[Updated....scroll to bottom.] [Updated again.]
Since I last posted on the troubles of the EdenFantasys.com website and their basic fundamental issues with manipulating outside links and denying outsiders their proper credit (what we would call pixellized plagarism), things have only blown up to a magnitude.
For those of you not familiar, EF was busted by sex blogger Maymay (over at Maybe Maimed, But Not Harmed) for using crafty Javascript chicanery to basically cloak links gathered from outside sources so that they would become invisible to search engine bots like Google and Yahoo!, converting them to internal links within their family of sites. The effect was to artificially game the system to boost their own site read counts at the expense of the original creators of links that they were, in effect, stealing from. To put it directly, EF was taking links from outside sources (and aggressively recruiting them, too, through “link exchanges” and affiliate agreements with other sites like AlterNet.org) and creating a virtual black hole “Roach Hotel” where incoming links get in, but links to the outside were hijacked and scrubbed before they got out, so that bots could not count them correctly.
This would be bad enough, were it not for the fact that EdenFantasys had also been building up a pretty bad reputation before hand for its treatment of some popularly known and loved sex bloggers. Always Aroused Girl (AAG), for example, has well documented her battle with EF regarding some back pay that was due her for work rendered with them. Essem ‘Em has her own stories of how she was treated by the brass of EF after a Google Document spreadsheet containing personal information was inadvertently leaked to the public.And then there is the story of Epiphora, who got booted from the EF forums under what can only be described as “questionable circumstances”. Maymay himself originally started his own investigation leading to his groundbreaking post because the EF brass raised hell over his own site using a link to an article that, while originating from EF, was also posted to AlterNet. (Apparently, the idea that contributors can often link to different sites got lost in the translation..or EF was just that damn greedy for the Alexa ratings.)
Well….the popular saying goes that the original crime usually doesn’t kill as much as the attempt to cover it up. If the efforts of EdenFantasys are any indication, then British Petroleum might have a bit of competition in the Grand Cover-Your-Ass MegaFAIL competition.
There are so many ways that a company can react to getting caught doing wrong. Consider the following to be the official list of how NOT to come correct and resolve your behavior.
First off…it is probably not a good idea to respond to your critics by censoring them out of your forums. Especially, if said critics have caches to save their censored posts before you drop the hammer on them. Or..if they have their own damn blogs. Case in point: Epiphora :
Well, apparently my painful-to-my-eyes comment was TAKEN VERY SERIOUSLY:
I have been working hard to not only introduce Eden Fantasys to parts of the blogosphere that have never before heard of us, but also to get them comfortable with us. And that’s hard to do when there are people undermining that work, effort and fragile trust by seeking out reviews to vote down, leave snotty comments on, etc. This goes hand in hand with what I said in my thread about the Off-site Review Program — bloggers have their own voices, just as all of you do, and they’re entitled to use those voices to present their reviews, even if they do so in a manner that you don’t agree with or find appealing — or on a blog whose layout you don’t find to be visually appealing.
So by this reasoning, anyone who rates a review “not useful at all” should be worried, as should the people who agreed with me that the blog is painful to the eyes. And by the way, I do not SEEK OUT reviews for any reason. I subscribe to the reviews RSS feed, and only open reviews of toys that look interesting to me. But sure, go ahead and spread lies.
This part — this is the part that really got me:
Epiphora’s recent behavior is nothing new; we made the decision to permanently ban her because she is a repeat offender, and the fact that she is a repeat offender clearly shows that she has no regard or respect for the community — that includes all of you, not just the “community” in terms of the forums here on Eden Fantasys and the EF staff.
Excuse me, but how dare you? Did you really just say that I have no respect for anyone, let alone the sex blogging community ? Somehow I think my readers, followers, and friends would disagree. Entirely.
Apparently this has “been coming for a long time” and I am a “repeat offender.” Right. A repeat offender — and 2 1/2 year veteran — who was never warned. Never flagged. And who never committed any offenses worse than anyone else. The decision is final.
So, let me get this straight…..a well respected blogger gets run from a forum without any warning, without ever being flagged for her comments, and without even a wave…because she criticizes a blog theme as “painful to the eyes”?!?!? Did Sam Berg’s twin sister take over that forum, by any chance??
Ahhhh, but it gets better…turns out that when Maymay’s story broke and people attempted to use the EF forums to ask basic fundamental questions about their shady practices, the moderators’ response was to go to the time honored tactic of the guilty: They simply banned those critics and wiped their posts clean off the map. Or, to use a popular phrase down here: they “zipped” them.
An example from another sex blogger whom have had issues with EF in the recent past, BritniTheVagiwig from Oh, God, That Britni’s Shameless (from this post ):
I posted a link to Maymay’s article detailing EF’s unethical “linking” practices in the EF forum. As you know, I already posted about them here . Well, EF being the “transparent” and classy place that they are, removed the post . See? It no longer exists. But, fear not! I still had the page up and screencapped it, so you can see that this thread did actually exist.
