Our development team isn't exclusively American, it's a very diverse international group of people. If we tried to appease every nation's rules regarding how information should be monitored, we'd spend all of our time figuring out how to prevent people from seeing pictures instead of improving our gallery software. I don't know what Idaho's laws are regarding the internet any more than I know what Israel's laws are regarding the internet. The person ultimately responsible to ensure his or her site complies with the various laws of their locale is the webmaster. And there are fantastic tools already available to a webmaster to help them comply, such as the many age verification systems, all of which can and will do a much better job than Coppermine ever could.
agreed, that is why I suggested hooks into coppermine to support 3rd party systems and an option in the control panel to turn the entire thing on or off.
Coppermine comes with a default statement that every person must agree to before joining, which can be edited by the administrator at any time. If you want to add a statement that requires the age of a member to be over 13, feel free to add it.
that might fly somewhere, but in the US, COPPA requires a much more stringent approach.
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So, in my opinion there's no point re-inventing the wheel. Use an age verification service if you want to do everything in your power to keep minors from viewing your website.
once again, I completely agree... but the hooks still need to be there for 3rd party systems to use. Sites that have mixed content should not have to ....
operate in fear of COPPA or have an all or nothing approach but be able to use an al-a-carte approach to content viewing.
I'm only suggesting a fairly simple (phase 1) system of webmaster validated age verification and checks for flags in the topic/content display. Phase two would provide hook mechanisms for either 1x verification via 3rd party callback url, or continiuos checks such as that provided by sexykey.com.... The first and second are a bit easier to implement, the thrid becomes problematic in that there is simply no standard between all the providers and may also require some fiduciary compensation on the part of the webmaster.
if I had the time, i'd write it myself.
But, I don't have 2-3 days (I have started, but at this rate, it will take me more like 2-3 weeks, if I even get it done at all.)
the reason it'd take 2-3 days is because the mod i'm writing has an installer which CHECKS the database for the presence of the required field(s), makes the nescicary alter_table() requests, and makes copies the affected files with the changes that will be required. (hopefully few as I
think all of the functions are fairly centrally located and will therefore be fairly easy to check/change)