{{define "title"}}Frequently Asked Questions{{end}} {{define "content"}}

Frequently Asked Questions

And some that nobody asked

General FAQs

Why was this site built?

This site was developed as a response to growing uncertainty as to the future of available social networking sites for nudists and exhibitionists to use. Back in 2018, Tumblr was put under pressure and they banned all NSFW users from their platform. In 2020, Pornhub also fell victim and deleted 80% of all user content on their site. In 2021, Onlyfans almost fell victim to the same scheme: there is a group of anti-porn prudes who are systemically combing across the Internet and trying to get the very concept of porn and nudity banned from online.

Alongside that story, there is growing uncertainty in general about the future of free speech and "safe harbor laws" for social network service providers online. Depending on how it shakes out, it may become risky for sites such as Twitter and Reddit to remain online if the service providers become liable for content uploaded by their users. It seems likely that one day Twitter and Reddit will chase NSFW users away like Tumblr did and it may be risky for any new startups to fill that void (Onlyfans and most adult sites have switched to requiring photo ID to verify your accounts!)

When a site has random unverified users able to post random content, you end up with some awful things being posted - which traumatizes site moderators and provides hooks for the anti-porn brigade that took down Tumblr to come for your site as well. This website was designed for this modern environment, and intends to keep on top of things from day one.

What makes this site different?

In the context of the modern Internet we live in, this site does things a bit differently:

What do you define as an "exhibitionist?"

"Exhibitionist" may not be the best word but the way I define it is basically "sex-positive nudism," or in contrast to the common sentiment that some nudists have that says you must "keep the sex out of nudism." For example, many nudist websites don't allow pictures that contain an erect penis at all.

I don't know a better word for it, and "sex-positive nudist" is a bit of a mouthful. Some exhibitionists are all about getting their rocks off from being sexual in inappropriate public places, 'flashing' poor unsuspecting strangers. This is not what I'm about, at all! Consent is sexy, and your displays of sexuality should only be for consenting audiences who like to see that stuff. That's why on {{PrettyTitle}}, you may upload that hot content but just mark it as 'Explicit' so others may have some choice in whether they have to see it.

Why does {{PrettyTitle}} permit sexual content?

Some may find it interesting that a "nudist" website allows this stuff at all, when so many others frown on it. It may help to describe some of my [the site founder's] background and my own journey into nudism, and this question can be answered in two parts:

  1. I got started into nudism through the path of "taking nude photos and sharing them online" and the initial goal I set out for was to "get a picture of everything I possibly could do while naked," from doing mundane household chores to getting into fully sexual/porn type of content. So, when I was going to build my own nudist social network, of course it had to allow for people like me. There's a whole "sex-positive nude world" on the Internet (we were on Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, and everywhere) as a whole parallel community to the anti-sex nudists ('classic nudists' or 'prudists' for shorthand).

    As a nudist and an exhibitionist, I can behave myself fine when in the company of 'classic nudists.' I can go to a nude resort and not be weird or inappropriate at all, and I am 100% on the same page as you when I find it creepy and awkward when somebody at such a place is being inappropriate. I have accounts on some 'regular naturism' sites and post only my mildest nudes there. But I do feel a little constrained or like I am walking on eggshells sometimes in that kind of environment.

  2. Secondarily, simply for being a gay man I would not be welcomed by much of the mainstream establishment nudist community, such as AANR in the States. Many of such nude resorts have a "no single men" policy and they consider a gay couple to be "two single men." I understand that they want to avoid creepers and gawkers who show up just to ogle the women, but this inherently homophobic policy that the mainstream naturism communities holds means that, if I were to build a 'classy' nudism site, I would be catering to people who would not even have me as a member themselves.

If you are looking for a prudist site, there are plenty of other options you can look at. But {{PrettyTitle}} is unapologetically a sex-positive nudist site and we are all consenting adults here who can share our naked journey with like-minded individuals online.

Keep in mind, the default website experience is that the 'explicit' content is gated away and is opt-in to see it. Members mark their 'explicit' photos as such, and you opt-in to see explicit photos and forums in your settings. This way we might strike a balance and be able to support nudists from both sides of the spectrum. But if you find it uncomfortable to know that exhibitionists even exist on this site, then we may not be right for you, and we wish you good luck elsewhere.


Certification FAQs

What does certification mean, and what is a "verification selfie"?

This website requires all members to be "certified" or proven to be real human beings on the other side of the keyboard. A "verification selfie" is where you take a picture of yourself holding onto a hand-written note on a sheet of paper to prove that you are a real person (and not just catfishing with somebody else's stolen photos).

