Hi -

I was at my parents' house over New Year's, and I wasn't able to access any NC-17 fanfics over at fanfiction.portkey.org. I know you've been working on restricting access, so when I noticed I wasn't logged in, I thought that might solve the problem. It didn't work; it just bounced me back to the same page without logging me in, and when I clicked on the title of any NC-17 'fic, all that came up was a blank page.

Now that I'm home, I noticed that I'm apparently not logged in here, either. (I guess I have a username/password for Kindred Spirits, but not for the fanfic site. At any rate, when I enter my username/password on the fanfic site, the same thing happens as happened at my parents'; I get bounced back to the same page.) Yet, I *am* able to access NC-17 fanfics. The 'are you over 18 page' comes up, and all is well.

Could it be a Netscape problem? (I use IE at home; my parents use Netscape.) Or does it have something to do with being logged in at talk.portkey.org on my home computer and not at my parents'? (Their dial-up is very slow with this site, so I don't generally even try to get to it.)

Just curious,
Renata

Well it could also depend on the permissions setup with your parents' PC. It's possible that such (adult) access is blocked by your parents' PC or the service provided for your parents' internet.

Forums and the Fanfiction section runs on two seperate Login Systems. The fanfiction.portkey.org AND users.portkey.org uses the fanfiction system. It's different to the forums system , because we made them at different times, and didn't integrate them into the system. HOWEVER, we've not implemented the Adults only NC17 access yet. So the reasonable reasons why thing happened might be :

a. Your parents ISP block bad sites like PORTKEY -- however, this is unlikely, as we're not rated with these companies, and when they find them they ban entire .something.com, so you wouldn't be able to access the site at all.

b. Your cookie settings are different. Check your internet explorer setting. I'm fairly sure that you will find that your "Privacy" settings in there are much lower. It's probably medium to very low. The Netscape might be configured on your parents computer to be very high privacy settings. Basically the cookie that portkey serves out to your computer keeps track of info like if you said YES to the form asking if you were over 18 or not. IF the securtiy and privacy settings are really hight, you can't use the fanfiction section fully. You can use the forums though... It's becuase the forums also uses a technology called - sessions, that keep track of unique users for upto 15 minutes at a time.

Thanks -- I guess it's probably the privacy setting thing. I'm certain it's not a kid-safe thingy.

(sigh -- "thingy" -- my vocab goes to heck when it's past my bedtime)

Night,
Renata

I don't think you can stop people from accessing NC-17 fics really. If they want to read them, they'll find a way around them.