‘Your Escort Site‘ uses the WordPress software. This makes creating and editing web pages quite easy, so it’s what we use for nearly all of our clients’ sites too.

Every time it is updated – several times a year – the new version of the WordPress software is downloaded and installed from wordpress.org, the website that hosts the development of the software. (It also has lots of other things for the software, like themes and plugins too.)

We are not the only people using the WordPress software – at the moment, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of all active websites use it!* The biggest is the wordpress.com blogging site, owned by the same people who own wordpress.org.

Would it be easier if three different things weren’t all commonly known as ‘WordPress’? Yes, but it’s too late to change things now…

.. so just remember that WordPress the software is a different thing than wordpress.com the website, even though it uses the same software as we do. It’s also different from wordpress.org, which is the website people like us get the software from.

* _{Amongst other things, this means if we disappear, clients will find it very easy to find someone else who can help them host and maintain it.}

** _{It does also mean that there are a lot of nasty people who specialise in breaking into WordPress sites – but we do everything we can to stop them, and no-one’s managed to hack a YES site yet.}

** _{They probably won’t be as nice though :)}

I recently set up email on a new server. All the test emails went off happily, so I started using it for family emails. No problems..

.. except with Yahoo, including the organisations stupid enough to let Yahoo manage their email for them, like Sky and BT who both put their internet customers on it. Yahoo send a ‘we’re never delivering any email from you, ever’ rejection message:

All messages from (your server) will be permanently deferred

Why? They don’t say – the message points you to a webpage that doesn’t exist. The real link gives the not very helpful info that

This message indicates Yahoo is seeing a high volume of emails from your (server), which is a characteristic of unsolicited, bulk emailing. .. We do not disclose further information about our filtering practices.

One of the joys of running your own email server is that you can see for certain how many a “high volume” is. In this case, it’s four. In a week.

Elsewhere on the mess that’s Yahoo’s ‘help’ area is the advice to “Send email only to those who want it” – each of the people who we’ve had problems emailing this week are friends who have emailed us – and run your email server properly and securely. Not that Yahoo would recognise a secure email server if they fell over one: hacked Yahoo accounts are the single biggest source of the spam that gets through the filters here (the victims are people I know, so their mail is treated differently to that from addresses I’ve never heard of).

But the thought to take away is simple: if you have a Yahoo email address, is this happening to mail from potential clients? I don’t know… and neither do you.

There are dozens of registrars, people who will handle the business of registering a domain name for you. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t need one, but the people ultimately in charge of the domains you want set things up so that in reality, you do.

For example, it’s possible to register a .co.uk domain directly with Nominet, the people who run them. It’s just that they will charge you £96. If you are a member, as any registrar offering .co.uk domains is, the amount Nominet charges them drops to £6, and so they’ll do it for you for about £8*.

Ever since one of the early registrars prepared to deal with the public – freeparking.co.uk – fucked up a renewal, costing me a much loved domain name about ten years ago, I have used 123-Reg.co.uk but I am currently wondering why.

In January, I noticed that according to their system a particular domain should have been renewed a week ago. ‘Eeek,’ I think, ‘I don’t want to lose it, I had better renew it now! I wonder why it wasn’t renewed automatically…’ Fortunately, just before pressing the ‘pay’ button, I check the details with Nominet and discover that it’s not due for renewal for another year and eight months. Using 123-Reg’s support service sorts that out, eventually.

Yesterday, I had a PayPal email regarding a payment to 123-Reg. Looking at the amount, it’s a .com domain for a year. ‘Ah, I must have forgotten to renew one and it’s done it automatically,’ I think, ‘How nice’.

Except that today, I had another PayPal email regarding another payment to 123-Reg. Looking at the amount, I go ‘What the fuck?!’ as it is for rather more, and I know that I have not either registered or forgotten to renew anything today. ‘That’s interesting, I haven’t had the usual invoice emailed to my account’s email address for either of these…’

It turns out that yesterday, they renewed a domain – without being asked or sending me any email about it – that does not need renewing until next June. Then today they renewed it again, this time for another three years. Had this not been done via PayPal, but done via a direct debit or card, I would not have had any notification of this until a statement arrived, possibly nearly two months later.

