A few nights ago, I received an email from Editor of EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine, Judy Cole, asking me to modify this Kink On Tap brief I published that cites Lorna D. Keach’s writing. Judy asked me to “provide attribution and a link back to” SexIs Magazine. An ordinary enough request soon proved extraordinarily unethical when I discovered that EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based.
While what they’re doing may not be illegal, EdenFantasys has proven itself to me to be an unethical and unworthy partner, in business or otherwise. Its actions are blatantly hypocritical, as I intend to show in detail in this post. Taking willful and self-serving advantage of those not technically savvy is a form of inexcusable oppression, and none of us should tolerate it from companies who purport to be well-intentioned resources for a community of sex-positive individuals.
For busy or non-technical readers, see the next section, Executive Summary, to quickly understand what EdenFantasys is doing, why it’s unethical, and how it affects you whether you’re a customer, a contributor, or a syndication partner. For the technical reader, the Technical Details section should provide ample evidence in the form of a walkthrough and sample code describing the unethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques EdenFantasys, aka. Web Merchants, Inc., is engaged in. For anyone who wants to read further, I provide an Editorial section in which I share some thoughts about what you can do to help combat these practices and bring transparency and trust—not the sabotage of trust EdenFantasys enacts—to the market.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Internet sex toy retailer Web Merchants, Inc., which bills itself as the “sex shop you can trust” and does business under the name EdenFantasys, has implemented technology on their websites that actively interferes with contributors’ content, intercepts outgoing links, and alters republished content so that links in the original work are redirected to themselves. Using techniques widely acknowledged as unethical by Internet professionals and that are arguably in violation of major search engines’ policies, EdenFantasys’s publishing platform has effectively outsourced the task of “link farming” (a questionable Search Engine Marketing [SEM] technique) to sites with which they have “an ongoing relationship,” such as AlterNet.org, other large news hubs, and individual bloggers’ blogs.
Articles published on EdenFantasys websites, such as the “community” website SexIs Magazine, contain HTML crafted to look like links, but aren’t. When visited by a typical human user, a program written in JavaScript and included as part of the web pages is automatically downloaded and intercepts clicks on these “link-like” elements, fetching their intended destination from the server and redirecting users there. Due to the careful and deliberate implementation, the browser’s status bar is made to appear as though the link is legitimate, and that a destination is provided as expected.
For non-human visitors, including automated search engine indexing programs such as Googlebot, the “link” remains non-functional, making the article a search engine’s dead-end or “orphan” page whose only functional links are those whose destination is EdenFantasys’s own web presence. This makes EdenFantasys’ website(s) a self-referential black hole that provides no reciprocity for contributors who author content, nor for any website ostensibly “linked” to from article content. At the same time, EdenFantasys editors actively solicit inbound links from individuals and organizations through “link exchanges” and incentive programs such as “awards” and “free” sex toys, as well as syndicating SexIs Magazine content such that the content is programmatically altered in order to create multiple (real) inbound links to EdenFantasys’s websites after republication on their partner’s media channels.
How EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have an impact on you
Regardless of who you are, EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have a negative impact on you and, indeed, on the Internet as a whole.
Here’s another verifiable example from the EdenFantasys site showing that many other parts of Web Merchants, Inc. pages, not merely SexIs Magazine, are affected as well: With JavaScript disabled, visit the EdenFantasys company page on Aslan Leather (note, for the sake of comparison, the link in this sentence will work, even with JavaScript off). Try clicking on the link in the “Contact Information” section in the lower-right hand column of the page (shown in the screenshot, below). This “link” should take you to the Aslan Leather homepage but in fact it does not. So much for that “link exchange.”

(Click to enlarge.)
- If you’re an EdenFantasys employee, people will demand answers from you regarding the unethical practices of your (hopefully former) employer. While you are working for EdenFantasys, you’re seriously soiling your reputation in the eyes of ethical Internet professionals. Ignorance is no excuse for the lack of ethics on the programmers’ part, and it’s a shoddy one for everyone else; you should be aware of your company’s business practices because you represent them and they, in turn, represent you.
- If you’re a partner or contributor (reviewer, affiliate, blogger), while you’re providing EdenFantasys with inbound links or writing articles for them and thereby propping them up higher in search results, EdenFantasys is not returning the favor to you (when they are supposed to be doing so). Moreover, they’re attaching your handle, pseudonym, or real name directly to all of their link farming (i.e., spamming) efforts. They look like they’re linking to you and they look like their content is syndicated fairly, but they’re actually playing dirty. They’re going the extra mile to ensure search engines like Google do not recognize the links in articles you write. They’re trying remarkably hard to make certain that all roads lead to EdenFantasys, but none lead outside of it; no matter what the “link,” search engines see it as stemming from and leading to EdenFantasys. The technically savvy executives of Web Merchants, Inc. are using you without giving you a fair return on your efforts. Moreover, EdenFantasys is doing this in a way that preys upon people’s lack of technical knowledge—potentially your own as well as your readership’s. Do you want to keep doing business with people like that?
- If you’re a customer, you’re monetarily supporting a company that essentially amounts to a glorified yet subtle spammer. If you hate spam, you should hate the unethical practices that lead to spam’s perpetual reappearance, including the practices of companies like Web Merchants, Inc. EdenFantasys’s unethical practices may not be illegal, but they are unabashedly a hair’s width away from it, just like many spammers’. If you want to keep companies honest and transparent, if you really want a “sex shop you can trust,” this is relevant to you because EdenFantasys is not it. If you want to purchase from a retailer that truly strives to offer a welcoming, trustworthy community for those interested in sex positivity and sexuality, pay close attention and take action. For ideas about what you can do, please see the “What you can do” section, below.
- If you’ve never heard about EdenFantasys before, but you care about a fair and equal-opportunity Internet, this is relevant to you because what EdenFantasys is doing takes advantage of non-tech-savvy people in order to slant the odds of winning the search engine game in their favor. They could have done this fairly, and I personally believe that they would have succeeded. Their sites are user-friendly, well-designed, and solidly implemented. However, they chose to behave maliciously by not providing credit where credit is due, failing to follow through on agreements with their own community members and contributors, and sneakily utilizing other publishers’ web presences to play a very sad zero-sum game that they need not have entered in the first place. In the Internet I want, nobody takes malicious advantage of those less skilled than they are because their own skill should speak for itself. Isn’t that the Internet and, indeed, the future you want, too?
TECHNICAL DETAILS
What follows is a technical exploration of the way the EdenFantasys technology works. It is my best-effort evaluation of the process in as much detail as I can manage within strict self-imposed time constraints. If any of this information is incorrect, I’d welcome any and all clarifications provided by the EdenFantasys CTO and technical team in an appropriately transparent, public, and ethical manner. (You’re welcome—nay, encouraged—to leave a comment.)
Although I’m unconvinced that EdenFantasys understands this, it is the case that honesty is the best policy—especially on the Internet, where everyone has the power of “View source.”
The “EF Framework” for obfuscating links
Article content written by contributors on SexIs Magazine pages is published after all links are replaced with a <span> element bearing the class of linklike and a unique id attribute value. This apparently happens across any and all content published by Web Merchants, Inc.’s content management system, but I’ll be focusing on Lorna D. Keach’s post entitled SexFeed:Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts for the sake of example.
These fake links look like this in HTML:
And according to Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, <span class="linklike" ID="EFLink_68034_fe64d2">female consumers make up 56% of video sales.</span>
This originally published HTML is what visitors without JavaScript enabled (and what search engine indexers) see when they access the page. Note that the <span> is not a real link, even though it is made to look like one. (See Figure 1; click it to enlarge.)
Figure 1:
In a typical user’s browser, when this page is loaded, a JavaScript program is executed that mutates these “linklike” elements into <a> elements, retaining the “linklike” class and the unique id attribute values. However, no value is provided in the href (link destination) attribute of the <a> element. See Figure 2.
Figure 2:
The JavaScript program is downloaded in two parts from the endpoint at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx. The first part, retrieved in this example by accessing the URI at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx?i=jq132_cnf_jdm12_cks_cm_ujsn_udm_stt_err_jsdm_stul_ael_lls_ganl_jqac_jtv_smg_assf_agrsh&v_14927484.12.0, loads the popular jQuery JavaScript framework as well as custom code called the “EF Framework”.
