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In evaluating this suggestion we should examine what it would mean to remove the account requirement on this specific site, given the toolset, the community, and the focus it has.   There's no such thing as an all-ages creative platform. Those that try to be one tend to allow everything right up to exposed genitals and explicit sex to capture the broadest possible audience, just as movies try to skirt an R rating even if they were made for adults. Being responsible about graphic horror like the OP is worth encouraging with more flexible controls, but one of the most popular kid-targeted IPs involves a serial child murderer stuffing their corpses inside animatronic animals, so I suspect anyone indignant over kids seeing "extremely dangerous work" probably means sexually explicit content.   I've been hanging around WA for a bit and I'm going to venture that we're mostly discussing the kind of stuff you'll see if you've read more than ten sci-fi or fantasy novels published after 1960, or watched an R-rated movie. Behind live performers, this is the type of adult content that's becoming harder to promote to an appropriate audience. Every site that bans NSFW says there are plenty of places to post porn if you want to; I do post my work on those sites and the worldbuilding and SFW background that gives it context is no more welcome there than my explicit art would be on Tumblr these days.   WorldAnvil is one of the only sites that 1) has room for customization, writing, and visual art; 2) welcomes (rather than pretends it doesn't see) adult content; 3) allows fan works; and 4) has community-focused development priorities. It also has a stricter content gate than most porn sites, which usually just have an "are you 18+" button unless they're charging for access.   This is understandable and the story of the internet. Back in the 90s and 00s the sites with the long-form "Do not enter if you're under 18! I'm serious, I don't want you to be scarred for life!" enter pages were almost always attempting to be responsible custodians of works about as racy as an Anne McCaffrey novel. The mature work I've seen people actually promoting from here is usually dark fantasy on par with Game of Thrones, or amounts to a tasteful acknowledgement that some grown people like sex and seek out likeminded partners. Folks, I would not post my mildest world lore in the official Discord's mature channel, because I can read a room.   Twitter is one of the most viable platforms for building an audience for adult work. I want very, very badly to start throwing WorldAnvil out as an alternative, but while there are creators very willing to pay for a site that won't build on our backs and then toss us into the street again, the account requirement is a dealbreaker. It doesn't prevent anyone who really wants to from getting in, but the barrier meant to discourage idle curiosity from kids also discourages curious adults--and when linking from Twitter we already have to target the audience we want, tag our posts, and block kids if we see them because it has no content controls to speak of.   If someone was actually surfacing adult material on WA in a way that endangered children, I'm pretty confident it'd be handled, because this is not Twitter.   I would love to have a built-in popup on articles to link visitors to the broader world context, because even if they're open to NSFW they may not be comfortable interacting with kink or specific themes. I would like to be able to flag my world as NSFW for site filtering purposes and leave the SFW articles available for anyone to view while restricting individual articles to people with an account. I want to be able to set up a field where people have to confirm their birthdate like M rated game pages on Steam.   No responsible creator wants anyone looking at their work who shouldn't be or doesn't want to. It is as it ever was: irresponsible people just don't flag their stuff properly, and the fact that that's the easiest "workaround" for this is exactly why it's not useful in managing informed consent for adults.

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Yep. This is a good suggestion. The 18+ tag is just a warning, not an access-limiter.

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My intention to put content in World Anvil, would be to share it with outside users, not necessarily Word Anvil users. My fiction is intended for adults, so I will be putting 18+ tags on my content automatically.   My expectation is that outside users would be able to see this content, uninhibited.   So yes!!! Make it so!

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I am not opposed to the idea of the button, necessarily. But this site is for worldbuilding, and making settings, and preparing content. Not for publishing stories, in my opinion. If the people you are linking your WA to are dissuaded from reading it because they have to make an account, maybe this is not the best platform for publishing your work. The goal for WA should be to get more users rather than less

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I feel like a lot of people are too old to remember how they or their friends were as minors. Almost every classical methods of 'protect the children' are pointless and easy to get around by said children. Ultimately, it mostly harms the creators without protecting anyone.

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In general, alongside something like this being an option, I'd also hope for reader accounts to be a thing as to encourage interactivity.

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I don't really mind about the 18+ part, but I would like people to be able to read my articles without having to create an account. As someone else observed, there are many who will come here just for this theatre-connected work, who are not gamers and won't ever use the place for anything else. It would be great if there could be a layered option so you can view without an account, but creating an account allows you to interact, eg: for forum posting, or creating your own character article to connect to a world, etc.

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I believe not tagging them as 18+ and rather put a disclaimer at the top of your article serves the exact same purpose.

