ideas: Automatic age verification

Automatic age verification
As a maintainer of an adult oriented asylum I would dearly love to have some internal automatic age verification. Right now maintainers have to manually check the age of anyone requesting to join their communities and this forces people to publicly display at least the year portion of their date of birth (or to email the maintainers, creating more work for everyone).

What I would like to have:

1. A hidden tag on accounts to mark them 18+. This would be opt-in and would not require any publicly visible information in their profile (though I suppose some people might want it visible and maybe that should be opt-in as well).

2. A setting on asylums that restricts memberships to 18+ and automatically checks for the tag on any account that tries to join.

People from LJ probably recognize this as the only useful part of their flagging system.

Related to this, if an asylum is restricted to 18+ it should be possible for a maintainer to make public, unrestricted, posts. This gives the option of putting some asylum information on the main page and not just in the asylum info (and makes the layouts prettier). LJ users will notice that this is not possible with LJ's flagging system.

Tangentially related question: Is there currently a way to set an asylum friends only AND have public posts? I figured out how to friends lock my asylum through the admin console but as far as I can tell I cannot set the security of posts to public now. I'd like to have a "no, this really isn't dead, just adults only" post while having the default security on new posts be friends only. :)

Entirely unrelated: The "read this first" post linked in this asylum's info hasn't been updated since 2005 and was made by a deleted account. Maybe that should be updated?

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	xie_xie_xie 2007-12-28 06:53 am UTC (link)
	I don't want InsaneJournal keeping track of the ages of its users. I don't police the ages of people who use my journal or my asylums, and I don't intend to. I'm not the world's mommy. The more IJ does to require or facilitate this, the less happy I will be. (Reply to this) (Thread)

tephra
2007-12-28 07:10 am UTC (link)

That is why it would be opt-in, for those of us that do want to do the token effort (and it is a token since lying about your age on the internet is trivial).

In the FAQ here there is this line to consider:

"If you are the maintainer of an asylum in which users regularly post explicit images, you must monitor the membership of your asylum carefully to make sure that all of your members are of legal age to view such material. Again, this is to protect both you and InsaneJournal."

My suggestion comes from a desire to comply with Squeaky's request with less effort on my part, and less disclosure of personal information on the part of users wishing to join my asylum.

There is nothing in my suggestion that would require you to use it for your journals or asylums.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	xie_xie_xie 2007-12-28 07:11 am UTC (link)
	I understand.... I just hate it. Of course I would do nearly anything for squeaky. I just resent having to babysit other people's children. :( (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	tephra 2007-12-28 07:14 am UTC (link)
	I view it as being able to ignore the fact I'm babysitting. :D Once the settings are done I don't have to go look at everyone's profile before I let them in the door. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	xie_xie_xie 2007-12-28 07:28 am UTC (link)
	I know, and honestly, the piece that irritates me is having to flag my own journal or asylum in some way as being "adult" or "explicit." It makes it so much easier later for someone to come to me and say that I knew I was posting stuff no innocent kiddies should see, and seems to me that it makes me more, rather than less, liable. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	tephra 2007-12-28 07:42 am UTC (link)
	I figured my proposed system would be invisible really, unlike LJ's, unless for some reason people opted to make it visible on their own journals/asylums. Most adult oriented asylums already "out" themselves in their info so having an automated accept/reject based on a hidden age tag wouldn't make them stand out any more than usual. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	xie_xie_xie 2007-12-28 07:44 am UTC (link)
	True, my journal's info page already says "Important notice: In case your parents for some reason let you wander the internets unsupervised, unless you're of legal age to read adult material wherever it is that you live, please don't read my journal." And yet I whine. ;) (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	tephra 2007-12-28 07:55 am UTC (link)
	laughs :) I admit, I've been reluctant to make the suggestion because I knew the first thing people are going to think of is LJ's flagging system. I was, and still am, expecting to get jumped on for making the suggestion just because of that association. LJ is really good at taking a good idea and beating all the good out of it. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	skuf 2007-12-28 07:38 am UTC (link)
	I agree. (Reply to this) (Parent)

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