The EF Framework contains code called the DBLinkHandler, an object that parses the <span> “linklike” elements (called “pseudolinks” in the EF Framework code) and retrieves the real destination. The entirety of the DBLinkHandler object is shown in code listing 1, below. Note the code contains a function called handle that performs the mutation of the <span> “linklike” elements (seen primarily on lines 8 through 16) and, based on the prefix of each elements’ id attribute value, two key functions (BuildUrlForElement and GetUrlByUrlID, whose signatures are on lines 48 and 68, respectively) interact to set up the browser navigation after responding to clicks on the fake links.
var DBLinkHandler = {
pseudoLinkPrefix: "EFLink_",
generatedAHrefPrefix: "ArtLink_",
targetBlankClass: "target_blank",
jsLinksCssLinkLikeClass: "linklike",
handle: function () {
var pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
pseudolinksSpans.each(function () {
var psLink = $(this);
var cssClass = $.trim(psLink.attr("class"));
var target = "";
var id = psLink.attr("id").replace(DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
var href = $("<a></a>").attr({
id: id,
href: ""
}).html(psLink.html());
if (psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
href.attr({
target: "_blank"
});
cssClass = $.trim(cssClass.replace(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass, ""))
}
if (cssClass != "") {
href.attr({
"class": cssClass
})
}
psLink.before(href).remove()
});
var pseudolinksAHrefs = $("a[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix + "']");
pseudolinksAHrefs.live("mouseup", function (event) {
DBLinkHandler.ArtLinkClick(this)
});
pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
pseudolinksSpans.live("click", function (event) {
if (event.button != 0) {
return
}
var psLink = $(this);
var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix);
if (!psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
RedirectTo(url)
} else {
OpenNewWindow(url)
}
})
},
BuildUrlForElement: function (psLink, prefix) {
var psLink = $(psLink);
var sufix = psLink.attr("id").toString().substring(prefix.length);
var id = (sufix.indexOf("_") != -1) ? sufix.substring(0, sufix.indexOf("_")) : sufix;
var url = DBLinkHandler.GetUrlByUrlID(id);
if (url == "") {
url = EF.Constants.Links.Url
}
var end = sufix.substring(sufix.indexOf("_") + 1);
var anchor = "";
if (end.indexOf("_") != -1) {
anchor = "#" + end.substring(0, end.lastIndexOf("_"))
}
url += anchor;
return url
},
ArtLinkClick: function (psLink) {
var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
$(psLink).attr("href", url)
},
GetUrlByUrlID: function (UrlID) {
var url = "";
UrlRequest = $.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "/LinkLanguage/AjaxLinkHandling.aspx",
dataType: "json",
async: false,
data: {
urlid: UrlID
},
cache: false,
success: function (data) {
if (data.status == "Success") {
url = data.url;
return url
}
},
error: function (xhtmlObj, status, error) {}
});
return url
}
};
Once the mutation is performed and all the content “links” are in the state shown in Figure 2, above, an event listener has been bound to the anchors that captures a click event. This is done using prototypal extension, aka. classic prototypal inheritance, in another part of the code, the live function on line 2,280 of the (de-minimized) jsget.ashx program, as shown in code listing 2, here:
live: function (G, F) {
var E = o.event.proxy(F);
E.guid += this.selector + G;
o(document).bind(i(G, this.selector), this.selector, E);
return this
},
At this point, clicking on one of the “pseudolinks” triggers the EF Framework to call code set up by the GetUrlByUrlID function from within the DBLinkHandler object, initiating an XMLHttpRequest (XHR) connection to the AjaxLinkHandling.aspx server-side application. The request is an HTTP POST containing only one parameter, called urlid, and its value matches a substring from within the id value of the “pseudolinks.” In this example, the id attribute contains a value of EFLink_68034_fe64d2, which means that the unique ID POST’ed to the server is 68034. This is shown in Figure 3, below.
Figure 3:
The response from the server, shown in Figure 4, is also simple. If successful, the intended destination is retrieved by the GetUrlByUrlID object’s success function (on line 79 of Code Listing 1, above) and the user is redirected to that web address, as if the link was a real one all along. The real destination, in this case to CNN.com, is thereby only revealed after the XHR request returns a successful reply.
Figure 4:
All of this obfuscation effectively blinds machines such as the Googlebot who are not JavaScript-capable from seeing and following these links. It deliberately provides no increased Pagerank for the link destination (as a real link would normally do) despite being “linked to” from EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine article. While the intended destination in this example link was at CNN.com, it could just as easily have been—and is, in other examples—links to the blogs of EdenFantasys community members and, indeed, everyone else linked to from a SexIs Magazine article or potentially any website operated by Web Merchants, Inc. that makes use of this technology.
The EdenFantasys Outsourced Link-Farm
In addition to creating a self-referential black hole with no gracefully degrading outgoing links, EdenFantasys also actively performs link-stuffing through its syndicated content “relationships,” underhandedly creating an outsourced and distributed link-farm, just like a spammer. The difference is that this spammer (Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys) is cleverly crowd-sourcing high-value, high-quality content from its own “community.”
Articles published at SexIs Magazine are syndicated in full to other large hub sites, such as AlterNet.org. Continuing with the above example post by Lorna D. Keach, Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts, we can see that this content was republished on AlterNet.org shortly after original publication through EdenFantasys’ website on May 3rd at http://www.alternet.org/story/146774/christian_anti-porn_activists_now_targeting_female_. However, a closer look at the HTML code of the republication shows that each and every link contained within the article points to the same destination: the same article published on SexIs Magazine, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5:
Naturally, these syndicated links provided to third-party sites by EdenFantasys are real and function as expected to both human visitors and to search engines indexing the content. The result is “natural,” high-value links to the EdenFantasys website from these third-party sites; EdenFantasys doesn’t merely scrounge pagerank from harvesting the sheer number of incoming links, but as each link’s anchor text is different, they are setting themselves up to match more keywords in search engine results, keywords that the original author likely did not intend to direct to them. Offering search engines the implication that EdenFantasys.com contains the content described in the anchor text, when in fact EdenFantasys merely acts as an intermediary to the information, is very shady, to say the least.
In addition to syndication, EdenFantasys employs human editors to do community outreach. These editors follow up with publishers, including individual bloggers (such as myself), and request that any references to published material provide attribution and a link back to us
, to use the words of Judy Cole, Editor of SexIs Magazine in an email she sent to me (see below), and presumably many others. EdenFantasys has also been known to request “link exchanges,” and offer incentive programs that encouraged bloggers to add the EdenFantasys website to their blogroll or sidebar in order to help raise both parties search engine ranking, when in fact EdenFantasys is not actually providing reciprocity.
More information about EdenFantasys’s unethical practices, which are not limited to technical subterfuge, can be obtained via AAGBlog.com.
EDITORIAL
It is unsurprising that the distributed, subtle, and carefully crafted way EdenFantasys has managed to crowd-source links has (presumably) remained unpenalized by search engines like Google. It is similarly unsurprising that nontechnical users such as the contributors to SexIs Magazine would be unaware of these deceptive practices, or that they are complicit in promoting them.
This is no mistake on the part of EdenFantasys, nor is it a one-off occurrence. The amount of work necessary to implement the elaborate system I’ve described is also not even remotely feasible for a rogue programmer to accomplish, far less accomplish covertly. No, this is the result of a calculated and decidedly underhanded strategy that originated from the direction of top executives at Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys.
It is unfortunate that technically privileged people would be so willing to take advantage of the technically uneducated, particularly under the guise of providing a trusted place for the community which they claim to serve. These practices are exactly the ones that “the sex shop you can trust” should in no way support, far less be actively engaged in. And yet, here is unmistakable evidence that EdenFantasys is doing literally everything it can not only to bolster its own web presence at the cost of others’, but to hide this fact from its understandably non-tech-savvy contributors.
On a personal note, I am angered that I would be contacted by the Editor of SexIs Magazine, and asked to properly “attribute” and provide a link to them when it is precisely that reciprocity which SexIs Magazine would clearly deny me (and everyone else) in return. It was this request originally received over email from Judy Cole, that sparked my investigation outlined above and enabled me to uncover this hypocrisy. The email I received from Judy Cole is republished, in full, here:
From: Judy Cole <luxuryholmes@gmail.com>
Subject: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 17, 2010 2:42:00 PM PDT
To: kinkontap+viewermail@gmail.com
Cc: Laurel <laurelb@edenfantasys.com>Hello Emma and maymay,
I am the Editor of the online adult magazine SexIs (http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/). You recently picked up and re-posted a story of ours by Lorna Keach that Alternet had already picked up:
http://kinkontap.com/?s=alternet
We were hoping that you might provide attribution and a link back to us, citing us as the original source (as is done on Alternet, with whom we have an ongoing relationship), should you pick up something of ours to re-post in the future.
If you would be interested in having us send you updates on stories that might be of interest, I would be happy to arrange for a member of our editorial staff to do so. (Like your site, by the way. TBK is one of our regular contributors.)
Thanks and Best Regards,
Judy Cole
Editor, SexIs
Judy’s email probably intended to reference the new Kink On Tap briefs that my co-host Emma and I publish, not a search result page on the Kink On Tap website. Specifically, she was talking about this brief: http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676. I said as much in my reply to Judy:
Hi Judy,
The URL in your email doesn’t actually link to a post. We pick up many stories from AlterNet, as well as a number from SexIs, because we follow both those sources, among others. So, did you mean this following entry?
If so, you should know that we write briefs as we find them and provide links to where we found them. We purposefully do not republish or re-post significant portions of stories and we limit our briefs to short summaries in deference to the source. In regards to the brief in question, we do provide attribution to Lorna Keach, and our publication process provides links automatically to, again, the source where we found the article. :) As I’m sure you understand, this is the nature of the Internet. Its distribution capability is remarkable, isn’t it?
