For those of you that have adult websites, I'm sure the issue of age verification and warning pages is something you've all considered and hopefully most of you use. Certainly if you live outside of the U.S., the necessity of such a page may not be a legal issue, but I'm sure that most responsible adult webmasters don't want children looking at their websites, even if it's only because they just use up your bandwidth and can't buy anything from you anyway.

Many of you have been led to believe that there is currently no law in the U.S. that requires us to use warning pages, but most states do have laws that prohibit the sale of explicit materials to minors, and some specifically include the Internet. It's probable that most of those laws would not hold up in court, but it's still possible to be prosecuted.

The closest the federal government has come is the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) which has been shot down twice by the Supreme Court, albeit by a slim margin the last time. The idea behind COPA is to "identify technological or other methods that will help reduce access by minors to material that is harmful to minors on the Internet." Basically what that means is that they want every website that contains material that they deem to be harmful to minors to use some form of age verification system to prevent a surfer from entering the site without first obtaining a password, which would only be issued after they somehow proved their age. Pay sites do that by requiring members to pay for access and credit cards are the preferred method of payment. As we all probably know, that isn't a foolproof method, but it's the best one we've got for now.

The thing is that COPA seeks to make the same requirement of any website that they deem harmful to minors, even free sites, like TPGs, galleries, freesites, linklists, etc. The idea of expecting a surfer to provide their credit card information to access a TGP gallery is ludicrous to most of us, but it's a possiblity if COPA ever passes. Fortunately, as of now, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that COPA is unconstitutional, but the decision this last time was only decided by a majority of one. The next time it could just as easily pass by that single vote if only one more justice decides to vote in favor of the law.

In my opinon (you knew you were going to get it), every website that contains adult content should have a warning page as it's index page and the better the warning, the better for you legally. To my knowledge, no one has been prosecuted for not using a warning page or allowing minors to access their website so we have no way of knowing whether the simple warning that we see on most websites is even close to adequate, but the attorneys I've talked to say that the more ammunition they have, if they ever need to defend someone in court, the better.

Would a simple paragraph stating that the site contains adult content and you must be 18 to enter be sufficient? Not likely, although it's pretty much the only option we see used by free sites. However, a script was developed by attorney Larry Walters that includes a signature field and a drop down menu to select the age. He obviously makes no guarantees, but he does believe that it may hold up if ever tested in court. The script used to be available only to his clients, but I believe he is now making it available for a fee. For those of you that like the idea but don't want to pay for it, I have developed a similar script, although mine uses an age field that must be filled in rather than a drop down menu. The script is free and is available here.

One key feature of my script is a small bit of code that you can add (it's optional) to every interior page of your website (free sites, since the interior pages of pay sites are password protected) and will send anyone that lands on any page -- for the first time -- to your index page where they must complete the name and age fields (name is optional) in order to access the site. This means that you can still optimize the interior pages of your website for the search engines yet still make sure everyone sees your warning page as well. The idea behind the name and age fields is that although it's a simple matter for a minor to use a fake name and age, it can be shown in court that they showed 'intent' just as a store owner's attorney would use if a minor used a fake ID to purchase beer.

In addition to a good warning page, I also strongly suggest that all adult webmasters register their sites with ICRA and add the tags to their pages that help parents use filters to prevent their children from accessing your sites.