Controversy and Rebrand: How HotMilitaryGirls Became HotMilitarySupporters

When he was busily creating a wide variety of different websites back in 2009, Mark Hines didn’t really intend for a military-themed adult forum to become his flagship site, despite the fact the Air Force, Air National Guard, Air Force Reserve and Army National Guard were where he’d spent 23 years of his life in service to his country.

“I was starting all kinds of different sites back then, many of which were not adult, but unexpectedly Hot Military Girls exploded,” Hines told YNOT. “I was really enjoying learning to create websites, learning about SEO and all that goes into it. You could say I was experimenting with a lot of different niche type sites – and figured why not learn while looking at hot girls?”

The concept behind the site was simple: HMG was a forum for military servicemembers, veterans and supporters to post pictures. The site caught on with its intended community, quickly growing to about 50,000 active users, with plenty of daily posts with pictures of “military girls, wives, girlfriends and supporters daily,” Hines said.

While HMG’s rise in popularity was fast, controversy soon followed.

“Our first time hitting the news there was a post from a military man who supposedly took photos of a girl who he was forcibly having sex with,” Hines told YNOT. “Of course, we deleted the post, contacted our lawyer, Lawrence Walters, and aided in the investigation by suppling authorities with IP addresses. This hit national news and led to a documentary, not about the website but the story itself. Obviously, we had a lot of new visitors and attention, but it soon went back to normal.”

Unfortunately for Hines and the HMG community, the incident wouldn’t be the last time the site drew attention of the unwanted variety. In 2018, as part of her campaign to address a photo-sharing scandal involving a Facebook group called “Marines United,” then-Senator Claire McCaskill demanded that a probe be launched into the HMG.

In a letter to Glenn Fine, the principal deputy inspector general for the Department of Defense, McCaskill wrote that she was “particularly concerned about Facebook pages linking to a website titled ‘HotMilitaryGirls.com,’ which is still online and active as of October 2018.”

Hines said that while most of the content on HMG was “self-posted,” McCaskill was “was going after the site claiming military members were posting this content without the consent of those female military members.”

Even though the site had prominent notices telling members not to post content without the consent of those depicted in it and Hines was comfortable they had done nothing to encourage such postings, “we decided to shut the site down while our lawyers looked at it.”

“Since 2009 there has been a lot of changes within military regulations for members regarding posting nude content, so we do not want to put our users at risk nor do we want to provide a platform that encourages, or even slightly encourages military members to violate new regulations and laws,” Hines told YNOT.

When he decided to put the site back up, Hines decided a rebrand was in order – one that arguably better reflected the site’s user base, anyway. Given his experience in operating a site with a name that suggested active duty personnel is the primary community, it’s no surprise Hines would want to shift the focus to supporters, particularly when this was always his intended audience.

“Since a huge amount of the content on HMG was of supporters, we decided to change the name from Hot Military Girls to Hot Military Supporters – which is geared better towards what our goal has been all along,” Hines said. “When deployed, military members have little or no time for personal pleasure, though they have a lot of downtime with little to do, or to entertain them. What better way to support the troops than to have a forum where they go and see and meet hot girls from around the world who support what they do and are willing to share some sexy content?”

With the branding shifted over to ‘supporters,’ Hines said HotMilitarySupporters is now hoping to receive more posts by “amateur models who have websites, cam profiles and video selling accounts to jump in and support the troops with such content – which also provides the models with a free platform to plug their services, content and URLs.”

“The forum is open to all women and has specific categories for military wives and girlfriends, but the ‘Nudes for Troops’ category is perfect for adult industry models to go post and share, along with plenty of room for text and linking tools to share and direct the users how to get more of their content,” Hines said.

HotMilitarySupporters has also been upgraded in the process of relaunching, enabling users to post and share more compelling content.

“Before the site did not support video well at all, but we’re now running on XenForo, so there’s amazing photo and video sharing abilities, watermarks and links allowed,” Hines said. “Our focus is to get sexy girls to share their content and especially a personalized video directly to the troops verbally giving their thanks and support to them.”

In telling YNOT his story, Hines was quick to heap praise and appreciation on those who helped shepherd Hines and his forum through the controversy in 2018. In particular, he cited attorney Larry Walters and Chris Alex of Way3 Hosting as being instrumental in the reemergence of the forum.

“Both are second to none,” Hines said of Walters and Alex, adding that Walters not only assisted in guiding him through the prior uproar around HMG, but in getting the new HMS forum ready for prime time, as well.

With the controversies surrounding HMG now seemingly behind him, things are looking up for Hines all over. As with the forum itself, things in his personal life got worse before they got better.

“My wife of 18 years, who ran HMG with me, left me for some other guy shortly after retiring,” Hines said. “But because of the work I did marketing the site and looking for girls to post there, I met Sofia Gomez, a cam girl 22 years younger than me in Colombia. I’ve lived with her for the last two years. She has a site with ModelCentro, does great on ManyVids and is on a few different video-selling sites.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives” – but if Mark Hines’ tale is any indication, Fitzgerald’s famous axiom doesn’t necessarily apply to American cyber-lives.