Quote Originally Posted by punterminator View Post
Eh, no. Up until now I have been prepared to be on your side about the agency thing Patricia. I understand that you don't have the time/resources to track these guys down yourself. But I think that when you have the amount of overwhelming evidence that you have about this particular Cork agency then something really has to be done.

This isn't just a small annoyance here, it is a hugely irritating mess which really makes a joke of the independents section on the site.
These are the issues from our point of view:

(a) Our advertising manager (who has several years experience of dealing with escorts in Ireland) and her team is convinced that agencies that advertise as independents are not going to stop doing that, no matter what we do, so long as the situation in Ireland is that 'clients prefer independents'. They are honestly telling me it doesn't matter what I do, e.g. take ads down, penalise people for advertising falsely etc, nothing is going to change, independents that get taken down for being agency in our opinion would just change their name/photos/number and come back as independents again. In all my years running E-I, I have never had my advertising team tell me an idea is so completely unfeasable and so I have to take their opinion here seriously.

(b) I think you guys also underestimate just how hard it is to genuinely see who is independent and who is agency. The private escorts forum is regularly home to ads from highly regarded independent ladies looking for a lady to share a flat with, or reception services etc... Are we to deem 80% of the ladies advertised on E-I agencies, which is about the number I would guestimate could be if we considered using a receptionist or flat-sharing grounds for being an agency, or is it just the ones clients think are agencies we should act against? I'm not going to start listing names of well known independents that I know do flat shares sometimes or use receptionist services sometimes here, because that wouldn't be fair on those individual ladies, but I know if I did you guys would start saying "Oh yes well obviously she is an indepenent, that's clear because she's always on these message boards talking for herself..... but this other lady who uses a receptionist isn't....." and rules can't be unfairly applied like that. If we were going to have a rule on E-I, it would have to be applied to everyone, not just a few.

(c) I've come to see trying to decide who is agency and who is independent as beyond our remit. We are an escort directory. If we tried to start deciding who is independent and who is agency we would have to start getting seriously more involved with our advertisers than we are currently and, very importantly, legally, that would be suicide for this site according to our lawyers, and I'm not going to risk getting this whole site shut down over this one issue, which I can see is an annoyance to clients, but is it worth risking the whole of E-I over it?

(d) We have reviews and message boards where clients can say they feel an independent is an agency if they want to. Eliane hasn't a single review from a client saying they think she is an agency, but that's because no client has written one, which is not down to us. We have given clients the tools to make this site better for everyone by sharing info. It can't keep coming back to it being our problem to warn everyone of everything because we can't legally get so involved with our advertisers to know so much about them. We are working hard every day to try to make this site better, e.g. yesterday we added a site-wide search, in ways we can without getting on the wrong side of the law.

Pat x