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You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone
Okay, I was going to post my YT followup today, but then there was a post on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fictional_fans that triggered a rant that was apparently all ready to go. So here: My Thoughts On Adult Content Warnings on DW.
As far as I know, setting your entire journal to adult on DW does three things:
1) It puts a note on your profile under your username.
2) It means that people who have deliberately chosen to block adult content will get a warning.
3) It means that logged-out users will get a warning.
-It does not automatically block under-18 users from seeing your content (DW leaves this up to individual users and does not age-check.) ETA: It looks like I was reading the FAQ wrong: if you don't give a birth year that marks you as over 18, it does automatically apply the filter. There's no attempt to verify the birth year given, though, except requiring it to be less than 120 years ago, and they're not actually blocked - they can still click through the warning.
-It does not trigger external porn filters (at least, not the fairly stupid one where I work.)
-It does not mark entries as adult in any way that logged-in users without the filter turned on can see, unless they check your profile.
-It *might*, as a side effect, block your content from getting indexed/archived by bots, but there's a separate setting you can choose to turn that off if that's the actual effect you want (And if you do want to be able to google-search your journal, you might not be able to).
And what I think a lot of people don't realize (because they don't use DW logged out very often) is what the warnings actually look like for logged-out users. I spend a lot of time in incognito browser windows, so I see them a lot.
First, they are VERY ANNOYING. If I'm trying to read the journal of someone who has that setting, I first have to click through a warning page to see their journal at all; then every individual entry has its content replaced with the warning; then if I click through the entry, I have to click through the same warning page again to see the entry. If it's on a reading list, I see the entry text replaced with the warning, and click on it, and then still have to click through the second warning page to see the entry. I have to do this for every individual entry, it does not remember. There is no way to see them on the reading list without clicking though to the individual entries. If it's a direct link, the direct link redirects to the warning page, which I then have to click through. And there is no way to see an adult-content entry with cuts if you're not logged in (which is especially a problem if you're using cuts for things like extra trigger warnings.)
Maybe that is your intent, you want to scare people off with annoyingness! But if you haven't tried reading your journal logged-out recently, I suggest opening an icognito window and trying, just so you actually know what it looks like.
Because the other thing is: the adult content warning on all the entries does not make a distinction between "this entry is marked adult" and "this journal is marked adult". When you click through to the second warning page, it does give a reason if you entered a reason, but that's it, and that doesn't show on reading pages. And most people who have their entire journal set to adult are doing it "just in case", and 90% of their entries are not, in fact, adult. This can lead to a weird impression.
What people actually see is an entry text replaced with ( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )
When the content under the cut is, like, a chocolate chip cookie recipe or a cute cat picture, it's just kind of funny.
When the content under the cut is talking about a fun date they went on with a same-sex partner, or a list of crisis hotlines, or a photo of their toddler in a swimsuit, or something like that, it's less funny.
Once in awhile, I have had to click through ( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. ) in order to read a rant about how it's homophobic to mark all lgbt-related content as adult, and then it's just kind of deeply tragic.
So I strongly suggest:
1) Look at what your account looks like to logged-out users once in awhile.*
2) Unless your journal really is at least 75% adult content (it's a sideblog for just your pornfic, it's a journal of your D/s adventures, something like that), don't mark it as adult content by default, or you will be implying things you may not mean to imply.
3) If you are posting mostly non-adult content but still want to cover yourself, you write your own warning in your profile and/or sidebar, and then put the official adult content warning on individual posts that are actually adult.
4) If you do want to keep the default adult content warning anyway, because your journal's not for logged-out users, you can individually mark entries as not-adult, and you should think about that when posting an entry where the adult content warning might create the wrong impression about what you think is adult content (or if you're posting an entry you intend to be linked to people outside DW.)
* Actually, I strongly recommend this for all websites everywhere, because so many of them are just a crappy experience for logged-out users - I had to point out an AO3 bug recently that had been ongoing for years that nobody had noticed because I'm apparently the only power user who ever reads the site logged-out. This is something that's become sort of a social-justice bugbear for me, actually. Because if you're assuming all your users will just log in and stay logged in, you're assuming they all have their own computer, which they control access to, and use on connections and in spaces that are secure enough that they are comfortable leaving everything logged in all the time. And, as a library employee, I can tell you: there are a lot of people who do not. And they are poor people, people in insecure housing, people living with abusers, etc. So maybe most of your users do stay logged in all the time: but when you design your site around that, you're telling the person who walked to the library from the women's shelter that your site isn't for people like her.
(DW in general is really good about this, it's just the adult content warnings in individual journals that don't need them where I notice it.)
(Tumblr has actually gotten better about this lately: it used to hide the login button up in the corner of the logged-out homepage, but it moved it front and center awhile ago. An actual interface improvement on Tumblr!!!)