Also, while we’d absolutely be thrilled to have you send us updates on stories that might be of interest, we would prefer that you do so in the same way the rest of our community does: by contributing to the community links feed. You can find detailed instructions for the many ways you can do that on our wiki:
http://wiki.kinkontap.com/wiki/Community_links_feed
Congratulations on the continued success of SexIs.
Cheers,
-maymay
At the time when I wrote the email replying to Judy, I was perturbed but could not put my finger on why. Her email upset me because she seemed to be suggesting that our briefs are wholesale “re-posts,” when in fact Emma and I have thoroughly discussed attribution policies and, as mentioned in my reply, settled on a number of practices including a length limit, automated back linking (yes, with real links, go see some Kink On Tap briefs for yourself), and clearly demarcating quotes from the source article in our editorializing to ensure we play fair. Clearly, my somewhat snarky reply betrays my annoyance.
In any event, this exchange prompted me to take a closer look at the Kink On Tap brief I wrote, at the original article, and at the cross-post on AlterNet.org. I never would have imagined that EdenFantasys’s technical subterfuge would be as pervasive as it has proven to be. It’s so deeply embedded in the EdenFantasys publishing platform that I’m willing to give Judy the benefit of the doubt regarding this hypocrisy because she doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a search query and a permalink (something any laymen blogger would grok). This is apparent from her reply to my response:
From: Judy Cole <luxuryholmes@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 18, 2010 4:57:59 AM PDT
[…redundant email headers clipped…]Funny, the URL in my email opens the same link as the one you sent me when I click on it.
Maybe if you pick up one of our stories in future, you could just say something like “so and so wrote for SexIs.” ?
As it stands, it looks as if Lorna wrote the piece for Alternet. Thanks.
Judy
That is the end of our email exchange, and will be for good, unless and until EdenFantasys changes its ways. I will from this point forward endeavor never to publish links to any web property that I know to be owned by Web Merchants, Inc., including EdenFantasys.com. I will also do my best to avoid citing any and all SexIs Magazine articles from here on out, and I encourage everyone who has an interest in seeing honesty on the Internet to follow my lead here.
As some of my friends are currently contributors to SexIs Magazine, I would like all of you to know that I sincerely hope you immediately sever all ties with any and all Web Merchants, Inc. properties, suppliers, and business partners, especially because you are friends and I think your work is too important to be sullied by such a disreputable company. Similarly, I hope you encourage your friends to do the same. I understand that the economy is rough and that some of you may have business contracts bearing legal penalties for breaking them, but I urge you to nevertheless consider looking at this as a cost-benefit analysis: the sooner you break up with EdenFantasys, the happier everyone on the Internet, including you, will be (and besides, you can loose just as much of your reputation, money, and pagerank while being happy as you can being sad).
What you can do
- If you are an EdenFantasys reviewer, a SexIs Magazine contributor, or have any other arrangement with Web Merchants, Inc., write to Judy Cole and demand that content you produce for SexIs Magazine adheres to ethical Internet publication standards. Sever business ties with this company immediately upon receipt of any non-response, or any response that does not adequately address every concern raised in this blog post. (Feel free to leave comments on this post with technical questions, and I’ll do my best to help you sort out any l33t answers.)
- EdenFantasys wants to stack the deck in Google. They do this by misusing your content and harvesting your links. To combat this effort, immediately remove any and all links to EdenFantasys websites and web presences from your websites. Furthermore, do not—I repeat—do not publish new links to EdenFantasys websites, not even in direct reference to this post. Instead, provide enough information, as I have done, so visitors to your blog posts can find their website themselves. In lieu of links to EdenFantasys, link to other bloggers’ posts about this issue. (Such posts will probably be mentioned in the comments section of this post.)
- Boycott EdenFantasys: the technical prowess their website displays does provide a useful shopping experience for some people. However, that in no way obligates you to purchase from their website. If you enjoy using their interface, use it to get information about products you’re interested in, but then go buy those products elsewhere, perhaps from the manufacturers directly.
- On the recommendation of my friend Dr. Charlie Glickman, I suggest Good Vibrations.
- On the recommendation of my friend Shanna Katz, I also recommend Fascinations.
- Watch for “improved” technical subterfuge from Web Merchants, Inc. As a professional web developer, I can identify several things EdenFantasys could do to make their unethical practices even harder to spot, and harder to stop. If you have any technical knowledge at all, even if you’re “just” a savvy blogger, you can keep a close watch on EdenFantasys and, if you notice anything that doesn’t sit well with you, speak up about it like I did. Get a professional programmer to look into things for you if you need help; yes, you can make a difference just by remaining vigilant as long as you share what you know and act honestly, and transparently.
If you have additional ideas or recommendations regarding how more people can help keep sex toy retailers honest, please suggest them in the comments.
Update: To report website spamming or any kind of fraud to Google, use the authenticated Spam Report tool.
Update: Google provides much more information about why the kinds of practices EdenFantasys is engaged in degrade the overall web experience for you and me. Read Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages at the Google Webmaster Tools help site for additional SEO information. Using Google’s terminology, EdenFantasys’s unethical technology is a very skilled mix of social engineering and “sneaky JavaScript redirects.”
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by Christophe
19 May 2010 at 13:36
One thing that is unclear from the article, to those who are not as current on SEO technology: What benefit accrues to EF from preventing search engine’s from crawling the outbound links? As written, the article makes it seem that EF is doing this out of pure malice, which (regardless of one’s opinion of the ethics) seems unlikely. Can you elaborate?
by Christophe
19 May 2010 at 13:39
Another thought, apologies for the double comments: Again, I have no connection with EF and am not defending them, but could they be doing this in ordet to track outbound clicks? I do realize that the same could be accomplished by intercepting the click *with* a valid url in the href attribute, but could this be a case of just overly aggressive implementation, rather than malign intent?
by Sarah Sloane
19 May 2010 at 13:42
I removed all of my outbound links to EF & SexIs last week due to other issues, however this disturbs me beyond belief. I was one of the people responsible for hiring & editing other amazing writers while I worked at SexIs…and I had absolutely no idea that this was going on. I wish I had known; if I had, my time with EF would have ended long ago and I would not have spent so much of my time and so much of my energy (and risked my reputation) encouraging others to work with them and defending them because “my experience with them is good!”.
I also checked my contract, and now have a very different understanding of this clause than I did when I signed it…
“Author agrees that company has it’s own discretion to format editorial material, embed advertisement, hyperlinks, and visual arts within it…”
Thanks for going to all this effort to let everyone know about their business dealings, Maymay.
Pingback
by Beyond disgusted…partly with myself. at SarahSloane.net
19 May 2010 at 14:06
[...] First, please go read Maymay’s post, Edenfantasys unethical technology is a self-referential black hole. [...]
by maymay
19 May 2010 at 14:14
@Cristophe:
The benefit to EdenFantasys is appearing to be both the “hub” and the “spoke” nodes in the network. Each position has a certain value; they want both, but you can’t be both if you play fair. So, clearly, they’ve decided not to play fair.
There are far, far, simpler and far, far cheaper ways to implement the kind of link tracking you’re suggesting they’re doing. Yes, EdenFantasys can (and likely is) doing statistical link tracking as well as or as part of this EF Framework codebase. I’ve seen “overly aggressive implementations” and, frankly, they are are nowhere near as shady as this. Look at, for instance, URL shorteners, some of the most shady and exploitable link-tracking mechanisms on the Internet. Even those play fair by SEO rules. EdenFantasys’s platform, however, does not.
Ask yourself: why would they go through the trouble to write what is clearly very professional code in order to bend or break the rules of the Internet search market?
by Alessia Brio
19 May 2010 at 14:27
We are removing all our links to Eden Fantasys on the Toys for Tarts blog. Thank you for your post!
by DDog
19 May 2010 at 14:31
I’d never heard of these people before, but ick.
I looked at your examples. With my browser, all the links do show up in the status bar on hover as leading back to the page I’m already on. Is that peculiar to my browser and most other people would see the link they expect to see, while really being redirected?
by maymay
19 May 2010 at 14:34
@DDog:
You’re seeing the state of the page as it exists in Figure 2. It’s not peculiar to your browser, it’s the expected result of a missing (i.e., undefined)
hrefattribute. Again, it seems intentional to me. The EF Codebase is basically guarding the real destination for as long as it can, knowing it’s a valuable commodity, and not giving it up until after a human visitor (using JavaScript) clicks a “link.”by DDog
19 May 2010 at 14:43
@maymay
Ah, gotcha. I skipped the technical explanation because I don’t speak JavaScript but I see that now. So machines can’t see where it’s going, and humans can’t bypass the redirect by typing in the link themselves.
by Elodie
19 May 2010 at 15:12
I was wondering how EF managed to appear at the top of so many searches. Thank you for explaining this. Have you contacted alternet.org about it? I think they would be very unhappy to learn they were unknowingly complicit in such a practice.
by Christophe
19 May 2010 at 15:33
The benefit to EdenFantasys is appearing to be both the “hub” and the “spoke” nodes in the network. Each position has a certain value; they want both, but you can’t be both if you play fair. So, clearly, they’ve decided not to play fair.
