All right folks. FetLife’s founder, John Baku, unleashed a wave of pedophilic comments on an unsuspecting 9 year old boy. (Disgusting.) FetLife’s new community manager, Susan Wright, is telling a woman targeted by a convicted murderer that the other FetLife users who are sending her personally identifiable details to this felon are not in violation of the site’s Terms of Use. (Bizarre.) And the people who are continuing to post my full legal name and other information, despite many of my friends having sent me screenshots showing that they’ve repeatedly reported these violations, are continuing to do so.

And you’re on FetLife…why?

Because it’s the place where you find out about events? Check out FetLife iCalendar, an easy way to sync your Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, or any other calendaring application with FetLife events. (Yup, I said “sync.”)

Because you don’t want to lose all your account history and FetLife offers no way for you to get it? Check out this free FetLife Export tool, which comes complete with a video walkthrough for making a full backup of your FetLife account.

Because your writings are on FetLife and it’d be a pain to move them to another blogging platform? Last night, I wrote a WordPress plugin that automagically imports your FetLife Writings from FetLife.com into your WordPres blog. It’s called the WP FetLife Importer and as soon as it gets now that it’s approved, you can download and install WP FetLife Importer directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Until then, you can download a copy from my staging server.

If your blog is on WordPress.com rather than your own server where you can install plugins, try the FetLife to WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) Generator instead.

Recently, I got some email from folks who run a BDSM/fetish group concerned that FetLife isn’t the best place for them to be. (Y’think?) Moreover, although they had come to rely on the site for just about everything, they had no way to contact the over 2,000 members in their FetLife group informing them that they’d like to transition away from FetLife.

Turns out, I’m getting more and more requests from folks who are beginning to realize that FetLife is exploiting them and not letting them leave easily. When a company, or a service, or a person, tells you that you need them to survive, and at the same time they hinder your attempts to leave, what you’ve got is an abusive relationship.

And while I can continue to say “I told you so” until the cows come home, I’m taking a different approach this time.

• If you’re an individual person and you want some help escaping FetLife, leave a comment or make a request for some code and I might be able to make an exporter/importer/content migration tool for you.
• If you’re an organization or a group, check out my (still very new) Escape from FetLife page and ask me for a quote. I can make hours upon hours of labor-intensive work moving content out of FetLife as easy as…well, as easy as clicking a button. (Don’t believe me? Try any of the tools, above.)

I was a professional Web developer and free software programmer for almost a decade. If you (or anyone you know) wants help getting off of FetLife, let’s make it happen. (Because I can.)

See also: The FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine, and its accompanying analysis, “Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online”.

In this video, I’ll show you how to move your FetLife Writings and Pictures to a WordPress blog with a few clicks of your mouse using the free FetLife to WordPress converter. If you found this tool useful, please consider making a donation.

All right folks. The founder of the fetish dating Website FetLife(.com), John Baku, unleashed a wave of pedophilic comments on an unsuspecting 9 year old boy. (Disgusting.)

And you’re on FetLife…why?

Because your writings are on FetLife and it’d be a pain to move them to another blogging platform?

In this video, I’ll show you how to move your FetLife Writings and Pictures to a WordPress blog with a few clicks of your mouse using the free FetLife to WordPress converter. For this demo, I’ll pretend that I’m John Baku, that I actually had moment of conscience, and that I realized I need to ditch FetLife. Okay, here we go:

“Oh my god! The website I made is a terrible privacy disaster! It’s full of security holes! I’m misleading people about their safety and privacy online! Individuals and community groups, they rely on me and my team at FetLife to keep them safe and in touch with their friends, but we’re doing horrible things like censoring rape survivors, selectively enforcing our own rules, dictatorially blocking criticism using outright censorship and bogus DMCA takedown notices, and generally exploiting people’s trust. WHAT HAVE I DONE? I need to get away from FetLife ASAP. But how am I going to take all my years’ worth of writings, and my hundreds of pictures and journal entries, and photos of myself making racist jokes elsewhere? SHIT! I’ve locked people into using FetLife like the corporate scum I now realize that I am! OHHHH, WHAT AM I TO DO?”

“What’s that? Maymay wrote a tool to convert a FetLife user account to WordPress? Thank goodness! I’ll make a free, private WordPress blog and keep making racist jokes there. That way, fewer 9 year olds will be subjected to my terrible, terrible judgement and mocking sexualization. Thanks, maymay!”

You’re welcome, John. I’m still waiting for a response to the invoice that I sent you, but what-evs.

Okay, so, moving your stuff out of FetLife is really pretty easy. Just go to http://FetLife.maybemaimed.com/fetlife2wxr Enter your connection details—I bet John Baku’s password is “I’m an idiot”—and click the “Connect to FetLife and make my WXR file” button. Be patient; if you’ve posted a lot of stuff (like you have, John) it may take a while. This might be a good time to reflect on the horrific fact that the BDSM and fetish community have a 50% higher incidence of consent violations than the general populace, as measured by a recent NCSF survey. That means you can significantly increase your likelihood of getting raped or assaulted and all you have to do is go to your local BDSM Munch a few times! “Safe, sane, and consensual” MY ASS.

Anyway, you’ll eventually be asked to download a file. Save that file to your computer; it’s got all your FetLife Writings and Pictures in it! (I’ve already downloaded a copy, here.)

Next, go to WordPress.com and sign up for a new free blog. You can make it private if you wish, which unlike on FetLife actually fucking means something here. Okay, then click “Sign up!”

From your new blog’s Dashboard, go to “Import” from the Tools menu. Then choose “WordPress.” You’ll be asked to upload the file you saved earlier, so go ahead and do that.

After the file uploads, you’ll be given the option to “Assign Authors” to the posts you’ll import, but you can leave all the settings at their defaults. Then, click “Submit.”

WordPress will tell you it’s “Processing…” the file and, again, now might be a good time to reflect on the systemically abusive nature of the BDSM Scene as a social institution. It’s basically a worldwide cult that brainwashes whole demographics of people into believing that they need to suck some other demographic’s metaphorical dick to feel fulfilled. That’s evil. And people like Susan Wright, NCSF’s Executive Director and recently-hired FetLife Community Manager, are complicit in it.

Once your import’s been processed, you can return to your WordPress Dashboard and happily note your posts and pictures and all their comments were imported successfully! Here’s a couple. You can browse around and note that all the comments on his posts, all the post content, it’s all there. In WordPress’s Media Library, even the pictures on your profile in FetLife were copied to your new blog on WordPress. The images are now on the WordPress blog!

