Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

The FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search user script allows you to search for profiles on FetLife by age, sex, location, sexual role, sexual orientation, profile bio (a user’s “About Me” section), listed fetishes, what they’ve entered for “Looking For,” and much, much more. This user script implements and then extends what is, as of this writing, the most popular suggestion in the FetLife suggestion box:

Search for people by Location/Sex/Orientation/Age

Increase the detail of the kinkster search by allowing us to narrow the definition of the search by the traditional fields.

With the FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search user script installed, a few clicks will save hours of time. Now you can find profiles that match your specified criteria in a matter of seconds. The script even lets you send a message to the profiles you found right from the search results list.

This edition of the FetLife A/S/L Search script is an enhanced, extended version with full support for all genders and designed in a way that makes it immune to FetLife’s recent automatic banhammer.

FetLife A/S/L Search (Extended Edition) is the easiest, fastest, and safest way to search profiles on FetLife. It’s ad-free and free-of-charge. The code is open source and the service is maintained solely by donations. If you like this script, consider donating to support me in making continued improvements. But even if you don’t donate, you’ll still be able to use every feature, forever, ’cause that’s how I roll.

System requirements

The following software must be installed on your system before installing the FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search user script.

Mozilla Firefox

If you use the Mozilla Firefox web browser (version 12.0 or higher), ensure you have the Greasemonkey extension installed (at version 1.0 or higher).

Google Chrome

If you use the Google Chrome web browser (version 23 or higher), ensure you have the Tampermonkey extension installed.

Installing

To install FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search, go to https://maybemaimed.com/playground/fetlife-aslsearch/ and click the “Download and install” near the middle of the page:

Download and install FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search

If you enjoy this script, please consider tossing a few metaphorical coins in my cyberbusking hat. :) Your donations are sincerely appreciated! Can’t afford to part with any coin? It’s cool. Tweet your appreciation, instead.

If maybemaimed.com is censored where you are, you can alternatively go to the GreasyFork.org page for FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search and click on “Install this script“. If the script is also unavailable at GreasyFork.org, you can download and install it directly from GitHub.com.

Using

To use FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search, log in to your FetLife.com account and click the “A/S/L?” checkbox in the top navigation bar, near the Search box.

The “Extended A/S/L search” tab will appear:

In the “Extended A/S/L search” tab, there are four panels that you can open to modify your search criteria. You can ignore any panel you don’t care about. Clicking a panel name will expand it to reveal the options within. For example, clicking on “Search by Age/Sex/Location” will allow you to select search criteria for age, gender/sex, location, sexual orientation, and/or sexual role. Click on the “Help” buttons to the right of any option or panel to view a pop-over with additional instructions. Clicking anywhere outside the pop-over will close the help text again.

To expand the search interface, click the “Enlarge” button at the top-left of the FetLife A/S/L Search options. The button will move to the top-left of your browser window, the search interface will expand to fit the available space, and the button’s text will change to “Close FetLife A/S/L Search.” Clicking on it again will return you to the FetLife page you were browsing.

When you’ve selected your search criteria, click “Search.” The search panels will disappear and a progress bar will appear. When the progress bar turns green, the first batch of your search request is complete and you will be presented with a sortable table that displays profile avatars, nicknames, and any other account information relevant to your search. To view additional information about a profile, click the green plus button (+) to the left of the user’s nickname.

Due to the sheer number of profiles FetLife A/S/L Search (Extended) is able to search and the speed with which it can do so, results are both batched and paged. If your search query returns many results, you will see a pagination control at the bottom of the search results table that will allow you to page through the batch. You can also filter the batch using the “Filter results batch” text field at the top-right of the table. After the first result batch is presented to you, the “Search” button becomes a “Show batch number 2” button. Clicking on it again requests the second batch from your search.

To start a new search, click the “Reset” button.

Frequently Asked Questions

Before you report a new issue with FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search, please check to ensure your question is not already addressed in the list below.

• Can I search in a location other than my own city, state, or country?
• I used this script and FetLife banned my account. What gives?

Can I search in a location other than my own city, state, or country?

