The board is indeed meant to be closed to those thirteen and under. It’s not that the TOE is 18-over and the rest of the board is not. The fact is we do not mod for adult content anywhere (unlike TORC), and the TOE is merely meant to be a safe place for people to discuss adult subjects. But Tosh is right - some of our members would not be able to visit the site at all if it were open to under-13 members.
The 13 year age limit is related to the US
COPPA law, btw.
The board is supposed to be set up so that when a new member tries to register they are first asked a question about their age. If the say they are under 13 they are supposed to get a polite letter telling them to bugger off. Otherwise they are allowed to register. The current setup does not ask the age question, so that does need to be fixed. I seem to recall that on the old board we were able to specify the text that was in the email the kiddies got. Don’t know if that is still possible with the new software.
One of our lines of defense against bots was the member-activation process. By being member-activated the registrant would receive an email at the address they registered with and would have to click on the link in the email to activate themselves. By checking to see if a new member was activated or not was one we could tell if they were legitimate or not. It was not a perfect system since some legit registrants would wait days to activate themselves, but if all of the warning signs were there (bogus name, i.e.:freeporn, bogus email address, no activation) you could easily tell who was real and who was not.
By the way, I strongly object to the baleetion of freeporn. This board has no freeporn. This board needs freeporn.
Did you know that hotmail won’t let you create an email address that uses certain words? Neither did I.