Behave yourself.
You heard that countless times when you were growing up. You wished for the day when you'd never hear it again, only that day never came. As you got older you discovered that you had to check your behavior more and more each year. Now you know that "behaving" has more to do with censoring your baser reactions that it is about controlling your energy. You have hopefully learned that there are certain codes of conduct in public life, private life and business life. Some of those rules seem ridiculous but obeying them gets you farther faster than rebelling against them does.
Difficulty arises when one is faced with a situation where the rules of behavior are unstated or unestablished. The adult Internet is one of those unknown territories. The rules are hard to learn in this neoteric field because they are yet to be formalized or even written down. Until now.
Online porn slingers are a volatile breed. A collection of adult webmasters conversing on a message board is not unlike a pack of chimps. They get along most of the time but every once in a while one chimp will challenge another chimp. The simians battle it out till it ends with the winner fucking the loser in his little chimpy butt. Chimps have their own society and their own customs and this nasty behavior seems uncivilized to us humans. It works for the chimps nevertheless. The namelessness of the Internet removes numerous human norms and mores. We speak our minds because we can and there's an awful lot of virtual ass raping among the chimps of cyber porn. Knowing some of the rules of the Jungle before you enter will help keep you safe from it's dangers.
In our series: Rules of Etiquette for an Unseemly Profession, I explained the nine rules:
1. Ignorance of Spam is no excuse
2. No statement is retractable
3. Judge not lest ye be judged
4. Trust No One
5. Expect No Sympathy
6. Read the TOS
7. Get in the Game
8. Play the Game
9. Understand it's all a Game
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Here are some new Rules of Etiquette for an Unseemly Profession taken directly from real-life adult webmaster experience:
Watch Your Mouth
You want to share? Good for you. Adult Webmaster boards and chats are freer that the average public forum. Sex is discussed and displayed and so are personal opinions, industry trends, current political topics along with a fair share of pissing. Freedom of speech is probably more practiced in ours over any other field. If you have something to say, you get a venue to say it in. What you don't get is the right to cause trouble for your peers or those hosting the platforms for your expression.
If you found a site that deals in illegal activity like child porn or identity theft, posting links in an alert topic on a message board is a bad idea. Regardless of your intentions, a link is a link is a link. The owners of that board can get in trouble for the links posted on their public forums and don't believe for a minute some person or computer isn't monitoring where you chat. The robots that scrub the net for hate speech and criminal movement doesn't look within context, they look for words and hyperlinks. A public forum is all well and good but take in to account the profession you've chosen and how many want it killed. Report illegal links/activities to the proper authorities.
Watch The Quiet Ones
The adult Internet has an abundance of braggarts and blatherers. Porn chats and forums are the prime format for networking and promotion. Individuals become known and companies gather affiliates by trolling the boards. Just the same, that big mouth with plenty of time to type reams of prose on a forum might not be any farther along than you are. Having a lot to say can mean one doesn't have a lot to do. The most well-known board hog isn't always the one who's got the knowledge you need.
Look for the posts and statements of the ones who aren't as visible, aren't as noisy. The quiet ones aren't that way out of shyness. They are infrequent in their postings because they are busy making money. They don't babble on about nothing. They wait for appropriate questions and timely comments. Those folks that post sparingly have the most to say and it's wise to watch for their wisdom.
Watch Your Asss
Somehow, somewhere along the line, someone's not going to like you. Perhaps even hate you. The reasons could be silly or serious but there's no escaping it. If you gain success, your haters increase their numbers by threes. Whether you're innocent or not doesn't matter. If someone on the adult Internet field hates you, you could suffer a great deal from their misguided wrath. From a virus sent through anonymous email to the jizz mopper who defames your ethics all over the net, an adult webmaster is dangerous enemy. They can fuck your stuff up good no matter who you are. Be smart. Don't give out too much personal info in public forums. Act like a civil adult and remember there are monsters.
Rules such as the ones I've covered so far aren't there to limit you or censor you. Rules happen because of a need for order and self-preservation. You don't have to abide by one single rule I've written but you might find your journey a more pleasant one if you do.