PG Lens Classification on Squidoo

In my last post I described what I think is a big problem with R and X rated lenses on Squidoo that completely prevents them from ranking well, or indeed getting any traffic at all. I briefly mentioned Kylyssa's SquidU topic where she talks about her lens getting it's rating changed from G to R due to numerous reports. That is actually a very interesting topic that started a discussion about whether we need a PG rating on Squidoo or not. The general consensus was, from what I gather, that Squidoo lens classification system does need to be improved (but don't take my word on it since I'm biased - go ahead and read the topic, especially the posts discussing rating issues, for yourself). You might find this and this post particularly interesting.

clouda9 has already posted on her blog regarding this issue (My Shout For a PG rating on Squidoo) so I'm just going to pick up from there and write down some of my thoughts.

First of all, I think Squidoo is already as family-friendly as it can get, for a very simple reason. If you go to your Profile and use the Safe Browsing setting in the Account Settings, you can set the filter to display only G rated lenses as you surf Squidoo. In my opinion, this great little feature is more than enough to ensure that kids don't see what they shouldn't see. There's no need to stop all the non-member visitors to R and X lenses as I wrote in my previous post, and there's no reason why Squidoo shouldn't allow PG rated lenses without any kinds of warning pages since you will still be able to set the filter to display only G rated lenses if you wish to.

In fact, I believe adding a PG rating would improve the situation with mature content on Squidoo. Since there's no point in making R or X rated lenses, people often choose G rating for more "grown up" topics: swearing, violent Family Guy or South Park cartoons, skimpily dressed models, guides how to shave your pubic hair, or how to cure vaginal yeast infections, just to name a few G-rated lenses I came across in the few minutes of my little experiment.

You see, even with the G-rated filter your kids can still come across such lenses since they're rated as G! However, if a PG classification would be added as a "standard" of sorts, lensmasters would be able to change their lens ratings to PG without losing all the traffic to draconian rules of R and X ratings. That would leave the G-rated lenses much cleaner and family-friendly.

"But why not just report such lenses and let the HQ bump the rating to R?" you might ask. Like I said just now, in mere 5 minutes I came across so many lenses that might need to be rated higher than G, Squidoo would be shooting themselves in the foot blocking them all. But those are only the most obvious offenders. If you would dig deeper, I'm sure you would find thousands of lenses which could offend someone in one way or another even without being obviously non-G rated at a first glance. Even you might have a lens or two of this sort in your collection, one that is not "purely" G-rated - and if a lot of lensmasters report it, it might too be "killed" with a bump to R rating.

Squidoo is just so diverse and has lenses on so many different topics that I think it has outgrown the restrictive G rating that slows down the growth and stops some people from writing about the things they like.

I appreciate all the comments, but if you have a few minutes and are a member of SquidU, perhaps you could go to the PG rating topic in the Requested Features sub-forum and express your thoughts there.