Why I started this forum
  • In 2008, I was working toward my doctorate in clinical psychology and having a terrible time with one particular practicum supervisor. I was desperate to improve the situation, so when I came across a scientific article about pheromones, I started wondering if they could be helpful (and if I could even get my hands on some.) It didn't take too much time for me to find a sales page for A314, from Androtics Direct.

    The ad copy promised to immediately elevate my social status, causing women to want me and men to want to be me. At that time it was being sold on Love-Scent.com in a 15mL bottle of thick, herbacious oil. I was gullible enough to take the bait... and I'll be damned if the stuff didn't work. It didn't solve all my problems -- and, in retrospect even created some new problems. I didn't read any forums or think too much about what I was doing, I just knew that when I spread a couple drops of this stuff behind my ears, my asshole supervisor wasn't quite as critical.

    A314 helped me get through that difficult year, and then it drifted to the back of my cabinet where I forgot about it.

    The next time I came across it, I decided to do some more digging -- what'd this stuff really do? And what other possibilities were there?

    I ended up registering for the Androtics PheroTalk forum, starting a journal, and being utterly captivated by the wide array of molecules, insights, potentialities, and experiences. More than anything, it was the scientific approach to pheromone testing that they advocated that really got me going. They were the first ones that really seemed to recognize that each molecule did something totally different. It wasn't just about sexual attraction -- it was about shaping social reality. Testing each molecule and combination of molecules without expectations to see what, if any, social effects it might have.

    I really think Androtics deserves a lot of credit for developing this type of research as a consumer enterprise. However, in time I became dissatisfied with their level of secrecy. No matter how well you come to understand one of their putative pheromones, you never know what it is. And so, when they stop selling it, your efforts are wasted. I also kept wanting to design real experiments to determine the objective psychological effects of various molecules -- but you really can't do that kind of research when you don't know what chemicals you're using.

    I also found that the readymade "consumer" products Androtics sold were very inconsistent. Sometimes you'd get a bottle that worked great, other times you'd get a bottle that did nothing.

    Toward the end of my time on PheroTalk, I literally read their forum from the beginning, in chronological order. You can learn a lot doing that. But some of the things I found were not entirely agreeable to me. There had been concerted efforts to suppress and obfuscate knowledge, broken promises and intentional misleads covered over in NLP marketing malarkey. I didn't like the taste of it and wanted something without all the profit-motivated deception and general hogwash.

    And I discovered that a lot of the other PheroTalk veterans who felt this way had landed at Mark-in-Dallas' new forum, PheroTruth. I found Mark to be very welcoming when I arrived there, and he helped to fill me in on some of the dramatic history that had led to an exodus of PheroTalk's most insightful contributors.

    PheroTruth was a sleepy community at that time. There weren't many active members. The main thrust of the forum's attraction was that it was an open alternative to PheroTalk. You could talk about products from other companies. You could talk about molecules by their actual chemical names.., nobody was doing that, at the time, but you could.

    So, I started talking about molecules. Around that time, some of us convinced Chris from Alpha Dream to start selling single molecules. Soon True Pheromones started doing the same, and I discovered that some potential pheromones could be extracted from dietary supplements at home (like pregnenolone, which turned out to be an incredibly useful molecule.)

    As this surge of action brought new members to PheroTruth, I and one other member (Beccah) were named as admins. I was honored, and had a great time at it... for a while. But I became disappointed that a lot of the same drama and deception that I left PheroTalk to get away from had followed me to PheroTruth. I learned that two previous admins had left in a huff, for good reasons. Mark is a guy who is just too invested in his own ego to be able to deal with the dynamics of an Internet community.

    Soon he was pretending to take hiatuses, exhorting us admins to feign impartiality and withhold our personal opinions, asking us to deceive the membership about how much control we actually had. Mark wanted to wheel & deal with vendors for forum sponsorship while playing at having entirely pure motives and taking a loss on running his forum.

