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.

R and X Rated Lenses on Squidoo

This time I'd like to write about one of the biggest issues on Squidoo - namely the problem with R and X rated lenses.

You probably know that while G rated lenses are the "standard" on Squidoo, you can also create R-rated and X-rated lenses which can contain mature content classified as "adult" - including porn. Note that R and X ratings don't necessarily mean that a lens contains porn or even erotic images of any sort - an R rating can be chosen because of swearing, videos featuring violence, nudity, drugs or just general "adult" topics.

What you might not know is that creating R or X rated lenses is absolutely pointless after certain changes Squidoo implemented some time ago. You see, if an outside visitor (meaning not a member of Squidoo) happens to reach your lens he will be greeted by the following screen:

See anything wrong with it? Age verification dialogues before viewing mature content are a norm on all websites. However, Squidoo takes a ridiculous approach in requiring visitors to create an account before they are able to view the lens. This effectively makes your lens useless since no outside visitors will ever be able to enter it.

"But that's good", you say. "I don't want no porn on my Squidoo". Let me point out a few problems with the current situation:

1) R and X rated lenses aren't always "porn", and G rating is quite restrictive if you want to write a good lens on more "grown up" topics (South Park? Body painting? Top 10 bikini photo models?). Choosing R or X rating is the worst thing that can happen to a lens since it won't be able to get any visitors at all except maybe 10 people a week from Squidoo itself.

2) It's confusing to new lensmasters. A newbie might choose to make an R rated lens about a more mature topic, put in a lot of work, and only then learn that the lens he or she made is useless since it won't ever get search engine, referral or direct traffic from non-members.

3) It wasn't always this way. The earlier version of the warning page was a reasonable age verification dialogue where you simply had to click "Yes" after reading the warning about mature content ahead.

4) It does not solve the problem of Squidoo being "associated" with porn. You see, Google still indexes those lenses just fine, and that means while lensmasters get 0 visitors, they can still squeeze "link juice" out of Squidoo by linking to all kinds of porn websites.

My point is this: if Squidoo does not want to see any non-G rated lenses being made, they should outright say so and either delete all R and X rated lenses or move them to another domain (like their Ever.com project, only this one would be for adult content). Now they just make things impossible for lensmasters making such lenses, but technically still allow them.

On the other hand if Squidoo has no problem with R and X rated lenses, I'd be very happy if they removed the absurd adult content splash page that requires registration and replace with a simple age verification prompt (like thousands of other big websites such as YouTube do).

You might wonder what brought on this long rant. If you don't mind doing some reading on the forums, see the following two topics:

http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=36349

This is a topic discussing lensmaster Kylyssa getting her lens rating changed to R, which of course killed all the traffic to it. I don't even see why the said lens had to be rated R, but it illustrates my point that R and X rated lenses are pointless and will never get any traffic or rank well.

http://squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=35795

This is a topic with a few suggestions regarding R and X rated lenses on Squidoo.

Furthermore, G rating is rather restrictive and I do believe that Squidoo would benefit from adding a PG rating for more "grown up" content - without any kind of splash pages, of course. Most people don't realize but lenses about, say, South Park (violent cartoon with a lot of bad language), vaginal yeast infections or shaving your balls can hardly be qualified as G-rated (yet Squidoo is full of them). A lot of lensmasters, myself included, have supported this idea in Kylyssa's SquidU topic I just mentioned.

PG rating might be a topic for a separate post; for now, it's clear that Squidoo ratings system has some issues. It makes absolutely no sense to stop outside visitors from entering R or X rated lenses unless they register. It's bad business: just think of all the traffic Squidoo and lensmasters are losing this way. Again, if R or X rated content is not wanted, then the HQ should just disallow creation of such lenses and deal with the old ones.

I even doubt if this annoying splash page serves any function in protecting kids from content they're not ready to see. If we're talking about little Squidlings, their parents can just set the Safe Browsing filter in Squidoo account settings (since they are members, the warning page will never be shown to them anyway!). If we're talking about non-members whose eyes this ridiculous splash page is supposed to protect - well, kids will find "naughty" content anywhere on the net much easier than they will on Squidoo, and a simple age verification dialogue would serve the same function without making R and X rated lenses useless.

May 2009 Squidoo Payout

The Squidoo payout for this month is already sitting in my PayPal account. I've got $54 this month and you can view the payment screenshot below.

The Squidoo payment tiers for May 2009 were as follows (note tier 1 breaking $13 mark and tier 2 topping $2 mark):

High LR: $13.06
Medium LR: $2.10
Low LR: $0.09

I haven't been working much on my Squidoo lenses lately, and it shows. This is at least partly because of the little ghostwriting side-job that I'm doing. I'm not even sure if you can call that ghostwriting because I'm just slaving writing tens of blog posts a day for a few quick bucks (LOL). Hopefully I'll have more time soon to work on becoming my own boss with Squidoo.

P.S. Have you read the recently re-published interview with Captain Squid? It contains some interesting information and insights into Squidoo strategies of one of the most successful lensmasters ever - in money making area and overall.

My First Purple Star Lens: Hubble Deep Field

I am very pleased with the fact that one of my Squidoo lenses has recently been awarded a purple star (see, I knew the Giant Squid status would come in handy). It is my very first - and hopefully not the last - purple star. I received it for my lens on Hubble Deep Field, an astronomical image of the Universe produced using the Hubble telescope - which is, by the way, due for a final servicing mission in the orbit this month. The lens contains Hubble Deep Field and Ultra Deep Field images as well as explanations and some information on the upcoming Servicing Mission 4. It was a blast creating it since I've always been interested in science and space.

The purple star gave it a nice lensrank boost (it's currently sitting at #306), good thing it finally came out of the WIP after the recent bug of lensrank being "stuck" was fixed.