Sending a “key” to one’s “showcase”

There are lots of things that A-M gets wrong, and some things it gets right. Actually… I can’t think of much that it gets right, it just happens to be a place where you can go to find married ladies who want to fuck. (And actually… most of them don’t want to fuck, they just want to think about it, and then change their minds later.) (Actually… most of them aren’t real in the first place, they’re either spammers or accounts that A-M staff created to boost their numbers.)

One of the aspects of the site that always makes me laugh, however, is how it treats your photos. Photos are obviously an important part of the process, you can’t know if you want to fuck someone until you see what they look like, so of course A-M has capabilities for handling photos. There is an option for public photos that anyone can see, and, given the nature of the site, an option for private photos that can only be seen by people you specifically grant access. All of this makes perfect sense. In fact, they even have some rudimentary capabilities for editing a photo to insert a mask over your face, so that you can have a public photo that really is you, but still protect your anonymity. Private photos can be sent or requested in isolation, or photos can be attached along with a message.

What makes me chuckle, however, is the nomenclature A-M uses for these private photos. You don’t “grant access” to your photos, you share your key. And They’re not called “private photos” in A-M, they’re called your showcase. It’s the showcase part that makes me chuckle; I don’t think anyone in North America can think of the word “showcase” without associating it with The Price is Right. Nothing on that site makes me more self conscious then when I “share the key” to my “showcase” with someone. It makes me feel like a prize – but in the cheeziest way possible. Am I “A NEW CAR!!!” or am I a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco treat)¹?

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the site’s functionality in this area, just that the way they market it seems kind of awkward, and it’s that one, stupid word: “showcase.”

Actually, since I’m here writing about it anyway, there are some things wrong with the functionality. Let’s talk about that, shall we?

Editing Photos

As mentioned, you can edit a photo when you upload it, to insert a mask on top of it or blur parts of it out, or do something to hide your identity (while still providing enough detail for potential suitors to get horny looking at you). Unfortunately, the editing features are terrible, and on the one occasion I tried using it I couldn’t figure out how to make it work.

Firstly, it seems to only work on certain browsers, which is ridiculous in this day and age. How do you have cross-browser compatibility issues in 2015 (when I tried to use the feature)? Especially when a website is all you do – overcoming cross-browser compatibility issues should be part of your core competency!

Secondly, though I don’t remember the specific details, I seem to recall that it was non-obvious how to save your changes, and how to make the edited photo public (but keep the non-edited photo – which is still there – private). So I gave up, and removed it/them.

It wasn’t a big deal for me, the photo I tend to use for my public photo is already cropped to not show my face. I worry about the effect this will have on women, though: are they going to get frustrated with this (as I did), give up, and decide not to bother with their profile at all? So many women are already teetering on the precipice, unsure if they want to continue on with adultery or not; it seems that we would want to avoid giving them one more reason to abandon the idea altogether, and go back to being a pure and virtuous woman who stays faithful to her husband. (But fantasizes about fucking a guy like me, who’s a good kisser and has a nice cock.)

Looking at Someone Else’s Photos

When I first started on A-M, way back when, viewing someone’s private photos worked like this:

1. You’d go to someone’s profile. She may or may not have a public photo, and if she did it would be displayed. It’s possible to have multiple public photos, too, in which case they’d all be shown as thumbnails. If you clicked the public photo it would open up full-sized in an overlaid window, and if there were multiple they’d show in a crude slideshow format².
2. If she also had private photos, there would be a button you could click to see them. If she had granted you access to her “showcase” then the thumbnails would appear on a new screen, with that same crummy slideshow functionality; if she hadn’t, then the screen would give you a message saying that you don’t have access, but you could click a further button to request access.
3. If you clicked that subsequent button to request access, the system would send a message to her, and she could either grant access or ignore it. (I think there was also an option to specifically say no, but most people were too polite to use that, and just ignored the message.)

Sometime along the way, however, that changed. Everything looks the same on the main profile page, the button to access her private showcase is still there and clicking it will bring you to that same error message page, except that now A-M sends the request email automatically, and the message you see is no longer “click here to send a request,” but, “your request has been sent.” This is a subtle change, but one that caused some confusion for me, for a while, when I accidentally sent a few of those requests before getting the hang of the new way of doing things. It still has the potential to cause confusion, actually, because there is no indication, on the main profile page, whether I actually have access to this woman’s photos or not – so clicking that button might show me her pictures, or it might send her a message requesting that I see her pictures, but I don’t know ahead of time which will happen (unless I can remember if she’s sent her access or not).

For this, I actually prefer the mobile site, where all of the photos – public or private – will be visible on her main profile page (once I have access), so there’s no confusion. The mobile site is shitty, I hasten to add, so don’t mistake this for praise, but at least in this area it got something right.

For women on the site – especially those without credits (which is most of them) – this has now become one of the standard ways of contacting someone. Rather than sending a wink, some girls just request my showcase photos. In most cases I ignore these requests, but if I look at a girl’s profile and she’s really interesting, I’ll reply with a real message, and attach my “showcase key” to that.

Watch Those Default Settings!

There’s one other weird capability available on A-M, which is that you can set it to automatically grant access to your photos anytime someone else grants you access to theirs. If I were to send you access to my photos, the site would automatically give me access to yours, unless you turn the setting off.

And that last part is the important part: this option seems to be turned on by default, which is fucking ridiculous. It’s a stupid enough feature in the first place, I have trouble figuring out why you’d want your adulterous photos to be automatically sent to anyone who sent you theirs, but to have it turned on by default is even stupider.

A-M: you do realize that the whole point of your website is to enable people to commit adultery, right? And that privacy is an important part of that?

Footnotes

• ¹ Do they still give away Rice-a-Roni on that show? Or am I showing my age? ↺
• ² Like circa 1996 crude. ↺