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Yall are aware that many website with adult content require absolutely nothing of people who want to access them? Plus, if kids want to read graphic horror or other 18+ stuff, I doubt that they would go look for it on WA of all places- especially not when one can literally just go on youtube or spend like 5 minutes on google looking for whatever it is one wants to read.

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I can say with quite some authority that any child over 10 likely knows how to make an account on any site regardless of any "age restrictions". I also think it's very unlikely kids are going to be even hanging out around WorldAnvil. Right now the account requirement is harming creators more than it is saving any theoretical children.

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100% agree. Also: there are way worse things my kids can stumble onto on the internet without even having to click a button. This is why parental controls exist, both on devices and at the router level. Don't penalize creators and potential customers of this content.

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18+ content spans a huge spectrum and without a membership (or even with) it can be difficult or impossible to verify that adult erotic material (as aside from shocking/ horror, extreme or uncomfortable) is not falling into the hands of minors and inappropriate audiences. It might be better to create a new category of warning and labeling, with something like the USA movie ratings of G, PG, R, and X where PG and R might be accessed by "I promise I'm 16+". This proposal is not adequate to handle the issues.

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There's a major problem revolving around this. A simple "confirm you're over 18" button can be easy to bypass. A kid can bypass it with one click, especially if they're borrowing their parent's phone, tablet, or other electronic device for something. Some kids won't care (or even read that and just click) and still go into read only to either have images of nudity or horror pop up. What if their parent sees it and makes complaints about WA allowing kids to easily have access to graphic content? This could potentially get WA in trouble with lots of parents.   In my opinion, this is not a good decision. It presents the chance for kids to be exposed to this type of content, which can give them nightmares.   I understand wanting people who don't have WA accounts to read your 18+ content (I know I've had issues with it while being on my phone and not logged in but wanting to read some 18+ articles), but you have to think about how easy it will be to bypass a simple "confirm you're over 18" button or "put your date in" tactic.   Also, for anyone wondering if WA is USA based, I don't believe it is. The owners of WA are from Europe and it was even developed over there (specifically the UK).

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I completely agree with this. This will also go long way for those that want to monetizing there work to be able to share it with other communities easier without those communities having to make accounts just to read your work.   This is a good feature Request. Will allow those of us that are working on monetizing to share our 18+ works easier!

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I completely agree. I often have articles that likely should be 18+ just on principle, but I will go out of my way to avoid it and rely on implication if possible. This is a HUGE reason why. A simple toggle or maybe just an "enter birth year here," kind of thing would be an excellent idea.

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I'm very much in agreement with Naelin below, though PrincessHoneytea brings up a pertinent point regarding legality. I think WA is based in the USA, so they have to worry about America's exceptionally asinine laws regarding 18+ content (most of which only serve to penalize content creators and do nothing to actually stop children from viewing aforementioned content).   I get into sometimes graphic detail regarding certain kinds of body horror or significant violence, and while I wouldn't want children to see it, most of the people I share my works with aren't interested in making their own WA accounts.

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Yeah, it is all about consent. So long as the pages are marked and under an additional wall with a sign, I think they should be accessable.

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Oh gods yes please. Being that the adult articles cannot be shared in the discord anymore, not being able to share them outside the community either makes them mostly invisible for anyone other than existing followers if hosted in WA.   I don't know how the anonymous commenter below thinks that making a few clicks to create a full account linked only to an email provides any sort of accountability or limitation to a kid wanting to read adult stuff, but I assure them it doesn't. It just makes things harder for the author to generate engagement in the adult public, which happens to be the ones that have less time to invest into things they are not yet engaged with.

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So you want that so, our kids can go and read your possibly extremely dangerous work with no accountability or limitation?

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This gets my full support, we need this. It is frustrating trying to promote my 18+ account on twitter only to say when someone is interested in more, that they have to create an account first. Then it doesn’t work immediately and they lose interesting or are not ready to jump through this additional hoop creating an account on a site they won’t use otherwise.

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Absolutely agree! The easier it is for readers (outside the WorldAnvil community) to access an author's work, the more helpful WorldAnvil becomes as a platform for not just worldbuilding behind the scenes but sharing (and monetizing!) those worlds and stories.   Reader Accounts would also be helpful in this. In the case of 18+ articles I think both are needed.

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AO3 has a popup that makes people confirm they're over 18 before accessing 18+ stories, so it's certainly not unheard of. I believe there are a lot of legal issues surrounding this kind of thing, though, so I'm very interested to know the dev response to this request!

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