The VideoBox Blog

Update: We are officially out of shirts.

We have had a few t-shirts left over from a convention in Amsterdam this year (10 to be exact) and I’d like to offer them to the first ten people to respond in the comments of this post. There are 5 XLs and 5 XXLs, but they’re American Apparel shirts and sizes tend to run small.

So, if you’d like one of these snazzy shirts (I wear mine all the time), post your size preference (XL or XXL) in the comments section. Be sure to use your real email address in the form so I can contact you to get your mailing address.

Here’s what they look like:

Click the image for a larger view

Update: We are officially out of shirts.

The nominees for the 2009 AVN Awards were published last week and I’m very proud to announce that VideoBox has been nominated for Best Adult Website!

This is the first time we’ve been nominated for an AVN award and everyone here is very happy. The AVN website says that the judging “will be based on content quality, quantity and originality, site design, usability and features.”

I think we do well on most of those criteria, but I’m probably biased. I guess we’ll see if the judges agree with me next month. The award show is happening on January 10th at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas.

Alison,

Maybe this is more a technical question but why does Videbox distort HD videos rather than just letterbox them or just post them with the 16:9 aspect ratio?

Cheers,
jfro21

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Click image to enlarge

Many of you have noticed that VideoBox launched a new warning page last week. Most of the folks who’ve mentioned it were wondering about the identities of a few of the girls. I could just tell you who they are, but what’s the fun in that?

Instead, I’m offering a free month of VideoBox membership to the first person to name each girl numbered below.

Click image to enlarge


Submit your entries to contest@videobox.com with the subject line “Warning Page Contest” by 5pm PST on September 2nd. The winner will be announced on September 3rd. If no one accurately identifies all of the girls, the entry with the most correct answers will win. Good luck!

Hint: three girls appear more than once.

For the past month, I’ve had the pleasure of beta testing a small VideoBox add-on program that is designed to block selected member comments from the movie review section. This application represents the latest response from the site to satisfy subscriber requests. Let’s take a brief look at the program, which is expected to be made available to the full membership within the next several weeks.

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Today we’re launching SSL or HTTPS support for a number of pages on the site. This includes the login page, change password form and other user specific sections. You’re probably familiar with “lock” or secure icon in the bottom window of your browser. This form of surfing means the data transmitted is encrypted from your source computer all the way to our destination web servers. Thus folks in your office, dorm or other environments can’t “sniff” your login information. This is a great value if you’re browsing on unsecured WiFi or other shared networks.

For clarification, our billing partners have always received your credit card billing information in this fashion. Extensive testing has been done for the past few weeks to minimize problems. As always, please escalate any issues via the tech support request form.

P.S. I’m sure the uber geeks will point out that HTTPS doesn’t prevent MITM or Man-in-the-middle attacks are still possible. You pervs!

We’ve gotten several customer service emails lately asking why we don’t ban more members for making offensive or off-topic reviews. My feelings about this are mixed, but I think the opinions of paying members are really the ones we ought to be listening to. So I’d like to pose this question to you guys: should we be doing things differently?


Feel free to expand on your feelings in the comments. It’s a complicated issue and I may have missed a point of view with those four choices.

There’s a bit of mystery, I think, surrounding how we get content for VideoBox. There are many theories, I’m sure, but I think it’s time to set the record straight on a few things. In order to crack open the process a bit to the people it matters to, I asked our content buyer a few questions that will hopefully shed a little light on the topic.

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