A worksafeness database for URLs, comprising three parts:
- A site that lets people vote on whether the consider a specific URL SFW or NSFW.
- A pair of bookmarklets to automatically vote one way or the other for the URL being viewed, so that people can cast their vote with just a mouse-click.
- A Mozilla extension can be written that automatically looks up the worksafeness of a URL before fetching it, and presents you with a choice of continuing if a majority of users have marked the URL NSFW.
Comments
Also, it occurs to me that a lot of messageboard posts use pic hosts like www.imageshack.us, so a lot of the urls that you most care about will be newly generated and only used for a brief spike, so there won't be much chance for them to get into the database.
And for your second point, I guess we'd just have to hope for widespread adoption, so not-safe URLs get added more quickly.
I think I'd rather keep the number of bookmarklets to a minimum. People don't like to have their bookmarklet toolbars cluttered, and requiring two to vote is already pushing it. (Ha ha, pun.)
Of course, this'd be massively abusable if it ever got widely adopted. Googlewars all over again.
I have this (probably foolish) faith that the overall decency of humanity will prevail and keep public systems from being abused too much. Plus, we'll limit votes to one per IP per URL, and then people can't do too much harm by themselves at least.
I always get the feeling that one of these days one of your brainstorms is going to pay off and suddenly make you a lot of money. I recommend investing it wisely.
BTW, I've got a script running now collecting LJ account-type statistics at a glacial, won't-upset-the-LJ-admins pace. It'll probably be done in a week or so, and then I'll post the info I have gleaned.
But thanks for the vote of confidence!
Now: if you tied this in to something that might simulate a trust network, like say my LJ friends, then that could be interesting.
Despite your warning, I'm inclined to give it a try, just to see for myself how it turns out. If it ends up being largely useless, you have every right to say "I told you so!"
Definitely go for it.
You're right, though, it could easily be tricky, and as an admin I'd probably have to do a fair amount of dispute mediation. That could get bothersome.
I also don't know if Outfoxed actually warns you in advance about dangerous pages.