Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » underage warning pop-up

They're told "Sorry, this person is not accepting friend requests right now." the identical message that is shown for when you have this setting set to "No one." When it's an inbox message, the error that comes up is, "(Username) is not accepting messages right now."

There is no way to distinguish between whether you're being rejected for age group or because the person just has their settings on lock.

It was done this way so that people who did not wish to reveal their age, for any reason, don't have to.

Why not force kids to reveal their age for safety reasons? Many parents and guardians are under the impression that a good safety measure is to have their children never reveal their age or to lie about their age and claim to be older than they are in order to throw pedophiles off the scent.

You and I might very strongly disagree that this actually protects them. We might think that this has the very unfortunate effect of putting non-predator adults in a weird situation where they believe they are just interacting normally with another adult. But for a certain portion of the population, it makes them or their caretakers feel much safer and more secure. I might find their reasons for feeling safer that way to be illogical. Even so, I think that the feeling of safety that they gain from being able to hide their age and not have it sussed out by others to have value. This is the right to privacy that Claine was talking about.

I refer you back to my last post about a solution being to ask the other person to send you a new inbox message, even after you have initiated one. When you have the "only people in my age group can initiate" setting turned on, people can reply to a conversation you have already started with them, but unless they are already on your friends list, they will not be able to start a new inbox convo with you unless they are in your age group.

Quick edit: I started typing this awhile ago, without seeing a lot of the messages since posted.

Gonna say first that I'm super mixed about how I'd even prefer it myself, but I do at least think Kim and the mods have pretty solid judgement on whether or not to try implementing anything for it, so... Eh, this post is probably going to be a mess.

It's been noted a number of times that people don't only want to hide their specific age, but that minors specifically get encouraged to pretend to be adults to be less of a target (even though it's also been noted that doing that actually puts them at greater risk). Whether or not someone is 18+ does, itself, still count as a privacy and comfort thing. Someone may still feel at greater risk of being targeted if they can be outed as as a minor. I could easily see that being true in some places; and much as I hate to think about it, even this site may have such people lurking, especially since the reasons for targeting a minor can vary, and some of those reasons might not be as obviously wrong to everyone.

I can see reasoning for having it be a vague pop-up thing. Blocks work similarly; the person who has been blocked is not informed unless they attempt to interact with the blocker in a disallowed way, and even then, the message keeps things pretty unclear. If basically the same message were used, that confusion would still commonly be there, and even those more familiar with it would not know if it was an age group thing or a block. That could admittedly create some unnecessary confusion and distress if someone thinks they were blocked and that's not the case, but it is still a possibility. Or heck, I don't imagine it would need to be any more intrusive than whatever mechanism prevents people from sending friend requests to those who only accept them from their own age group.

Another possibility I could see is to simply remove the friend button for users outside of one's own age group, if they have that same limitation set for incoming requests already. On one hand, it'd be a pretty subtle little change that could potentially go entirely unnoticed by anyone who might otherwise casually friend someone, leaving them none the wiser. On the other it wouldn't even require the attempt before it's revealed, and someone actively looking to friend someone would still notice the missing button.

A relatively simple way a user could handle it themselves, though, is just to ask the other person to send the friend request. This puts the "outing" into the hands of the person who would be outed, for the most part, as they could simply refuse. I don't know if friending-back can be blocked by the age group thing, but if not and both people want to confirm, you get a mildly annoying little friend/unfriend/friend dance.

Minors can already also use settings to restrict incoming contact to their own age group.


Users registered as minors on the site do not have the option to view content that has been labelled 18+. Images that have been labeled are censored out. Profiles that have been labelled are inaccessible. Only adults are given the option to view such things. If you're using the system properly, minors would not be at risk of exposure to adult content in your profiles.

For those who don't know, I think Zel is referring to this: https://www.rprepository.com/community/news/1012

Gonna point out that, while there are obvious safety risks to both kids and adults with relation to adult content showing up in RPs, there are also plenty of adults who will practice age-related discrimination against children for reasons outside of the kind of safety discussed in this thread.

Kids are frequently talked down to, made to feel less intelligent, and often gated from communities even if those communities don't encourage or allow content that puts them, or other adults, at risk. Adults feeling that children are just too dumb or inexperienced to interact with as equals is also a huge reason kids might choose to hide their age online.

Age-based discrimination is very real online, and personally, not something I understand outside of the pragmatic concerns surrounding the law and child safety. I've met teenagers half my age who make me feel very immature, and adults 10 years my senior who act like toddlers. It seems to me, though, that most adults are more concerned with THEIR OWN comfort over that of a child, and I wonder what makes a person so small that they feel threatened by a child.

The truth is, if some horny teen ends up in your DMs, and you don't know they're a teenager until after the fact, all you need to do is report them and immediately cease contact. The consequences of their actions are far more likely to rain down on the site admin's head than yours. Once you report them, it's no longer your problem. You didn't do anything wrong. If it makes you feel gross regardless, well, that's not an unexpected response, but if we ran the world on how people felt, we'd have to deal with far more insanity than we already do.

Edit: Not trying to imply that an adult's comfort is a totally invalid thing in this discussion, but that it feels to me like too many adults think their need to feel comfortable is somehow more valid than a kid's need to feel respected.

okay i’d like a mod to close this topic because i think we’ve lost the plot here— and the point of my suggestion. i don’t think this discussion is going in a healthy direction, folks.

So like...this whole thing could just be avoided by using the new, fancy, handy-dandy verified adult system, no? If people are that concerned about interacting with bonafide adults, that's the only way to do it. There's plenty of kids who signed up as adults on this site when they weren't. Sure, it might cut down on your pool of potential people to chat with because there's plenty of us folks who aren't verified for miscellaneous reasons (mine being data security), but it'd mean you don't have to worry about kids.

I was going to talk about how people are starting to get really exclusive in regards to minors, but Aardbei captured it better than my 2 am brain can. Remember that this is a PG-13 site first and foremost, not "18+ strip club for sooper mature adults, no kidz allowed". A line has to be drawn between "comfort" and "straight up excluding the site's targeted demographic because we want to turn it into an adult RP site."

uuuuuseeee the verified adult systeeeeem

Raising my hand that data security is also the reason I haven't used the verified system either... I also don't seek out ERP, so I can't imagine it ever being an issue for me, heh.

Owl's original suggestion was some sort of subtle suggestion to let us know the user we're contacting is in a different age group.

Through this suggestion thread, I found out that the setting regarding age group doesn't mention age settings at all when a minor tries to contact, it acts the same as not accepting friend requests/PM's.

I don't see how that being implemented as a send or receive setting instead or as well, is such a hard concept to grasp.

If all these settings and securities are already in place using both the privacy settings and the content warnings for characters, and we're worrying for nothing, that's great!

Otherwise, I think opinions and debate should be left for elsewhere and yeah - topic closing might be best bet.

This is my TLDR version:

• Some adults would feel safer NEVER accidentally interacting with a minor, regardless of whether that minor lied upon registering, or didn't lie on registering but is lying now.
• Other minors (or their caretakers) feel much safer when people DON'T know that they are a minor. It's not the exact age they don't want revealed, it's their age group in its entirety.
• These desires are in conflict.
• The RPR values include some level of privacy, including avoiding ways that people could out your anonymous characters with "test" blocks, finding out ages by changing their own personal settings and seeing how that effects their ability to send an inbox message, etc.
• The values of privacy and boundary setting are sometimes in direct conflict, and compromises/balances have to be worked out between them. Sometimes fixing one problem causes another where these things are at issue. This is tricky, and understandbly, some people are going to err more toward boundaries or more toward privacy in how they would personally solve these problems.
• The reason I am reluctant to add an outgoing "stop me from initiating contact with someone not in my age group" is because you could enable it for a moment, test, then disable it, test again, and know someone's age group when they have not opted to publish that information, regardless of what the error message was made to say.
• Even though we would not be revealing exact age, revealing someone's minor status when they feel safer/less likely to be targeted by not revealing that does indeed breach privacy.
• Both of these scenarios, being able to find out and not being able to find out, are frustrating to different people for different reasons.

There are a few potential solutions to those who are really concerned that someone is making a claim about their age that does not match what they told the system:

• "Initiate" contact means being able to start a new inbox conversation. You can message someone and ask them to send you a new inbox message. They can refuse to do so and maintain some level of anonymity, but if they agree and then successfully do it, you know they are registered as within your age group.
• You might consider asking that person to name a few of the topic titles currently on the first page of the Adults Only LFRP forum results.
• If you absolutely cannot risk someone lying to either you or us, the only way to get close to sure that that person isn't lying is to stick with only people who are age-verified. Someone who really wants to lie about their age can do it twice, both on registration and to your face.

Those first two solutions do mean that you might potentially exchange a few words with a minor. I realize the idea of this thread was to avoid even having to say hello, so again, it's a compromise solution rather than the total block that was originally suggested.

Anyway, locking this topic as per Owl's request.