According to me ,A family friendly directory means a directory which can be used by an entire family to find important informatiion.(It should contain Adult listings or poker or casino links)
If you think this is an absurd discussion then simply get off the thread and stop trolling. Your continuous attempts to harass just about any post of decency is annoying to the decent members here. Don't you have something better to do than get on with being an editor of family UNSAFE dmoz? If you have something constructive to comment on, and snake oil is definitely a good point then do so but please, cut this rubbish out where you try to discredit threads. This is possibly one of the best discussions we could have, regardless of whether I started it off or not.
Jamie, given that people do not use directories such as yours to actually find sites, what possible benefit is it to anyone (other than your revenue generation) for you to put the label "family friendly" on your directory other than to widen your trawl for webmasters who think that there is some benefit in paying you to include their sites in your directory?
the best way to decide whether a directory is family friendly or not, is to call your family and sit together and browse it! Can you browse a so-called "family friendly" directory with your kids, parents, wife, sister and brother! if not then that directory is probably not all that family friendly after all! Most directories and websites listed on it are unsafe or not recommended for kids! I mean atleast without parental care, as most sites have ads on it which the site owner dosenot have control!! Different family are different, may be my family can't browse casino sites together but some families can, so casino/poker is a subject which is hard to decide on the family friendly front! May be the directory owners can run polls/surveys on the directory where the visitors will give their openions on what they want to see on the directory and what they don't consider family friendly.
Can you just leave the thread continue for a while before jumping the gun. I'll then come out with a FACT based summary WHY people should use directories over search engines.
Running a directory so tightly tied to the arts, I knew that I would have to deal with issues of nudity that were not related to porn or other types of low-life sexually explicit materials. When I asked a similar question on an Arts & Crafts forum the answers I received were quite surprising. One person went so far out on a limb as to say that adults are part of a family too and therefore much of what has already been mentioned as non-friendly was actually OK with them - it's not all about children was their belief. The other extreme was almost to the point of no skin showing anywhere - meaning old-fashioned Puritan standards. Most however, agreed with the views already expressed in this thread. Since I deal with art, this is something that I had to define for my directory in terms more specific than most here would need to for their own sites. I opted for if it was a doll-like figurine (doubt many children haven't seen Barbie nude) that would not be something objectionable (many in the craft forum agreed with that assessment, obviously some did not). If, on the other hand it was realistic paintings that included 'anatomically correct' images - it was out. The non-friendly issue has come up only twice since I started almost 2 years ago. One was for a studio who simply never replied when I asked if they accepted art that "celebrated the human form" and the other was for a very talented artist who truly celebrated the forms of his girlfriend and himself. I sent him an email explaining why he would not be included on my site and I received a very nice and understanding reply in response. One painter on my site creates "beautiful women in exotic locations". Her work is truly beautiful and is more about the beauty and fantasy of women rather than the suggestive side that phrase represents. There was a short time after I listed her site that I was getting hits from folks who obviously had something other than arts and crafts on their mind. Can only imagine what they were thinking when they landed on my site. lol I would think in many ways it's much easier for a general directory to define what is and what is not family friendly as the whole arts issue is probably not something you have to deal with anyway. The only thing that I see that has not been specifically mentioned already would be all the "enhancement" lotions and potions websites - if their gross emails in my inbox are any indication of what their sites are like...
@YMC: That is such a fantastic post YMC. I would green but I have to spread around first. @JamieG This is a really hard topic to tackle because everyone has their own personal views on what would constitute as a family friendly website. There are so many ways this could go, so instead I think I would just prefer to read the topic of discussion at this point, rather than trying to express anything. Good topic and discussion though.
You can't spread love any more your hitched. I was in the same boat though and would have repped a great post. Thanks.
Thank you both for the kind words. As you can see from my post this has been a major issue with my sites. It is something that to some degree each website owner has to decide what level of family-friendliness they want for their sites. Being family-friendly is unfortunately a perspective sort of thing and there will never be any one right approach. If you start factoring in cultural differences the issue gets even muddier. I do however think that too much responsibility has been placed on website owners and not enough on parents to ensure that their children do not find and even fall prey to objectionable material on the web.
Agreed. Start factoring on semantics YMC, things get even muddier I've just been checking on this side of things and the possible legal issues with that. I was knocked sideways with how abused this is.
@ JamieG, I have bidding directories that are family friendly - By saying family friendly, what I do is to ensure links in them are suitable for all ages and legitimate in the eye of law (well at least in general) - This will rule out: p0rn, warez, hate, racist, gambling, and other related sites. I dunno whether my definition is right, but at least that what I do. Cheers!
There's a variety of definitions, your link here Radiometro Mac Solar 6th in your list isn't working. I also noticed that 6 of the bids on your front page were made by the same site. And I hope this helps, if your going to say Links can be removed at any time for violating our link policies, perhaps having a policy in place in the first place would help?