Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Clear divisions of 18+ and under 18 RP Ads.

Hello, I would like to make a suggestion that RP ads for adults and for those under 18 be completely separated. I have seen a number of RP ads suggesting sexual themes in the All Ages section of the RP ads. Knowing this is a federal offence, it would be best for adults to stay out of the All Ages or have some kind of block when sexual themes and smut are mentioned or written within the ad.

I believe the ‘all-ages’ and the ‘sexual’ selections only show up at the top of the LFRP forum if the user is 18+. 17 on down don’t have a choice of filtering and don’t see any of the 18+ choices.

Then adults are placing them in their ads in All Ages.

I don’t think so. Once the ‘sexual’ choice is ticked in writing the ad, it goes in the ‘Adults Only’. ‘All-Ages’ is only a search choice for Adults only. It’s all pretty well designed. Of course nobody can stop under 18’s from lying on their application that they are over 18. If they write it in the ad there isn’t much more to do than report them, which would still be the case if there were separate forums instead of filters. I don’t think clearer divisions in the design of the site will prevent what is written in ads.

I mean they don't click it, they mention it in the ad write up itself.

Falyn. Deathandthemaiden and I have had to report someone recently, posting a RP mentioning smut, and a sixteen year old replied. It wasn't in the 18+ nor was it flagged for adult content! This is becoming too frequent.

I appreciate your concern about this! It's definitely something that gets a lot of thought and attention, because it's such a thorny issue.

I don't think it makes sense for us to blanket-ban people 18+ from having any interaction whatsoever with people 17-. Most of these interactions are perfectly fine. Many of my best childhood RP memories are from getting to play with, and learn from, much more experienced writers than myself. We'd also end up with weird fringe issues where, if you join at 16 and make a friend-circle that's about your own age, on your 18th birthday you might find your friends who are still a few months younger than you have just vanished from the forums and you're cut off from people you've known for years.

The other bit is -- the vast, vast majority of these cases aren't adults posting requests for smut, they come from minors posting requests for smut - it appears on all-ages because they literally can't put anything on the adult forum.

This makes another reason why it doesn't make sense for us to force adults to not interact with minors in any way -- most of the people who report topics where minors are requesting smut are themselves adults; adults tend to be VASTLY more concerned with minors following these rules than smut-interested minors are.

You may be glad to know that a LOT of smut-related words are auto-flagged for the mods to check out, but again, it doesn't make sense for us to automatically do anything with topics that contain certain words -- 99% of the flags are closed as harmless, because it's just people saying "I have no interest in smut, please don't ask" or something similar, and we certainly allow people to make their boundaries extra-clear. The mods review anywhere from a couple to many dozens of Server's auto-flags per day.

We're not able to auto-search for every possible phrase and metaphor people might come up with, but another passel of stuff is caught by mods just browsing around and noticing things. And if the mods don't catch it themselves, the community tends to be excellent about flagging stuff that Server misses in his initial review. Because the site is so big and so busy these days, I super strongly encourage members to not be shy of hitting that "request a mod" button!

Unfortunately, the majority of LFRP has become primarily erotic RP these days. Seems like it doesn't matter if you filter out sexual content or not, people can't be bothered to do the proper tags for it and just post it anyways. Something really needs to be done about it, because finding non-sexual RP has become so hard that I stopped looking here altogether. Even if you do 18+ and click 'don't allow sexual content', you still have to filter through a million 'possible sexual content' ads. I really think that possible sexual content shouldn't be included with disallowed.

Thank-you for the reply Kim.

Sorry, I replied at the same time. I wanted to make sure your post was seen.

Not properly tagging your posts is super against the rules. Report those you see that need updating in this way. If they don't take correction and prove themselves repeat offenders, they can end up banned.

Edit: Unless you're talking about the new "optional" tag?

Referring to players posting ads in adult only without any tags whatsoever. The optional tag is a separate issue, as it keeps showing up despite 'disallow' being an active filter. I feel as though the optional tag would be better off showing up in allow and require only, as most of us filtering through disallow don't want any sexual content at all.

The filters definitely need to be updated to match the new set of tags; I haven't been able to get to that yet but it's for SURE on my soon-to-do list!

As for people not bothering to tag their topics at all, please do hit report on these, I will boot repeat offenders so hard. It's not okay.

New filters would be greatly appreciated. There's many of us who don't want to RP with minors due to personal comfort reasons or other explicit content, but still aren't okay with sexual content just because we're posting for 18+ players only. It's certainly been a frustrating experience for myself and a few friends, having to claw through pages and pages of ads including sexual content; I know for myself, I've had to stop searching until a workaround is able to be implemented. Having a way to completely avoid all sexual content ads, optional or required, is probably what would make me start looking at LFRP again.

Edit: Ideas for new filters. Require: Only shows ads that require sexual content. Allow: Shows ads with optional, as well as required sequel content. Could include ones without either as well. Disallow: Only show ads with neither optional or required sexual content.

I just really want to underscore for people who are TLDRing this thread; this is almost entirely minors posting such ads in All Ages. Further separation of age groups therefore would have very little impact on the issue of when ads for smut manage to turn up on the All Ages board.

I know this is a serious topic, but I can't help but do this:


Now, on a serious note. These kinda things are unavoidable. It is normal, but still. No. No. No. I have a younger brother, and it's just weird to imagine those youngins being y'know even if it's RP. I hope they follow the rules this time or try NOT to cheat the system, if you know what I mean.

Kim, do you think it would be feasible to incorporate a way for any new LFRP ads to require the ‘sex’ filters to be set by 18+ users before the ad is allowed to post? Maybe add a third box that says ‘no sexual content’ and one of the three boxes has to be ticked to allow the ad to post? That way if there is no content message at the bottom of the ad but mentions sexual content in the text, it was clearly posted by someone under 18. Just typing out loud my thoughts on this.

I personally think the best method for filtering would be to have people select what exactly they are looking for before posting an advertisement:

No sexual content, Optional sexual content, and Sexual content.

With filters corresponding to these three selections. Sub-tags like: Graphic Violence, Dark Themes, and Mental Illness, etc would also be nice, but that's another can of worms.

I'm mostly building off of what Sacrilege and Rogue-Scribe has already suggested. Credit where credit is due.
Lately it feels like the Adult 18+ LFRP page has turned into a hot-spot for Sexual content with Non-Sexual ads sometimes peppered in but completely ignored. I don't think 18+ and 17- users should be completely separated but I do think the 18+ section has been overrun with a particular theme that has a lot of Non-Sexual 18+ users turning to abrasive and isolated measures to try and understandably avoid this audience.

Having clearly labeled content, on both forums, would help with a lot of this tension. I'd like to roleplay with adults, given I'm an adult myself, but I do not want to always be smothered in Sexual Adult content. (The filters don't always keep 'em out)

This is the system we have now?

I think perhaps they mean that you have to select one of the three options before you can post the ad. I could be wrong though.