a look behind the scenes

WordPress staff email to us about our blog – sent only after noticing major drops in views. You have to request to find out if you are marked as a mature blog.

Hi,

Your blog is marked as mature.

This has happened because of the images and the text. While I appreciate the fact you are using NSFW and the ‘more’ tag this does not help when someone arrives from a tag page or any other link – they see the full post contents with no warning. This is what happened to the person who indicated your blog should be Mature.
Art blogs can and are excepted but some of your images fall outside of what I would call Art for this purpose. Your tags also clearly indicate the sexual nature of the posts and the terms used indicate that is not a purely factual/functional/biological discussion.
As you say yourself – “we like the science and the social of sex.” and that takes the blog into the adult/mature category. It is not a blog many would be happy for younger people to read or for those who wish to browse without finding Mature blogs.

I know that traffic will have dropped off but search engines are not blocked at all.
Your blog being marked as Mature is consistent with how we use this tag.

My reply. (I decided to not even touch the issue of what art is and who decides what the art exemptions are AND what the means by a “functional/biological discussion” about sex! And so many things that made me angry but I didn’t want to get into it.) :

I see your point and I’m not really one to get in crazy arguments with people who offer me free services (although we pay a bit for an upgrade…I’m just sayin’).

But.

Is there any timeframe on when this issue might be addressed by WordPress? It would be great if there was even a small teeny tiny button somewhere that asked for age verification and then allowed folks who are over 18 to search for sexual health information when they need it. Or if there was a category for “mature” that could filter out any posts marked as mature unless a person verifies age?

In the forums it looks like there is a lot of waiting for clarification and some suggestions for dealing with mature blogs, but not a lot of public discussion from the WordPress people.

We’re not up there with the porn sites that are still available at the search of a sex tag, but we’ve talked about it and probably don’t want to modify to become “unmature” since the boundaries are so vague. We’ll stick with the invisibleness, but we’d like to help change your policies if possible.

Thanks for your time.

Happy reading.

And then he replied again. I have to give them credit for being really quick and responsive and somewhat ok with engaging on this issue.

Hi,

We are aware that some blogs do fall just over the line into Mature and yes it is – and always will be – a subjective judgement.
I am planning to work through all such blogs and checking them. For those I am not sure of I will ask for a second opinion.
But the overall issue is something we are looking at how to address in a way that is satisfactory to all.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience – it is a tricky issue.

Somehow it’s more infuriating to me though because it seems like instead of engaging with people one on one a general policy should be put in place that would help us run our shit smoothly and keep the kids out and the adults in.

There will be a hootchi cootchi summit soon where we talk about where to go from here. Sometimes I feel like (at least for me) I’m just re-posting a lot of stuff that I am finding on the major pro blogs. So maybe we’ll switch things up a bit. More personal? More art? More music? Maybe some of you like that we siphon through all the other blogs and bring you only the good stuff?

Should we just blog about puppies and unicorns?