Certification helps protect our members from harassment by anonymous trolls or automated spam robots that plague other similar sites.

Do I need to send a "verification selfie"?

Yes.

Certification is required before you can gain access to the greater community on this website. Pre-certification, you may only access your own profile page and settings, but can not browse the member list, see the site Photo Gallery, or participate on the forums until your profile has been certified.

Your certification photo is only seen by site administrators and does not appear on your profile page.

Note: there's no need for this to be a nude pic, either. Just your face is OK so we can see if it looks like the face pic you're presenting on your profile page.

Why the hard requirement to certify?

I didn't set out to build "just another social network" that allows for random, faceless, anonymous people to sign up - you can do that literally anywhere else. This website was designed specifically to get ahead of what happened with Tumblr, Pornhub and other sites in recent history. It wasn't just a random whim of Tumblr when they kicked all of the nudists and other NSFW users off of their platform -- they were pressured to do so by a vocal minority of anti-porn prudes who have been working their way across the Internet and trying to make sure that nudists, exhibitionists, porn stars and sex workers have no place at all to exist online.

I have been watching how these groups operate. They throw out wild claims that a website like Tumblr or Pornhub is running rampant with illegal content (such as child sexually abusive material, human trafficking, revenge porn or so on) and use that as a scapegoat to put pressure on a website via the banks and advertisers into either bending the knee or shutting down completely. Tumblr elected to just blanket ban all NSFW users from the platform, Pornhub deleted 80% of all user content from their site, and Onlyfans nearly fell as well (before they decided instead to require government-issued photo ID from their members, which I do not want to do).

This group wildly exaggerates statistics and misrepresents their finding to push along an agenda which is really just anti-porn, period; but the fact of the matter is that any wide open public website that allows random people to just sign up and start posting things will always technically leave room for those kinds of claims to be thrown around. If a website doesn't require a user to verify their face, you'll get bad actors who sign up blank, throwaway accounts (probably hiding behind a VPN, too, to conceal their location) and start spreading god awful things on a site and it becomes a game of whack-a-mole for site moderators to keep on top of (not to mention the trauma it causes for moderators who need to deal with all that shit). I don't want any of that nonsense on this website.

The certification requirement should help curb a lot of that and bring some other nice benefits besides for the other members of this site:

I understand that certification may be inconvenient for some members. I know there are plenty of people for whom it isn't a concern at all. I may be able to work with you on an alternative method for certification; see the next section, below.

What can non-certified members do?

Before you have an approved certification photo, you can mainly only access and edit your own profile page, and upload a few pictures while you await approval. Your pictures won't be shown to members on the Site Gallery until you're certified, and most of the website's features (namely, the Forums, Site Gallery and Member Search Directory) are gated behind certification.

Certified members may, at their own discretion, be able to find your profile page by browsing the Member Directory. They may send you a friend request or reach out to you. Or, if you happen to know a member's profile URL on this site, you (the non-certified member) can view their profile page and photo gallery (depending on their privacy settings), send them a friend request or direct message. But basically, it will be difficult to discover users to interact with until after you are certified - and this is intentional to help guard against spam bots and creepy people.

Privacy FAQs

Can my Profile Picture be kept private?

You may set your Profile Picture to be "Friends only" or "Private" visibility if you wish to be more discreet about your face pictures.

What are the visibility options for my profile page?

There are currently three different choices for your profile visibility on your Settings page:

How do I delete direct messages (DMs)?

You have two options for deleting your private one-on-one chat messages.

You can delete your own messages by clicking on the "Delete" button that appears below them. This deletes your message from both of your threads, and (if unread), will not notify them that they had an unread message.

You can delete the whole thread by using the "Delete whole thread" button at the bottom of the conversation. This will remove both of your chat history with one another and make it like you never exchanged a DM before at all.

How does blocking somebody work on nonshy?

If somebody on {{PrettyTitle}} is bothering you or you just do not wish to see their presence or content around the website anymore, you may "Block" them by going to their profile page and clicking on the Block button.

When you block somebody, {{PrettyTitle}} draws a hard line between your two accounts and will make it so that you two do not see each other anywhere on the website:

The idea is that if you block somebody, it should look as though they may have just deleted their {{PrettyTitle}} account completely and you should not see them anymore and they should not see you either.

If you find any corner of the site where this fails to happen (and you see somebody who you have blocked), please report it as a bug to be fixed.

Photo FAQs

Do I have to post my nudes here?

