Internet Firms Launch New Web Rating System

Jeremi writes: "Salon has a brief article about a new content self-rating system being proposed to Congress in lieu of government-imposed restrictions. I wonder if this is a good thing or bad, and whether or not it will succeed where previous attempts failed?"

Comments

Re:It'll kill small sites through litigation

[ghostlibrary]

We use server-side includes (SSIs) with our side, i.e. a standard header file for every page. Over 9000 pages, and I can change them all by editing one file.

So it would be very easy for me to add a uniform ratings tag to each and every page. You might want to consider such a system, it's easy to implement on most machines and really saves time when you need to do changes-- or even redesign the site.

You do raise a very good point, though-- what if each article you publish may have a different rating than 'the default'.

Does 1 article about sex mean the entire site is R-rated, or does per-article blocking take effect? I can see front pages that are (of course) 'G' rates even when the content is 'X'-- naturally a visitor to that site will obey the filtering of the lower pages.

So a child seeing the 'G' cover for "House of Goatsex" will no doubt say "oops, no need to alter the filter, I didn't want to go deeper" [err, bad choice of words there, but you get my meaning]

So will it be per-site or per-page? If per-page, you get the 'lure' factor above. If per-site, how do you rate geocities.com?

Ah, rating is always sticky.