Yes. The original FetLife Age/Sex/Location Search didn’t provide an interface for you to choose a location directly, but this Extended Edition does. However, the location fields can be tricky for some. They are case-sensitive and the value you enter is matched against only one location field (either city, state/province, or country). This means you can only search for one of these at a time.

For example, say you want to find profiles listed as being in “Baltimore, Maryland, United States.” The best way to search for this location is to enter Baltimore in the location text box. Notice the proper capitalization! Similarly, if you want to find profiles of anyone in the State of Maine, enter Maine and again pay attention to proper capitalization. This may also return some results of profiles listed as being in a city named “Maine,” but hopefully you can put up with a tiny bit of imperfection. I may be able to fix this issue in a future version of this script, so be sure to keep your script updated.

I used this script and FetLife banned my account. What gives?

You’re probably confusing this script with a different FetLife ASL Search script. There are a huge number of copy-cat scripts out on the Web, and many of them are unable to search stealthily. This script is immune from FetLife’s auto-ban because the way it works remains 100% invisible to FetLife.

For some reason, FetLife decided to start automatically banning accounts that they suspect use tools they disapprove of even if those tools make your FetLife experience more of what you want it to be. They do this by trying to detect add-ons that “crawl” their website, that is, tools that load many pages at once. FetLife A/S/L Search (Extended Edition) is undetectable by FetLife because it doesn’t load any pages you don’t. Unlike the many immitations of this script, FetLife A/S/L Search (Extended) does not crawl FetLife and so using it is completely safe.

If you’re still using the old, original version of this script or installed one that a lot of other folks copied, however, your account may have been banned for “crawling” even if you weren’t actually crawling. (FetLife’s detection system just makes a best-guess, they’re not exactly very sophisticated.) The good news is that if you email the FetLife carebears you might be able to convince them to reactivate your account. It’s important that you insist you were not using any unapproved tools to increase your chances of getting your account reactivated.

FetLife A/S/L Search (Extended Edition) also includes a “Classic (slow) search” mode. Using that mode is generally discouraged because the Extended mode is faster and safer. But if you do insist on using the old “crawler” search method, this script includes an “Online search speed: Wait X seconds per page” option that lets you control how quickly your search proceeds. The higher (more stealthy) you set this value, the safer your account, but the slower your searches will be.

Is this legal? Will I get in trouble for using this?

FetLife A/S/L Search (Exteded Edition) is completely legal and safe to use.

Still, in a trigger-happy legal environment where people eagerly sue over spilled milk, it’s hard to say. IANAL, but the way this script works is actually pretty simple: it just cooperates with other copies of itself! No part of this tool involves malicious hacking, cracking, or theft. The code for the script itself is public domain (it’s not even copyrighted), the information it uses is all fair-use, and the tool as a whole is what the sometimes trigger-happy people in suits call a “transformative work.” (Look it up.)

FetLife has historically been very quick to mis-use the law for illegal purposes, and there’s no telling whether they’ll do the same again. But even so, the chances of you getting in trouble is slim to none. Hell, I’ve been targeted by FetLife’s lawyers for years for a bunch of other stuff and I’m still just fine. :P

That said, since this script is public domain, it’s entirely use-at-your-own-risk. There’s no warranty or customer service or anything like that, but I’ll happily refund the $0 you paid for it. ;)

