Reduce Required Age to Thirteen

Why is the required age to join here 18? I don't see any adult content or other reasons why people 13-17 can't join this website. Just a suggestion, to set it to 13+ instead (there are teenagers who are forum administrators/website owners).

 

That's a good suggestion. @Brandon

 

Whoops, accidentally spelled "Reduce" wrong in the title. Can you fix it?

 

I didn't know we had a required age set here but... I do have it set on my other forum for 18 an over, I agree with @Cerberus and that I would prefer an older audience.
I may change this here but I'm pretty busy right now working on client work right now so it'll have to wait.
I guess we could see what others thought here on Admin Talk?

 

Most webmaster children are pretty mature, really. Sometimes you don't even notice that they are that young. I also go for the idea of lowering the age requirement, as I was 17 just last year.

 

It all really depends really. Some forum owners are mature and some are not. And thus, that's why its over 18+ to register. I think a better age number would be 16 and up - because it allow us to open up to more users - and there seems to be a lot of younger webmasters these days, so why don't we do it? And if it becomes a problem, we can always revert back to 18+ to sign up.

 

Do you want your forum to be meddled with younger interference as a child's play of defacing a newly painted wall?

 

I think it should be reduced too.
I mean if they want to learn about being a webmaster at a young age... Why stop them?

 

I also agree with this, most forums have got the required age at 13. Even hacking sites have the required age at 13.
But, The owner of this site may not want little kids with bad grammar joining.

 

Heh didn't realize this forum had an age limit... I do agree though it should be lowered to at least 13... Hell I was 15 when I started my first forums / site. Nothing wrong with that.

 

My thought is that 18 is a bit much. For one I am only 17 and would feel pretty uhm, not sure the word for it if I were not in allowed within an admin community for my age considering I also run one.

I understand where you're coming from on this but once again I am only 17 and I feel I conduct myself quite well around forums and I always have.

16 is still quite old really, people shouldn't be restricted in a community like this.

I saw only 10 when I first started a forum and yes my grammar probably sucked but I still conducted myself around all forums in a proper fashion.




In the end think on this one fact.
This is in admin forum. Admin forums are made for forum owners to come together and chat, share, discuss learn and more and really what does it say about a community if you aren't happy to help the new forum owners and welcome them just because they decide to start out at a younger age. I personally feel that is wrong and it would make me uncomfortable even being here. When I was around 14 and was more serious with forums if I came here and wasn't allowed to register even though I could conduct myself around the place perfectly you sure would never see me back.

 

Pretty much summd up my thoughts to a "T". Personally, I feel like kids (13-16) are too immature to run forums and shouldn't be running them. I started young but back then it was a different generation of sorts. Nowadays kids are much more immature and way too overly sensitive with all this 'cyber bullying' BS. It'd be stupid for some emo teenager mad at life to run a forum. God forbid you say something they don't agree with, they'd go slit their wrists and hang themselves in their closet.

 

I'm 16, 17 on the 14th and I found this a bit unnecessary.

Decrease it to 15 or 16.

 

I hate to say it, but I think it's rather a moot point. Regardless of what the set forum age is; people who want to signup and are too young will just lie about their age. Not that I condone breaking any websites ToS, but it's just reality I fear.

 

That is true as well. The good (and bad) thing about the internet is you have complete anonymity and can lie about pretty much everything and no one would know the real truth or have any way of finding out.....so while I think the restricted age should be about 17 or 18, no one would know for sure if a 14 year old kid stumbles onto an adult related website...

 

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I have no plans to change our TOS.
I know some younger users will come in here and as long as they act mature, there will be no problem.

Our rules are in place so if an incident does come up, we can clearly show what we allow on the forums.

 

Yes, I think that is the best bet. Make the TOS clear so it basically C.Y.A (if ya know what that means yeah ) in the event of anything actually popping up, so you don't face any trouble because your TOS clearly states such and such and the user agreed to it by posting on the site in the first place. :-)