You should be comfortable with doing so, but it isn't a hard requirement. On some other nudist social websites, many nudists have lamented to me about how often they get messages by anonymous, faceless profiles who slide into their DMs and get all pervy and weird on them. While {{PrettyTitle}} only requires a face pic and verification selfie, other members will feel more comfortable if you post some of your own nudes as well.

It's kind of like nude beach etiquette: no nudist at a nude beach enjoys it much when people arrive who refuse to get naked and they're just there to gawk and be a peeping tom and perv out over all the naked bodies they see. If you don't want to post any nudes here, at least don't act weird or creepy with people here.

Do I have to include my face in my nudes?

You don't have to! I know many nudists are not comfortable with their face appearing in their nudes. You are free to post "headless torso shots" or leave your face covered or censored. But you should have at least one face pic (as your default profile pic) - it can be a G-rated selfie!

If you're only comfortable with posting like close-up dick pics, please mark those pics as "explicit" -- many nudists prefer to see the whole nude body and don't want to see just dick pics everywhere. And don't set those as your default profile pic!

The " Gallery" link on the site nav bar goes to the Site-wide Photo Gallery page. Here is shown all of the public photos uploaded by all (certified) users, if those pictures are also opted-in to appear on the Gallery in their settings.

If you have friends on here, you may also see their "Friends-only" photos on the Site Gallery. This way, you don't miss any updates if your friends add a new picture (so long as they allow their picture to appear on the Gallery).

When you upload a picture you may opt it in or out of the Gallery by checking a box on its settings page. For example, you can upload a Public photo but opt it out of the Gallery -- it will then only appear on your profile page.

In January 2024 we have added a rate limit on how frequently you can upload a new photo and have it appear on the site-wide Photo Gallery in order to cut down on "spam" when a new member would sign up and immediately upload all 100 of their photos to their gallery page.

We don't want the Site Gallery to be dominated by large swaths of only one person's photos that go on for pages and pages, so you may only feature up to 5 photos per day on the Site Gallery. When you have 5 or more photos, uploaded within the last 24 hours and marked to share with the Site Gallery, you will not be able to add additional photos to the gallery until you wait a day OR edit one of those recent photos to remove it from the gallery.

If you have been throttled from sharing new Site Gallery photos, your options are:

Our recommendation: take it slow! Share a few pictures per day on your gallery until you eventually fill it out. This is also a better way to get engagement on your photos: your friends are more likely to "Like" and comment on your photos if you drip feed them slowly vs. if you upload your 100 photos all at once.

Can I include other people in my photos?

It can be acceptable to include other people in your photos here - for example pictures of you and your partner together or you with a group of your naked buddies. However, please observe the following rules:

What is considered "explicit" in photos?

On this website, I make a fairly common distinction between what's a "normal nude" and what's an "explicit" photo:

You are permitted to upload explicit content to your profile, just mark which pictures are explicit to help the rest of the community in case someone prefers not to see that. You can enable a setting on your profile if you are comfortable with seeing explicit content from other users -- by default this site is "normal nudes" friendly!

Are digitally altered or 'photoshopped' pictures okay?

In small doses, modified pictures may be permitted if you consider them to be artwork inspired by your real photos. For example, the founder of this website likes to create "clone pictures" featuring multiple copies of himself around a scene together. Some guidelines to follow when it comes to Photoshopped images include:

Some examples of acceptable use cases for Photoshop include:

Does this site prevent people from downloading my pictures?

This website does not go out of its way to prevent people from downloading pictures, and nor will it pretend to. This is actually a very difficult problem to solve in the year {{.YYYY}}.

I could add some JavaScripts that prevent right-clicking on my pages so you can't just "Save image as," but this would only deter desktop (mouse & keyboard) users and is easy to work around. I could place a transparent image over top of all your pictures like Instagram does and if you try and save it, you just get a one-pixel transparent GIF; but this is trivially defeated by any novice web designer by just right-clicking, "Inspect element" and deleting it from the web page to get at the photo it was protecting.

And people can always just screenshot the whole web page - and a web page can't do anything at all to prevent that. With mobile phones this is an especially easy and common thing to do. Any mild measures this site could take to deter downloading would only provide a false sense of security, which is worse than having no security.

There are risks inherent with putting a picture on the Internet. This website does provide some controls you can utilize as to who will see the pictures you upload:

It is against the site rules to repost other members' pictures without their permission. If you know that a member has reposted your nudes, please report them and let us know!

Forum FAQs

What do the various badges on the forum mean?

You may see some of these badges on the forums or their posts. These are their meanings:

Can I create my own forums?

