addition to lat/long I'll be asking people what neighborhood they're in. So you'll have both, but browsing by neighborhood will not be the primary way to browse. Geolocation is pretty fundamental to how I want to build the site (it's 2014, after all – I don't want to build a site that would have been appropriate in 2004). So turning off geolocation won't be an option. That's why I have to get it right. I think between being able to move your location, and the minimum distance limits I spelled out above, I think it should take care of user's concerns.

I could do that, but it doesn't really work. Everyone in the same result set needs to observe the same distance rule or you can figure things out. For example BBRT has the option to hide your last login. But searches are initially sorted by last login, if the person before and after were both online in the last day, then you know the person who hid their last login was online in the last day as well. Same thing would happen with distance. If the people on either side of you say <50 feet, and yours says <1 mile, then the person will know you're actually <50 feet away even though it says <1 mile.

A mile is 20 New York blocks, 12 blocks in most other US cities. Assuming light traffic (don't have to wait at every corner) it takes 20 minutes to walk a mile in an urban area. That's a pretty long walk. Personally 1/2 mile (10 blocks) is close enough that I think of it as easily walkable for a hookup. Remember - I'm coming from a NYC mindset where cars aren't an option (even though I happen to have one). So in places like NY a mile is too big for a min distance. I went down the whole postal code lat/long centroid option. Found a database of nearly a million zip codes around the world. Took me a long time to get them imported into MySQL. BUT the data for Canada is crap (and support for Canada is important), and there just isn't data for many countries. So I've abandoned the zip code idea. And when you think about it that was the solution from 5-10 years ago - we have access to better data these days. Now think about an event like MAL, IML, Dore Alley, etc. In situations like that you're probably fine with pretty accurate distances. @PORTaURINAL asked me to develop a proximity alert feature – he wants to know if a top he's interested is within 200 or 500 feet of him. Something like that is actually pretty complex, but my point is, some people are OK with that. Or imagine you're in a bathhouse or a bar – you want to know what other guys are in that bathhouse/bar. I suppose some stalker could figure out you're in the bar, but it's different than knowing your home address. Agree? The solution I'm thinking of right now would be "1/2 mile or the distance to the 10th closest member – whichever is less, plus if you're within 250 feet of a gay venue (or check in at that gay venue) the site will show you as being at that gay venue." Will that make people like you (and TigerMiller) happy? Can "10th member" be lowered to 8th or 5th? One other thing I could do is ask people whether their location is Big City/Mid-Size City/Suburban/Small Town/Rural and have different rules for each. So it could be 1/2 mile for urban, 1 mile for suburban or mid-size city, 3 miles for small town, and 5 miles for rural. Then I'd just look at how the 20 closest known locations were rated and take the most frequent response and use that rule set. But what I'm hearing out of all of this is that I can't just take a NYC approach to things. It's easy to get lost in a crowd here on a daily basis. Celebrities love NYC 'cause privacy isn't really a big problem – everyone just ignores you. Guess it's not that way elsewhere. But, big cities are where hookup sites get their initial "critical mass". For BBRT that happened in Chicago for some reason. That means urban dwellers are my primary initial concern, but at the same time I can't scare off the rural and small town folks. To be clear, CumdumpNetwork.com will be a completely different site based on BBBH.com data. The location shown for them will be whatever they want it to be. So they can choose a major intersection near them, or the city center if they're in a small town. In other words CDN has it's own rules and isn't the core of what I'm trying to understand with this thread.

So you like Grindr, but at the same time you don't quite trust it - you keep deleting your profile. The issue with any of those sites is that people can keep moving around and see the distance get smaller and smaller until they figure out where you are even though there's no map. It's just the nature of the beast - yet it's generally considered acceptable and the apps are wildly popular. I want people to build up reputations on BBBH - so deleting your profile will defeat that purpose. I'm now wondering if there shouldn't be some sort of upgrade or something that lets users set visibility to "only trusted members and guys I think are hot". The question is how many guys think like you do and will have trust issues with the site? Hmmmm....

I tried to get CumdumpNetwork.com up and running using a different strategy. That failed. I could have put a lot of effort into it, but it wouldn't have been all that great. BBBH.com will offer members the opportunity to be listed on CumdumpNetwork.com. So first I have to get at least the basics of BBBH.com up and running. So no, it's not working yet. As far as the drink - are you in NYC?