So that’s it! In just a few clicks, you’re able to take back control over your own content, to move it around wherever you wish, and never again rely on FetLife for anything.

What’s that? Still using FetLife because it’s the place where you find out about the parties on Saturday night? Check out FetLife iCalendar, an easy way to sync your Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar, and many other calendaring tools with FetLife events, without ever having to log in to FetLife ever again. (Yup, I said “sync.”)

My name is maymay, and I’m passionate about empowering people to own and control their own content. If you found this tool useful, please consider making a donation. Click the DONATE button, the link below the video.

And if you’d like to learn more, visit maybemaimed.com/escape-from-fetlife.

(Note: This post is a republication of my original post from January, 2013.)

Last October, I introduced the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) at the 2012 Transcending Boundaries Conference. In the final session of the conference, I facilitated a community forum about the tool and the issues it addresses more generally. Watch the entire session, “Help FetLife’s Rape Culture FAADE Away,” online or read the full transcript.

FetLife.com, an online meeting place for fetish and BDSM enthusiasts, censors the postings of its users when they allege other users of the site have raped, assaulted, or otherwise violated their consent, giving rise to a new grassroots movement within a youth S&M subculture committed to supporting survivors of sexual assault.

In this community forum facilitated by Social Justice Technologist and veteran BDSM community muckraker maymay, participants discuss the endemic problem of abuse within the BDSM Scene and brainstorm ideas for how to combat a terrifying status-quo. Using academic sources such as David Lisak’s and Stephanie McWhorter’s research on Predator Theory as a springboard, maymay introduces a new tool called the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) to assist the community in its search for strategies to fight the “hush-hush” mindset that keeps rape culture so prominent in formalized BDSM organizations.

“The BDSM community has had, in its modern incarnation, at least two decades to develop some system of self-policing to keep abusers out, and what it’s done instead is promote abusers to positions of power,” said one participant.

“Fuck asking permission,” maymay concurs. “Fuck asking for cooperation from the powers that be that have shown us that they’re not interested in doing anything other than continuing to silence and abuse their own institutional positions and powers to maintain a status quo that is actively dangerous, actively abusive, and only serves themselves. I’m over it. It’s done, and it needs to go away. And it can if we all cooperate on building tools like this, and promoting these tools to others.”

Learn more and spread the word about the FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) at http://tiny.cc/faade

Read a full transcript of this session at http://maybemaimed.com/?p=4531

An excerpt from the session:

[O]ne of the concerns that I heard that wasn’t raised here, specifically, but that I heard out there in the conference, was, “Well, if I use this tool, I’m afraid FetLife will ban me.”

Number one: well, shit, isn’t that kind of part of the problem? And number two: yes, that’s why we can’t trust FetLife and can’t communicate with them at all. Does that makes sense? Okay, I see nodding. Any questions about those two pieces?

False accusations: bring it the fuck on. And here’s why. In both situations, where the accusation is “objectively” true, whatever the fuck that means, and also in situations where it is not true, this tool will—and the use of this tool, and the reporting of these allegations, and the sharing of these allegations—forces a consent conversation to the surface and empowers people to actually deal with the issues rather than continue to sweep them under the rug, in several different ways.

If you have a allegation levied against you and you feel it’s inappropriate or unfair, what can you do? You can ignore it, such as we’ve been doing already. Or you can, when you see that you have a report such as this one showing up on your profile above orientation, looking for, etcetera, at the very top of your profile, and you also have this very lovely, provided by FetLife—thank you, FetLife!—editable box right here. It’s called “About Me.” I propose that you respond to the allegation in the About Me section. And what that does, is several things. Number one: gets information about consent violations and alleged assaults out of this tool and onto FetLife. Wonderful. Number two: it will offer us the ability to see how people actually respond to these allegations.

Now, currently, the state of affairs is that if you do not have an alleged accusation against you, you are perceived more or less to be safe. A safe player: “Don’t worry, this person’s fine.” The problem with this is, number one, you very well may have an accusation against you. There may very well be an accusation against this person that you don’t know about because this information is siloed. And that is what the whole ConsentCulture project, that’s what people have been reporting, that’s what people have been saying. In fact, in the live—where is it? Oh, here it is—in the data here, people are already saying here, “This person had a reputation for known BDSM-related consent violations,” etc. It would have been great to know that. But this person probably didn’t have any information about this. So, [FAADE] will surface that.

Read the full transcript….

See also:

• Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online

Did you know? Premium content that you “have to” pay for to watch on FetLife can actually be viewed by anyone, even if they never log in to a FetLife account (because FetLife “privacy” and “security” is piss poor). This means people who paid for a FetLife subscription to watch videos can share those videos with others using free, direct links that never expire.

The FetLife Video Sharer script:

Lets you share videos on FetLife with anyone for free. Gives you a direct, free link to bookmark so you can watch FetLife videos even when you are not logged in to your account. Send the link to someone without a paid FetLife membership account to make it possible for them to watch the video for free, too.

Learn more at maybemaimed.com/fetlife-video-sharer.

The most recent report filed in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife alleges abuse on the part of a FetLife Carebear:

It reads, in full:

Fetlife caretaker FAIL. This lady could see that I was being harassed and not only failed to help me, but suspended my fetlife account when I screencapped the abusive crap I was being messaged with to show people, and then issued fake copyright violation notices to get the evidence removed from being hosted. Fetlife do not care if you get abused, they do care to make sure no-one knows about it.

Anyone familiar with my work already knows that FetLife used numerous improper copyright violation notices (DMCA takedown notices) to try to wipe Predator Alert Tool for FetLife off the face of the Internet, and failed. I even sent FetLife an application to become a Caretaker touting how familiar I was with the process of DMCA notice and counter-notice (which I credit them for forcing my hand to educate myself about). For more than a year now, FetLife’s been smart enough to stop engaging with me.

But this report is interesting. Firstly, it’s a good idea. Report the site admins. I should’ve thought of that earlier.

More importantly, however, this showcases exactly why the Predator Alert Tool suite is what we actually really need: the “report abuse” button on websites shouldn’t go to the site admins, it should go to the rest of the user community.

Anaiis Flox has a new feature over on the Slantist today titled, “You Can Browse FetLife Profiles Without Logging In.” I’ll suggest an alternate title: “Everything maymay said about FetLife years ago is still true.”

