11:03 AM
Rants & Whines Adventures with children

On an age restricted list I help run:

Female person immediately uploads story to list archive which has red text warnings at top and bottom that it's for members only. I don't recognize her address, check list membership, not there, I delete her story and email her to let her know she needs to join the list first before uploading her stories.

She requests to join, gets the automated form asking for an age statement and emails back:

"what's an age statement?"

I explain that it's just a statement of how old she is, like "I am __ years old", something like that.

She emails back, "I am 15. Now am I part of the list so I can submit my story?"

I explain that I'm sorry but the group is for adults only, for people 18 and over and I reject her pending membership.

She replies, "Why not?? I sent an age statement!"

(I didn't happen to check the group's admin email address so I didn't see that reply for a couple weeks.)

Two weeks later, she requests to join the list with another email address (different AOL screen name but using the same particular capitalization method) and uploads another story, listing her same name, original address for feedback and new address as subscribed. I delete her story.

I see she's in pending again and I check the group admin address, see her "Why not?!" and tell her *again* that the group is for adults, that means 18 and over and since she's under 18, she can't join and she can't upload stories either. I reject her membership and ban both her email addresses.

(alice pauses to see what the young lady will do next....)

I've decided that I like the age statement requirement, not really for the point of keeping out people under 18, because I know there's plenty of fifteen and sixteen and seventeen year olds who are more mature than some thirty and forty year olds (myself included at times) but it's more of a mental maturity check. If someone is mentally mature, they'll usually be savvy enough to say they're 18 or older and get to join the group. If they're not that mature yet, then they won't.

And does anyone know of any Harry Potter archives that I could recommend to this person to upload her story? It's gen so it needn't be an adult HP archive. I guess she's just really antsy about putting her story on the net somewhere, she doesn't seem interested in the list at all. I can send her the link to fanfiction.net, but some HP archives where she could upload her story would be good too.