On the face of it, it is a very good idea... but it does pose some administrative problems. You knew there was going to be a "but," right?
Firstly, I would have to manually put all members under 18 into a separate membergroup in order to restrict their access to the new board. At the moment, there are no such delineations based on age.
Secondly, I don't know
who is under 18 because people are not required to put their birthdate when they join. They only need to confirm that they are over 13 years old by ticking the box.
A way around this might be to add yet another required field to the membership form, but even then there is no way to force people to fill it in. I would probably be constantly chasing people who missed out the question to confirm their age before letting them in. (I already do a lot of "chasing" for other missed questions, so I'm being realistic here rather than pessimistic.)
Another way is to raise the minimum age for all new members to 18. Those child members who are already known to us would not be thrown out, of course. But I would still have to put them into a different group to make the "Adults Only" board invisible to them. Another difficulty here is not knowing exactly when the child members will turn 18. I would have to wait for them to ask me for access to the restricted board because there is no way to make that automatic.
Btw, the PFZ is visible as soon as people have completed registration and had their accounts activated. There is no minimum post count required in order to access that board.
It's the "Shopping & Auctions" board which is not visible to all members immediately. You need to have 25 posts in order to access it:
http://www.playmofriends.com/forum/index.php?topic=100.0The simplest way to restrict access by board is to base it on post count. Maybe it would be better to make the new board a VIP area which can only be reached after several hundred posts? I really must stress that the one thing we
don't want to do is make it an 'anything goes' board. I would still insist that all basic guidelines on posting content and behaviour are met, regardless of whether the area is invisible to younger members.
It's likely a heavily restricted board will cause a rift between those who are allowed to see it and those who are not. For example, if someone was to reference information in the hidden area back in the public zone, the ones who can't go and read it for themselves might feel that they are being discriminated against.