This feature is coming soon! Users will be allowed to create their own forums and act as moderator within their own board. The forum admin pages need a bit more spit & polish before it's ready!

Some related features with managing your own forums will include:

Chat Room FAQs

Who can access the chat rooms?

The chat room is available to all certified members who have public photos on their profile page. Shy Accounts who have private profiles or keep all their pictures hidden are not permitted in the chat room at this time - but they may get their own separate room later where they can bother other similarly shy members there.

The chat room supports webcam sharing and so we only permit non-shy people into the room so as to put our minds at peace - that whoever is watching your camera at least has a public face picture on their page.

What are the technical requirements to use the chat room?

The chat room seems to work the best on the following combination of devices and web browsers:

The chat room and video sharing generally works well on the above devices. Below are some that are known to have issues with the chat room at this time:

I can't share or connect to other peoples' webcams

First, verify that you're using a known supported device when accessing the chat room. Generally this means you're running a Firefox or Chromium-based browser on a desktop computer, laptop, or Android device. Webcam sharing does not work at all in Safari on Mac OS, and portable Apple devices such as iPad and iPhone do not work with the chat room at all.

If you are on a supported device, check out the following information about how webcam sharing works:

A couple of steps you can try and troubleshoot this issue include:

If all else fails, it's unfortunate but at least the text chat functions should work at least. Some big video apps like Zoom or Jitsi Meet tend to work better because, if you can't establish a peer-to-peer connection, they will fall back on using a proxy server to transmit your video through to the other party. The {{PrettyTitle}} chat room does not have such a proxy server -- because the bandwidth can get expensive to carry video across! Only peer-to-peer video sharing is supported at this time.

Where can I learn more about the chat room?

Please also see the Chat Help page which gives a tour of the chat room interface and some additional information about how to use the chat room.

Shy Account FAQs

One of the things that {{PrettyTitle}} wishes to avoid is the dreaded "blank profile" that slides into our DMs and gets creepy and weird on us. You are encouraged to participate on this site and share at least one public photo with the community. You may opt to have only "G-rated face pics" on public and nudes on private, or keep your face on private and share some body shots with your face cropped out on public - but share at least one good picture on public.

When your profile page or photos are all set to Private or Friends-only, you will be considered to have a Shy Account. A Shy Account can still interact on the forums but will have limited options to interact with non-restricted ({{PrettyTitle}}) members.

What restrictions apply to Shy Accounts?

The limits placed on Shy Accounts are:

The idea is to keep the shy members isolated from the non-shy ones. We nudists are sharing what we can and we don't want creepers to be ogling our nudes and not sharing anything in return. If all your pics are private, you look like a blank profile to us - and you will be kept with the other blank profiles until you choose to participate.

What can Shy Accounts do?

There are still a lot things you can do with your certified but Shy Account:

How do I fix it?

Leaving Shy Account territory is easy:

  1. Don't have your profile page set to private. Only logged-in, certified members can see your page, anyway!
  2. Have at least one public picture to share with the class. Ideally, it will be your profile picture that shows your face, but we'll settle for a good headless body shot. We're all sharing our nudes here, we'd like it if you participated as well.

If you are new to all of this, here are some ideas how you can manage your photo gallery to have at least one public picture to share:

Technical FAQs

Why did you build a custom website?

Other variants on this question might be: why not just run a Mastodon instance? Or why this website and not a Discord server or MeWe group or insert off-the-shelf free software or hosted web service here?

It certainly would've been simpler to just use an off-the-shelf open source app such as Mastodon (a decentralized, Twitter-like app) or similar. These apps though have a scalability problem: users with their infinitely long timelines will upload infinite photos until your server runs out of disk space and not enough of them may donate to cover the costs. And the Fediverse feature (Mastodon is like e-mail and users from all servers can like, follow and comment on one another across the entire network) is a double edged sword too: all my members would need to tag even their "normal nudes" as NSFW or else other servers would ban ours (meaning we have to follow rules imposed by the wider Internet community), and conversely it is difficult to moderate incoming content from other servers showing up on my users' timelines. It's not a good fit for the vision I had in mind.

And on just using a service like Discord or MeWe to host my community: that's still putting us in the hands of a corporation which can one day decide to ban all NSFW users. Many people run nudist Discords and MeWe groups, but I needed something whose fate is kept in my own hands.

Is this website open source?

Yes! The source code for this website is released as free software under the GNU General Public License. It is programmed in Go and the source code is available at code.nonshy.com/nonshy/website. If you're a developer and would like to contribute bug fixes or new features to the website, see details here.

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