Photos get some engineering love!
Over the past few months, we’ve been busy making some important upgrades to how we handle your profile photos. Our goal was to ensure your content is treated with the respect and care it deserves and we’re happy to report that the rollout went smoothly—which means you might not have even noticed anything happening behind the scenes!
Many of these upgrades are part of our regular maintenance to ensure Tryst.link can continue to grow with you. If you missed our last update, here’s a fun stat: last year, we displayed your thumbnails alone more than 9 billion times! That’s a lot of photos served! Some other key changes we implemented:
- We’ve improved how we create thumbnails means less of a chance of your thumbnails being cropped awkwardly, even for landscape photos.
- When you unpublish your profile, your photos will stop being accessible, even if someone has a direct link to them.
- A more faithful reproduction of colour profiles in professional photos. If you’ve ever uploaded a black and white photo to see it shown in colour, this improvement is for you!
- We’ve stopped Google (and other major search engines) from being able to index your photos in their image search tool. We did this in response to the many folks who emailed us for help getting Google to de-list photos after taking their profile down.
- We have always deleted photos associated with deleted accounts, and have enhanced the robustness of this process, further strengthening our confidence that no trace is left behind!
- And finally, after 6 years, we can finally update the watermark on your photos! You should see the logo update over the next week. So long old logo! 👋
The new way photos work also opens up some exciting future possibilities to bring you new ways to manage your photos and ensure they look as good as possible.
Online-only providers listing in other categories
We’re aware that some providers who only provide online services have been advertising in our in-person categories. This can reduce profile visibility for in-person providers and make it harder for clients to find what they’re looking for.
We want to make sure that our categories stay accurate and useful, especially for in-person providers. We’re working on ways to tackle this issue!
Thank you to everyone who’s noticed this and let us know. Your input helps us make Tryst.link better.
This month on Tryst.link
- More common languages are suggested first - We saw that a surprising number of providers were selecting not widely spoken languages like “En” or “E”. We took a slower look at usage and noticed that users who didn’t enter the whole language name were more likely to make these kinds of selections. Now, instead of showing an alphabetical list of results, we show the most commonly selected languages first, for example, if you enter “e”, you will see English first in the results.
- As an aside, we now have more than 8,000 profiles with languages listed!
- Profile contact email addresses are validated for correct format - We improved the validation around contact details shown on a profile to ensure that an email address listed is formatted correctly. While we were doing this we noticed that there was a bug preventing error messages from getting to you to let you know when there was a problem to correct so we also fixed that up. Now you’ll know what the issue was rather than having to guess!
Other improvements
- We corrected a bug that meant that when you are browsing the search pages of Tryst.link, you might look like you are logged in when you aren’t. We fixed the checks that ensure your logged-in state is correctly reflected to minimise the chance of this mixed state happening. Even when it did appear logged in without being, our authentication system was still correctly preventing account actions.
- Thanks to some excellent investigation work by one of our engineers, we uncovered a subtle bug in search filters that meant if you removed a gender filter using the X on the filter bubbles the new results would apply to both the gender listed on the profile and the gender(s) that profile caters to. This bug scenario hardly ever happened in real searches but we are glad to see it resolved!
- We only allow changing your profile username once per 30 days and this month fixed a few bugs related to how that period is set.
- Making changes other than to your profile username was incorrectly marking the field as though it had been changed, causing subsequent changes to be incorrectly blocked.
- The date of change was being updated even if the validation of the field failed, which meant if you made a typo you would then be unable to enter the correct thing and save.
- To make sure things like this can’t slip through in future we have improved our tests to cover these scenarios!
- Some providers who re-submitted their verification continued to see messages on the dashboard asking them to resubmit, even after it was accepted by our team. We’ve done some spelunking in the code, figured out what was happening, and squished that bug. You should only see actionable things now!
In the community
There's always a lot going on in our amazing community! Here are some of the latest events, news, and resources for workers.
Are you involved in an event? Do you have some news to share? Are you aware of an industry initiative that deserves a shout-out? Let us know!
- Big Thick Energy - Jiggles Big Babe Strip Show at Knox St Bar, Chippendale NSW, AU on Friday Feb 14. Show starts from 9:30pm. Bring cash (to see them flash)
- Tilly Lawless Book Launch - Thora - 23 July at 6:30 - 8:30pm - Donlon Books, 75 Broadway Market London E8 4PH. Celebrate the UK launch of Thora. Tilly will be reading from her book on the night
- Sexquisite - Sexsquisite Valentines: Thu, 13 Feb at 7:00pm at 93 Feet East, London 7:00 pm GMT
- House of Boussé - Slumber Party @ Strangebrew Friday 14 February
- SMUT The Show - The Lab at Fool's Paradise, Adelaide AU 21 Feb - 15 Mar
Recommended Media from the Tryst Team
Listen: Themme Fatale - Trans Sexual Podcast
Read: Trans Rad Fem - Talia Bhatt
Watch: Hustler White (film) 1996
In the media
See below for the latest industry news pieces and mentions in the media.
- ‘Inside Vincent Wechselberger's Intimate Portraits of Queer Sex Workers’ - Upsana Das, for ‘Polyester’
- ‘Bonnie Blue, Lily Phillips and the Tabloidification of Sex Work’ - Eli Cigini, for ‘Dazed’
- ‘Romance Labor: on Sean Baker’s Anora’ - Marla Cruz, for ‘Angel Food Mag’
- ‘Sex workers with HIV Got a Win. It’s Not Enough’ - Laura LeMoon, for ‘The Body’
- ‘Hiring Sex Workers: Good for business, great for our future’ - Shane Lukas, for ‘TEDx Talks’
- ‘Medieval Sex Workers’ - Dr. Eleanor Janega and Dr. Jamie Page, for ‘Gone Medieval’
- ‘Advocates, Lawmakers Seek to Legalize Sex Work in Illinois’ - Amanda Vinicky, for WTTW News
- ‘In Conversation with Frankie Van Kan’ - (OR MAYBE REPLACE WITH REVIEW (A Body At Work) by the time this is getting published.
- ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi True Story Explained: What The Netflix Movie Leaves Out About The Real-Life Sex Worker Activist’ - Ann Lispett, for ‘Screen Rant’
- ‘Sook-Yin Lee on adapting Paying For It — her ex's bestselling graphic memoir about sex work’ - Vivian Rashotte, for ‘ Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)’
- ‘Four Sex Workers Spill On How Their Profession Has Changed Their Own Sex Lives’ - Laura Masia, for ‘Pedestrian TV’
- ‘I’m a middle-aged sex worker, my wrinkles have paid for eight houses’ - Melissa Todd, for ‘Metro UK’
Don’t forget to check back in a month’s time for our next update!
Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!
We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨
