Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Suggestions related to the 18+ themes

I had a couple of suggestions that I thought other people might be interested in, even if I likely won't use them. One of these are dependent on the turn on adult filter that had been mentioned in the discussion about it.

1. Obviously there has been talk about a seperate forum for the adult rps, but in the mean time there has been rp requests that have not been umm...delicately phrased I guess. I won't list examples so I don't signal people out, but I have seen them. So maybe until it's been decided as to what to do about these sort of roleplays. Maybe there should be a sticky or section in the help for tips about asking for these roleplays. I just figure that if they are going to be done, they should be done in a tasteful manner as to protect the site's younger members.

2. While the roleplays and ads for them have been talked about, what about adult only characters? Right now, while people can set up a tag as identifying that characters contain sexual themes, there isn't much to keep kids even under the age of 13 from seeing them. If someone who isn't even a member clicks on a profiles with warnings, they only have to click that they are ok with seeing it before they can see it. So perhaps there could be an additional option to mark some character's as adult only so only people checked into the adult part of the site can see them as they wouldn't be visible at all to people without accounts just browsing the site. The main reason I mention this is because I have seen some pretty explicit stuff on a few characters. Examples include: Pictures of characters engaged in various sexual acts including intercourse and laundry lists of sexual acts that said characters are up for doing. So I just thought that this might be a good idea if the adult part of the site is implemented.

I feel like something along these lines is a good idea. I was browsing a character profile the other day that was marked for sexuality and language. Now I've seen some marked as such that were pretty well-done and such, but as I was scrolling, I came upon the gallery. The gallery was set in full-size (not the icon boxes you can click), so I suddenly had an entire screen full of a completely naked character picture. I think a way to identify 'adult' from just 'minor sexual themes' might be a good idea.

EDIT:
Kim, a separate section for adult RPs would be really nice. Was trying to find the whole important thread we had discussing these things but couldn't, so just going to say it here. I just took a look at the 'Looking for RP' section and found five 18+ very sexualized 'looking for' posts on the first page alone. As a person who honestly struggles with 'keeping it clean', the last thing I need is all this temptation shoved in my face. I know that that's just my personal struggle, but in the interest of our younger players it is not good for them to go looking for a regular RP and be given the opportunity for so much that they should not be getting into.

Here is the link to the thread mentioned.

The separate forum is absolutely happening, ASAP. Especially graphic requests in LFRP are presently removed whenever the mods catch them. Luckily, the really ugly stuff doesn't turn up that much. The "guidelines" for requesting adult RP aren't really different than the overall forum guidelines. I'm much more keen on spending time getting the separate forum up than I am in trying to create more band-aids for the few months in between.

I'm not super interested in restricting tagged profiles to be members only, as this makes life harder for those members who use the site as a place to store their character info whilst doing their actual gaming elsewhere -- if it's hard or impossible for their non-member friends to see their profiles, this decreases the value of the site for that population significantly. Moreover, it does nothing to prevent minors from seeing the content. They can still sign up and lie about their age in a heart beat, and in fact creates massive incentive for them to do so.

Clicking "I'm of age" on a profile without signing up, and asserting "I'm of age" when registering aren't really any different, morally speaking. A minor still saw whatever they wanted to. But legally speaking we're not allowed to store information about anyone under 13 without a bunch of signed forms from their parents (email addresses count as breaking this law). So, really, if people are going to lie about their ages (they are), I'd prefer they cause us to break as few laws as possible in the process.

I see your point kim. Oh well I thought it was a good idea, but I guess it's not.

Great to hear that! I think you're taking great measures as far as you're currently able, Kim. Thanks a lot

I just wanted to pontificate further on this point, and clarify how I try to make policy decisions in this area. My two big criteria when trying to decide how to approach these matters are:

1. Try to make as many people as possible feel comfortable
2. Try to keep everyone safe

"Safe" is a tricky one. It includes physical safety and legal safety and indeed, emotional safety where possible, such as by preventing harassment. For some people the definition of "safe" would include preventing minors from seeing adult content, whereas many minors would object, and even their parents are going to have wildly different ideas of how much is too much. That one is hard to pin down, and we try to strike a sane balance.

But then we loop back around to people who DO want to be protected from adult content, such as Celestina. This is an issue I'm much more interested in: helping those who want to be helped!

Unfortunately, it has its muddy areas as well. It's been suggested more than once that there should be another set of check boxes to indicate when a warning is really a warning, because sometimes when you say you're comfortable with sexual content, what you see is a picture of two boys kissing, and you think, why was this even tagged? And then other times you say you're comfortable with seeing it, and you get a face full of tentacle hentai, making it very hard to know what you're agreeing to see without seeing it. Catch 22.