The article also has a brief summary of some history only long-time readers of mine are likely to remember:

This is a replay of an incident that occurred two years ago when a FetLife user created a PHP proxy to illustrate the issues with FetLife’s insufficient concern for user privacy. The user, known online as maymay, had been a long-time critic of FetLife’s inconsistent approach to user safety, and was one of the loudest voices rallying for the use of cryptographic protocols at login (which FetLife finally adopted in 2011).

The proxy maymay created in the summer of 2012 accessed FetLife and made the profiles of public individuals in the BDSM community available to people outside the network. It took no time for this proxy to be coded, and even less for it to get to work, illustrating how false people’s sense of security really is on the kinky network. Because this was an activism project, maymay widely publicized what they were doing; unfortunately, FetLife refused to face the underlying issue, choosing instead to launch a campaign accusing maymay of hacking the site and endangering its users.

Since “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and “any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch,” FetLife chose to address their piss-poor security by pointing at me and shouting, “WITCH! WITCH!” And since the BDSM community has the social and technological competence of a Monty Python movie, most people reflexively shouted “BURN HIM!”

By the way, the PHP proxy still works.

So then I created Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, and when I presented it at a conference, the typical response from these “feminist sex-positive consent activists” was to point at me and shout “RAPIST! RAPIST!”

This should be one of those “pay attention to what they do, not what they say moments.” You don’t even need to look that closely to notice that the kink/BDSM community isn’t trying to end rape culture; they’re trying to eroticize it.

See also:

• FetLife lies. Like, a LOT.
• Got Consent? FetLife Doesn’t Get It
• National BDSM public relations group admits to mishandling $60,000 worth of individual donations, and maymay called it.

One of the most contested features of the Predator Alert Tools is that the report forms are unmoderated. This means anyone can add any information they want to the databases without oversight. If you’re used to using Internet tools that are tightly controlled by corporations (and you are), Predator Alert Tool’s lack of admin oversight may intuitively make them feel incomplete. But the unmoderated nature of Predator Alert Tool databases is intentional, and definitely a feature, not a bug.

Letting the PAT databases get spammed is a feature? Yes. It’s not hard to understand why. You have to remember that the whole point of Predator Alert Tool is to support survivors of sexual violence. One of the best ways to support survivors and others who might be vulnerable is to identify people who are unsupportive of tools that help users report rape. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that if someone is trying to destroy a tool that supports rape survivors, that person probably doesn’t prioritize supporting rape survivors very much.

People who try to break tools designed to support rape survivors are extremely likely not to support those who have had their consent violated. And it just so happens that identifying people who are likely to be unsupportive of those who have had their consent violated is what Predator Alert Tool is designed to do. Letting people attack PAT and then identifying who launched those attacks turns out to be an exceptionally reliable indicator—undeniable, even—that those attackers should be included in the database itself.

If someone violates your consent, you can report it. Likewise, if someone writes hateful reports about you (like “this person is a whiny drama queen”), and you can guess who did it, report that too. If you see spam reports (like “violated my consent by being hot as hell”) in the database and you think you know who’s doing it, report that too. The more someone tries to misuse Predator Alert Tool, the more information about their misuse is available. In other words, Predator Alert Tool is antifragile; damage and chaos don’t break the system, they help it grow.

Since the Internet is fundamentally a record-keeping archive, the “attack spam” itself is conclusive evidence of an attack. When the source can be identified, the people behind the attack have effectively provided us with all the documentation we need to prove that, at a minimum, those people cannot be relied on to support others struggling with a consent violation. Identifying the source of attacks against Predator Alert Tool is relatively easy, as I will demonstrate below. And people who attack Predator Alert Tool effectively self-incriminate by providing extremely compelling evidence that they belong in Predator Alert Tool databases, themselves.

Predator Alert Tool has already been the target of several useful spam attacks. I wrote up a detailed analysis of one instance in a prior post titled “Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online.” If you haven’t yet read it, I suggest that you do. It provides a step-by-step case study of how Predator Alert Tool can be used to smoke out people who are generally unsupportive of rape survivors’ needs, above and beyond its more straightforward use of warning others in your community about potentially dangerous people.

Predator Alert Tool has a cultural purpose beyond simple communication. It is designed to facilitate conversations between and among rape survivors, exposing rapists and rape apologists in the process. And, empirically speaking, Predator Alert Tool has been extremely good at that.

The remainder of this post provides details on this week’s denial-of-service attack against Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, a profile of the attackers in question, some information about mitigation strategies, and asks for input from you, the survivor support community, about how to best respond to such attacks in the future.

What a denial-of-service attack against Predator Alert Tool for FetLife looks like

Starting on July 16th, at 3:51 PM Pacific time and continuing until the following day at 11:57 PM, Predator Alert Tool for FetLife was subjected to a sustained denial-of-service attack that filled the database with large blobs of spam data. The attack ultimately prevented people from adding new reports of consent violations they experienced at the hands of FetLife users. Since PAT-FetLife regularly receives legitimate non-spam submissions on a daily-to-weekly basis, this means it is likely that multiple people who were brave enough to come forward with their stories of sexual violence were prevented from sharing them by FetLife’s cadre of rape apologists.

Instead, their attempts to post new information resulted in an error that looked like this:

When a Google Form is subjected to a denial-of-service attack that fills it with large blobs of spam data, the form can no longer be successfully submitted, as shown in this “Oops, something went wrong” error screenshot.

Currently, PAT-FetLife uses an “old style” Google Spreadsheet as its datastore. There are limits imposed by Google on the size of such spreadsheets, and by filling the spreadsheet with huge amounts of meaningless data, the attackers were able to forcibly prevent any other users from adding information to it. (These limits have been lifted in the “new” version of Google Spreadsheets, which Google says it will automatically migrate PAT-FetLife to sometime before the start of the year 2015. When this happens, attacks of this nature should be much more difficult to accomplish.)¹

Due to the way that the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife browser tool works, most if not all of this spam was never even visible to end users. This is because the client will display an entry in the database only if the person to whom that entry is linked has interacted with the page that the user is currently viewing. Therefore, the attack only prevented people from adding information to the database. It did not disrupt anyone already using the tool, nor did it block any information already provided in the tool from being viewed.

Earlier today, I was assisted in identifying the attackers as a group of FetLife users who were boasting about breaking the tool on their FetLife pages (more on that in just a bit). After doing so, I published an archive of the database’s spammed and inoperative state so that you can take a look at it in its entirety. I then restored the database from a prior revision, which also returned its functionality.