Change log

• Version 0.4.4
  • Feature: Support all new sexual role options in both Extended and Classic search modes.
• Version 0.4.3
  • Bugfix: Correct an issue that sometimes resulted in an infinite “Loading” progress bar.
  • Bugfix: Correct an issue where search results intermittently failed to return correct user information.
  • Additional improvements to load capacity and network utilization now offers better performance, especially on slow Internet connections.
• Version 0.4.2.1
  • Bugfix: Stop automatic searching when end of results are reached in Classic mode.
• Version 0.4.2
  • Bugfix: Fix nickname detection on Google Chrome.
• Version 0.4.1
  • Google Chrome fixes.
    • “Extended A/S/L Search” in Google Chrome now loads when you click “Open Extended A/S/L Search” link to workaround Chrome’s strict settings.
    • Bugfix: Fix search results display table in Google Chrome.
• EXTENDED EDITION (version 0.4)
  • The “Extended Edition” adds a huge number of features and improves the speed, safety, and ease-of-use of A/S/L-based searches.
  • Feature: Massively extended search criteria.
    • Sexual orientation searches are now supported.
    • Arbitrary location-based searches are now supported.
    • Nickname-based searches can be performed by substring, prefix, suffix, regular expression, or SQL-like wildcard matching.
    • Searching for profiles based on the text in their “About Me” section is now supported. You can match by substring, prefix, suffix, regular expression, or SQL-like wildcards.
    • Searching for profiles based on a URL in their “Websites” list is now supported.
    • Searching for profiles based on a fetish they are “into” or “curious about” is now supported. Again, you can do substring, prefix, suffix, regular expression, or SQL-like wildcard matches on these fields.
    • The “Looking For” can now be used as a search criterion.
    • The answer to “How active are you?” can now be used as a search criterion.
    • You can narrow your search based on how many friends a profile has.
    • You can narrow your search based on how many pictures a profile has.
    • You can narrow your search based on how many videos a profile has.
    • You can now filter searches based on whether the profile is a “Free Account” or a “Paid Account” (premium FetLife subscriber).
  • Feature: Customized search results view.
    • You can customize the search results view to show only the profile fields you care about. You can always view additional profile information by clicking on the green plus button (+) to the left of a search result listing.
  • Feature: Integration with third-party services.
    • Integration with UserSherlock.com, and TinEye.com let you easily find FetLife users on other social networks like Twitter or Instagram based on their FetLife profile information.
    • Integration with Predator Alert Tool for FetLife (PAT-FetLife) lets you report users for sexually predatory behavior to the rest of the FetLife user community. This means you can now name names of rapists in a way that FetLife’s carebears will not be able to censor.
  • Feature: Immunity from FetLife’s anti-crawling technology.
    • Using “Extended A/S/L search” is completely invisible to FetLife, so there is no need of a “stealth” option. Stealth is built-in!
    • If you insist on using the old search mode, now called “Classic (slow) search,” the “stealth” option is still available to you and is recommended to avoid an account ban.
  • Usability: “Help” buttons thoroughly describe each control in detail and give examples of how to use them.
    • Clicking on the help buttons that are new in various parts of the user interface will explain the feature that the button is next to. Click anywhere outside of the help pop-up to close the pop-up.
  • Usability: Full-window search view.
    • Click the “Enlarge” button to make the Extended A/S/L search interface expand to fill the browser window.
    • Once expanded, click the “Close FetLife A/S/L Search” button to return to the original view size.

Versions of this script prior to 0.4 are considered deprecated and unsafe to use.

• Version 0.3.11
  • Improved stealthiness. This script is now “invisible” to FetLife because it no longer creates any extra HTTP traffic that can be used to detect its use from the network. Take care to use a reasonable “stealthy” search speed, for classic searches, though. All users are strongly encouraged to update to this version.
• Version 0.3.10
  • Improved user interface.
    • Detailed help for search options is now available as in-page pop-ups.
    • The “Online search speed” option is now presented as a slider.
• Version 0.3.9
  • New option to control online search speed. FetLife has begun banning accounts that use this script if the search speed is too fast. Setting the “Online search speed” value higher will cause your searches to be slower, but is less likely to trigger FetLife’s auto-ban.
  • Enable all F-like search options.
• Version 0.3.8
  • Disable MtF searches. Trans women are women.
• Version 0.3.7
  • Offer a “return at least X matches per search” option for finding more matches more quickly.
• Version 0.3.6
  • Added support for searching on Kinkster Search result pages. Useful for combining FetLife’s search-by-username with the more advanced search filtering options provided by this script.
• Version 0.3.5.1
  • Fix bug in Google Chrome where “send ”user” a message” returned null.
• Version 0.3.5:
  • Added support for searching profiles while browsing fetish lists.
• Version 0.3.4:
  • Added support for Google Chrome with the Tampermonkey extension installed.
• Version 0.3.3:
  • Added support for arbitrary location filtering by substring.
• Version 0.3.2:
  • Added support for searching user’s friend list.
• Version 0.3.1:
  • Added support for event attendee searches.
• Version 0.3:
  • Added support for group membership searches.
• Version 0.2:
  • Added support for State/Province and Country searches.
• Version 0.1:
  • Initial release.