    I stepped down as admin when he & the other admin started censoring discussions on "the ONLY uncensored pheromone forum." Soon after, Mark had a blowout with the other admin too, and she stepped down. Later, Mark named two other longtime forum members (Terry & Pago) as admins, and again it lasted some months until they had a blowout with him and were removed.

    I decided to start a new site, without all this drama that has plagued the pheromone world. Because I don't care about that stuff -- this is a hobby for me, I just want to enjoy it, learn about our world, and make some friends. So I put up HackingTheHive.com. But, the site's mission was too diffuse, the software was too complicated, and (most importantly) I just didn't have the time to put into it at that time. I set up the best single pheromone knowledge base in existence today, but I was in the middle of some major life changes and didn't have it in me to contribute on a daily basis.

    In fact, for the past year I have hardly used any pheromones at all -- the occasional squirt of Glace or smear of True Alpha, but no testing or experimentation. Because my life got turned upside down... I found myself in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people and social expectations, and I needed to find my baseline all over again.

    Now, I've got my wits back about me and decided to start fresh with this hobby. So I registered pheros.net and set up this forum. I don't know what this community will evolve into -- at a certain point I may try to set up some organized group experiments, I may even try to set up an infrastructure to make it easier for people to get high quality concentrates or mixes. But this isn't my job -- in real life I'm a psychologist.

    My central mission in starting this site is to create a fun, scientific, and reasonably drama-free place for pheromone enthusiasts to encourage one another, learn, and share experiences.

    Thanks for reading all this! I'm really looking forward to getting to know you.
  • Let's make it right this time. Move on!
  • Welcome, Fly! Great to have you around, and looking forward to really getting this community going.

    I hope you'll write an introduction :)
  • Joined In ...

    Escape from the Drama and a place to say openly if stuff works or if not ...

    You´ll see an introduction these days ;)


  • Pago! Welcome! I'm very glad to see you here. My goal is to make this place low-drama, uncensored, and bullshit-free (except if there are bull pheromones in there... might be worth a try then.)
  • The new page is something totally unexpected... Borderline free... Hopefully... ;)

  • JohnnyHard! Welcome to the party :)
  • Hello, everyone. This is Ratatoskr AKA Injektilo AKA Vespero, for all of those coming from Pherotruth and, before that, Pherotalk. I'm here hoping that, in the line of major pheromone forums (in other words, large ones dedicated to pheromones in general rather than specific vendors, though I'm allowing Pherotalk its place as the first, because they really did get the ball rolling), third time's the charm. Best of luck to everyone. I know we can go further than ever before with this.
  • Love it! Welcome Ratotoskr B-)
  • Thanks dbot for Starting a new site. PherotRuth is getting old and fast. Maybe here we can get some real testing going on on some real molecules to use.
  • Great to be here.
    I was never at Pherotalk but read most of dbot's material on Pherotruth and on the Hive.
    Bought a lot of products and got interesting results.
    I got curious abot PEA and have been working on that one only.
    But it got so very quiet about that molecule over at Pherotruth so I was a little worried about posting about it.

    I have interests in spiritual stuff too, but with a kind of cold scientific approach.
    Pheromones has been my main interest for 2 years now.
    English is not my language but hopefully you can understand....
  • @kmacc45 - Awesome to see you here. You're like the Puff Daddy of pheromones :D

    @Ridder - Thanks for joining! I'm interested to hear about your PEA experiences, and whether/how they overlap with your spiritual ideas. I've been thinking about PEA recently... I have an idea that it might be active at just a few dozen nanograms, like a-THDOC is.
  • Hey hey, nice new site, looking forward to contributing when I can :)
  • Welcome Dr. Rattlesnake :-h
  • A friend recently let me know about some lies that Mark-In-Dallas had told about me a while back in the private area of PheroTruth.