/rant.
fictional_fans that triggered a rant that was apparently all ready to go. So here: My Thoughts On Adult Content Warnings on DW.As far as I know, setting your entire journal to adult on DW does three things:
1) It puts a note on your profile under your username.
2) It means that people who have deliberately chosen to block adult content will get a warning.
3) It means that logged-out users will get a warning.
-It does not automatically block under-18 users from seeing your content (DW leaves this up to individual users and does not age-check.) ETA: It looks like I was reading the FAQ wrong: if you don't give a birth year that marks you as over 18, it does automatically apply the filter. There's no attempt to verify the birth year given, though, except requiring it to be less than 120 years ago, and they're not actually blocked - they can still click through the warning.
-It does not trigger external porn filters (at least, not the fairly stupid one where I work.)
-It does not mark entries as adult in any way that logged-in users without the filter turned on can see, unless they check your profile.
-It *might*, as a side effect, block your content from getting indexed/archived by bots, but there's a separate setting you can choose to turn that off if that's the actual effect you want (And if you do want to be able to google-search your journal, you might not be able to).
And what I think a lot of people don't realize (because they don't use DW logged out very often) is what the warnings actually look like for logged-out users. I spend a lot of time in incognito browser windows, so I see them a lot.
First, they are VERY ANNOYING. If I'm trying to read the journal of someone who has that setting, I first have to click through a warning page to see their journal at all; then every individual entry has its content replaced with the warning; then if I click through the entry, I have to click through the same warning page again to see the entry. If it's on a reading list, I see the entry text replaced with the warning, and click on it, and then still have to click through the second warning page to see the entry. I have to do this for every individual entry, it does not remember. There is no way to see them on the reading list without clicking though to the individual entries. If it's a direct link, the direct link redirects to the warning page, which I then have to click through. And there is no way to see an adult-content entry with cuts if you're not logged in (which is especially a problem if you're using cuts for things like extra trigger warnings.)
Maybe that is your intent, you want to scare people off with annoyingness! But if you haven't tried reading your journal logged-out recently, I suggest opening an icognito window and trying, just so you actually know what it looks like.
Because the other thing is: the adult content warning on all the entries does not make a distinction between "this entry is marked adult" and "this journal is marked adult". When you click through to the second warning page, it does give a reason if you entered a reason, but that's it, and that doesn't show on reading pages. And most people who have their entire journal set to adult are doing it "just in case", and 90% of their entries are not, in fact, adult. This can lead to a weird impression.
What people actually see is an entry text replaced with ( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )
When the content under the cut is, like, a chocolate chip cookie recipe or a cute cat picture, it's just kind of funny.
When the content under the cut is talking about a fun date they went on with a same-sex partner, or a list of crisis hotlines, or a photo of their toddler in a swimsuit, or something like that, it's less funny.
Once in awhile, I have had to click through ( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. ) in order to read a rant about how it's homophobic to mark all lgbt-related content as adult, and then it's just kind of deeply tragic.
So I strongly suggest:
1) Look at what your account looks like to logged-out users once in awhile.*
2) Unless your journal really is at least 75% adult content (it's a sideblog for just your pornfic, it's a journal of your D/s adventures, something like that), don't mark it as adult content by default, or you will be implying things you may not mean to imply.
3) If you are posting mostly non-adult content but still want to cover yourself, you write your own warning in your profile and/or sidebar, and then put the official adult content warning on individual posts that are actually adult.
4) If you do want to keep the default adult content warning anyway, because your journal's not for logged-out users, you can individually mark entries as not-adult, and you should think about that when posting an entry where the adult content warning might create the wrong impression about what you think is adult content (or if you're posting an entry you intend to be linked to people outside DW.)
* Actually, I strongly recommend this for all websites everywhere, because so many of them are just a crappy experience for logged-out users - I had to point out an AO3 bug recently that had been ongoing for years that nobody had noticed because I'm apparently the only power user who ever reads the site logged-out. This is something that's become sort of a social-justice bugbear for me, actually. Because if you're assuming all your users will just log in and stay logged in, you're assuming they all have their own computer, which they control access to, and use on connections and in spaces that are secure enough that they are comfortable leaving everything logged in all the time. And, as a library employee, I can tell you: there are a lot of people who do not. And they are poor people, people in insecure housing, people living with abusers, etc. So maybe most of your users do stay logged in all the time: but when you design your site around that, you're telling the person who walked to the library from the women's shelter that your site isn't for people like her.
(DW in general is really good about this, it's just the adult content warnings in individual journals that don't need them where I notice it.)
(Tumblr has actually gotten better about this lately: it used to hide the login button up in the corner of the logged-out homepage, but it moved it front and center awhile ago. An actual interface improvement on Tumblr!!!)
/rant.
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