Age limit

Meta
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is there a age limit to the thrive forums, the FAQ does not say there is, as far as I know, there is no age limit.
Now we know what happened to youtube, they got in trouble for letting kids on, and this got them sued by COPPA, as thrive grows, and of course more people will join the forums, but if there is no age limit, then COPPA may sue thrive

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Legally speaking the internet has a 13 age limit on most things (without parental consent). The terms of service and other rules basically make the forum family friendly anyways so mods can delete anything inappropriate.

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The problem with youtube was not that kids were on the internet but that they were taking data from kids knowingly, so I don’t think we have to worry about coppa[1] here?

  1. coppa is not an organizatoin btw but a U.S law ↩︎

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We don’t advertise/host ads do we? I think the laws we have to worry about are EU anyways, the US barely regulates stuff.

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I think I remember looking a bit into this when we started, and I think the info I found was that if we don’t specifically target kids or ask people their age, we don’t need to take any precautions. We’d only need to react if there is a problem. All of our other discussion channels are through other platforms which have terms of service only allowing people 13 and up to join them. That means for example if someone joins our Discord and says they are 12, we need to kick them, but we don’t need to have any kind of prechecking there, we only need to react if we know someone is breaking Discord’s TOS.

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so there is no age limit on this forum?

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:person_shrugging:

I already said everything I know about the topic.

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well you did not make it clear if there is a age limit or not
@hhyyrylainen so basically there is no age limit on the forums?

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As far as I know, we don’t need to have an age limit.

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so are under 13s allowed?
I always thought the COPPA rule was stupid because most 10-12 year olds have been usually educated by their school for long enough to realize they can not leak personal info
After all, most people according to my survey most people here are over 13

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Since that, I’ve seen one bit of advice saying that you are not safe even then. And in fact you should write in your terms of service that you must be 13 to use the service.

In effect meaning that if we happen to know that some user is under 13, we have to ban them immediately.

In retrospect asking people their age was a bit of a not the best idea (edit: referring to that one thread on the forums with various polls). At least it’s not like an official questionnaire or anything, just users having fun posting content.

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Sorry for the necropost, but what if someone says they are 13 after being around the forums for 1 year, or say they are 15 after being around for 4 years? Would they be banned then knowing they joined underage but are no longer underage?

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I answered a very similar question on the community discord recently. In summary, it seems in most cases that I’ve seen users will be banned until the time it is certain they are above the age limit. So in this case there’d be nothing to do as the user is now allowed to be on the site.

Note that recently I’ve heard some indications that we would actually need to set the age limit to 16 for EU law reasons (13 is the usual age set by USA).

But I don’t know for sure what should be done from a legal standpoint. I’m not an expert.

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maybe you could allow a user on the server until it is known that they are also in the EU. if you don’t really know that a user is both under 16 and in the EU, do you really know that they are breaking laws?

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