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azurelunaticTitle:
Streamline logged-out viewing of NSFW/18+ content
Area:
logged-out users, entries
Summary:
Allow logged-out users with no content preferences set to declare their preferences in some fashion to reduce the number of steps they have to take in order to view flagged content. This would be especially helpful for people who use bookmarking services and offline cached content services.
Description:
There should be some way for logged-out users and people without accounts (and external services, which generally do not have accounts) to view content flagged as NSFW or 18+ with a minimum of barriers, provided that there is some acknowledgment.
Some services have a way to add something like "?view_adult=true" to the end of a link.
One could possibly also do this with saved cookies, but that could be an issue for external services attempting to index the site. On the one hand, sometimes it's good to have a thing that's technically public but the contents have not been crawled. On the other hand, "NSFW" shouldn't mean "dear search engines, please don't index or cache this", it should mean "NSFW". (I am not opposed to the idea of an entry-by-entry no-index/no-cache sort of setting, but I don't want it in my NSFW/18+.)
An external service could always set up an account for their indexing tool to use, but that's a one-by-one sort of solution, and not all external services would necessarily be willing to do that, and it doesn't seem elegant.
Having a URL argument could lead to someone posting a link somewhere and someone else clicking it and getting a faceful of something they did not want. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping the entry owner from posting something blatantly NSFW with no entry settings to indicate that it is. The regular site view does display a discreet little warning at the top of every flagged entry, so even a link where a warning splash page was bypassed would have some indication that this was NSFW/18+. It could also lead to someone who is under 18 logging out and using the URL argument, but a logged-out user can view an 18+ flagged entry by clicking the button that declares them 18+.
If consensus is that the existing NSFW/18+ warning is too subtle for being useful to visual logged-out users who have bypassed the warning splash page, one compromise might be to make a larger header area with a more prominent warning when that page has been bypassed, to (depending on screen size) attempt to force the actual NSFW content down below the fold, in the fashion of spoiler space, and to have a notice that is less easy to ignore than a 16x16 icon. (Text-only users could get the same effect; I'm not sure of the best way to get the same effect for screen reader users.) (However, having a very large bright red scary type of visual warning could be bad for misclicks-at-work use case; it should advise the user that they should be aware without alerting the whole office that they just clicked into something NSFW.)
This suggestion is apropos of the Pinboard most-wanted-features discussion, which includes thoughts on handling Dreamwidth NSFW/18+ flagged entries.
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
18 (41.9%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
6 (14.0%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
7 (16.3%)
(I have no opinion)
8 (18.6%)
(Other: please comment)
4 (9.3%)