October 22, 2014

Keep safe online

For the second time, we just had some instances of some peoples' accounts being accessed by other people.

The reason is now very clear: there are some escort sites who may store your password in clear text in their database. Some of them may then use your password to try and log in as you in other places (like for your profile on Massage Republic). They were changing links to the profile owner website to their own site.  These sites are obviously bad places with very bad people running them (idiots, basically).

Any decent site (like us) will never store your password in clear in the database. The full explanation is a bit technical, but I will try and provide the human version. When you register or change your password we take that password and transform it using some clever maths (which I don't understand, but it's the same one used when you login to your bank) and store the transformed password. The great thing is we cannot reverse the math (explanation is complicated) so we can never know your password. When you login, we have to make the transformation on the password provided and compare against the originally transformed version.

Regardless of how safe we work to make things on Massage Republic, you can still be at risk if someone else has your password. Especially if you re-use it on multiple sites. To keep it safe, use a different password on Massage Republic.

If you have any questions on this, please ask. It is complicated and the underlying reasons are tough for many people (including computer scientists) to understand.
October 20, 2014

What's wrong, and what's right?

You know the one thing which is easy?

It's to say any woman (person, men, trans and everything other favour of which is the beautiful diversity of humanity) who ever sells her company / time / affection / body / sex is in the wrong...

The people who say this are mostly middle-aged men (some of which then get caught doing 'wrong' - Ranker highlights 19 politicos doing wrong in the US, the same thing goes for politicians in other countries). Many of those politicians got back in office. Few of the girls got anything but hassle. We are right to pursue politicians with double-standards, but more-and-more people don't care. Hypocrisy is the real bad thing, not what they did or the people they did it with.

We are liberalizing as a global society (just think about it, men can get married to men in some places, girls can kiss each other in others, and generally we don't care), in some countries same-sex couples can adopt; 30 years ago it would impossible everywhere. Today, divorce is not possible is many countries, but girl-slavery has been reduced to increasingly less places (hopefully none soon). We should celebrate gay couples. We should also celebrate people who are sex workers; if people choose the profession. We should also scream and shout when government/police/others start deciding what people can or can't do - they were not elected on that basis. Much worse, are religious leaders doing the same as no-one elected them; they elected themselves.

Many 'liberated women' in the media scream about escorting being a cardinal sin against women. How much do they know about it? How much do they understand about why people do it?

What's wrong?

Everyone agrees on the answer. Co-coercion. slavery, enforced labour, trafficking, and every other sort of pressure that can be put on a woman to provide sex to to customer. This disgusts everyone.

What's not wrong?

Anything else: what a woman - or man or TS - decides to do with their body with a partner. It is the choice of each person.

You might ask about drug addiction or economic deprivation; these are serious issues, but are ones that need to be addressed at a societal level.

Why is Massage Republic here?

The site was started to enable more independent providers to get clients - on their own terms. For hundreds of thousands of enquiries, each advertiser didn't need to pay anything. We think that every time a person doesn't need to be on the street to get business it is one less chance for something bad to happen.

To our users

Thanks for never - in 2 years - doing anything bad. We really do appreciate that, your comments and help. Hope we can make the site even better for you in the future. Big kisses!

To our advertisers

You have been amazing. Advice, help and some useful stories. All these things helped us improve and make a better placed for you today. We love you all, big hugs.
October 15, 2014

Screen sizes / Payments

In the last couple of years, many of our advertisers and users have moved much of their use to mobiles and tablets. We have done a lot of work to make the experience on those devices work well - if you have seen anything wrong there please get in touch.

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Payments - we are aware lots of people are having problems paying to upgrade. We are working to get this fixed and hope to do so in the next weeks.

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Apart from the above, more advertisers are getting more enquiries than ever. So we did some things right. Any other comments are always welcome! Kisses, Claire.
September 19, 2014

Help each other out

We have just released a feature for our advertisers which we hope will be useful.

When you receive a message sent through Massage Republic you get a special link at the bottom of the email. You can use this link to report a person for bad behaviour: by email, SMS, or in person. Please do so!

These reports will be shared with other advertisers when they receive a contact from the person.

We hope this helps everyone share information about problem customers and makes everyone a little safer.


September 5, 2014

Back to school

A big shout out to those of our advertisers that are working mums. The oldest and - at times - one of the hardest professions in the World is even tougher if you have kids. Oh, yeah, it's already really hard having kids in the first place...

Opinion seems to be split between when or even whether you should tell your kids what you do for a living.

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of good advice out there, a quick Google got these:
When we tried to work out what advice to give, we realised we can't. There is no single answer. It makes sense that the best outcome is probably that your kids never know. For many people, this is the same as 'no-one' should ever know. But if your situation means that they might end up finding out, then this is something which you might want to manage in advance or at least work out how to do so.

The only thing that is probably seriously good advice is don't get caught in a lie: if you are confronted by one of your kids with the question and lie, there is a good chance you can seriously damage both your authority and the relationship. If they are asking the question, you are already probably in deep shi*... Most of those outcomes are worse than either working out how you will react in advance or having your answers ready for them. Even if it is true, you can't tell them that 'I have done this for you'. You need to explain much more about how you made your choices - or ended up without choices - to make them understand; and none of that is 'their fault'.
June 11, 2014

A new face for Massage Republic

We have recently launched a new look for Massage Republic. One of the main goals was making the site work better on mobile phones and tablets. We also took the opportunity to make the user experience better.  People are viewing more pages each visit, so we think it's working well.

We hope you like it! Any feedback is always welcome.

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In other news, we have carried on growing visits and enquires to advertisers. We have added an icon on listings for videos so users can see there is one there. It seems this is quite popular, so if you don't have a video on your listing consider adding one. We have some new 'stuff' coming in the next months - will keep you posted.
May 7, 2014

What can we do for you?

We're happy that we have been generating more and more business for our advertisers. Our stats show we have increased enquiries by 50% in the last 6 months. If you are not seeing more enquiries, think about improving the quality of your listing (title, description and services offered), don't use CAPS and make sure you answer questions.

Users are also giving us positive feedback. More people are asking questions on the site and leaving reviews. Great for everyone.

So, what next?

We want to hear from you! What do you want?

Some of you have already provided some great feedback, but we want to hear more. We're here for you - as an advertiser or user of the service - so we want to know what we're doing wrong, what we could do better or what you would love to have on the site.

Leave feedback here us or drop a comment below.

Thanks! We will really appreciate every comment.