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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	snapelike 2007-12-28 08:54 am UTC (link)
	Oh please, no. No LJ 'we're watching you'. Things like this is why a lot of us left LJ in the first place. The more of this we get, the more responsibility for other people's surfing we take upon us... (Reply to this) (Thread)

keieeeye
2007-12-28 11:23 am UTC (link)

It would only be used for asylums that ALREADY require you to be 18 to join, though. As it is at the moment, you have to have your full birthdate visible in your profile so the maintainer knows you're 18 so they can accept you, and it's an awful lot of work for a maintainer to check the age of every single person who wants to join. If you don't want to join an asylum that bills itself as 18+ it wouldn't affect you at all, the way I'm reading it. The only way it would, is if you choose to turn it on for the purposes of joining an asylum that would be checking how old you are anyway. It just means that you don't have to display your whole birthdate in your profile, and the maintainer has less work to do.

I assume that if the asylum didn't require friends-locked posting, you'd be able to read all the posts anyway, they wouldn't be behind the stupid cuts. If they do require friends-locked posting, well, it's exactly the same as how the system already is. If you're under 18, the maintainer won't let you join, you can't read the posts.

The vast majority of asylums wouldn't bother with something like this, so it really would only affect the users who want it to affect them.

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	tephra 2007-12-28 07:14 pm UTC (link)
	Exactly. All I'm wishing for is a bit of automation for adult oriented asylums that wish to abide by Squeaky's request to monitor the age of their members, and privacy for the members themselves. (Reply to this) (Parent)

snapelike
2007-12-29 06:01 pm UTC (link)

I think the problem is that as soon as the tool is there, it ends up being expected one uses it. I own a 800+ members NC-17 comm, and I don't want to close anything. I moved it from LJ because I suddenly had to nurse other people's children, and I so don't want that. Our authors warn, rate and lj-cut, and we don't want to make our (shy) lurkers become members if they don't want to.

I don't think Squeaky would require us to use such a tool, but others might, ie: Warriors of idioc- er- Innocence and their likes. If it's there, there will be bitching over it, I'm sure, even if I can see its usefulness as such.

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keieeeye
2007-12-29 06:41 pm UTC (link)

Well personally, I can see how the tool would be incredibly useful, but I can also see that if Squeaky even tried to bring it in, a lot of people would be very, very unhappy, even given the assurances above ~~because some people lack critical thinking and go with the herd :P~~.

Our authors warn, rate and lj-cut, and we don't want to make our (shy) lurkers become members if they don't want to.

They wouldn't have to. The tool would only be used when someone actually is joining the asylum. It wouldn't use the stupid censoring cuts. The only way it's at all similar to what LJ uses is that, IF you choose to turn it on (which I imagine would just mean clicking a box that says you're 18), it tells the maintainer of an asylum that you're 18 if you try to join and the asylum has an "18+" flag (which I imagine would just mean clicking a box that says "this asylum is 18+"). It wouldn't be used to censor anything, just to cut down on the work of checking every prospective member's userinfo to see what their birthdate is.

but others might, ie: Warriors of idioc- er- Innocence and their likes.

They can't. They don't own this site.

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