Video and workout titles

[bzar]

The VF thread about workouts with bands for lower body motivated me to look for Andrea Orbeck’s Supermodel Butt and Thighs workout. I went to Thriftbooks.com and searched using Andrea Orbeck DVD as search terms. The results showed up empty – she’s an out-of-the-mainstream instructor. i did this because some non-mainstream instructors are listed twice with the same product. From there, I searched with the terms supermodel dvd. Empty again.

Reluctantly, I did a search using butt dvd. I hesitated doing that because on sites like Amazon, porno will usually show up. At Thriftbooks, a relatively newer site, they are known for selling regular books and DVDs. On the last and 3rd page of the results, a very graphic image of a sex toy mislabeled as a “DVD” appeared. Its description was also very graphic too. This was so offensive that I had a hard time reporting it because I wanted to provide the link to the page. I emailed customer support with the link and got a reply within 12 hours. I simply asked if that listing was within their guidelines. They apologized and took it down immediately and thanked me for bringing it to their attention. In hindsight, I should have signed into my account and sent a message because sometimes when you send an email from your personal account, it gets filtered out and not seen, or worse, deleted as spam, especially with explicit words in the URL link that was necessary to provide to the site owner.

and no Andrea Orbeck DVDs on their site. shucks.

I remember past VF threads where VFers had complained about buying videos in brick and mortar stores. Fitness videos were often categorized as “other” along with all kinds of other videos like tractor pull events, car racing and even some soft-porn videos too. Although not exactly the same thing as what happened with Thriftbooks, it forces people like us to use a word chosen by the video creator to experience the cringe-worthy moment in our search for workouts! Thriftbooks determined that it was bad listing data, which I believe to be true. Database info can be mis-transcribed.

This story shows why it’s important to have a human validate information on your site. It also makes us wish video creators would think carefully about how they name their videos.

It makes me laugh a little about this story, but also makes me shake my head.