Update (July 20th, 2014, 1 PM Pacific): On July 20th, 2014 at 3:53 AM Pacific time, a renewed attack of the exact same type described above resumed. Once again, CarolyneTiler, whose legal name is Caroline Tyler and who currently works for EMIS, a medical software company, as an “IT Systems Support Consultant” in the United Kingdom according to her LinkedIn profile (public version), admitted to doing this on FetLife:

Screenshot of CarolyneTiler’s comments in a FetLife status thread reading: “I have done NOTHING more than use the public access available to all. I consider that this so called reporting tool is mainly used to harass and abuse other members of this site by those too cowardly to publicly state their issues.”

As of this writing, I’ve temporarily disabled the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife’s Google form submission (here’s an archive of that state) while I compose complaint letters to Caroline’s employer and Internet Service Provider. I am also looking for pro-bono legal representation from attorneys who have a record supporting sexual assault survivor’s rights. Please contact me directly if you know or can refer me to any such legal professionals.

I’ll re-enable the PAT-FetLife reporting mechanism after I’ve finished getting in touch with Caroline Tyler’s employer, etc., and I’ll post another update once I’ve done that. If I can get in touch with a lawyer, I’ll also do my best to contact England’s law enforcement agencies that oversee Internet crimes, so ideally this lawyer would also be at least familiar with “hacking” cases.

Thank you.

Just a brief update to show Caroline’s admission of guilt:

A screenshot from FetLife showing Caroline Tyler’s update: “Seems that MayMay is getting a bit ruffled about me filling his silly database with rubbish. shame!!!”

I will also note that I use gender neutral pronouns.

I’ve posted another update as a new blog post.

Profile of a FetLife rape apologist and Predator Alert Tool attacker

It’s illustrative to know more about who attacked Predator Alert Tool for FetLife.

As soon as the spam/DOS attack began, I suspected someone who was already listed in the PAT-FetLife database. So the simplest thing to do would have been to look at the recent activity of the users already reported. Sure enough, yet again, that’s all it took to find people bragging about having broken the tool:

A screenshot showing that a FetLife user named CarolynesRose (user ID 2940118) posted a status update about PAT-FetLife (formerly known as FAADE) being broken.

This user’s FetLife user ID is 2940118. That’s one of the FetLife users reported (numerous times) in the PAT-FetLife database. The first report about this person was filed on December 3rd, 2013, and the most recent one was July 15, 2014, the day before the spam attack happened. This user account is literally the second from the last report before the spam attack began; hatred for PAT-FetLife from kinkshit rape apologists is almost as reliable as clockwork.

This particular user is actually someone who’s interacted with me before, on Facebook. On April 16th, 2014, a Facebook user using the name Anna Dawn Brecht, born June 11, 1980 (and who listed her phone number as +44 7983 971104) messaged me:

Hello

I believe you are behind the FADDE application. I am nicely asking that you go to it and either remove the entry under MarmiteGirl…or at the very least remove my REAL name from it. A person in our area has beein using your data base not to report genuine threats..but to vent at people they have an issue with. Either way I am sure you do not want peoples real names being used on your database.

Anna

As you can imagine, I’ve gotten requests like these on occasion, and if I respond at all the answer is always the same. My response to Anna Brecht was similar to all others:

I have no problem with people’s legal names being used. I’m sorry that you have to deal with a person in your area abusing the system. If you do not already know who that person is, you may want to read the following articles that describe why I do not moderate nor will I ever edit, modify, or delete information that is posted to it: http://maybemaimed.com/2012/12/21/tracking-rape-cultures-social-license-to-operate-online/ and http://days.maybemaimed.com/post/62691251191/many-people-with-concerns-about-the-predator-alert Please do not contact me with this request again. If you do, I will block you. Take care.

After that, Anna Brecht blocked me on Facebook and I thought no more of it until I saw the following entry posted to PAT-FetLife on May 22nd, 2014:

This is the person behind the FADDE application.This claims to be there to protect people against abuse and non consensual activity..and name and shame people. The fact is this individual created this as hates the BDSM community and all we stand for. When nicely asked to remove names and leave comments his reply was

“I have no problem with people’s legal names being used. I’m sorry that you have to deal with a person in your area abusing the system. If you do not already know who that person is, you may want to read the following articles that describe why I do not moderate nor will I ever edit, modify, or delete information that is posted to it:Please do not contact me with this request again. If you do, I will block you. Take care.

Lets see how he feels having his personal name and details on his FADDE database. As he is the Abuser and the BDSM community is becoming the victim.People are using this site to vent grudges and make malicious statements with no accountability.Yes some arseholes may get mentioned but on the whole good people are having their real names and business posted on here and labelled abusers over personality clashes etc. Lets see if he sticks by his rule of not censoring posts when he is names a long with his facebook link.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=633290004

I think I might have literally laughed out loud but, again, thought no more of it. I am not exactly embarrassed about my position: I prioritize the ability of rape survivors to communicate over protecting people from having their reputations harmed by that communication. Period.

Anyway, it was a simple matter of following links from CarolyneRose’s (aka “MarmiteGirl”) profile to find the following gem posted by CarolyneTiler, CarolyneRose’s “Dominant,” according to their FetLife profiles:

A screenshot showing a FetLife user called CarolynesTiler boasting about being the person who “broke” the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife (formerly known as FAADE) consent violation reporting system.

As you can see, a user with FetLife ID number 13350 going by CarolyneTiler, boasts, Oh dear, I appear to have broken fadde a bit and then later, Well, it’s not dead but at least you can’t add any more :)

Chalk another one up for “Dear rape apologists, please try harder, it is far too easy for me to find you.”

What I find so telling about this example is that what appears at first to be a somewhat understandable request to be removed from the PAT database has obviously turned into a desire to shut the system down for everyone, regardless of its benefits for others. Anna Brecht and her cohort prioritize their reputations and, as the Streisand effect shows yet again, their attempts to remove information they don’t want publicized results in the publicizing of that very same information.

Only in this case, because of the cultural nature of Predator Alert Tool, it also tells a compelling story about how much (or little) they prioritize supporting people who experience sexual violence.

There’s plenty more dirt on these kinkshit rape apologists in FetLife, all easily exportable and then searchable. Here’s a thread on FetLife called “lowest form of scum” in which CarolyneRose and several others complain about being included in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife database. There’s your usual flailing about “outing” kinksters (which is not even a thing) and the classic dose of grandiose language that you’d expect from BDSM’ers. It’s amusing to read, if you’re into that sort of thing.