[capped original pages from EF forum redacted for length, you can read them over there at Britni's blog post here]
[...]
If the picture isn’t working for you, AAG has individual screengrabs of the thread .
EF claims to be about “transparency” and “community,” when, in fact, they’re about none of those things. And this? Is complete and total bullshit. Anyone that still defends this company is unethical, too. There’s no defending this crap.
EDIT: I have now been blocked by EF, and was not given a warning, or an email explanation. At all. I just went to log in, and it told me my account was locked. I’m the third person that I know of. To me, it looks like they’re trying to get rid of anyone that could possibly know (and spread) the truth. The truth hurts, don’t it? That’s called “damage control.”
Not only that, comments are being deleted all over the forum. Comments are there and then gone. Threads are, too . Threads say “new comment,” yet nothing is there, implying deletion. Myself, Sex and Law , and Holly (Woman Tribune) were all locked out of our accounts for posting comments or threads pointing out the error of EF’s linking policies. [...]
Ahhh, but not to worry…EF justifies their censorship…errrrrrrrr…their protection of their assets from undue criticism.
And here is the bullshit explanation they’ve given, which as you can see, people are still letting them know is incorrect. The “examples” they cite aren’t even backing up their point. None of them use the same script that EF does, even though they’re citing them as examples. And anyone that tries to point that out, or why it’s unethical, is being deleted. You can read Google’s explanations of why “sneaky Javascript redirects” are unethical and wrong here . [...]
What…..bullshit, you say?? You mean, like this elongated post written by the president of EdenFantasys attempting to defend their linkage theft??
[Originally posted at EF's forum, reposted at AAG's blog here ]
Dear contributors ,
I want to address recent concerns about EdenFantasys’ linking practices.
I am talking about multiple links placed on our website by thousands of contributors: reviewers, forum participants, manufacturers and general users.Thousands of users post daily on EdenFantasys. These are posts on the forum, reviews, commentaries, personal profiles and today we even opened up our video platform EdenTube . This is all user-generated content (UGC) which requires special handling to assure our website is not damaged with malicious software that could compromise our commerce operations, credit card security compliance procedures, and overall could shut down the website.
It is a common practice on all user-driven websites, including giants like Facebook, MySpace, Yelp or any of the others. You read from time to time about disastrous outbreaks of trojans – virus software – inserted this way into platforms. When it is detected that the posted content contains scripting, linking or other coding symbols beside just alphanumeric characters, the standard coding procedure is to raise a security alert flag. Then there are two ways to handle this: a program can erase / delete all coding from the content or encapsulate it into a separate module that won’t be able to interfere with the rest of the website.
EdenFantasys uses high efficient and the most advanced Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX with DotNET and JQuery frameworks to handle this technical problem. As a matter of fact, our server logs detect over 1,000 daily attempts to insert malicious software on all available user-submit forms. These technologies allow us to be a safe and reliable place.Some helpful examples include these sites, which do the same JavaScript-based encapsulation:
[list of "links" removed because they all pointed to EF instead of the intended sites]
Those are just a few of the millions of sites who utilize this linking practice as means for protection of user-generated content on interactive platforms.
All linking within SexIs Magazine, on contributor profiles, and elsewhere on EF have always been encapsulated. This allows us to be able to display all of the content instantly without pre-moderation and to share traffic with our contributors.
If there is anyone here whose promise was not met, please contact us and we’ll address the problem immediately. We all appreciate your patience here. The allegations made by a few individuals are misguided, misinformed and surely confusing to most people. This is the stuff of highly experienced programmers and it is easy to twist such information out of context. I wanted to address it here for your reassurance. We care deeply about our community, and as you can see, this is another way we endeavor to make Eden a safe place to play and shop.
Eden is my greatest passion, watching this community grow and seeing people interact with each other on so many levels has been a dream come true. There is no other place like this, and I truly feel that we have the best community out there. We are looking forward to even better times and more exciting features in the future. Thank you to every person who has made Eden such a special and welcoming place!
And then, the lead programmer of EF decides to double up on the doublespeak.
I am the lead programmer here at Eden – here is my input, I hope it is helpful!
99% of modern browsers support JavaScript and it is turned on by default. On our website, we heavily use JavaScript, AJAX, JQuery Framework and XML in order to make information available faster, more secure. Most parts of our website will not work without JavaScript.
In most cases modern search engines do not understand the dynamic information, although it would be highly beneficial for us if they did, since they are missing a lot of information.
As software developers, we will continue to use JavaScript because we believe that the dynamic applications are the future of Internet and are better for our customers.
Thanks!
It would have been a wonderful defense….were it all true. AAG came up with the Word of the Year to describe this: “Bullshitilicious.”