Hm, OK. This may be just your basic SEO 101, question, but the net effect of this appears to be that EF is actively making it look like they do not link to anyone besides themselves, while other people link in to them. In what way would it hurt their pagerank if they played fair? (Again, I want to emphasize that I am not defending EF’s behavior, just trying to understand the details.)
This seems like something it might be worth bringing up with Google, as it is an obvious game against Google’s algorithms.
by Tom Allen
19 May 2010 at 15:35
Just so you are aware, it’s not just EF that plays games with the link reciprocation. A few years ago, I was asked by several online adult product companies to exchange links. I checked their websites (to make sure they were actually selling products), and put up text links in my sidebar. I then promptly forgot about them.
A few months later, I was checking my blog stats, and suddenly remembered that I had those links up. I discovered that I had not a single hit from either of them. I then went back to those websites and discovered that neither of them had any “links of interest” page. Nowhere did EoV show up on the sites. I didn’t think much of it, and removed the text links from my side bar.
A few weeks later, I received an email from one of the companies, complaining that I had removed the link. I expressed my surprise at his complaint, since there weren’t *any* links to other blogs or websites at their site. He explained that they never link to anything directly, but that they set up another website on which the exchanged links would appear. Oh, and would I please put the links back, or they would be compelled to remove my own link from their exchange site?
I spent some time searching for it, and finally had to ask for the address. Yeah, there was a link to my blog, plus links to other places, but there didn’t seem to be anything attracting people to that site. I told them that since their exchange page had not resulted in one single visit to my own, that I would not be replacing their text link.
OFGS! I just went to check Gmail to see if I could find the email exchanges, and you’ll never guess who one of the link exchanges was with!
And the response:
So, I guess that there really is a link exchange, of sorts. Kind of. But it’s really a shame that EF would take advantage of the… let’s call it the spirit of the sex blogging community.
by maymay
19 May 2010 at 15:37
@Cristophe:
That’s right.
That’s my whole point, Cristophe: it wouldn’t hurt EdenFantasys’s page rank if they played fair. So again, I urge you to ask yourself: what motivation could EdenFantasys have for deliberately not playing fair?
by Mr. Puck
19 May 2010 at 15:40
Very well researched piece that has all but driven a stake through their web strategy. They are well and truly fucked.
You can be assured you will have a cease and desist order very shortly as this post is truly a threat to their entire business.
The other drama posts that have been spreading, they don’t give a fuck about. This post can destroy them.
by maymay
19 May 2010 at 15:43
@Tom Allen:
What you describe is precisely the unethical and shady business dealings that I describe when I talk about dead-end pages or “orphan” sites. It’s a pretty well-known spamming technique, one I’m pretty sure Google considers worthy of reporting at Google’s Spam Report tool. Perhaps you should report all the companies who have done this to you in the past? Perhaps everyone else reading should, too.
EdenFantasys’s EF Framework obfuscation codebase is deliberately turning their entire web presence into the kind of orphaned site you describe (insofar as you are concerned, but without the lack of pagerank and lack of findability due to a lack of incoming links, insofar as they are concerned), while simultaneously doing what it can to hide the fact that it is doing this from unsuspecting contributors. That’s part of what I find so hypocritical and unethical about what they’ve done.
by maymay
19 May 2010 at 15:48
@Mr. Puck:
Well, in that case, I encourage you to copy everything in this post to your own blog, and post it there, as AAG has already done. My content license permits unaltered republications and syndication of all of my content, as long as a (real) back link is provided. Feel free to excerpt, quote, and otherwise republish anything in this post. In fact, I encourage you to do this.
If I am going to look at a Cease and Desist letter, then we might as well distribute this post as far and wide as possible, and show them just how well the Internet works as a distribution platform even without resorting to unethical practices. Maybe they’ll learn a thing or two about the new 21st century currency: trust.
by aagblog
19 May 2010 at 15:55
Thank you maymay for writing such a thoughtful piece and for fielding these questions.
It’s important for our community to realize that EF’s issues go beyond one or two people who maybe we don’t personally know or even like very much. EF takes advantage of every one of us with these unethical practices and it’s high time for them to be called out on it.
aag
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by More Shoddy Business From Eden Fantasys
19 May 2010 at 15:57
[...] This was originally published and written by maymay at Maybe Maimed But Never Harmed. I encourage you to repost, retweet, and excerpt from this post. And again, ask yourself: is this a company you want to do business with? EdenFantasys’ unethical technology is a self-referential black hole. [...]
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by Not food related, possibly NSFW- Edenfantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole « Veggie Love
19 May 2010 at 16:29
[...] busy or non-technical readers, see the next section, Executive Summary, to quickly understand what EdenFantasys is doing, why it’s unethical, and how it affects you [...]
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by The Eden Fantasys Debacle (Or: How NOT To Win Friends And Influence People By Stealing Their Linkage) | The SmackDog Chronicles (Ver. 2.6)
19 May 2010 at 18:11
[...] to length, I will simply refernce you to his full article over there; I strongly encourage anyone who is even remotely in the progressive side to go there and read it. [...]
by Christophe
19 May 2010 at 18:54
> So again, I urge you to ask yourself: what motivation could EdenFantasys have for deliberately not playing fair?
Well, actually, I’ll ask you instead. :) If there is no advantage to them whatsoever for doing this, why are they? They aren’t actually blocking people from leaving their site, since for human-operated browsers, the links do in fact exit EF’s site. They would not hurt their page rank by using proper links.
The only thing I can think of is that they simply do not want to give anyone else an increased page rank through their links, while being able to say that they do in fact link to them. But they could achieve this just by a “nofollow”, and it’s hard to see why denying the page rank bump to their vendors is enough in their interest to justify the engineering expense.
So, I’d be interested in your thoughts on their motivation, because I’m having a hard time understanding in what way this benefits them.
by Lorelie
19 May 2010 at 19:12
How utterly distasteful. Considering my only other exposure to them has been regarding a tacky post by a tacky/rude moderator on their boards publicly posting about banning a contributor, I will not be ordering from them. Ever.
by maymay
19 May 2010 at 19:13
@Christophe:
So, I’m really not sure how many more different ways I can keep saying this, but the question you ask here is a clear misrepresentation of this conversation.
There is an “advantage” to EdenFantasys’s unethical technology because it fails to contribute equally to other publishers’ pagerank while actively utilizing others’ efforts to privilege their own pagerank. In other words, EdenFantasys wants to have their cake and eat it, too.
Even though their own pagerank would not be hurt by playing fair, their comparative pagerank in relation to their contributors’ is, indeed, higher than it would otherwise be by denying reciprocity. If they played fair, they would merely be contributing to others pagerank. If and only if EdenFantasys considers contributing to others’ pagerank a threat to their own (which I argue is exactly the unnecessary and misguided zero-sum game they are playing) does their code begin to offer a reason for existence. The sophistication and quality of the code they’ve implemented is what makes me believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that playing this unnecessary zero-sum game is, in fact, their misguided intention.
Remember, it’s not merely that their links are turned into fake links, but that their code syndicates content to other web sites with the links carefully altered. I don’t know what else they are doing, and I haven’t spent the time and effort that EdenFantasys clearly has to dream up what could be possible—my point in bringing this to light is precisely the fact that this unethical behavior actively undermines trust because it is deliberately designed to be as opaque as possible.
I make no bones about my agenda: promoting transparency. Period.
Anyway, I hope this is clear to you now. I really don’t know how to explain this another way. Perhaps others will offer their attempt at paraphrasing my words if you need a different explanation.
by aagblog
19 May 2010 at 20:06
Not everything evil people do needs to make logical sense.
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by EdenFantasys: the self-referential black hole « an unassuming girl
19 May 2010 at 20:12
[...] black hole May 19, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments I just finished reading this article by maymay, and I’m going to cross-post it here just in case he gets a cease and desist, as [...]
by Sex & Law
19 May 2010 at 20:14
Does anyone know if other websites such as Fascinations or even Babeland do this? Is this practice specific to Edenfantasys? I’d kind of like to know before I jump on the bash-Edenfantasys-wagon.
But yeah, besides that, wow. This is really sad.
by aagblog
19 May 2010 at 20:36
I did a quick check of a post I wrote for Babeland’s blog last year: http://blog.babeland.com/2009/08/10/problem-politeness/
My links are correct as I originally posted them. They are NOT altered in any way.
by Shanna
19 May 2010 at 20:36
Sex and Law – while I can’t speak for Babeland, I can say as one of the 3.5 members of the marketing/web department at Fascinations, we most definitely do not do it. Visit any of our sex educators pages on FunLove.com, and you can turn off JavaScript, and it’ll still link no problem.
