this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Newgrounds, a gaming forum, has some clever ways for non-intrusively complying with the shambling disaster that is the "UK Online Safety Act".

For years, I've been doing something similar to this when generating internal reports on DNA Lounge demographics: e.g., if someone bought a ticket for an 18+ event 5 years ago, they must be at least 23 years old now.

Newgrounds: Here is our current plan for UK users:

  1. If your account is more than ten years old, we will assume you are currently over 18. This is in line with one of the methods of effective age assurance, which involves paying a third party to match your email address against some sort of database of scraped data, which determines if your email has been in use for a long time. We have our own long-term data, so we'll use that instead.

  2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.

  3. If your account ever bought Supporter status more than two years ago, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be at least 16 to have a Paypal or debit card in the UK (assuming we are right about this).

  4. If none of the above applies, you will have the opportunity to pay a small one-time fee via credit card as confirmation of your age.

We are not planning to offer things like ID checks or facial recognition because these require us to pay a third party to confirm each person.

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[–] stealthbox@programming.dev 16 points 1 day ago

Wow newgrounds is still around? That's awesome, I used to watch stuff on there when I was 12, I'm now 36 haha. They made some funny stuff.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I guess its better than the weirder and more intrusive methods. But still a miserable way to have to manage your website dedicated to... goofy little video games and flash videos?

Once again, crazy to think this site should even qualify under the rule.

Censorship always gets stupid.

[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Once again, crazy to think this site should even qualify under the rule.

newgrounds absolutely has a bunch of fucked up porn stuff.

It also has a bunch of fucked up non porn stuff

THIS. WE NEED THIS.

Good job, OG newgrounds. Sadly i did not experience it's prime.