For years, I've been baffled with the way that people utilize the warning check boxes. There are oodles of profiles that do not need to be flagged for anything that their author has flagged for everything. In talking to some of the people who do this, some of the reasons that have come up are:

• They feel that any form of censorship is wrong, and so they are deliberately misusing the check boxes as a form of protest. The line of reasoning seems to go "No one is free until everyone is free," except they're applying it to information.
• They know there's no actual "Adult" content on their profile but they feel that minors are too immature to be good long term RP partners, so they want to scare them off
• Their personal beliefs are strict enough that they judge the content on their site to be highly taboo, even when most people don't bat an eyelash
• They know someone whose personal beliefs are strict enough that they just felt the need to be double-careful, even though they know 99% of the population just won't care.
• Even though they haven't uploaded any sexy-times pics or descriptions in the current profile iteration, they're afraid they might want to do so in future and forget to tag the profile, so they tag all profiles with everything in advance so they never have to worry about it again.

With this type of stuff in play, my faith that adding more checkboxes would make it easier to know how "extreme" the content you were about to see is very low. We're asking people to clarify what is on their profile, and enough out there take the "better safe than sorry" mentality and choose all warnings rather than accurate warnings, that I think we'd end up in the same boat. It'd say, "Warning! This profile is 18+ only!", and you'd still have no idea whether you were actually going to see something innocuous or something really graphic.

Which is a really long winded way of saying: Celestina, I totally feel you, that is a real problem, and I wish I had a solution for you! I'm still stuck pondering how to address that issue, since adding more systems just doesn't seem like it will solve the human issues. Possibly the only way around this at present is to assume all warnings are real warnings, but if you have a particular interest in a certain profile, such as preparing for RP, to communicate with the profile owner to find out why they chose the warning level that they did. This is somewhat arduous, but I don't know another way at present!

Kim, thank you so much for the fantastic and in-depth response. I'm glad that you are indeed taking such measures and wanting to help out aside from the sticky legal issues! I completely understand what you're saying. Thanks for helping me to understand the issue a little deeper and I hope that you will find ways to help soon! In the meantime yes, I will take every warning as a serious warning, and if I NEED to see the profile, I'll ask the player first. Thank you!

Hmm on the warnings and with the ideas of more check boxes, I came up with something. Maybe there could be a separate forum in RP Discussion where people could ask for help in deciding which warnings were applicable and if they really needed the big guns so to speak. I mean I personally would be happy to help my fellow roleplayers out with this and I doubt I would be the only one.

As for myself, I tend to use the violence warnings to denote a particularly violent character. One that is likely to go past PG-13 in the violence department. As for the other two, I honestly don't use them as I generally don't use curse words in rp and none of my character's have anything that would require the sexy warning.

I think the problem that Kim describes remains with this. Plus I don't think a majority of people is interested in having to wade through topics, create topics and then wait for support from (unfortunately sometimes misinformed) members before being able to proceed with creating their characters. It seems like a massive amount of extra work that'll only make people frustrated and doesn't really improve the system itself.

We could do some extra educational efforts to help people decide which tags to use, and it might mitigate the issue somewhat, whenever the problem was uncertainty. I don't think it would address the 5 other reasons for using the checkboxes in non-standard ways, however. Case in point, you just said that you use the violence checkbox for reasons other than graphic violence on the profile itself! Which is not "wrong", I'm not going to fault you for using them in that way, it just does confuse this one particular issue of what a person is agreeing to see when they ask to be shown your profile.

I really do appreciate you guys thinking about and discussing these issues. I'm very happy to discuss them with you!

Not sure if this has been mentioned in this thread or another, but a triple layer of check boxes would be an idea.

Safe -- U/PG-rating.
Mature -- Racy, maybe artistic nudity, suggestive.
Adult -- explicit.

Deviantart uses a similar system, to my knowledge.

Are you suggesting that in addition to or in place of the current checkboxes?

I'm not sure! Either or? I mean the current checkboxes work for violence, language and sexuality broadly speaking, but as someone I think pointed out, language for example can vary from light cussing to full-on foul language that would make a sailor blush. So for sexuality, that might range from fully clothed (safe), to suggestive and artistic nudity (mature) to outright explicit (adult).

So while some people might be comfortable hearing a few light swear-words and seeing nudity in the context of arousal not being the intention, someone else might prefer no swearing at all but explicit sex. Therefore the filtering would be more tailored.

This sounds very confusing to me. Most people don't know the difference between general, mature and sexual and will possibly argue that their 'artistic nudity' isn't sexual, even when it is. I see it on art sites all the time and I find those places extremely hard to navigate to my preferences because nobody labels things correctly. I don't expect it to be different here. The recurring theme is that everyone interprets the labels differently, so by that argument a tailored filtering experience isn't even really possible.