We want people to like us, and to put ourselves behind what we say. I wanted to increase sex positive behavior, so we brought in more sex educators to write, removed anal ease and shrink creams, and are adding materials and brand categories now, so that people can more easily find body-healthy toys.
That said, we also have one web guy, that does the site design, SEO, behind the scenes for affiliates and much more, so things change slowly. But we would never, EVER do anything like that. If we did, I’d leave, like I did with EF.
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by Bad Move, Eden Fantasys
19 May 2010 at 20:38
[...] Edenfantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole [...]
by Kayla
19 May 2010 at 20:59
Finally. Holy shit. Sorry. I’ve been searching for a site to help me with my explanation, but getting through Google’s SEO information is horrid.
Anyways, why would EF want to do this?
Pagerank is based off of how many sites link to you and how many sites YOU link to. Imagine each link in to EF as a “+” to their total Pagerank (which is basically your spot in Google’s search pages). Each link out of EF is a “-” to their total Pagerank. To achieve the highest possible PageRank, you’d want to have many inbound links, but no outbound links. When you look at it that way, it makes lots of sense why they’d do this – they’ve made it so Google doesn’t recognize that these are outbound links.
Does that make sense?
(source: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html#outbound_links There’s tons of other sources, but it sucks trying to find how links effect SEO)
by Earthquake
19 May 2010 at 21:23
Thank you for the clear technical section! I have forwarded this link to all the technical/activist people I know. (They have to be both for it to bug them enough.)
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by At A Kinky House » We’re Good, But Not Everyone Is
20 May 2010 at 00:49
[...] of code, I’m jumping a bandwagon. Please read all read about a company I do not do any business with (and hope never to do business with) as customer, vendor or writer. [...]
by Sarah Sloane
20 May 2010 at 03:47
I just pulled all of my google analytics data for the past year, and went through it with a fine-toothed comb.
I’ve written 25 articles for EF, and had a live profile there that, until last week, had a link to my main website. I have gotten zero visits with EF as the referrer. However, when I had one article that I wrote for Alternet published last year, it yielded dozens. I’ve also gotten links back to me that have yielded hits from Good Vibrations, Fascinations, and other retailers that I’ve worked with.
That kinda says it all, at least for me.
by Woman Tribune
20 May 2010 at 06:18
Thank you for writing this and we will definitely be using a portion of it on our website, of course with a link back to this post because we’re not unethical like some other websites we know. This information made it to the Eden Fantasys forum (it’s how I found this post, actually) and a lot of people have been talking about it. After some research and reading on the forum from others, I was just about to type a response and just like that, the forum was deleted. Obviously Eden Fantasys knows that this information will bury them.
I am now ceasing to work with Eden Fantasys in any way, shape or form and I highly, highly, highly suggest all other bloggers, reviewers and contributors do the same. This is not right and deleting a forum post where people are genuinely concerned and want answers is unforgivable. Eden Fantasys has proven that they do not care about what any contributor thinks or feels. They just want stats and money and I won’t help them get either.
As for real woman-positive, sex-positive and ethical retailers and communities, Babeland and Good Vibrations all the way!
by Christophe
20 May 2010 at 06:28
@Kayla
> (source: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html#outbound_links There’s tons of other sources, but it sucks trying to find how links effect SEO)
Ah, thanks! I wasn’t aware that outbound links reduced absolute pagerank; suddenly, their behavior makes sense. (Not defending, of course, but it is generally unwise to assume that someone’s behavior is utterly irrational, regardless of how evil it is or appears.)
by Britni TheVadgeWig
20 May 2010 at 06:53
They took the post down, but I screencapped the thread: http://britisshameless.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Eden-Fantasys%E2%80%99s-unethical-technology-is-a-self-referential-black-hole-Sex-Shop-I-Trust-campaign2.png
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by EF Continues To Dig It’s Own Grave
20 May 2010 at 07:04
[...] posted a link to Maymay’s article detailing EF’s unethical “linking” practices in the EF forum. As you know, I [...]
by Clarisse Thorn
20 May 2010 at 08:29
Huh. I’ve had comparatively good experiences with EF — they donated a few hundred dollars to my sex-positive film series. They also recruited me as a writer (offering a really good rate, actually) and though that didn’t work out for bureaucratic reasons, the editor I talked to was really nice and helped me find contacts at other places. I’ve also been impressed with a lot of their content. Sorry to hear about all this.
by Kick Ass Kitten
20 May 2010 at 08:37
Wow. That is really deceptive/nasty of EF. I’ve bought things from them once or twice in the distant past – actually think it came from something AAG’s site had mentioned, so I figured EF was a good resource. But to not link with others is disgraceful, unfair and selfish. I’ll buy elsewhere from now on. Thanks for writing this post!
by richard wagner
20 May 2010 at 10:20
This just blows me away. I always wondered why I never got so much as one hit to my site(s) from all the work I’ve done at EF and SEXIS. It’s really disturbing to learn that one’s colleagues, people I’ve trusted, were not playing fair. If I hadn’t ended my association with them over a month ago, I would certainly do it now.
Thank you for bringing all of this to our attention and for your copious documentation of their unethical behavior. In the end, there is always karma.
by DominaDoll
20 May 2010 at 11:08
Wow MayMay. This is amazing investigative work and I am shocked by the depth of EF’s shady dealings. Having heard what they have done in the past to their past employees, and the way they have treated them, I am still dumbfounded by the way they had blatantly tried to mislead the bloggers and writers who have supported them in “their” community.
As far as other sex toy companies go, I review for several, and have never had any problems with Babeland, GoodVibes, PinkCherry, TabuToys and many others who have always treated me fairly and with good faith. I stopped reviewing for EF shortly after what happened to AAG & Essin’Em.
I also work for Sextoy.com as the Reviews Editor for sex toys. We offer sex toys for review to our reviewers in exchange for reviews and links back to our site. We do not lie about promising backlinks to our reviewers that are not real.
EF’s practices are dishonest, insincere, and unethical.
Thanks for looking into this.
by Jack Stratton
20 May 2010 at 11:18
This is an amazing piece of investigative journalism!
I’ve been aware of Eden Fantasy’s various unethical practices for a while now. In my brief work doing a review with them I had my real name exposed online and witnessed other people not get paid, jerked around, etc.
I don’t shop there, I don’t link there, if I hear someone talking about EF I tell them about these things and suggest they shop somewhere else. This is just more info to add to the list.
Thanks for the great work.
by Sex & Law
20 May 2010 at 12:04
Okay, my comments have been deleted, along with another person who noticed they were being deleted and demanded answers about it. Luckily I did take a capture which can be found here:
http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/dd35/jack_o_diamonds/EF.jpg
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by Link Roundup: Eden Fantasys? More like Epic Fail « Heartbreak Nymphomania
20 May 2010 at 12:53
[...] Male Submission Art, and who also happens to be a professional computer programmer, discovers that EF's linking practices are unethical. (This post has been cross-posted here and here, and Maymay is encouraging people to re-post the [...]
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by Eden Fantasys: A Sex Shop No One Can Trust | Woman Tribune
20 May 2010 at 14:21
[...] to last night. Maybe Maimed wrote an important, must-read article, Edenfantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole. Maybe Maimed’s post exposes how Eden Fantasys “has invested a staggering amount of [...]
by Epiphora
20 May 2010 at 15:32
This is one of the greatest posts in the history of the internet. So beautifully researched and thorough. You should get a medal for this.
I would be interested in what you think about Fred’s “explanation” for this linking behavior.
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by EdenFantasys.com Shoots Itself In The Balls…Again - ErosBlog: The Sex Blog
20 May 2010 at 15:50
[...] internet shitstorm that’s been brewing up since yesterday, when the Maybe Maimed blog posted this devastating analysis of the shady link practices that EdenFantasys uses. If you’ve read this far, you want to go [...]
by Melen
20 May 2010 at 15:52
Excellent write up. Having stayed out of the drama initially, I originally thought this could have been a misunderstanding. Having been in the tech field professionally for over 13 years myself, it became clear after a short period of time that something was not right, and I regret that I now have comments on Fred’s post that defends them, and can not post a follow up comment. I also can’t seem to get my comments deleted (tho someone felt it was fine to edit my comments without my knowledge mere minutes after I posted them, something else I consider extremely unethical).
However, with this information out there, I’m curious to see how EF will respond. Personally, I can have some measure of respect for a company that publically says “We screwed up, our policies were crap, and here’s how we’re going to fix it”. Is there hope? I have no idea, and after EFs programmers comment I’m not sure it makes sense to hope for them to see the light.
