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Edit on August 18 2016:
I'm dropping my score another ten points due to the sudden rash of broken links on videos and photo sets that fail to load completely. It now looks like someone dropped a bomb on the train wreck.
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I do love amateur sites, so I'd had my eye on this site for quite a while. I finally jumped when I saw their offer for a six month subscription for $25. Cheap enough, right?
I'm calling this a $25 train wreck.
The navigation is so haphazard, it's out and out frustrating. To begin with, the drop down menus aren't even coded right. Click on a button expecting it to drop down below it and the drop down shows up under another button. Once you figure that out, go look for the member's entrance. Nope - not there. Not there either. WTF? No clear member's entrance. It took a while, but I finally figured out that you have to click on a picture to get the prompt to enter your username and password. But, even after that, there is still a mix of member content and links to join on different pages.
OK... now I'm in. What do I get?
Is this 1996? All the content for an entire year is on one page with each shoot represented by a single thumbnail and the option to download the 1080 or 5000 pixel zip file. Click the thumbnail and you go to the viewing page. 15 thumbnails on the left third of the page, click a thumbnail, get a popup pic, framed with a 150 pixel wide (some more) border so, in effect, you're actually getting slightly smaller pictures. It's also flash viewing only and only on smaller resolution pictures with no option for in-browser viewing. Way to many of the 5000 pixel pictures look like they were 1080 pixel pictures simply enlarged with a picture editor. Downloading the sets for the larger pictures, I get checksum errors on about 20% of the zip files, which consistently meant that the last picture is missing from the set.
I looked for a link to videos but that doesn't exist. Turns out the third thumbnail in every row on the aforementioned list of content is a video. As you go back in time, more videos are interspersed in the year list. The videos, like the pictures, have their own problem. They're marred with a watermark that's a band of color and the Nude-Muse logo that goes across the entire screen but not completely at the bottom. Most of the videos don't appear to have a way to download them. If it wasn't for a flash add-on for Firefox, I wouldn't have grabbed a lot of them. Even then, downloading through a flash downloader didn't give me the resolution you'd associate with a direct download. The 1920x1080 videos I got all look slightly pixelated. On top of all of that, there were still a lot of videos that I couldn't download at all because the add-on doesn't detect them.
The only real positives here are the models and the amount of content. Six picture sets and one video a week for a photography site is the only thing the site does that's keeping up with the times. This is truly an amateur site, with women of all sizes, ethnicities and ages, although I will say the average still seems to be white, thin to average body type and in the 20 to 30 year old range. So, in the end, I'd only recommend this site to the most ardent amateur fan or someone who doesn't mind dealing with the site's shortcomings for a cheap subscription. |