I am waiting to see what the response to my email to them is. I still like their control panel** but this is twice in one year that their system has decided to make an error to their advantage. And that’s twice too many.

So if you have any domains registered via them, keep a very very close eye on your accounts.

Update: They say that they renew domains for the same number of years as they were originally registered for. Which is fine, but the domain in question wasn’t originally registered for four years and thus even more shouldn’t have been renewed for five (one in June plus one plus three in successive days in July)!

I have had a refund for the big payment, but I am still interested in hearing how good the control panels for gandi.co.uk and portfast.co.uk are… Moving .co.uk domains between registrars is fairly simple.

* _{The difference between that and what you pay the registrar is partly their profit, partly the costs of membership, and partly the cost of having the systems that should make it easy for you to do it.}

** _{The website interface to manage your domains – it is much easier to get it to do what you want than the pain that is GoDaddy’s.}

…there are so few people offering website design on AW. They charge at least one credit (i.e. one pound) per day to have an ‘other services’ profile.

It also explains why the few on there charge between two and five times what we do.

One will also ‘rewrite your profile to make it unique and authentic for £80’ – there is obviously a meaning of ‘authentic’ we hadn’t heard of before :) – and even more helpfully lists profiles they’ve done so everyone can see how authentic they really are!

There is a lot of prejudice against prostitution* and so if you’re going to do sex work, your privacy is vitally important. There are people who show their faces on ads, but once you do that, you are potentially outing yourself to everyone you know and, possibly more importantly, ever will know.

So we take your privacy seriously. We take payments in Amazon vouchers, for example. This means that we do not need or want to know your real name, address or card details. It also means there will be nothing incriminating on your card statement.

And while we can do photo-editing to blur or otherwise conceal your face in photos, we’d prefer to talk you through doing it yourself.

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* Anyone who tells you that escorting doesn’t involve having sex with clients is after your money. As with straight men escorting women, the market for non-sexual escorting is tiny so there are only two sorts of non-sexual ‘agencies’ out there: scams and those about to go out of business. (It’s easy to tell the difference – if they ask the ‘escorts’ for any money whatsoever before they have cash in their hand from a client, they’re a scam.)

Recently seven years ago, someone asked what the options are. They’ve changed since then, but so you know what the answer was then..

Until 2019, you had two main ones:

1. Just put any email address as the contact email.

+ Easy to do

+ Could possibly avoid clients getting asked why they’re getting email from an escort site

+ You may have one already and quite possibly have a preference for Gmail / Protonmail / Yahoo* / Hotmail** / etc etc

– Possibly not quite as impressive or memorable as…

2. Have a ‘Name@YourDomain’-style email as the contact email. What it will actually do is just send mail onto a second email address which you tell us about.

+ Looks a bit more impressive and may be easier to remember

+ It’s possible to have anything @YourDomain sent to you, including misspellings of your name

+ If you have a Gmail account, it is possible to have that real address send as name@domain as well as receive mail for it..

– ..otherwise you will be getting emails to one address and replying to them from another

– It’s more work for us to set up

+/- You should know that email to your domain will be ‘greylisted‘*** to reduce spam. This involves delaying mail from addresses that you’ve not heard from before – including new potential clients – for about five minutes. Some other email services do this, some don’t

+/- You should also know that, as with almost any other email service, we could see the contents of mail to and from your domain if we wanted to. We don’t and won’t****, but if you don’t want to take the chance that we’re lying, it’s not for you!

Conclusion

Hardly anyone used the second option and everyone who did had switched to using Gmail or Protonmail when the imaginary PC***** that ran the mail server that handled their mail (and that for the IUSW) needed a big update.

At that point, it was much easier to say ‘Enough, we’re not running a full mail server for clients any more’, so use Gmail / Protonmail instead.

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* Gmail is not perfect, but we’re not sure why anyone would have a preference for Yahoo…

** … or Hotmail / Outlook Live, whose main feature is that it’s not Yahoo.

*** Email involves having the computer sending it and the computer receiving it having a little conversation. It’s not literally ‘Hello, is there an email server there?’, ‘Yes, I’m an email server, who are you?’, ‘I’m…’ etc, but it’s not far off.