A few simple reverse image searches also turned up a trove of identifying details outside of FetLife. For instance, on Twitter, CarolyneTiler goes by @CarolineT1961. Could the “1961” be a birthyear? According to CarolyneTiler’s FetLife profile she is 52 years old, so it does indeed appear to be so:

A screenshot of CarolyneTyler’s Fetlife profile showing the ease of correlating information provided, in this case an age, to other social media accounts.

Caroline Tiler’s Google Plus avatar is also a picture she shared on FetLife. From that profile, we also learn that Anna Brecht has a Google Plus account, and that Caroline Tyler attended Elmhurst Primary School in Newham, followed by the Stratford School (also in Newham), and finally the Redbridge Technical College in Essex.

If she wished her employment history to remain more private, then she should probably not also have made the same mistake of sharing her LinkedIn profile photo on FetLife, too. (Here’s the photo link directly, so you can view it without logging in to FetLife.) I wrote up a bunch of privacy tips for FetLife users some time ago, consider reading them if you’re concerned about the ease with which information about you on the Internet can be correlated by someone with access to a search engine (like, y’know, everyone on the Internet).

CarolyneTiler, or, more accurately, Caroline Tiler, was also active on message boards, including GingerBeer.co.uk as well as contributing a post to TransgenderZone.com:

While it may not always be obvious by listening to what they say, these people—like most BDSM’ers—don’t really care about consent. And by watching what they do, which we can now all do in an unprecedented way thanks to the Internet, it becomes very obvious that the BDSM community, dramatically more than other communities, hosts the absolute worst of the worst when it comes to people who will actually prioritize consent—that is, they don’t.

Even the attacker herself, CarolyneRose says on FetLife:

In my view it was a good idea ruined by poor implementation and no moderation. It is used as a tool of abuse now sadly.

Caroline Tyler chose to use her information technology education to launch a denial-of-service attack against a tool that gives voice to rape survivors on a website that actively censors and silences them. She didn’t choose to contribute to it, or to copy it and make her own better version or “forking” in the lingo of open source programmers—the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife is an open source project, as are all the other implementations. I rest my case.

This is not a surprise to anyone who understands that, despite all their bluster, the kink/BDSM community isn’t trying to end rape culture. They’re trying to eroticize it.

What to do about attackers

The obvious thing to do in a case like this is to document what happened and then write reports about the people responsible linking to said documentation in the very tools they attacked. I’ve already done that for CarolyneTiler and everyone who metaphorically high-fived her effort. You can view the reports in PAT-FetLife just as you would any other report. And I’ve taken the additional step of writing a statement in Predator Alert Tool for Facebook about Anna Brecht, as well, linking to this post, since she was kind enough to give me her Facebook account, too.

Of course, feel free to follow any of the links in this post to the attackers’ conversations and chime in, yourself. In fact, I’d strongly encourage that. Remind these attackers that trying to take down what is still the only warning tool for rape survivors on FetLife is a shitty way for supposed advocates of a “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” so-called “lifestyle” to behave.

Beyond this individual case, it seems obvious that, in the future, it should be possible for people who use Predator Alert Tool for Facebook to view reports filed in Predator Alert Tool for FetLife and vice versa. Predator Alert Tools already span the majority of mainstream social networks; it should be feasible to link them all up across social networks. This might sound scary, but it’s something that your government (the NSA, GCHQ, and the rest of the spooks) already do. Only they’re not using that capability for exposing rape culture and its apologists, because the military-intelligence-industrial complex’s entire operational motive is rooted in rape culture, obviously.

But there are other, not so obvious enhancements that could be made to the Predator Alert Tool suite. I have been very vocal in soliciting ideas and support for these tools ever since their inception. Since then, some folks have contributed publicly, and a slew more in private.

What the tools need more than anything else right now is more people who are willing to speak up publicly—pseudonymously or not—in support of them, and against people like Anna Brecht who would attack them. Predator Alert Tool is a code hacking project, yes, but it’s also a culture hacking project. Even if you don’t code, using Predator Alert Tool to change the conversation about rape in our culture is something everyone—namely you—can do.

1. Not impossible, just harder. There are other methods of mitigation that the new Google Spreadsheets backend supports that will raise the bar, too.

This post is a brief update in Q&A form to address the most common questions I’m getting about the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife service disruption.

Why can’t I share information about a sexual assault that a FetLife user committed?

Due to a deliberate and sustained denial-of-service attack by a FetLife user, the PAT-FetLife reporting mechanism is unavailable. Please see my prior post for more details about this attack.

Who is behind this attack?

The attacker is not shy. She boasts about her actions on the BDSM/leather/kink dating website FetLife.com, where she goes by the username CarolyneTiler. Her legal identity is Caroline Tyler, a resident of Bradford, West Yorkshire in the UK.

Caroline Tyler’s contact information is collated on Pastie.

Whom does this attack harm?

The people whom Caroline Tyler is harming with her denial-of-service attack against Predator Alert Tool for FetLife are the people relying on PAT-FetLife as a way of communicating about dangerous people inside the kink/BDSM community.

Caroline Tyler’s motivations to attack PAT-Fetlife seem, at least in part, to be personally directed at me. However, attacking PAT-FetLife doesn’t harm me in any way. (I don’t use FetLife.) It harms people who want to remain involved in FetLife but who also want to have access to uncensored information about potential play partners. This kind of peer-to-peer reputation system (like “Yelp for BDSMers”), is something FetLife users have been requesting for years and that FetLife still refuses to provide.

If you’re worried about these attacks against PAT-FetLife hurting someone, it’s not me; it’s ethical kinksters on FetLife you should be worried about.

What can we do to deal with this attack?

In response to this attack against Predator Alert Tool, a number of people have expressed interest in helping to support sexual violence survivors by assisting the Predator Alert Tool project in both the short and the long term, with respect to this specific attack and to attacks in general.

For the short term, with respect to this specific attack

As stated in my prior post, there are a number of things we have done and can still do:

The obvious thing to do in a case like this is to document what happened and then write reports about the people responsible linking to said documentation in the very tools they attacked. I’ve already done that for CarolyneTiler and everyone who metaphorically high-fived her effort. You can view the reports in PAT-FetLife just as you would any other report. And I’ve taken the additional step of writing a statement in Predator Alert Tool for Facebook about Anna Brecht, as well, linking to this post, since she was kind enough to give me her Facebook account, too.

