On Jan 22, 2009, at 11:46 AM, katja wrote: > I'm thinking of something like the stamps/colours of different age > badges at conventions might be helpful. What the age ranges would > be would be another conversation, but even just having a little > icon next to the username on their profile that's a different > colour or picture might be handy. Then, it's fairly overlookable, > but if you are a mod looking for proof of age, that'd be there. It > could be automatically generated from the given date of birth from > signup.
I think any automation of such a function would be a mistake. There is a solid subset of users who object to any publication of their personal info at all, witness the objections to the new profile because it puts the posting stats up at the top instead of at the bottom under a link to full view. I can only imagine the shrieks of outrage at something like age badges. Any function that addresses this issue has to balance in some useful manner between one user's privacy and the other user's desire to restrict their content based on age, both of which seem to me equally valid and significant. Consider too that young users and/or their parents may want specifically to *conceal* age to prevent the child being targeted by predators. This should, I think, be thrown into that balance also. It would be more difficult to program, but the approach that seems to me to make more sense for privacy and utility both would be to give community or journal owners the *option* of age-limiting their members/trusted list and have that work entirely in the background based on the age they set as the lower limit and the age a user entered at journal creation. It would probably want a manual override available in case the mod/owner chose to make individual exceptions. Obviously, if this were attempted, it would be something for the "some time in the future" list. Cheers, ER _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
