Age limited Forum proposal

Either way, you are not included.

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I think the easiest hack would be as follows:

Update the forums TOC, so all New members (and old members alike) have to add their DOB to their profile. (They can choose in their profile as whether it should ever be displayed or not). It would obviously have to be explained the importance of the real date and the that if they lie they could face the banning of their account (as Maximum severity)

Threads could be marked with a prefix of the Age ratings and it could be possible to write a hack to filter out the ages that a person isn't suppose to have access too. One great thing with this method is it's "dynamic" so as you grow older your access to threads increases too. (In some respects I can imagine kids trying to get in or waiting for a duration of time to get to the right age to access and then finding out that all their attempts to get in, probably wasn't worth the effort. Extreme hype and obvious disappointment.) The other great thing about this method is it can cover all forums.

Obviously in such a hack there should be an Admin override, as some people "Never grow up".

Obviously rating the thread could be a tricky one. You could have the manual method of moderators or initial thread posters making that decision, however this would always be under scrutiny. Perhaps there could be a Radio element applied to the thread (A bit like a poll) where you decide it's Maturity level or better still one per post. (So if somebody says something "Mature" which in some respects is an oxymoron, it could in fact effect the rating of the thread. )

Obviously such a ratings system where Members rate the thread inputs would mean that Moderators could be less concerned about actually editing peoples posts. After all that was the initial kind of moderation I started with, basically people could say what they wanted but it would end up spidered and stuck in the Sciforums archive (The hall of shame). Forum transcripts written in stone.

 

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Don't let this thread make you think it's just down to one particular poster. There are a lot of reasons for this proposal, separate to any persons complaints.

 

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some people do not put their real date of birth...I usually put that I am born in 1965

 

As I stated if they lied, they could face a ban. Again this is really about the legality, if they lie then we accept no responsibility since such measures technically would of been put their for their own interest (if not for that of a parent).

For instance I recently had a Netnanny company turn up in one of my website logs.

http://www.cyberpatrol.com/cyberpatrolcrawler.asp

They could block this site to a number of companies that trust them to make decisions, for example when a site at a college or university gets blocked it can be done by such companies being contracted to generate the filters. In essence adding better methods for dealing with age increases the overall availability of the site, which is better for all of us in the long run. Btw those sorts of businesses don't just block because of sexual discussion, they can block because of hate speech and other alsorted reasons.

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I don't like it because I think it is pointless extra work. I don't think a section needs to be set apart, I think we should be able to talk about it in the main sections.
I don't understand why we are worried about offending 14 yr olds.

 

Which is why I asked in my later post if changing the registration age limit to 16 would fix the problem. How are sites that're in the limbo between PG13 and R classified? It seems to me that anything that's too extreme already gets locked, deleted or sent to the cesspool.

 

Locking or Cesspooling currently doesn't really clean it up from bots spidering, which in turn then have their cache's checked for content management (NetNanny's)

Obviously Deleting does, however we've always classed deletion as a pretty severe move because of peoples reactions and the usual coments:

i.e.
"I spent hours writing that post and replying to people, the thread gets derailed by a few people and then you delete the whole thread... Stomp stomp *tantrum*"

There is a potential option for individuals:

Increase the age on the forums registration disclaimer to as you said 16.
Those people under 16 that could have something similar to the COPPA agreement could ask the Parent or Guardians to take their own responsibility for Monitoring their child's internet access. (like it kind of states now, just the age is 13)

[Obviously this is the one people have suggested for a while]

This deals with individual people, however it doesn't deal with the domain being blocked by filters for large networks because of the sites content.

 

Wouldn't the domain be blocked by filters no matter what you do, unless you start deleting threads?

 

Tbh, it's something I'm researching into at the moment.

Currently it could work much like a search engines do, a bots sent out to spider a site, the site is then caches, the cache is then processed by filters to identify the content and the filter is then relayed to individual clients (on a call by call basis) or blocklist's

The other variant is that Humans manually go through the pages in the Cache and define their own censorship ratings, which obviously costs a lot more in the long run and takes a lot longer to do.

In either case it doesn't answer whether their blocklists are "dynamic" or not. Does the rating chance per "Indexing" or is the first index ultimately the ratings set that site is lumbered with.

In honesty, this has actually got me tangenting and looking at the implication of an entirely new project, that's unrelated to the forum.

 

dont read it if you dont like it barbie, FFS can't you understand by now??


we need a more mature part of this forum where frankly kids like you dont go and cry to the nearest mod

 

Agreed. Age does not always equal maturity. Some people are like 17 going on 60, on the other hand I've known people in their 30s and 40s who were emotionally immature enough that they felt the need to denigrate me.

 

Since this board has always been a Science forum, i do not see how things we are talking about can already not fall into Human Science forum. After all; its all human science aint it?

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Should we need to discuss things related to "sex" or how to indulge etc. we could post that in Human science as well, unless you really want separation of concerns, in which case a sub forum would be ok. That can be moderated by couple of guys following standards that you set forth.

Just quick thoughts. I didn't go through the entire chain, sorry.
Rick

 

If we have a 'mature' section...the rest of the forums will be abandoned in no time.

 

no it wont, because there will always be people interested in science and human rights, just some adults would like to talk like adults without feeling that kids like barbiegirl will go and cry to a mod about what we're saying

 

So when can we have this Adult section up and running? I would like to make some indecent proposals!!!

 

if we are having an Adult section, can we have an Asian section there as well. Thanks.

 

Are you Asian ?

 

no, I am Russian, which is basically Euro-Asian. Is Euro-Asian person an Asian? I dunno :shrug:

 

So you're not Asian.. what makes you think you won't be prohibited from the Asian section ?

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