During the December doldrums when some media spend a great deal of ink “covering” obscure, radical and/or unlikely-to-advance bills filed early by legislators, I’d rather spend the next 300 words explaining the time NonDoc was a porno site.
Porno, you say? Like the kind you find on VHS in roadside shacks along I-44 in Missouri?
More or less, kid. More or less.
That time we were a porno site
In the fine print at the bottom of our site, you might notice a subtle shout-out to Jeremy Shannon, the technical guru who built NonDoc.com. In preparation for our Sept. 1, 2015, launch, Jeremy put in countless hours of work, and he trained McBee and me to operate WordPress as best as possible.
You could say we were all learning.
One day, we asked if there was a limit to the number of alternative @nondoc.com emails we could create. Jeremy replied affirmatively, saying he could create editorial@nondoc.com, letters@nondoc.com and virtually anything else @nondoc.com that we could imagine.
He created those addresses plus “sex@nondoc.com” as a simple joke to prove the point. I responded “Ha,” and we thought no more of it as the site launched about 48 hours later.
That first week, traffic spiked as people checked out what we’d been up to in creating early NonDoc content. But as soon as the clicks started rolling in, we also started getting questions from people whose companies were running McAfee antivirus software on their networks.
“Your site is flagged as pornography,” we were told a handful of times.
“Well, McBee is pretty handsome,” I jokingly replied at first.
Banging our heads against the firewall
Days turned into weeks, and neither Jeremy nor I could figure out how to exempt NonDoc from McAfee’s pornography perception. We deleted the sex@nondoc.com email address, but that didn’t trigger any reprieve.
“We are not peddling smut!” I yelled at the computer. “Just politics!”
Calls to McAfee’s support system referred me to their website where I could file a challenge to the Robot Ruling of Cyber Potter Stewart. (If they knew pornography when they saw it, I figured, surely they could see we weren’t it.)
I filled out the challenge form and waited. Days later, I filled it out again. And again. And again.
Nothing changed. We were still blocked on various public and private web networks. I laid awake at night wondering how many readers we were losing thanks to misappropriated prohibition. Perhaps we should just post lewd imagery and own our McAfee-determined fate.
“Click this ad, donate $3 and we’ll photoshop your bits onto a tyrannosaurus rex!”
I had The Fear, and I was losing my mind.
‘#$%@^*$#(@)$@, you dirty #@%#$@%&!’
Eventually, I called McAfee for a 15th time (or at least that’s what it felt like). And, with McBee as my witness, I berated a veritable hierarchy of imbeciles and ingrates until I reached a Director of Something Or Another who learned that I own a Roget’s Thesaurus and a tongue laced with enough filth to be blocked by every web filter in America.
Somehow that did the trick, proving conclusively that the only possible way to fight cumbersome bureaucracy is by slowly working within its systems until your brain starts to boil and you lose your cool on some shit-heel middle-management weekend coke-fiend who is intimidated by the notion that you can find out where he lives thanks to county records.
Moral of the story?
We hope you like our humble little porno site. Beware the robots.
