AdultSafe.org's Top 10 Best Practices for Adult Websites

Legally required in some jurisdictions, a warning page is intended to serve as a virtual “brown paper wrapper;” alerting surfers landing on an adult website that sexually-explicit materials will be found there.

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While a warning page serves as a textual barrier to entry, the use of the adult industry-sponsored Restricted To Adults (RTA) label or the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) -sponsored Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) label, enables software filtering solutions to automatically block the labeled website from unauthorized users.

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An adult industry-sponsored trade organization dedicated towards keeping children out of and away from adult entertainment, ASACP members endure a rigorous, ongoing process of validation and verification, where owners are identified and website content inspected to ensure that no minors appear within.

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One of the oldest tricks in the dishonest membership site owner’s repertoire is hiding or not displaying a “cancel” link; but member retention should be based upon member satisfaction; not upon member deception or process obfuscation. As such, the lack of an appropriate “cancel” or “customer service” link on a membership website or website that sells downloads or tangible goods, is an area for concern — and a warning flag for consumers.

’2257, short for 18 U.S.C. 2257, is a record-keeping requirements statute that compels all website owners depicting sexually-explicit materials to inspect and maintain copies of the performer’s identity documents for the purposes of age verification.

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Legally required on websites available within the State of California as well as in other jurisdictions, a privacy policy statement details the website’s information gathering and usage practices; disclosing how and where any information collected about visitors is used.

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Legitimate adult websites will be concerned with not only their responsibilities towards fulfilling the visitor’s needs, but in providing limitations on those visitors access to, and use of, the website’s infrastructure, services, equipment and more.

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Due to the controversial nature of adult entertainment, transparency of ownership is not always desirable, for any number of legitimate reasons. Having said that, a website that does not provide a mechanism for its visitors to contact administrators, either via e-mail, a contact form, ticket system, phone number or other means, prevents issues from being resolved; and this lack of communication between merchant and vendor does not foster an “adult safe” environment, making contact information an important necessity.

While one or two exit consoles (those pop-up windows that greet visitors leaving a site) are a proven way for adult sites to increase revenues without overly-burdening surfers, using a seemingly endless chain of them can be annoying at best; system-crashing at worst — and unwanted all of the time.

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A controversial addition to our Best Practices list due to the fact that very few websites, adult or otherwise, are able to achieve and maintain compliance with World Wide Web Consortium standards for webpage interoperability; compliance nonetheless makes our list, simply because attaining it demands excellence in the design and execution of a website and indicates that its operators are professionals that care about the details — and if they care about the typically minute details required for W3C standards-compliance, they will probably be very careful with the way they handle your personal information and other aspects of their business.

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