Originally Posted by AnotherGrogan

Hello folks

I'm not in the Adult Website business (though I've often thought about having an adult site)

I'm a user who has been going to reallyeighteen.com (and sites like it) periodically for a few years roughly and I'd like to share my perspective on this.

The problem as I perceive it is that the site doesn't really host the content, the thumbnails are redirects that pass control over to other sites and each time you click them you may end up somewhere else. The links don't always lead to the pictures shown in the thumbnails and once you get to another gallery of similar redirects you just don't know where you are going to end up if you click those links. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Grannies, kiddies, animal sex... nothing to do with the thumbnail images.

Indeed, a few times I've ended up at galleries showing pictures of what are obviously children. I haven't worried that much about it because it was very infrequent and I just closed that particular browser tab if I saw anything like that, realizing it's not really their fault once control has been passed on to another site.

Yesterday, I noticed that there was no dns for reallyeighteen. At the time I thought it was just a temporary glitch, or they were moving or something. I know how to use whois and get the authoritative nameserver and then query that to get the IP. So I did that, and set up a hosts file entry for the site so the virtual hostname would work. It seemed to be business as usual, but I hadn't been there in a few weeks.

Today, when I checked and the problem still wasn't solved I started to suspect that something like this had occurred and started to search for answers. Google has de-listed them from their databases, citing a request from chillingeffects.org. So the only info I found was from a few (questionable) spyware removal sites with instructions for cookie removal (I use Linux so I don't give a shit about Windows malware, and I always delete cookies and browsing data after visiting adult sites so that's no problem either)

A Yahoo search led me to this discussion here and now I understand what's going on. Looking again at the registrar info, I now see it's in "Registrar-hold" status (didn't read the info that closely yesterday)

From my perspective, I'll not be going back to reallyeighteen again, because I simply don't want to be associated with the stigma of "kiddie porn". I like pictures of nice young ladies in the 18-20 age range (I'm not even especially fond of "hard core"), but I'm not exposing myself to some potential overzealous and righteous ISP employee for what I might accidently land on. It really got me thinking about that. Whether charges hold up in court or not, once you've been accused of anything to do with child porn you're finished.

It's unfortunate, and I agree that this should not be the job of a domain registrar. Not only that, how the Hell can they provide ID for the models when it's not even them who has "hired" them? Maybe I'm not fully understanding how all of this works, but it seems to me that perhaps slick networks just has to be more discriminating in their afiliations. Shutting them down is inappropriate. Cripes... drop their domains and let them transfer them or re-register elsewhere if they don't approve of the content. That's where the registrar's responsibility should end. Similar for Web hosts. Drop the customer if you don't approve, but don't fuck with them.

I'm sure I'm not alone in the way I think, so this has probably really hurt them. They'll not be able to use those domain names again... they'll have to start anew. This whole thing sickens me and that domain registrar can burn in Hell. I'll certainly never use or recommend them.

Again, I do not want to encounter child porn, but this is way over the top.