Of course, feel free to follow any of the links in this post to the attackers’ conversations [and contact information] and chime in, yourself. In fact, I’d strongly encourage that. Remind these attackers that trying to take down what is still the only warning tool for rape survivors on FetLife is a shitty way for supposed advocates of a “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” so-called “lifestyle” to behave.

Additionally, as a user on Facebook said:

Hey, EMIS [Caroline Tyler’s employer] is a company that does stuff with computers related to health, and rape is a public health issue, so having an employee using their computer skills to attempt to destroy an anti-rape program is the exact opposite of what they say they stand for.

I responded:

That’s very true. Probably worth bringing up with their HR department. You can probably find out who their HR employees are by searching LinkedIn for that information.

For the long term, with respect to attacks in general

A technological response is needed, too. PAT-FetLife was a prototype I created in 6 hours one night a couple years ago. Since then, I’ve built numerous additional versions of Predator Alert Tool (for OkCupid, for Facebook, etc.) that work differently in order to try out new models and technologies. Ultimately, the goal is for it to function as an Internet-scale reputation system that resists rape culture. That’s a hard problem because rape culture can’t be solved with code alone; we need a sociocultural response (see above, “with respect to this specific attack”) and we need a sociotechnical response.

Thanks to this latest attack, several extremely capable technologists have contacted me expressing interest in Predator Alert Tool and have suggested several promising design alternatives built on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). You can follow the conversation on Twitter.

Since I am only one person (who lives in a car and whose primary income is donations), I do not have the financial, emotional, or social resources to do all of the above on my own. As I mentioned on Facebook:

I’ll follow up any leads I have, but my time is much better spent devising a more resilient technological response to this [general issue, rather than this specific attack], because empirically speaking that’s the one thing I have been doing that [most] other people describe being unable to do. However, I am still just one person. My time and energy is limited. Your participation and collaboration is appreciated and needed.

Again, a number of people have already begun collaborating on that work. I will be happy to put anyone who contacts me directly in touch with one another so that you can coordinate those tasks and work more effectively together.

When will the PAT-FetLife reporting mechanism be available again?

After Caroline Tyler’s first attack, I re-enabled PAT-FetLife. The next day, she again attacked the reporting form. This shows a deliberate intent to keep sexual violence survivors from accessing tools they use to communicate.

Unfortunately, also as discussed in my prior post, there is currently no technological way to prevent Caroline Tyler from continuing to make the PAT-FetLife reporting service unavailable. That’s why people are currently composing complaint letters to her employer and why I’ve asked for legal representation.

Adding new information to PAT-FetLife will therefore only be possible when at least one of the following happens:

• Google Forms updates the PAT-FetLife back-end to their “new” Google Spreadsheets system. The timeline they provided for this is “in 2014,” so that could be a few months yet.
• Caroline Tyler stops launching her denial-of-service attack on PAT-FetLife, either by her own choice or by being compelled to stop through social, legal, or other pressure.
• A new version of Predator Alert Tool for FetLife based on the DAO technology I am currently exploring (mentioned above) is ready.

Quite a few years ago, when I was much younger and still naively believed the BDSM, fetish, and leather subcultures deserved any respect, I saw the writing on the wall and wrote an essay titled “FetLife Considered Harmful,” in which I argued that this subculture’s digital poster boy, FetLife.com, was “the worst of both worlds” with respect to both online and face-to-face community. Working with a number of collaborators, I developed a number of software tools to help people use FetLife in a safer and more personally empowered way, perhaps the most famous of which is the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife. But another tool was called FetLife Export, and it makes a wholesale copy of a FetLife account’s activity.

Using FetLife Export, you can make a complete, searchable snapshot of your own or any other FetLife user’s entire account activity with just a few clicks. The tool is very similar to wget in that it makes an archive of web pages, but in this case the archive is specific to a given FetLife user’s postings, likes, comments in group discussions, wall-to-wall conversations, and other FetLife-specific features. This is handy because it means that when you see someone make a racist or sexist remark on a FetLife thread, you can download a copy of their entire FetLife history in one fell swoop—everything they’ve ever said in public view on FetLife—and then retroactively search their past postings for other, similar or related remarks.

What they might once claim is an “isolated incident” will seem very, very different in the light of a complete historical log of their behavior on FetLife.

I’ve been using this tool regularly since it was first released. If you wonder how I can be so “plugged in” to what’s going on in the BDSM Scene, how I can so quickly connect the dots between who-knows-who, it’s partially because I make and use these archives to find patterns that you can only see when you surveil the entire BDSM Scene in near-real time. It’s an invaluable tool for anyone doing systemic analysis, muckraking, or investigative reporting about the BDSM Scene.

In this brief guide, you’ll learn how to install and use the FetLife Export tool on your own computer, and you’ll walk through a sample invocation with the help of a simple, text-based wizard.

What is FetLife Export?

At its core, FetLife Export is a very simple perl script that asks for a FetLife username and password, then logs into FetLife using that account and downloads the activity of whatever account you tell it to get. It can download your own account’s activity, in which case it also archives private messages, and it can also download other people’s activity. To do this, it simply reads the target account’s activity feed and follows all the links. So if the target user has “liked” (in FetLife jargon, “loved”) a different user’s picture, that other user’s picture and all the comments on that picture get downloaded, too.

Installing FetLife Export

Since FetLife Export is a perl script, it can be used on any computer that has perl, including Mac OS X, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. The first two systems come with a suitable perl out of the box, but Windows users will probably need to install perl themselves if they haven’t already.

In addition to perl itself, the FetLife Export script uses a number of functions provided by other perl scripts, called perl modules, that your computer may or may not already have. The FetLife Export README file explains:

Most systems will have the modules you need. However, if you experience errors running fetlife-export.pl, you may also want to install all the required components yourself. To do this, run the following commands after you’ve installed your Perl:

cpan App::cpanminus
cpanm WWW::Mechanize
cpanm HTML::TreeBuilder
cpanm String::Escape
cpanm Unicode::Escape
cpanm LWP::Protocol::socks # Optional. Only needed if you'll use a SOCKS proxy.

That’s a bit terse, so head on over to the “Installing Perl Modules” guide on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) website for more detailed instructions. The general idea is that if you try to run the tool but get an error that starts with something like this…

Can't locate WWW/Mechanize.pm in @INC

then you probably need to install one or more of the listed modules. In this example, the module that’s missing is the WWW::Mechanize one, so you should run the command cpanm WWW::Mechanize at your command prompt. Similarly, if you get an error that looks like this:

Can't locate Term/ReadLine.pm in @INC

The solution would be to install the Term::ReadLine module with a command such as cpanm Term::ReadLine.

