There really isn't a way to determine if someone is lying when they indicate their age. Even if you were to implement something like a credit-card check, there's nothing stopping a kid from lifting their parent's credit card out of their wallet, either.

You can't really guarantee that the COPPA forms you might get via mail or fax are legit, either, I wouldn't think.

I don't intend to be a lie detector. I just need a way to make my best effort to determine whether someone is over a certain age. I can't help it if someone lies about that. All I can do is request the information.

My firm opinion is that parents should be responsible for what their kids are doing on the internet and elsewhere.

However, I know that sometimes, even if a kid isn't really trying to do something "naughty", they might see a site, and create an account really quick without even looking at anything that tells them it's not for minors.

The reason I want to be able to ask for a birthdate to restrict by age is so I can do my best to ensure that inappropriate content is not easily available to children, and also so that I can have some level of legal protection, in case someone's precious darling lies about their age and views a page on my site containing the "f" word or something.

I also run a couple of community-based sites that have some areas where teens are allowed, and some where only adults are allowed - not because of risque or naughty content, but because they are places for adults to discuss grownup issues without being interrupted by kiddie stuff.

What you are getting when you have something like this, is the ability to know that _to the best of your knowledge_ that someone is a certain age.

And yes, it would also be nice to easily let users display their age, instead of their birthdate in their profiles. : )

If I were running a site that was actually "adults only", I'd just have a thing that says something like:

"This site is for adults only. Do not view this site if you are under 18. If you are older than 18, click here."

I personally don't currently maintain any sites that allow people under 14 to participate. Frankly, there's simply not enough aspirin in the world for me to want to run a site with younger kids on it. : ) I just have no patience. But it seems like the ability to include COPPA stuff would be a good thing for people for whom it is an issue.

What I see very little of, in any site/CMS software, is any facility for including the sorts of tags that allow those kid-check type things to work... I used to put RSAC tags on my content, to help parents keep their kids from seeing stuff they oughtn't to, but eventually, I just got sick of worrying about some parent getting upset because their little hacker got to see something they shouldn't - while mommy and daddy were not paying attention.

My roomate has a kid, and a 14-year old sister. The roomie keeps the computer in the living room, where she can tell whether they're up to something they shouldn't be. But more than that, she teaches the kids in her care how to be safe and use good judgment, so we don't have to worry much anyway.

Regardless, being able to have a way to restrict access by age would be a _huge_ help to me, and I presume to other people.

I have, over the years, had several sites I've maintained where there were areas that needed to be restricted based on the age of users, but which had to have general content available to all members.

What I've always ended up doing was adding a feature that asked for the user's birthdate at signup, and either didn't allow them to change it, or made it apparent if someone did change it.

When it's something I'm building myself, I usually build it so that if a person chooses not to indicate a birthdate, they are assumed to _not_ be able to view age-limited content.

I haven't seen any existing portal systems or other software with a feature like this, but for me, it's an important feature.

I generally restrict the sites I run (that need this feature) to people over 13 years of age, so I personally am not terribly worried about COPPA, because I don't have websites suitable for those under 13 that contain material that should be age-restricted, but if anyone else _did_ need such a thing, I'd imagine a feature that trapped for age would need to filter out any birthdays for people under 13, (if I recall correctly, that's one of the kinds of info you aren't allowed to keep for those under 13).

I have seen some sites (usually custom-built ones), where there was a flag that could be checked in a user profile that a user could use to indicate that they wanted to view adult content and affirm that they are legally allowed to do so - but even that's not usually what I need.

Obviously, everyone doesn't need this feature, but I need it all the time.

While I'm thinking about it... it seems that age might not be the only criteria that a site owner might want to restrict access on. A method of allowing a module to access special privileges based on settings in a user's account might be useful for a number of purposes.

Someone might want to have a "women only" forum, for instance.

And yes, I know that there's often an option in various portal/cms/site systems for creating user groups that have special permissions. But often, an administrator has to manally manage membership in those.

Sometimes, it is desirable to have a setting where users can indicate that they wish to see (and should be allowed to see) a certain type of content, without outside intervention.

For instance, I have a site that has an image gallery, and some of the pictures are "mature" in content, some are relatively benign, and some are extremely adult. I want to be able to allow individual users to choose what level of material they are comfortable with without having to personally intervene.

Coyote

Ugh. The problem was that I was dumb. I had newbb 1, not 2. I needed to run the upgrade file.

newbb/update/newbb1_to_newbb2.php

Now I feel silly.

Coyote

Hmmm... fun fun... not sure if this is related, but when I went to turn off MySQL error reporting under system preferences...

It kept giving me a forum-related error, instead of turning off error reporting. It seems strange that it would be telling me about the forums when I'm on the system preferences page trying to turn off error reporting. : /

Anyway, it appears (so far) that recreating all the tables using the sql file included with CBB has worked. I haven't dug through every page or feature yet, but I'm pretty sure that even if I'm not XOOPs savvy enough to know precisely where the problem came from, it can be fixed.

Hope my fumblings here have helped someone else who had the same problems I was having. If anyone is aware of how to fix the actual problem, or of anything I might have done that will blow up someone's install, please share. : )

BTW: XOOPs-types... love the debugging options.

Okay... apparently, there's several tables that simply did not update properly when CBB was installed. Apparently, I'll have to go in and fix them by hand.

Fortunately, I'm just testing here, and didn't have a real forum, so I'll just recreate the tables from scratch. I'm thinking that someone who was trying to upgrade an existing forum would end up being a little sad though.

Not sure what's causing this issue precisely. Dunno if CBB was expecting a different version of the newbb forums or what. I used the one that came with XOOPs... was that the wrong one?

I'm wondering if the read me for CBB simply wasn't fool-proof enough to prevent me from being a fool. : )

The thread here, by the way, should probably be "CBB Database error."

Coyote

Okay... I went into the file:

admin_cat_manager.php in the module's admin directory, and found a line:

$fc->setVar('cat_showdescript', @$_POST['show']);

I changed it to the following to force it to have a value:

$fc->setVar('cat_showdescript', @$_POST['show']+0);

But then I got a _new_ error message:

Quote:

So, I looked in my database, and discovered that my "xoops_bb_categories" table only has three fields:

cat_id, cat_title, cat_order

I'm guessing there's a teensy problem with the install/update script for CBB.

So... I went digging in the sql directory, and grabbed out the description of the xoops_bb_categories field, and used it to recreate the table.

What creeps me out a little bit is that this involved dropping (erasing) the table, and making an empty one... but when I went into the category editing area, one of my existing categories was still there... but not the other one. Neither should have been. This I don't understand.

It _looks_ like this has fixed the problem for me. I'm hoping that I'm not going to keep running into little "speedbumps" like this throughout using CBB. CBB Looks like it's loaded with cool features, and I'm hoping to be able to use it.

Coyote

I'm having the same problem.

I installed the newbb 2 that came with XOOPs 2.0.10, and created a couple of categories.

I then installed CBB
(xoops_mod_cbb_1_13)

... as per the instructions included with the module, and everything seemed to happen with no errors.

I then tried to edit an existing category (which I'd already made before the upgrade), and got the "database error" (not very descriptive) message.

So, I tried to create a new category, to see if it was just a problem with updating existing ones, and got the same "database error" message.

I went in and turned on php error reporting, and got no errors when trying to update a category (but got several warnings about ksort reported when trying to view the actual forum pages - I doubt that those are related to this issue).

So, I turned on MySQL error reporting, and tried updating categories again... I got the following:

Quote: