This is ridiculous and hilarious — CC Bill is supposedly the PayPal for adult sites, and they process transactions for hardcore porn sites. You know, like this one. Actually, it feels good to be bad like this… Here’s the email:
> Hi Violet–
>
> I think you will find this interesting. I wrote you last week to check out
> our website. I have put a link to your blog on our recommended links page.
> I’m in the process of putting the site together, so I applied for an account
> with ccbill. The account was denied because of the link to your webpage!
>
> Apparently, way down at the bottom of your blog somewhere you mention some
> guy with a “diaper fetish.” “Diaper fetishes” are banned by ccbill, so
> based on that one mention they won’t let me process credit cards with them!
>
> It’s not a big deal–I just thought you would be interested. We aren’t
> going live for another month, and I will remove the link before then, so it
> won’t cause us trouble. I just thought you’d like to know since I saw that
> you are having trouble with some photo sharing site also. I don’t know how
> thorough their robots are, I might just be able to link to a different page
> on your site.
>
> I did point out to ccbill that there’s a difference between encouraging the
> fetish and making money off it, and a reporter writing about it, and that
> google itself will return links about diaper fetish as well–is a link to
> google also forbidden?
>
> Anyway, go figure.
Tres hilare — the list of people who link here include Forbes.com, SFGate.com, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal… but add a blog post about one totally misunderstood fetish (from my SF Chronicle column, no less), and it’s too hot in here for CC Bill.
Update: A webmaster emails, explaining that CC Bill is actually discriminatory in their linking practices, in some seriously offensively stupid ways. I guess when you’re the only business that serves adult sites, you get to be as sexist and sex-negative as you want. to wit:
> CCBill has a lengthy history of webmasters coming into conflict with
their censor-bots. For example, one of Tasty Trixie’s sites was
threatened to be cut off by CCBill for linking to Margaret Cho’s
blog, which used the word “bestiality”. CCBill also has a history of
threatening to cease processing for sites that link to Scarleteen,
since it – shockingly – provides information about sex to minors. I
fought them on that a few years ago, and after a few days of not
having processing, I got a manager to agree with me that Scarleteen
was not forcing innocent children to watch hardcore pornography
Clockwork Orange style, but other webmasters have just pulled their
links because it’s less hassle. Usually, if you fight CCBill, and
talk to enough real humans, that they’ll agree that you’re not
linking to anything that violate’s their policies. (I use jpg
banners to link to [redacted], so they haven’t caught me for that
yet. They did catch me when I used the word “menstruation”, though.
You’re not even allowed to write, “I’m on my period” in your blogs,
technically.)
> CCBill is sadly the processor or choice for most of us, since it’s
cheaper than getting your own adult merchant account and provides a
reliable affiliate program to its customers. Someday, I’d love to
leave them, but I still need to find an adult merchant bank that would
accept *all* of my websites, including my menstruation content.
(There is a European biller that accepts bloodplay, but it means
incorporating in the EU, and I just haven’t wanted to bother.)
