Adult links and social bookmarking

During the last couple of weeks I noticed something that’s a little bit bothering me: The increased number of adult links on del.icio.us. While I’m normally quite liberal about adult content being all over the web I think that a social bookmarking service should offer some ways to filter such content out. I’m not exactly talking about banning this content but just filtering like it’s for example done on spurl.net.

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Here the user can switch some 18+ control on and off as s/he pleases. There also seems to be some kind of regulation where entries that are not marked as explicit can be reported and marked by a staff member:

What is your policy on explicit material?

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If you've found material that you think does not belong here or is wrongly marked as 'Non explicit', please contact content@spurl.net and let us know.

With increasing popularity also considering “mainstream users” this whole thing could really become a problem IMO. But not only the “abuse” with p0rn links but perhaps also with some automated ad-scripts.

But hey…. did I forget something? Yes. Del.icio.us already has an “ignore” system which lets every user select tags or users to be ignored. This is actually a nice alternative for people who know what they are doing and who know where they can do this. It is even far more powerful the spurl’s appoach since it lets the user decide what should s/he wants to see and what not.

The content you set on ignore is still available for you if you ask for it explicitly by accessing the tag- or the user-directory manually.

IIRC spurl has the 18+ filter enabled by default which is a good idea. For del.icio.us this would mean some pre-ignored tags. This wouldn’t be as easy to toggle but still as effective (and people would perhaps think twice before removing the bans ;-) ).