Ask Yourself

Does this make your spidey-sense tingle? It sure does mine:

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!

This makes it tingle even more:

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!

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.

EF is not a reputable site for many, many reasons. The exposure of this unethical linking scheme is just the latest in a long string of bad behavior.

Why not do something about it?

–also read:
Link Roundup: Eden Fantasys? More like Epic Fail
Eden Fantasys: A Sex Shop No One Can Trust
EdenFantasys.com Shoots Itself In The Balls…Again