    I don't really care about all that drama anymore, but I do think it's important to clear the air so that people will know that I'm not actually the nefarious spammer that Mark made me out to be. I did more to make that guy's forum successful than he himself did, and was very disappointed with the way things ended up there. And I'm certainly not the only well-meaning person who has ended up on bad terms with Mark.

    So, I just want to air his accusations and respond publicly:

    Mark said that at the time I resigned as admin at PT, I was already working on HTH, and made problems regarding his censorship on PT only because I knew he was planning to launch a wiki and wanted to beat him to the punch. He even said that he had asked me to beta test his wiki before any of that happened, and I refused.

    All of that is blatantly false. Members of PT had asked for a wiki, but Mark didn't want to make one and I didn't really have anything to say about it. I had no intention of launching a site prior to leaving PT, but after that fiasco I realized I didn't want to be a part of an "uncensored" forum that actually was censored (by Mark.) On top of that, Mark was really rude and condescending toward me, and I didn't want to have anything to do with him. But I still wanted a community, so I put up HTH 5 days later. Those who were around to see that original site may remember that it was a stock install of Wordpress + Buddypress on a brand new domain. It even used the default Buddypress theme. Total setup time for that software is about 15 minutes. So no, it wasn't premeditated to start another site, and that's why I kept switching up the model of the site. I really hadn't thought it through much at that point.

    Also, Mark has accused me of being power-hungry and censoring people while I was an admin at PT. That's a really silly way of saying I deleted a couple of spambots. I never once censored anything any real person ever posted there (or anywhere else.) The entire ordeal that led to my quitting PT was precipitated by me fighting against Mark's censorship of a discussion.

    Finally, Mark said he offered me an olive branch many times after I quit as admin -- this is simply false. It just never happened. He's been nothing but nasty to me (and about me).

    Sorry for reintroducing this drama, but like I said I think it's important to respond to these kinds of accusations.
  • On a brighter note, it may also be beneficial for me to spell out my intentions regarding this site so that everything is out in the open:

    1) I intend to maintain this site forever, in more or less its present form. It places no burden on me to do so, as I maintain a web server anyway to host my personal web site, a few friends sites that I host for free, and sites for professional societies I'm a part of that I've donated hosting & domains for. In taking down HTH I transferred most of the content over here & notified everyone who had posted there that they should make copies of their content for their own records and/or copy it over here. I've had a lot more time to think over the model for this site now and am happy with keeping it simple.

    2) I don't expect to make any money off of this site, but if I can turn a buck or two without disadvantaging anyone I will. Why not? So, whenever I post links to vendors, I'll make them affiliate links if its possible and if I remember. If there's no affiliate program for a vendor, I'll post their links anyway if I consider them good or reliable.

    3) At some point in the future, I entertain a fantasy of setting up a good distribution system for reliably produced pure research pheromones. I've got some neat ideas for how it could work and really benefit the community -- maybe even crowdsourced mixes, blind tests, the whole shebang -- but I have no idea if I'll ever get around to really making this happen. Since I'm so busy building up my career, I would have to systematize the whole thing really well. Idk whether I could make it work. Anyway, it's a daydream for me, but don't believe anyone who tells you I'm scamming for money. If that were true this site would be targeting all the thousands of aspiring PUAs and not you handful of elite pheromone hobbyists & researchers :)

    I have worked in marketing in the past, and so I know a lot about marketing tactics and naturally incorporate them into my communication style sometimes, but this forum is really not a marketing effort for me. It's part of my quixotic quest to understand the microdynamics of the world we share.

    4) I haven't written an official policy for content ownership yet and really need to. My position is that everyone who posts here maintains ownership of their own stuff and, by posting, grants me a license to display it here on this site forever.

    So there you have it, that's pretty much everything there is to tell about my motives for building this site and intentions for maintaining it. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to discuss them with me publicly or privately.

    Also, I don't really think the forum needs any "policies" at this point, but if you have ideas about the way things should be here, please let me know. I want you to feel at home.

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