Thorns

So as most of you will probably have noticed, lj have added a ratings system to their posts: No Adult content, Adult Concepts (14+) and Explicit adult content (18+).

But I thought some of you might not have noticed some of the subtleties, and anyway thought it would be fun to test it out. This post is "No Adult content" (the default setting), here's an Adult Concepts post and here's an Explicit adult content post (none of these posts are actually offensive :))

If your profile lists you as under the age-cutoff for a given post, you will be unable to see it.
Otherwise the default is to have all flagged posts under an automatically generated warning cut, and have them not show up in searches... which includes friends lists. So if you didn't see Test 1 and Test 2 turn up in your friends list, have a look at your settings (unless you don't mind missing out on such posts :)).

You won't be able to change these settings if you don't have a birthyear set up in your profile or are logged out. And apparently the cuts go weird for community posts.

EDIT: These flags are voluntary, but there's also a capability for other people to flag your posts (see the top of any page for the little "flag this" icon, but please do not actually flag this post :)), and if more than one person flags it these get checked out by lj staff. Abusers of flagging will be blacklisted, so don't go crazy playing with that feature. There's a bunch of more detailed discussion and information on metafandom if you're interested and don't mind the danger of accidentally reading about Panic At The Disco slash etc :)

Finally, in completely unrelated news-you-probably-knew, livejournal has been bought by the russians.