Why I've Age-Gated Some Content on my Site
From today, you may encounter the occasional warning on my website asking you to verify that you're over 18 before you continue on to view a piece of content. Right now this mostly happens in the comics section, but you might encounter this anywhere after today.
Why is some content hidden?
Because I write for adults, kids, and young adults, not everything on my site is for everyone. Back in my comic book days I wrote horror comics aimed squarely at adults and, as such, the content is sometimes violent and will deal with adult themes. It should also be pretty scary, because that was the aim when I was writing it!
To try and ensure that no young person encounters anything that they might find upsetting or distressing, I've implemented an age-gate function on the site. Anyone who declares that they aren't over 18 gets a nice message and an explanation that they haven't done anything wrong. If you declare yourself as over 18... that's all good. Let the games begin.
How does the Age-Gate work?
This was a pretty simple piece of work for anyone interested in what's happening "under the hood". Building the Age-Gate was as simple as
- Adding a field to my Kirby blueprint to record if a page is "18+" or not.
- Adding code to my existing preloader so that if the current page is 18+ the preloader won't vanish with an appropriate button being clicked
Hey! If I've said I'm a grown-up why do you keep asking me?
I decided to keep the age-gate functionality on my site simple and to always check before displaying a piece of content that might not be suitable for everyone. There actually isn't much content on my site for over 18s only so, rather than run the risk that someone on a shared computer sees something they shouldn't, I decided it won't be too much of a hassle for people to confirm their age each time they tried to access the more mature content.
Stick with it. It's only one click and I hope the content you find is worth it.