It’s good for the “community” to hold them accountable for their actions, but I would caution against an overly emotional response. Boycotting, or simply removing your affiliation with EF, is understandable. Going on the attack to destroy their business will only back fire. Everyone should temper their anger with rationality and take the high ground.
by Karl Elvis
20 May 2010 at 15:52
It’s pretty entertaining to see Fred and his supposed programmer attempt to put a spin on this, while not actually addressing the issues.
by maymay
20 May 2010 at 15:57
I read their response, and investigated (briefly) some of the other sites they claim are using “encapsulation,” a term I’ve never heard of in this context before. I believe they are using a classic smoke-and-mirrors tactic, a classic “we’re doing it for your your own good, your safety, your security” misdirection, which is disingenuous. I call bullshit on EdenFantasys’s response, because the proof of the other websites’ innocence is underneath the “View source” button, just like the proof of their guilt is.
Here is a snippet of code of a link from one of the sites Fred mentioned, Lifehacker:
The above snippet was taken from the page at
http://lifehacker.com/5541901/liteswitch-x-makes-macs-application-switcher-far-more-useful.That snippet of code from Lifehacker, as you have already no doubt guessed, is exactly the same with and without JavaScript. It’s exactly the same in Safari and Firefox. It’s exactly the same on a Mac and a PC. It’s exactly the same for humans and for Googlebot. It’s exactly the same as other links on Lifehacker.com, even though it’s a link that points off-site.
So where is the “encapsulation” Fred is talking about? Maybe in his head. Or maybe he only wants his disingenuous story to be in the heads of non-technical users.
All of you can do exactly what I’ve done to test his claims. Disable JavaScript and view source. If you don’t already know the reality, then look into it for yourself, and then try to reconcile what you see with EdenFantasys’s story.
Let’s look again at EdenFantasys’s code for “links,” again with JavaScript disabled:
In no way do the two snippets bear any significant resemblance. Fred’s claim that other sites like Lifehacker are doing the same kind of sneaky JavaScript redirects is a flat-out lie. The audacity of his statement (he must have known someone would challenge the claim), is stunning.
The more EdenFantasys tries to throw smoke in the face of their unethical behavior, the more obvious their deception becomes, and you don’t need to be a professional web developer to tell the difference.
When it comes to technology, I don’t believe openness and honesty based on promises should be sufficient. When it comes to technology, demand actually honest and open code. Demand transparency, otherwise you get people like Fred making promises and crying “safety!” while doing exactly the kind of unethical SEO as they’re doing.
So no, I totally don’t buy their response. Not even a little. Not even close.
Moreover, the kind of link-filtering EdenFantasys describe doing for “safety” is a technique already implemented by sites like Twitter and Facebook, which both function very differently from the way EdenFantasys does. Arguing that removing offsite links and programmatically altering links in syndicated content to point back to themselves for “security” reasons is a weak straw-man argument. There are more effective ways to offer security, and I think any technical professional worth their salt can understand that.
That post he made is not intended to clear his company’s name, it’s intended to placate the already loyal and to confuse the as-yet undecided.
by Sex & Law
20 May 2010 at 17:46
@Maymay
When we attempt to demand transparency our comments are deleted and our accounts locked. My comments demanding an honest response were all deleted (though my comment above shows a screencap I managed to get from his thread of defense). My account was also locked and apparently “most” of the accounts that were locked will be unlocked next week if the members want to return (fat fucking chance). What blows my mind is that I wasn’t even sent an email.
Thanks for exposing EF for who they really are. I’m glad my name is no longer going to be associated with their shady shit.
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by Review: SaSi by Je Joue | Sexy by Sarah
20 May 2010 at 18:10
[...] Due to what I consider to be underhanded, dishonest and unethical business practices, I no longer endorse the company I reviewed this [...]
by Britni TheVadgeWig
20 May 2010 at 18:20
Maymay, have you seen this? http://www.sheposts.com/content/edenfantasys-accused-hoarding-links
“When asked to respond to MayMay’s post, EdenFantasy’s Marketing Director Victoria Steinour said the post was in response to an email exchange between an employee of EF and MayMay. She claims he “was stealing SexIs content and was angered by our request that he properly link to it… hence the lovely attack this week.””
by DominaDoll
20 May 2010 at 18:40
Like you said. Smoke and mirrors. I really don’t even know WHY people are making you explain when it is SO obviously clear. Holy fuck! I stand behind you MayMay. good work. Let’s not allow this to continue…
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by We're just... waiting. Hoping. Giving the benefit of doubt. | Insatiable Desire
20 May 2010 at 19:09
[...] This thing with the links, though… It bothers me. [...]
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by Review: Tantus Rascal O2 | Sexy by Sarah
20 May 2010 at 20:30
[...] Due to what I consider to be underhanded, dishonest and unethical business practices, I no longer endorse the company I reviewed this [...]
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by Review: Fascinator Posh Throe | Sexy by Sarah
20 May 2010 at 21:10
[...] Due to what I believe to be underhanded, dishonest and unethical business practices, I no longer endorse the company I originally reviewed [...]
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by Review: Hearts Leather Whip | Sexy by Sarah
20 May 2010 at 21:54
[...] Due to what I believe to be underhanded, dishonest and unethical business practices I not longer endorse the company I originally reviewed [...]
by Lauren
21 May 2010 at 06:53
We feel that it’s important for us at PHE, Inc to inform this blog (and its readers) that Adam & Eve and its family of websites neither participates in nor condones this type of alleged unethical practice. We work hard to maintain excellent relationships with our affiliates, reviewers, bloggers, visitors and all of our customers. We are proud of the relationships we have built with them and the search engines and regret the alleged actions of one may detract from those who strive for fairness and professionalism in their business dealings.
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by EdenFallacys « Juliettia
21 May 2010 at 08:18
[...] of deleting threads/posts containing concerns voiced by other contributors after the discovery of Edens unethical link farming while claiming that they do not delete or alter threads and posts in combination of banning my [...]
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by Beast of Eden « The Edge of Vanilla
21 May 2010 at 10:47
[...] of Eden Posted on May 21, 2010 by Tom Allen Since half the sex bloggers I know have an Eden Fantasys story to tell, I thought I’d add to the [...]
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by Better Sex Loves The Bloggers — Better Sex Blog
21 May 2010 at 14:18
[...] been watching the kerfuffle that has been raging in the sex toy review corner of the blogosphere and I have a few things I would like to [...]
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by Review: Rascal by Tantus | Sexy by Sarah
21 May 2010 at 15:33
[...] Due to what I consider to be underhanded, dishonest and unethical business practices, I no longer endorse the company I reviewed this [...]
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by Edenfantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole | Menstrual Poetry
21 May 2010 at 17:06
[...] busy or non-technical readers, see the next section, Executive Summary, to quickly understand what EdenFantasys is doing, why it’s unethical, and how it affects you [...]
by MissMarguerite
21 May 2010 at 17:24
When I heard of EdenFantasys, everyone told me to be wary of this site. I had no idea until going through countless bloggers websites and finding the burn effect had upon them as a result of being affiliated with EF. Even looking at their site, one can see there is a bit of spammy feel to it and can easily trick someone into thinking their site is being given hits or new visitors. Thanks for the article and glad to see it out there for everyone to take a second look at the site.
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by EdenFallacys…Errrrrrrrr, EdenFantasys.com: Now Officially The BP Of Sex Toy Websites…Except That All That Flows From Their Well Is BS (Updated) | The SmackDog Chronicles (Ver. 2.6)
21 May 2010 at 22:47
[...] those of you not familiar, EF was busted by sex blogger Maymay (over at Maybe Maimed, But Not Harmed) for using crafty Javascript chicanery [...]
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by Weekend Reading « Screaming Violet
22 May 2010 at 07:46
[...] led to the Discovery of the sites Un-Ethical link trading Practises by another fellow sex blogger Maymay over at Maybe Maimed, But Not Harmed. The Fallout of Which has earned itself the unflattering Moniker of ‘Eden’s [...]
by DBD
22 May 2010 at 12:26
I watched the post go up Wednesday night and watched it get ripped down by Thursday morning. I watched the threads get closed and contributors accounts temporarily suspended. I stayed off the forums until I had a chance to investigate. I just posted all about it again.
If you can – comment now.
MayMay – excellent job with this write up!
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by Exciting new “Time Out” blog; reflections on blogrolls and blogospheres « Clarisse Thorn: Pro-Sex Outreach, Open-Minded Feminism
23 May 2010 at 07:38
[...] sex toy website EdenFantasys, which also has an online magazine known as SexIs, recently got in a big heap of trouble because the links from their sites have been modified so that they don’t increase [...]
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by EdenFantasys: The Crumbling of a Community | Menstrual Poetry
24 May 2010 at 21:13
[...] when maymay’s article was published almost a week ago uncovering the unethical linking practices of EdenFantasys, people [...]
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by Wait, Wait, Fred has answers « Juliettia
25 May 2010 at 01:09
[...] “We’re just butthurt that in three years no one noticed what we were doing. We are confident that we do not violate Googles Webmaster Guidelines, we are sure of it!“ [...]
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by Love Bites: Clarisse Thorn | Time Out Chicago » » Sex toy & sex review site accused of scandalous writer treatment!