This is bullshit of the highest order of magnitude, folks. It’s even more bullshitilicious when you consider the posts they removed from that thread before locking it:
And this, courtesy of Mistress Kay :
Or this, courtesy of Sex & Law :
Why did EF not want these questions raised? Because any explanations they can give are nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
All sites need security measures in place to keep users with malicious intent from causing damage. I’m sure EF has implemented many valid techniques to deal with hacking and spam. But this linking scheme is not one of them. Ask yourself this: Would EF really be concerned about malicious content on Aslan Leather’s profile page ? Isn’t Aslan Leather a trusted enough “partner” with EdenFantasys to be worthy of an honest link back to their site? The very simple answer is the best answer: Of course they should have a real link; a link that is visible to human eyes and to Google. Every verified manufacturer and contributor should have a real link, instead of an “encapsulated” link. This is the kind of link that reputable sites give their friends and even their competitors.
And Maymay himself took little time to debunk this mountain of crap (from here , also again via AAG ):
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 :
<a href="http://www.proteron.com/">LiteSwitch X</a> [Site via <a href="http://onethingwell.org/post/610183401/liteswitch-x">One Thing Well</a>
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:
<span ID="EFLink_68034_fe64d2">female consumers make up 56% of video sales.</span>
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.
Violet Blue (the Sex Blogger, of course) has already quaintly called EdenFantasys' sitch a "reputation crisis" . I'd say that it's more like a freakin' nuclear meltdown. Several bloggers have now joined in a very public boycott of not only EF's retail service, but also the services of SexIs, their online magazine (no small feat, considering that the latter features the likes of Nina Hartley and Rachel Kramer Bussel as regular contirbutors), and a campaign to get Google to intervene to sanction EF for violating their rules of proper crediting and linkage is also underway. Only time will tell whether the power of the wallet will be enough to shame EF into submitting to reality of Internet etiquette and protocol...but the damage to their respect amongst the sex+ blogging community may never be undone...maybe even as soiled as the poor animals off the Gulf Coast awash in BP's black crude.
A nice and complete chronology of linkage (all of it real and original, of course!!) to all of the gramd EpicFAIL that is EdenFantasys can be found at Heartbreak Nymphomania .
Update: Oh, nice going, EdenFantasys....or, as I will now go ahead and call them now, EdenFALLACYS. You couldn't help yourselves with censoring people who posted to your forum...but now you are targeting people who merely post criticism of you... on Twitter?!?!?
Quoteh Juliettia:
It seems that while I have broken no rules of conduct much less posted in the forums since Epiphora’s wrongful banning , that my own account was locked tonight without any warning or explanation. While EdenFantasy Staff cannot be expect staff to monitor the forum 24 hours a day you can bet that they have a watchful eye on twitter at all hours of the day.
Not more than twenty minutes after I tweeted to Epiphora to add me to her list of those who were leaving #Edenfallacys was I suddenly logged off of my EdenFantasys account. Upon trying to log back in red text glared on the screen stating that my account had been locked and I needed to call customer service.
WAY TO GO EDENFALLACYS ! You’ve banned/locked/’cooled-off’ my account due to something that I said off-site. Not only did you ban me based on something I said off site without mentioning you, you also did not provide a warning or e-mail as to your explanation of such. I know it’s not personal because other reviewers have voiced they too were locked out. Of course you don’t owe me an explanation , as you’ve made it clear you owe NO ONE a truthful explanation for anything. We’re all just lying right? Right.
At first I was on the fence of continuing to review for Eden after the way staff responded (or lack there of) to the concerns and questions surrounding Epiphora’s banning. However the recent behavior 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 account for no GOOD reason aside from being butt-hurt has only reaffirmed my decision.
We are not children to whom you can say, “YOU’RE GROUNDED GO TO YOUR ROOM!” *banhammer*, instead we are adults with real questions and concerns about the company that claims to care about what the contributors think. If you have nothing to hide then you would not be deleting posts and threads . Instead you would ease the concerns with an answer that makes sense rather than a pile of bullshit containirng bullshit examples that was proven to be bullshit . Sorry Eden, but some of us are not sheep. You can’t just pull the wool over our eyes and scold us for daring to say something that isn’t filled with the sounds of puckering lips.
It’s no doubt that Eden has fucked up. It’s not just the contributors anymore. Other sex toy companies and sex celebrities have noticed as well. Hell even Tristan Taormino retweeted the problem. This is growing and I cannot even predict the impact that it could have. As the saying goes, “Just one upset customer can be the end of your business.” That one then becomes hundreds. Word of mouth in today’s internet advanced society is a powerful thing.
Update #2 [5-22-10] : Epiphora just posted a scathing update that consolidates pretty clearly how assholic EdenFantasys has been, with ever growing horror stories of sex bloggers and former EF customers recounting their experiences. If EF was a corporation, then right about now they would be up before a House committee, under oath.
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