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Comment by Atotalnoob | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t see any non-text content, but I didn’t spend that much time looking.

NSFW text is a thing, there are porn sites that house explicit text for zoophilia, pedophilia, incest, rape, etc. I’m not saying this site has anything extreme or out there, but there are likely laws governing what text can be shown, it’s simpler to just require login, since that will also help protect you against COPPA and other restrictions for minors that are non NSFW related.

I’m all for free speech, but there are laws governing how certain text is handled

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> there are laws governing how certain text is handled

Is that true?? In the US?

My instinctive metric[0] for NSFW is: Could a casual passerby see something that falls into a class of designated offensivenesses (e.g. sex of any kind, but not violence unless it's also sexual)?

Text in a giant font could certainly qualify. But I would not think that ordinary-sized body text would be problematic -- if the passerby has to pause and snoop, they are breaking other equally-important protocols to ascertain SFW or lack thereof.

0: I have not run this by an HR department, and I've worked from a home office for more than twenty years, so I may know nothing of which I speak!

A better metric might be “could a casual network filtering program pick up something that would be forbidden at work”.

Good point. I have never suffered such indignity, but I forget my privilege.

This is 100% the correct answer. It’s unfortunate nsfw was framed as a political question.

Wouldn't such a network filter also trigger on random (in the sense of unpredictable to the reader) pages here on HN though? Or Reddit, etc?

I've never lived under such a regime, but all of the trigger words I can imagine at OP's site are also present in generally-SFW discussion forums.

Yeah but the IT bod looking into it would see the rest of the site as context

If they check on a site and it's heavy on the NSFW maybe things get looked into with a bit more of a "... is this person browsing porn at work?" attitude

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