If you’re having more trouble getting it installed than you know how to handle, feel free to contact me (publicly, privately, however you prefer).1

Walkthrough: Use the FetLife Export Wizard on Mac OS X

If you have a Mac, you can use the FetLife Export tool after it’s installed simply by double-clicking on the fetlife-export.command file that comes with the software (download the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle by clicking on the “.zip” link for the latest version). Opening the .command file will launch a Terminal window that looks like the following screenshot, and begin walking you through a series of question-and-answer steps to help you make an archive of a user’s FetLife history:

FETLIFE EXPORT WIZARD
This software is released to the public domain. Fuck copyright.

Make a copy of your own or any other user's FetLife account.

You will need a FetLife account to use this tool. If you don't
have a FetLife account, you can easily create one at this page:
    https://FetLife.com/signup
Creating a FetLife account is free and does not require a valid
email address or other personally identifying information. For
maximum security, create an account while using the Tor Browser.
    https://torproject.org/

Type your FetLife username, then press return: SockPuppet

This first prompt asks you for the username of the FetLife user that the tool logs in as. This can be any account for which you can successfully log in to FetLife.com. If you don’t want to log in as your primary account, you can always create a secondary, secret account (a “sockpuppet”) that you use solely for the purpose of sleuthing around the site. If you want to make extra sure an account you create can’t be traced back to you, consider using the Tor Browser to register that account rather than your regular Web browser.

After you type your username, press return to continue to the next prompt:

Type the name of a folder to save to, or leave blank to use the default shown.
If this folder does not exist, it will be created.
Save to folder [/Users/maymay/Desktop/fetlife-export]: my-fetlife-archive

This next prompt is asking you for the name of a folder to save the archive in. It suggests the folder from which you run the tool, by default, but you can type whatever name you want here. In the example above, I’ve typed my-fetlife-archive, so the exporter will create a folder called “my-fetlife-archive” inside the “fetlife-export” folder on my Desktop, because that’s the same folder where the exporter program is on my hard drive.

Once you’ve chosen a name for the folder of your new archive, press return again to continue to the next prompt:

Type the ID number of the export target. For example, if you want to
create a copy of JohnBaku's entire FetLife history, type: 1
Leave blank to automatically detect and use SockPuppet's ID number.
Export target's user ID: 

Now the exporter wizard is asking for the FetLife ID number of the user whose activity you want to download. The ID number is the last part of the URL in the profile of a FetLife user. So, for example, the profile URL for JohnBaku’s FetLife account is https://fetlife.com/users/1, so his user’s ID number is 1. If you want to download your own FetLife history (perhaps to make a backup of your account, or to keep a local copy so you can more easily search it, as I do) then you can leave this blank and just press return immediately, in which case the exporter will automatically detect and use the ID number of the account you’re logging in with. That’s what I did, in the example above.

The next prompt asks whether you want to use a proxy. We discussed proxies in detail when we learned how to use BitTorrent.

Use a proxy? (Leave blank to make a direct connection.)
If you want to use a proxy, enter the proxy's URL here. For example,
to make use of a default Tor Browser, type: socks://localhost:9150
Proxy URL: socks://localhost:9150

You can leave this blank to make a direct connection from your computer to FetLife.com, same as you do when you log in to FetLife normally. But if you want to make sure that no one can figure out that you’re the one making a copy of whatever it is you’re copying, then I strongly suggest downloading and running the Tor Browser and then entering its proxy address here, which is socks://localhost:9150, as shown in the example. As before, press return to move on to the next prompt:

fetlife-export.pl will now run with these parameters:
fetlife-export.pl --proxy=socks://localhost:9150 SockPuppet /Users/maymay/Desktop/fetlife-export/my-fetlife-archive

When prompted next, enter the password for SockPuppet.
Password: 

The wizard shows you the full command line whose arguments it asked for, in case you want to run the command again without its help, and then prompts you to enter the password associated with your account. This is functionally identical to typing the password directly into FetLife’s log in form on its website, except that what you type won’t show up as bullets or stars, so be careful to enter it correctly. When you’ve entered your password, press return a final time to run the exporter itself.

You’ll see text appear in stages that, when finished, will look something like the following:

userID: 163357709
Loading profile: .
Loading conversations: . 8 conversations found.
Loading wall: . 5 wall-to-walls found.
Loading activity feed: ........................... 842 statuses found.
 78 pictures found.
 19 writings found.
 249 group threads found.
Downloading 842 statuses...
Downloading 78 pictures...
Downloading 19 writings...
Downloading 249 group posts...

logout
[Process completed]

When the exporter is done, you’ll see a folder of the name you specified, inside of which is another folder called fetlife, and inside that one will be a complete exported archive of the user’s FetLife account:

The archive contains any public images the target user uploaded to FetLife, along with all public posts they’ve made, all saved as HTML.2 Since the downloaded archive is just a bunch of HTML files, you can use your computer’s built-in search tools (Mac OS X’s Spotlight or Windows Search, for example), to find posts and comments with any given phrase in a matter of seconds.

Additional, advanced FetLife data mining tools

While the above exporter software is useful for a lot of reasons—it helps FetLife users keep backups of their account data, saves their FetLife content in a portable, HTML format, and more—there’s another, additional tool that might interest you if you do any serious investigative work amongst the (obscenely corrupt) BDSM Scene, called FetLife Maltego.

This tool is a plug-in for Maltego, an application designed to automate the process of collecting information about people from public sources such as their social media profiles, domain name registrations, email addresses, phone numbers, mutual friend connections, public records databases, and more. Both Maltego itself and the FetLife Maltego plug-in (called a local transform) are beyond the scope of this guide, but there are some good Maltego beginner guides and Maltego Tutorial videos out there.

Happy muckraking! :)

1. One of the things this project is still missing is a simple packaged executable, such as a pp packed one, so if you want to help improve this process, the maintainers welcome patches via GitHub.
2. Comments in the HTML file also record the original URL that the page was created from, in case you want to give someone the live link on FetLife.com, if it still exists.