The idea is that proper email sending computers will remember that and try again in a few minutes, at which point the mail will be accepted. Spammers, on the other hand, use programs that are designed to send out many millions of emails as quickly as possible, so they don’t bother with repeating first time failures. If everyone did greylisting, it wouldn’t work, but they don’t and it does – just doing this stops over 99% of incoming spam!

**** Not just because we’re nice and wouldn’t do such a thing: we also know reading lots of “I’m a special snowflake – will you give me a discount / do what your website says you don’t offer / meet me in five minutes / take cheques etc” emails is very boring :)

***** What a ‘virtual private server’ actually is. One big powerful PC pretends to be several smaller ones. They don’t actually exist anywhere but software can behave as though they did and they’ve made having an internet server a lot cheaper than it used to be.

We have had a couple of enquiries this week from people wanting a website for escort agencies. We’ve thought about it, including remembering the immortal words of Frankie, one of the mice from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but .. if it comes to a choice between [being pure] .. and on the other hand just taking the money and running, I for one could do with the exercise.

.. and the answer is, sorry, no.

Why?

Twenty years ago, as a prostitute your choices were street, agency or brothel work. The advent of places to advertise, mobile phones, and especially the World Wide Web changed all that and it’s now very, very possible to work for yourself. There will always be street work and we can see that brothel work is a good choice for some, but agencies are doomed to decline for the simple reason that agencies need escorts far, far more than escorts need agencies.

Neither of us know of any existing agencies we could actually recommend an escort to use. There are hundreds in London alone, but when someone on the SAAFE message board mentioned that they had worked for an unnamed one in London that was good but which had closed, it was possible to know which one it was! Agencies come and go, but good ones are like hens’ teeth.

Not that stops just about everyone and their dog thinking that they could run one better than anyone else. One of us used to work somewhere where there would be at least one call a week from someone wanting advice about starting a high class – in nearly five years, only two didn’t stress that – escort agency. After talking to them about it, I don’t think (m)any ever did do it.

For a start, the second you make money from finding someone escort work, you’re at risk of the laws against ‘control for gain’ – what replaced the offence inaccurately known as ‘living off immoral earnings’ in England and Wales – which carries a maximum penalty of seven years. (Is it sensible for governments to say that criminals are involved in running escort agencies while ensuring that everyone who does so is a criminal? No, but that’s the situation.) Plus on a conviction, the courts are also highly likely to go after your assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act, which leaves you having to demonstrate that what you own didn’t come from illegal income.

Then there’s all the other agencies already out there, the costs of advertising, the hours, the worry that ‘your’ escorts might be finding work where you don’t get a cut of the money they earn by having sex (and many of them will be), managing the agency’s reputation (‘punter’ websites may be a mixed blessing, but you will be judged ruthlessly by them), the overheads of having a decent security setup, etc etc. Oh, and don’t forget to pay taxes on the income – it may be money made illegally, but HMR&C don’t care about that and they actively look for escort agencies to find the ones that don’t pay tax.

We know more than most about what would be necessary to run an agency properly, and we wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.

So the best way of helping you is say, no, we’re not going to do agency sites because we don’t think you should be doing an agency. There are dozens and dozens of designers who will happily take your money and if you let us know what you’re being offered by them for what money, we can tell you if you’re being too ripped off. Or we may be prepared to offer a discount for group order of individual sites for people who want you to handle their booking procedures, but they’d have to be owned by the escorts themselves. It’d still work out much cheaper than a typical ‘agency site’…

Looking at how people find this site via searches, it’s clear that some are at the ‘thinking about it’ stage of considering escorting via searches like “Should I use a new name as an escort?” (yes, you should!)