25 May 2010 at 04:17
[...] (which has a number of affiliated sites, such as the online sexuality magazine SexIs) is now fielding accusations of dishonest dealings from one of my very favorite activists, [...]
by Jeff Schult
25 May 2010 at 11:10
I’ve written a few (three) pieces for Sexis in the last month. I am a geek, though not a programmer; I’ve been writing about ‘Net culture since the mid ’90s and I have managed teams that built and run large consumer web sites. And I have a few observations I’d like to share.
— I was taken aback, throughout this post, by the degree to which deliberate malice by tech staff and senior management of the company are assumed. It has long been my experience that senior management is often not technologically literate enough to be malicious, first of all — and that is certainly true of the editor of Sexis, a highly competent wordsmith. You didn’t really give them a chance to engage privately — I can’t count the email with the editor, who clearly had no idea what you were talking about.
— It seems much more likely to me that the site and the technology have evolved over time — years — and is a product of whatever platform (including the constraints and compromises in that initial choice) and everything that can go right and wrong since. Expediency, understaffing, ridiculous hours, unrealistic deadlines, quick fixes, code creep, etc. all are much more facts of life than getting to realize one’s techno-creative vision.
— Among the very-very-VERY first rules of an ethical (and civilized) online world was, and is: Don’t give or take offense easily. A corrolary with which many people are familiar is Godwin’s Law, which is not *quite* applicable here so I won’t quote it to avoid breaking it myself!
— You mention Page Rank and the implications that EF’s code has for that, and thus on search engine optimization, position, etc. Page Rank used to be considered important. However, you probably know that Google removed it from Webmaster Tools last year; Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.”
— Among my own first questions of EF when I started writing for them, actually, was regarding their SEO — because it did not seem to me to be very good. Check their Page Rank, if you want. See how things show up in Google. I think you won’t be impressed. That, to me, almost rules out the motivations you state.
— So I’m not sure that doing things your way would make that much of a difference. I think the data is pretty anecdotal, minimal and speculative. Myself — I’m a little more interested in the effects of “do follow” vs. “no follow” code on blogs. I’m a do-follow guy, myself.
— EF pays freelance writers for content. It’s not a huge amount but it “ain’t nuthin’ ” either. That’s increasingly rare in the last few years; I am aware that other sites which have code you like better get their content *for nothing more than giving links to the originator.* Cash is better, and I am inclined to give EF the benefit of the doubt.
My two cents, offered as such. I don’t want to prolong the discussion but I thought my points were worth adding.
by maymay
25 May 2010 at 14:13
@Jeff Schult:
I can understand why you might find my conclusions, which are certainly very firmly decided, to be questionable, and I’m very glad to see that people like you are thinking for themselves. However, your observations are similarly confusing to me as my “assumptions” seem to you: are you suggesting that technical expertise is required to be malicious?
So, does the result you see in the code I described concern you less or more knowing that it’s likely the result of “technology [that has] evolved over time—years”? It concerns me more because regardless of the platform, “years” would certainly give them the opportunity to set clear, correct, and accessible expectations about what their “link exchanges” actually meant (if they weren’t going to change the technology), or would certainly give them the opportunity to deal with understaffing, ridiculous hours, and so forth, if they did want to change the way the system works.
You’re totally right in this.
I tried to address this in one sentence in my post where I said “More information about EdenFantasys’s unethical practices…can be obtained via AAGBlog.com.” I linked to (some) of the earlier mean-spiritedness, in which EdenFantasys refused to pay AAG for work she’d done and was taken to small claims court about it. This has happened more than once, stories like hers have been surfacing at a steady pace over the course of about 5 years now, there have been other concerning situations, such as publishing sex toy reviewers’ last names and home addresses (hopefully inadvertently), and the negative experiences of other people like Epiphora just two weeks ago.
Again, while I focused my post on this one issue with the technology they use, I encourage you to read many of the link roundup/overview posts that summarize the other issues as well. I found Wilhemina Wang’s timeline useful.
So, just like many other things in life that you shouldn’t focus on “too much” (like, I don’t know, money) page rank is certainly still “important.”
Are you suggesting that because they have not succeeded in achieving high “page rank” on some measurements (of which there are many scales), they could not possibly have been trying for high page rank? That sounds like a logical fallacy to me.
Plausible deniability is a beautiful thing, and a well known, effective tool. :) Dozens of lines of JavaScript whose sole purpose is to obfuscate links isn’t what I would consider “anecdotal” or “minimal,” although you’re certainly free to speculate on whatever you wish.
Then you might be interested in the comments from Christophe, above, regarding
nofollow.So? I never argued that people weren’t getting paid, except for AAG, who wrote about being owed money that she didn’t receive.
I’ll tell you what I wrote at Insatiable Desires:
Let me put this another way: all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Your observations are valid and raise plenty of “if”s but, to my eyes, each and every one of the simplest explanations aligns equally well with this simple conclusion: EdenFantasys’s goals were clear, calculated, intentional, and unethical.
by Jeff Schult
25 May 2010 at 15:32
Thanks for responding. I don’t have much to add. However, to answer questions you posed:
— Yes, I think it’s possible, even likely, that the code in question is legacy, part of a platform or add-on that could have been implemented largely without much thought, possibly by someone who isn’t even there any more. They have some sort of content management system. I can’t tell what. But I bet they didn’t build it from scratch and I’d bet it’s spaghetti at this point. It’s entropy. The internal dependencies that build up over time on these huge sites is amazing. It may even actually NOT be a small project to change the code we’re talking about, depending on how the site works. Change can have unintended consequences.
— As to their reaction, understandably hasty and maybe not that well thought out? Your post is kind of a “gotcha,” I think. I don’t respond well to those, myself.
— I really do think their apparent inability to have great SEO (and page rank) supports my guess that they don’t have the apparent capability to be as deliberately bad as you make them out to be. I’m probably doing their programmers an injustice by quoting Heinlein … “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” … since they’re probably smart. But it’s relevant because my guess is that they didn’t give that code much or any thought until yesterday. It wasn’t “broken” so it wasn’t on the radar, maybe not in years.
So … I’m done here, I don’t want to stretch this out. I’ll answer email though.
Take care.
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by PinkSexGeek[dot]com » Dodged a bullet there…
25 May 2010 at 16:16
[...] Shortly after I read Maymay’s (Maybe Maimed, Kink On Tap, Male Submission Art) post on the Unethical Linking Practices by way of Sarah Sloane’s post Beyond disgusted…partly with myself. Twitter hashtag [...]
by Devilbluedress
25 May 2010 at 17:39
@Jeff Schult –
Jeff I only understand the technical side of this minimally. I do know what happens when you disable javascript and try to follow links. What’s interesting is how Eden reacted. They aren’t even interested in a discussion. They yanked it, killed every single post and went down a road of rapid censorship and locking out contributors so fast that I was stunned. Some entire posts were deleted in as little as ten minutes if they so much as referenced this.
That behavior alone implies they have something to hide.
I also understand Google search engines pretty well. The actual effect of killing all outbound links may be minimal. I believe that it depends on the ratio of external links to internal links that the bots can see. The search engines actually rely on a lot more information though.
by maymay
25 May 2010 at 17:51
@Jeff Schult:
Certainly; thanks for your comment. :)
Again, I appreciate your generosity but I find the sentiments you’re expressing pretty off-base.
Legacy code is one thing, and I’m sure capable technologists understand the horrors of such historic artifacts. However, the code in question and discussed at length on this blog post bears few earmarks of being “legacy.” The JavaScript cited from the EF Framework codebase is not only relatively prominent, but quite well designed, even elegant. In over a decade of looking at Web code of one sort or another, “elegant” is never a characteristic I’ve seen in “legacy code.”
Moreover, I’ll tell you (the other part of) what I wrote at Insatiable Desires:
I feel like calling me out for saying “gotcha” when, as you seem to point out, I really did “get ‘em,” makes you look like an apologist. Which is fine, but pigeonholing me as biased while doing something that certainly doesn’t make you look unbiased, seems like the pot calling the kettle black.
So, I’d caution you against using page rank as a single measure of SEO success, as you yourself reminded us in your previous comment. The things I find more insidious than the “sneaky JavaScript redirects,” as Google calls them, are the active community outreach perpetuating careful misrepresentations of “link exchanges”, as Tom Allen thoroughly documented, as well as the programmatic alteration of syndicated content. To the best of my knowledge, only Fred Petrenko is (incorrectly) arguing that the sneaky JavaScript redirects are not a violation of Google’s policies because that point is simply not in question.
Both the misrepresentation of “link exchanges” and the alteration of syndicated content are much harder to cite as direct violations of Google’s policies because they fall within the realm of social, not technical, subterfuge. That’s why I called part of this “a very skilled mix of social engineering” and ethics, not solely legalities and technicalities.
So you’re guessing that EdenFantasys is either stupid or malicious, but not both? I mean, sure, if that’s what you’re trying to get to, but either way you go with that one I really have to give you sincere props for being incredibly generous. I would not feel comfortable doing any kind of business with stupid people or malicious people, period. My whole point is that everyone who continues to associate themselves with EdenFantasys rightfully loses a lot of respect and trust (at least from me), because I don’t want to associate with people who associate with stupid people, or malicious people, period.
