Upset
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I Have a Suggestion for Similar Worlds

I don’t think it’s any secret that there are online predators on this site, hiding in the PMs(or sometimes less inconspicuously) and that there are young naive children on this site as well. There is an option to make a 13-15 and 16-17 year old account and while there are some measures put in to protect them, such as restricting who can communicate with them. Because this is an anonymous site so we can’t know for sure that if two people in that age range are talking that one isn’t secretely an adult, preying on the naivety of the other.
My suggestion is that for all underaged accounts, before activating the account they should have to go through a presentation of sorts, teaching how to look out for predators, not to give out personal information, not to reveal to much, not to send pictures of them self, etc. But on top of that, because I would expect the majority of children on here making an account would just skip right past it, I think we should quiz them on the presentation. Nothing too difficult because obviously we want them to join the site, but just enough so that we can be confident they have a general understating of how to protect themselves from predators. I know this isn’t cundusive to getting new members to join because many underaged members will be turned off the site by the idea of having to take a quiz just to join, but it insures that they can try to protect themselves from predators, which should be a top priority.

Thank you to anyone who took the time to read this, hoping this will be looked at seriously by the Admins and please any feedback is welcome, I’d like to know how the community feels about this as well.
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SW-User
All I would add, is that there's an active role for parents on this issue. They are the primary care giver, the buck stops with them.
JRVanguard · 26-30, M
@SW-User I completely agree but a lot of new technology slips parents by
I was on EP at 15 and it wasn’t because my parents didn’t watch over me, it was because they didn’t know enough about modern technology and web culture to keep me off such sites
SW-User
@JRVanguard hmm maybe, maybe I'm being too harsh on parents, but a quick Google search on "what's trending with teens" or similar lists a plethora of pointers to check out if necessary. It's not hard. You could easily do it in the commercial break of a tv program. But it'll never be fool proof of course. There is also "age gate software" which can block sites like SW who promote anonymity. Expecting content providers to be surrogate parents is going too far. If a child is so curious or maybe cunning to hide their activities from the parents, one could possibly question the parenting to date?
JRVanguard · 26-30, M
@SW-User Some parents are just ignorant honestly, it’s not cause they’re bad parents or anything, it’s just that they didn’t grow up with it so they don’t understand how different their childhood is from their child’s

I wouldn’t say the site is being a surrogate parent, I just don’t think a site would want to be responsible for a sexual predator taking advantage of an underaged user and it should be a priority to prevent

Like you said, most age gate software would block this site, and there are underaged users on here so their parents have already dropped the ball and they won’t be the only ones and I want the site to be able to pick up that slack
SW-User
@JRVanguard 100% agree🙂
JRVanguard · 26-30, M
@SW-User Thank you very much and thank you for being so respectful🙂