The three most important things to know:

1. The market for non-sexual escorting is tiny, despite what the scams eager for their ‘registration fees’ tell you. If you were a client, which would you rather do? Pay hundreds of pounds (what the scams promise) for chatting for a few hours with ‘non-sexual escort’ or pay typically rather less for an escort who will be happy to talk but who you can also be sexual with? 99% of escort bookings involve you being sexual…
2. .. with men. Anyone telling you there is a market for ‘straight male escorts’ is after your money (and it’s not much better for lesbian escorts). Exactly why so few women want to pay directly for sex is an interesting question, but the main specialist sexual health clinic in London has seen over eight hundred male escorts in the past few years. Only eleven had any female clients (and eight of them had mostly male ones!)
3. Go to saafe.info for some wonderful advice and support from people in the industry. It’s best if you do that before starting – there are lots of pitfalls to avoid – but if you are already a sex worker, you’ll be welcome.

There are hundreds of ‘escort directories’ out there. Some are free to use, some want paying for ads, and some are somewhere in between, with both free and ‘premium’ (the marketing word meaning ‘expensive’) listings available.

But what they nearly all have in common is that they want you to have a link back to them on your site. It’s a crowded market for the wannabes – there are very few really successful directories, and lots of people who would like to make money off someone else’s sex work – so there’s intense competition for high rankings on search engines and ever since Google came along, links have helped with that.

For free listings, I can understand this. It’s a lot dodgier for people you pay to demand it too. As part of a previous job, I used to buy ad space in papers and magazines. They didn’t expect us to advertise them in return, any more than the advertising in the local newsagent’s window means you have to stick a card in your window advertising them!

The directories also tend to insist on having the banner on the ‘front page’ of the escort’s site. Given the awful clashing flashing banners that many of them want, all it does is result in front pages that are horrible to look at, especially as there’s no consistent size for them. Everyone except the search engines skip over them quickly.

It also doesn’t help that they want different HTML code to display them. Some want you to upload the graphics to your site, while others want you to link to images on their site (which means they can find out how many visitors you have!). Some want a graphic and a line of text.

It would be lovely if escorts could insist on a standard format for directory banners. This would include insisting on them being one size, not animated, with simple HTML to display it. People should also have the choice to have the graphics on their site.

Is there any chance of it happening? Not as long as directories keep being able to have people believe, wrongly, that escorts need them more than they need escorts…

They sound lovely: people fill in a form on your site, press a button and you get it. You don’t need to publish your email address, and you can insist people fill out various bits of information before you’ll let them contact you.

But they are really not a good idea. What you end up having is a program as part of the website that takes what people have entered in the form and emails it to you. It’s much easier all round if they just email it to you themselves.

Why? Think about what happens when you get the emailed form. If you want to continue the conversation, you have to email them back. How do you know the email address they’ve given is right? You don’t – it could have an error in it or it could be someone else’s email address entered as a prank. Some programs try to test whether an email address is valid, but they often get it wrong. At one point, no-one with a ‘someone@somewhere.info’ email address could use a popular form program – it didn’t think any valid email address had more than three letters after the final dot.

The same things apply if you want their phone number – lots of mistakes / pranks / expecting only American style phone numbers.

Spambots also love them^*, so you need to have some way of people proving they’re human^** and that puts some humans off from trying. While obviously you’d like some people put off from contacting you (timewasters etc) they’re not necessarily the same people.

So while they’re obviously possible to do technically, we won’t do them. And we’re not sorry about that :)

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* One of the first ‘form to email’ programs turned out to allow you to email anyone, given a little trickery, not just the address they were supposed to go to. Spammers loved that. If you’ve ever had spam that started with a line like ‘Form submitted’, that’s why.

** Typically the modern version of asking people to say ‘Shibboleth‘: a CAPTCHA – a task like recognising letters in a snowstorm, something humans find easy-ish to do and programs hard. They help cut down the spam, but what can happen is that the spammers pay people tiny amounts of money to do them. Or they have a porn site and get someone to solve your CAPTCHA before giving them access to the pictures of naked people. The people who used Shibboleth as a test killed people who pronounced it differently from them. CAPTCHAs can be very annoying, but at least they don’t do that.

Blogs allow you to show your personality in an easy way. You can post about anything you like.

You can also choose to allow visitors to comment, but don’t let anyone post anything – you’ll have a blog full of spam links to sites selling fake medicine, fake watches, and anything else that can be faked. (Why don’t we get ‘Learn how to fake orgasms!!! They’ll never know!!!’ spam?) By default, we’ll set things up so you have to approve any comment before they are visible to anyone else.