What I’d like most, I think, is something that a blogger could use to mark her blog and that would make it filterable by the parental controls on browsers. Parents who support their teens’ access to sexually explicit material wouldn’t have to filter. Parents who wanted to restrict their teens’ viewing could do so. For that matter, anyone — parent nor not — who wanted to avoid such material could filter it out.

that’s a interesting idea that belongs in firefox’ bugtracker. (the API has to exist before websites can use the format). That’s worthy of a letter/post in and of itself.

The glitch with ‘mature’ tags not displaying ‘mature’ content, needs to be fixed by having an additional flag on each category. once categories have that extra field (admin side, not user side), a lot of the other problems we’re having can be solved.

What still bothers me is that there are global tag pages that clearly identify material as sexual in nature. The Erotic tag page is one example. And yet blogs that have been marked as “mature” don’t show up there. I still don’t get that. Just logically it doesn’t make sense.

So, Adam is not an activist leader. What if I put a letter on my blog that requests Automattic/WordPress.com to make a more logical policy. We could then direct bloggers — or others — to it, and could ask that it be sent to WordPress support and to Automattic itself.

Is that a good starting point?

Here’s what came to mind and what I considered asking the blog owner:

“You’ve spent so much time figuring out if it could be done, you never stopped to consider if it should be done.”

That guy and most of his commenters were certainly hung up on the idea of “sanitizing” the web and whether or not it was feasible or practical. Didn’t seem like a single one of them from either side of the issue ever really quite made the leap to whether it should even be attempted or why.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that its unfortunate so much time and effort is wasted on crap like that (OMG! R rated avatars!), and I think the issue again hearkens back to the discussion on Elizabeth’s blog about our culture of sexaphobia.

Exactly why again is it that a 15 year old shouldn’t be exploring his/her natural curiosity about sexuality?

Sorry for the stream of consciousness effect, I guess I’m just thinking out loud.

things like an under 18 warning plugin, i can make, and beg to be implemented. but i’m not an activist leader.