But hey, that’s just me. In my blog post, I argue pretty explicitly that everyone else would do well to consider this, too. So, while remarkable in your kindness, I can’t understand how it benefits anyone, not even you (except Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys, of course).
Well, no, whether or not they were minding it, that code certainly wasn’t broken! Which kind of proves the whole point about their deplorable ethics, doesn’t it? ;)
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by A History of EdenFallacys « EdenFallacys
25 May 2010 at 19:18
[...] Male Submission Art, and who also happens to be a professional computer programmer, discovers that EF’s linking practices are unethical. (This post has been cross-posted here, here, here and here, and Maymay is encouraging people to [...]
by Epiphora
25 May 2010 at 19:49
“Yes, I think it’s possible, even likely, that the code in question is legacy, part of a platform or add-on that could have been implemented largely without much thought, possibly by someone who isn’t even there any more.”
Isn’t that point negated by the fact that Fred is calling the code something oriented toward the future? And also the fact that he is defending it?
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by Kink On Tap » Blog Archive » Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed › EdenFantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole
27 May 2010 at 19:20
[...] Read brief source… [...]
by Irrationally Irked
27 May 2010 at 19:28
I wouldn’t support “EdenFantasys” even if they implemented the fairest link-back scheme on the net, simply because their name irritates the living daylights out of me. Every time I see it, I scream “FantasIES, fantasI-E-S!” in my head.
But I’m strange like that.
by The Beautiful Kind
27 May 2010 at 20:53
I don’t like seeing the sex blog/pos community become polarized by this issue. I hope differing opinions are respected and people can turn their focus to positive topics. Hence my fun post about my first colonic going up tomorrow. Now THAT’S the kind of ass hosing I wanna talk about!
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by Interesting posts, weekend of 5/30/10 « Feminists with Female Sexual Dysfunction
30 May 2010 at 11:27
[...] links in such a way with JavaScript so as to not improve the linked-to sites Google page rank. Edenfantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole. Britni put together a blog link roundup of some other sites that are covering this story, and some [...]
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by Screw You Sex Pervs « Past the Hurt
16 Jun 2010 at 15:56
[...] been or, surely now, never will be in any affiliation with them, I still need to post about it and link to the wonderful, truthful and trustworthy Maymay for the shit to hit the fan for the [...]
by Tracy
25 Jun 2010 at 20:12
GoogleBots apparently understand code these days.
http://mashable.com/2010/06/25/google-javascript/?utm_source=feedburner
Any idea what this might mean for said company?
by maymay
26 Jun 2010 at 00:47
In my best estimation, Tracy, it doesn’t mean much. Of course, only Google knows for sure, but I remain skeptical. Here’s why.
Firstly, the only certainty on any report about Google Caffeine (the recent Googlebot upgrade that supposedly understands “code”) that I’ve seen is the fact that not all JavaScript can be understood, which is no surprise. While some JavaScript can be understood, what’s known is that only code in which URLs already exist are indexed—news that’s over a year old now—while the EF Framework that EdenFantasys uses takes great care to avoid exposing any URL whatsoever until after a back-and-forth interaction (XHR) has been performed. (I described this interaction in the technical details section of my post.)
Second, and more importantly, it does nothing to address the far more underhanded part of EdenFantasys’s operation, in which links in syndicated content are altered to refer to the originating document, as I described in this post. Even if Google can now get at the links EdenFantasys hid, none of the altered republished content is using JavaScript, and it all points to EdenFantasys, not to the author’s intended destination. So, even if Googlebot can now follow EdenFantasys’s “linklike” elements, it doesn’t change the fact that the EdenFantasys “outsourced link farm” is still an outsourced link farm.
Moreover, remember that Google is the best and smartest search engine, but it’s far from the only one. Comparing the results Google returns against other search engine services like Yahoo! Web Search is always a good idea. Notably, the
linkdomain:operator on Yahoo! Web Search is arguably a lot more telling than similar searches on Google.Finally, let’s remember that claims like these have been made by everyone and their mother for many years, except by Google themselves. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice….
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by EdenFallacys » Blog Archive » Apples to Apples and still FAIL
26 Jun 2010 at 22:55
[...] those of you unfamiliar with the Edenfantasys linking fiasco. MayMay described this in great technical detail in his post( Please read his post first other wise much of this may not make sense). But in short Edenfantasys [...]
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by My Beautiful Kind Profile: “Sex, like a bright candle, has no innate morality” « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
28 Oct 2010 at 22:14
[...] entry with the answers she solicited from me after I noted her strong and growing associations with EdenFantasys, the unethical sex toy company, would give me pause in associating my work with [...]
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by Search for pictures of men being submissive, and you end up seeing pictures of women being dominant « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
27 Nov 2010 at 05:38
[...] integrity and, despite my helping him cut his podcast costs in half, he chose to stay sponsored by EdenFantasys for “a new microphone,” which is a severe blow to the respect I would otherwise accord [...]
by Maria
23 Jan 2011 at 23:47
I’m a little late to the game, but I have always loved the EF website and as someone who feels strongly about SEO and usability – I am horrified to hear they are doing this. They won’t be getting any business from me until this stops.
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by Kink.com’s correspondent incompetence or deliberate malfeasance? « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
13 Feb 2011 at 23:47
[...] It’s fair to say staying on the “good side” of Kink, Inc. employees is a prerequisite for models, but a luxury for bloggers like me—and I can do without such luxuries. There’s only one other company of analogous size whose PR efforts are as skillful, and I was not above publishing email correspondence with them, either: EdenFantasys. [...]
by Sonya
15 Feb 2011 at 20:18
Love this post
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by Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher – Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011 « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
30 Mar 2011 at 12:37
[...] being used by Internet sex toy retailer EdenFantasys on two of my blogs on different domains. When a commenter expressed concern that I’d receive a cease-and-desist letter from EdenFantasys I suggested that they copy and cross-post my exposé to their own blog, which they did. As more and [...]
by Tony
01 Apr 2011 at 09:53
So what’s with the nofollow links on these comments? Seems a bit pot and kettle.
by Dave
03 Apr 2011 at 02:32
“EdenFantasys’s publishing platform has effectively outsourced the task of “link farming” (a questionable Search Engine Marketing [SEM] technique) to sites with which they have “an ongoing relationship,” such as AlterNet.org, other large news hubs, and individual bloggers’ blogs.”
Google seem to be getting better at filtering and are evolving all the time. To the best of my knowledge, link farms are now practically useless.
Apart from that, it’s hardly a fair trade for you to link directly to their site and they not give a reciprocal link. Saying they have a link on another site going to yours is not reciprocal in the ‘eyes’ of the google bot.
Dave
Webmaster of – Interview Questions and Answers
by maymay
03 Apr 2011 at 11:13
No, it’s not, Tony.
by Jeff
04 Apr 2011 at 10:47
Haha wow this is amazing, SEX & SEO in one blog? I LOVE it!
by Robert Miras
30 Apr 2011 at 14:08
Thank you for this thorough investigative information about EDENFANTASY ‘s unethical behavior.
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by Backdoor access to your FetLife profile remained open permanently « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
14 Dec 2011 at 22:03
[...] If you already knew that you currently have little to no protection when using FetLife and you chose not to do anything differently in light of that—if you already knew the emperor is naked and you chose to pretend that he is clothed anyway—then, great! More power to your polite fiction! However, if you falsely believed you were secure because you were intentionally or accidentally misled, then I say shame on those who mislead you. [...]
by Mantis23
10 Feb 2012 at 13:10
Hi! I’m a bit confused, because I reached this blog post by following a link from the EdenFantasys website to read a full review on a locking toy box, which (apparently) took me to Toys for Tarts, and then another link to here. Would I have been able to get here, and post a comment, if I weren’t actually on the maybemaimed.com site? Is it possible EF has stopped doing this self-referential thing (which I admit I don’t fully understand, as a layperson)?
Thanks for helping me decide whether to continue purchasing from EF!
by maymay
10 Feb 2012 at 15:46
Mantis, I just took another look right now and EF is still doing this sneaky “linklike” redirection. Remember, Mantis, that if you haven’t disabled JavaScript in your browser then it will appear as though real links are working. They’re not real links, though, as my post details, above.
So if what you want to know is whether EF is still doing unethical things on the Internet, the answer is yes. What you choose to do with that knowledge is up to you. I, for one, have made my position on EdenFantasys clear.
by Mantis23
12 Feb 2012 at 17:26
Thank you for the response – I was just confused because I didn’t think I should be able to get to your actual blog, and post on it, by following links from EF, if they aren’t really linking to the external site they appear to link to. Maybe it only happens with some of their links…or…
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by The Moronosphere » It’s epic. It’s detailed. It’s devastating. And it’s hilarious
14 Apr 2012 at 17:10
[...] better is the post that stirred all this, over at MayMay’s blog, Maybe [...]