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

How do you check if the users are indeed as old as they say they are?
It is possible to build in a function that checks if the user is older than a certain age, but the question is: "How do you want to do this?"

In the current version it looks you will need to write a hack in order to do this. Most obvious would be to add the fields you need in the user profile and adjust the edit form to you needs. Then create functions that call the values of these fields and use them to determine whether or not they can access a certain page or module.

Looks like a lot of hacking, so in case of updates, be very careful not to overwrite your hacked files.

Martijn

John_N might be able to help you there. He told me that he has implemented a system that does just this. Basically, it stores everything age related in a personal 'dossier' that can be used to verify the website has done everything in it's power to make sure that what they believe is the user's age really is that, and that they acted accordingly.

Contact him for more information

Herko

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Hi martijn

with regards to age verification, COPPA requires that people under the age of 14 (i think) need to fill out a form and have their parents/guardians sign the form and send to the website/organization by written letter (snail mail) I don't know all the details of it other than when I used it with IPB forum.

Thanks Monty

I am also in need of a way to restrict users by age.

I've contacted John_N via PM, as Herko suggested to someone else, regarding the system that he has, and have not heard back from him - possibly he is on vacation.

Has anyone else gotten something like this working?

in my latest phot + profiles hack v2, i integrated a date of birth function into xoops..

so a new form class of formtextdateofbirth.php was created along with a gender select class and starsign class.

this allows users to enter date of birth on registration (using MySQL date format yyyy-mm-dd (altho it uses a calendar to enter the date and not text input)

on the userinfo page, the dob is not shown to other users, it is only shown as AGE which is a calculation of the users age from their given date of birth.

existing users have the option of editing their dob only once.. after that then only admin can edit their date of birth. (it's not perfect, but i'm no coder.. so maybe someone might be able to improve on it)

maybe someone could extend that to do the necessary checks.. and coppa form (but maybe a seperate page altogether for coppa requests might be better)

the user_birth value can be called by smarty using <{$user_birth}> and the users current age can be called as <{$user_age}>

maybe could be integrated with reg_keys module or reg_codes hack to allow under age users to be entered into their own group..

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Is it available for download?
We are also stepping into this subject.

my host server is down at mo.. but i could mail it you or send over msn if you want?

yes, msn is simple : )