Frustrated with a site

[Guest Dagda]

Alright, some of you may consider this too off topic for this forum but I would like some opinions on this situation.

 

There is an adult website that I regularly visit (besides this one) :-) that I have thoroughly enjoyed over the years. I access this website with an account I purchased from them soon after they came online. The account was a lifetime account. And I do mean a lifetime account. I bought it in 1995 and it has worked like a charm.

 

Until last week, however, when I was unable to enter the site for the first time. :'( Naturally enough I sent a message to their help center asking whether it was a problem at my end or theirs and what I should do to correct it.

 

I was informed by their membership staff that since they had switched billing companies I would have to sign up again and that my previous account had been cancelled in January of 2000 :o (which was news to me) and that I would be rebilled. :-(

 

Their technical support staff, meanwhile, is very politely asking for more detailed account information while trying to track me down in their system.

 

Right now, I'm running with the tech support people because they have been helpful and polite. Hopefully tech support will get me reinstalled. But they may not be able too. But does this situation strike any of the rest of you as being an enormous and unnecessary pain in the butt? Any suggestions on how to handle this or what to do?

 

Thanks in advance for being such nice guys and letting me gripe.

Jason

[Guest albinorat]

You know, lifetime guarantee doesn't mean your actual life time. It means the life time of the offer that was made. So long as the web site and that particular billing company had that arrangement then you also had an ongoing deal under those conditions. Once those conditions changed -- new billing company -- you no longer had a deal but would be expected to re-negotiate. Bummer but standard practice.

 

Al

[Guest N]

First, a "life time" offer means as long as the corporate entity exists. Any agreements or contracts continue with the corporation.

 

You should tell them that you will report them to the interstate commerce commission.

 

Their explanation is bullshit!

 

Good luck.

[Guest N]

Further......report them to the credit card company as not living up to their deal!

[Guest Raffy]

Jeez. Is that why I got shut out of Bedfellow last week? I assumed my membership had expired, though I was expecting an automatic renewal and it didn't seem like it had been that long. They must count on on airheads like me not to harass them when they pull the rug out...

Give 'em hell for all of us, dagda!

[Guest EvilSwine]

Being an adult webmaster who runs free sites and hangs out on webmaster boards, I can tell you that they probably aren't jerking you around when they ask you to sign up for a new membership account. I don't run any pay sites, but I use them as sponsors for my free pic sites as HooBoy does with Absolutely Male, Club Cock, and Video Secrets, and there have been a lot of problems over the last couple of years with third-party credit card processing companies.

 

It sounds to me like what has happened with the site of which you are a member is that their processor either went out of business or the site dropped them as a primary processor for some reason. Adult free picture site webmasters don't like something like this any more than you do. The reason is that a third party credit card processor is the real owner of your credit card info and not the site you joined, unless they do their own processing and only use the cc processor for managing their merchant account and processing monthly payments to affiliated webmasters.

 

If the third-party processor goes out of business or is dropped by a site that uses them to run their processing, then when the pay site moves to a new processor, the new processor can't legally have access to the credit card info gathered by the old processor. Hence, the reason they told you you would have to signup for a new account and re-enter all your credit card info. The bad part about this for a webmaster who has used them as a sponsor is that if they are a recurring sponsor who pays the webmaster a percentage of the membership fees for the lifetime of a referred member's account, the webmaster loses ALL the members he's sent to that site under the old processor.

 

HooBoy uses Absolutely Male and Club Cock and they're both run by one of the oldest and best adult pay site companies in the business. You probably won't go wrong if you join them. You should also check out the Video Secrets live shows, though. I was going through their pics they provide to webmasters to use in promotion and they have some cute guys, especially one named Jarrod. And I haven't visited and used them in a while, but there's a guy named Kurt who works for them and who was on early mornings when I frequented them who liked to play with toys and who was a nice, friendly guy. And for you guys who have had problems with Kirk the escort, I remember popping in a few times to see his shows. The thing I remember the most about him was one time he seemed to be more interested in taking calls on his cellular and doing business than chatting with the people who'd paid to watch him. At any rate, they're a pretty good deal as they are a major video feed provider and don't charge per minute.

 

Sorry for the long-winded post...