I just spent the day trying to figure out how I'll deal with GeoLocation and GeoCoding on my BBBH hookup site (under development). Before I spend a huge amount of time doing something people will have issues with, I thought I'd ask you guys what you thought about privacy vs. GeoLocation… On the one hand you guys use apps like Grindr, Scruff, etc. that know precisely where you are – down to a few feet of your actual location. And you're fine with that. It seems many of them won't report distances of less than say 200 feet. And they never show you on a map. But what you put on those apps is relatively benign since Apple requires the public content to be "family friendly". BBBH.com will be a lot raunchier. So the question is, do you have an privacy concerns about BBBH.com knowing your exact location that are more than the concerns you have for Grindr or Scruff? Here are some of the controls I'll be implementing - tell me if they're sufficient… Profiles can have two general privacy settings - public and members only. "Public" means that your profile will be crawlable and indexable by search engines and viewable by the general public. "Members Only" means that your profile and activity can only be seen by members who have logged in. And remember - even sites like BBRT have publicly crawlable profile pages - here's mine. One fundamental thing is that I'll never show a map of users except in one situation - Cumdump Network members - but they'll have to specifically opt into that and they'll be giving explicit permission for a specific location to be shown for them. It won't show their "live", actual location. The other thing I'll make sure I never do is transmit an actual lat/long to a web browser. I'll only transmit distances. The question is – should there be a minimum distance that's transmitted? In other words, do you care if someone knows you're "38 feet away" or would you rather they see "<200 feet away"? Just realize that if you choose something like <200 the sorting under that threshold will be completely random since I'll be implementing a solution where you can sort within the browser without having to hit the web server. So someone that's 150 feet away could appear before someone who's 5 feet away when you sort a selection of profiles by distance. Another (small) privacy control will be that while I'll store your lat/long, I won't ever store your address. This may seem dumb - I mean if you have the lat/long, you can figure out the address. But it's just sort of creepy for the site to record your address. But getting lat/long from a desktop browser only works some of the time, so for those users there will be the option to enter an address to come up with a lat/long, but the address won't be stored - just the lat/long. One feature I've been thinking of is to let people see non-logged in users that are near them. I've actually built things so users can be tracked across all my sites. On this site you can already see a list of site visitors and what page they're viewing. I'll extend that, so the page shown is from any of my sites (rawTOP.com, Breeding Zone, Raunchy Fuckers, BBBH.com, or Cumdump Network), but unlike this site you'll be able to see how far they are from you. Now, if they're not logged in you'll just see "Anonymous User", whereas if they are logged in you'd see their user name. And the other caveat is that if they're coming from an IP address that's unknown or on a cellular network the accuracy of their location is a bit hit-or-miss. Today the IP I had on my cell phone showed me in the northwest corner of Connecticut when I was in Harlem. So this entire feature is a bit up in the air - since what's the point if the data is bad? What I might do is only show users coming from known IP addresses. So let's say you log into BBBH.com at your local Starbucks so I know the IP, then someone else comes along and accesses the site from Starbucks without logging in - then I know their actual location and can show them to you. Clearly, this whole feature is very much up in the air, but I'm wondering your thoughts on it. So just generally talk to me and tell me what you think the guidelines should be for location data within the context of a bareback hookup site…

I love drag queens. They were the ones fighting the police at Stonewall, and they're still fighting for us… The question is, will drag queens fade away when the oppression stops? Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? In the meantime we all have a lot to learn from drag queens…

All of the above were done.

Go out and buy two HIV OraQuick tests at your local pharmacy. Start the encounter by taking tests and then stick to oral for the next 20 minutes until the results are ready. Once you've confirmed he's neg, then get down to fucking. Then repeat the tests every 3-6 months just to be sure. Yes, the tests aren't 100% accurate - they don't catch recent infection. But after talking to him for so long (and meeting him), you should have a sense for whether he's for real or whether he's playing games. If you're sure he's the type who's pretty conservative risk-wise, then you should be fine.

Turn it around on him, tell him you think he's the one who pozzed you and that you're going after him. He was completely reckless to fuck you without a condom and then you became poz, so it must have been him. I know it's nonsense, but there's more of a chance that you got it from him than that he got it from you.

For poz guys it would be completely optional. Some guys like the info out there others would rather not think about it. But for neg guys to state you're neg, you really do need to offer a testing date. Otherwise just choose the option to not show your status.

Think about tweens who barely care about HIV because they don't understand it. High/Medium/Low risk will help them. And it will help the guys who are math-phobic (there's a lot of those types). But there's also the issue of asymmetric risk. There's the risk to you, and the risk to the other person. Neg guys are only worried about their own risk, whereas poz guys are mostly worried about the risk to the other guy, and to a lesser degree the risk of reinfection for themselves. All of that will have to go into the High/Medium/Low that's presented to the users. That said, I was thinking of having a field in the profiles for last HIV test (for neg guys). In fact I was going to require a test date to get the status "Neg, Recently Tested" and then after six months it would change to "Not Sure, Probably Neg". The question is what to show when the test is even further in the past - say 12 to 24+ months. I'm thinking it'll go to just "Not Sure" after 12 months for bottoms, 18 months for vers guys, and 24 months for tops. I guess I could do profile fields for last viral load test date and the viral load number for poz guys, but in terms of importance on the page, it won't be prominently displayed. For this data as well as the test date for neg guys I'll probably have some small icon right after the HIV status, you hover over it or click it and it shows you last test date and viral load (for poz guys).

That would be too much detail. I want the simplified, dumbed-down version. Interesting that VL is logarithmic. I didn't know that.