There’s an interesting discussion happening over on the rolequeer blog called “Decolonizing Kink?” in which a few folks who are sick and tired of the overt racism and other bigotry teeming from within the rotten core of the BDSM and fetish “community” are talking about what, if anything, can be done about it.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt recall that this isn’t actually a new topic of conversation at all. For those of us whose eyes, ears, and other senses are attuned to this sort of thing, there are reports of utterly grotesque, racist, sexist, homophobic, rape apologist, and ableist behaviors—to name just a few systemic issues—emanating from the very heart of the so-called “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” BDSM Scene. Off the top of my head alone, I can recall:

• A fetish club in Richmond, VA called Fallout thought it would be a good idea to write “nigger” on their club walls for a post-apocalypse themed party. (Pro-tip: it is never a good idea to use racial slurs as party decorations.)
• That time when FetLife founder JohnBaku made a “Big Black Cock” joke, and some of the resulting discussion on FetLife (note how the link is not actually to FetLife, for reasons that will become clear as you read on).
• BDSM Scene “plantation retreats,” which is awkwardly defended in public by a Black woman named Mollena Williams, who’s basically the Eric Holder of the BDSM Scene and recites party-line No True Scotsman bullshit like “BDSM is not abuse” on cue with the best white supremacists. (Plantation Retreats are not just an American BDSM thing, because BDSM is a globalized and industrial societal infrastructure, so they exist in the United Kingdom, as well.)
• That time when the BDSM community told sexual assault victims it’s all their fault, which it turns out is not unusual.
• That time when a Portland leather bar was forced to cancel a Blackface performance. (Pro-tip: Never book Blackface performers.)
• That time when a nationally renowned BDSM educator named Mark Yu raped a play partner, she posted about it on FetLife, got censored by FetLife’s “no naming abusers” policy, which encouraged numerous other women to come forward, and they were all censored, too, and then Franklin Veaux blogged about it. What happened to Mark Yu? He was invited to present at a national BDSM conference the next year, ’cause, y’know, serial rape? No biggie.
• “White Trash Luau” themed fetish party with prizes for the whitest-skinned contestant? Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.

Now, if you’re surprised by how many incidents I’ve just listed (and I didn’t even try to name any of the recent FetLife-involved murders!), there are two likely explanations. First, you’re not really paying attention, and you probably should be. But second, even if you are paying attention, it’s not actually easy to find out about these incidents, much less to actually remember all of them, even if you’ve been around as long as I have. And that’s no accident: the bad publicity incidents like these generate (and these incidents happen so routinely, and have been happening for so long, they’re like clockwork—here’s another example from 2009) are actively suppressed and spin-controlled by both BDSM public relations/lobbying groups like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (aka. the NCSF, whose executive director was once employed by FetLife.com as their Community Manager) as well as BDSM Scene organizations and institutions themselves. This includes FetLife.

In fact, the design of FetLife.com is itself built from the ground-up to be a form of damage control for bad PR. FetLife’s interface makes it very hard to search for historical information on the site, and this is intentional. FetLife also effectively repels the web indexing robots of Google and other search engines, making it difficult to retrieve or archive information from within FetLife’s walls, and this is intentional. When information about activities that happen inside FetLife are exposed to the outside world, FetLife’s army of volunteers strictly police external websites with illegal Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices (I know—I’ve personally fought almost a dozen of these legal threats from FetLife’s “carebears”), and this is intentional. (Need some examples? Try here, here, or here, again, just off the top of my head.)

Why would FetLife be so committed to quashing discussion about these incidents? Because without evidence of a pattern, the white supremacist narrative of “isolated incidents” is plausible. You can’t say that “the BDSM Scene has a racism problem” with much conviction unless you can also see the discrete instances in which racism or another form of bigotry was institutionally, even violently protected time after time after time, year after year after year, again and again and again.

You need a pattern. To establish a pattern. You need data. If FetLife can prevent historical data from being widely available, no one can establish a pattern of bad behavior. And, of course, this kind of “forced forgetfulness” is intentional. As I wrote the other day, “the right to be forgotten” is abusive:

The erasure of history is a defining element of oppressive practices on the macro-scale of history, but also on the micro-scale of interpersonal interaction. Men who beat their wives rely on the fact that their ex-wives do not warn their new brides that they are abusive assholes. Serial rapists rely on the fact that their victims will not have the benefit of communication with their former victims in order to perpetrate multiple assaults. The idea that we should give anyone the power to enforce a kind of “forgetting” on other people is such a terrible idea that the only reason it gains favor is either the shortsightedness or the intentional sociopathy of its proponents.

Quite a few years ago, when I was much younger and still naively believed the BDSM subculture deserved any respect, I saw the writing on the wall and wrote an essay titled “FetLife Considered Harmful,” in which I argued that this subculture’s digital poster boy, FetLife.com, was “the worst of both worlds” with respect to both online and face-to-face community. Working with some collaborators, I developed a number of software tools to help people use FetLife in a safer and more personally empowered way, perhaps the most famous of which is the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife. But another tool was called FetLife Export, and it makes a wholesale copy of a FetLife account’s activity.

Using FetLife Export, you can make a complete, searchable snapshot of your own or any other FetLife user’s entire account activity with just a few clicks. The tool is very similar to wget in that it makes an archive of web pages, but in this case the archive is specific to a given FetLife user’s postings, “likes/loves,” comments in group discussions, wall-to-wall conversations, and other FetLife-specific features. This is handy because it means that when you see someone make a racist or sexist remark on a FetLife thread, you can download a copy of their entire FetLife history in one fell swoop—everything they’ve ever said in public view on FetLife—and then retroactively search their past postings for other, similar or related remarks.

What they might once claim is an “isolated incident” will seem very, very different in the light of a complete historical log of their behavior on FetLife.

I’ve been using this tool regularly since it was first released. If you wonder how I can be so “plugged in” to what’s going on in the BDSM Scene, how I can so quickly connect the dots between who-knows-who, it’s partially because I make and use these archives to find patterns that you can only see when you surveil the entire BDSM Scene in near-real time. It’s an invaluable tool for anyone doing systemic analysis, muckraking, or investigative reporting about the BDSM Scene.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use the FetLife Exporter yourself, read my short tutorial guide, “HowTo: Download a complete copy of any FetLife user’s posts, pictures, comments, and other activity using the FetLife Export wizard,” which explains how to use and how to install the tool on your own computer. If you have trouble getting it working and would like to, feel free to contact me directly (whether publicly, privately, or however you prefer) and I’ll be happy to walk you through it.

Here is a list of the first 3,730 of FetLife’s financial supporters who are male- and dominant-identified. More specifically, this list contains the FetLife user ID number, name, age, location, and number of “friends” of most FetLife users who purchased a premium FetLife membership and who self-identify as male and one of either “Dom,” “Master,” or “Top” on their FetLife profiles. I hereby dub this the FetLife Creeplist, Volume 1.