I formally require that the tags on my works are approved in advance by myself, for obvious reasons.
N.H. Dottor Piergiorgio Maria d’ Errico.
This is not possible.
(I explained this tagging plan back in the first post of this thread. I’m not sure what you think requires additional discussion.)
We will have a field on the upload form where you can suggest the tags to use, but our volunteers must review the game to make sure you’re not lying.
If you think the tags are wrong, please contact us; we’ll be happy to discuss individual cases. But that’s not “in advance”, obviously.
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I’m sorry, Zarf, but after what happened at the last year’s IFComp, I can’t allow tagging content of my works by anglo-saxon people, and generally tagging following certain questionable anglosaxon “standards”.
As a compromise proposal, if the vetting & tagging is done by a recognised non-anglosaxon volunteer (we have a sizeable French and Spaniard IF community) I can agree, of course I reserve the right of revision of wrong tagging.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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(disclaimer: this has turned into where JTN Finally Gets It Off His Chest; perhaps you want to skip it)
I dunno, I feel like it kind of is.
To some extent it’s a false dichotomy; the whole business of censorship is based on pre-compliance. Ada Palmer’s 2024 essay Tools for Thinking About Censorship[1] explains it well: “the majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power”. It’s almost always a matter of what degree of threat causes you to self-censor. But.
For a start, there’s the decision to jump this hard and fast in response to a potential extraterritorial demand, before seeing if it looks like Ofcom can make anything like this stick for overseas sites (or, say, end up preferring to use their powers to get UK ISPs to block any content they don’t like, instead). This whole show has been going less than six weeks.
Compare to, say, AO3/OTW, another US-based organisation hosting mostly-text content, some (rather more) of which is likely to be relevant to the OSA. I’m finding it hard to get definitive info, but signs indicate they’re not planning to do anything special (either in terms of geoblocking or “highly-effective age assurance”).[2]
Of course, OTW is an organisation explicitly set up, and presumably lawyered up, not to overcomply with this sort of thing; and they are starting from a different place with respect to tagging practices and such. Maybe other differences I haven’t thought of, I’m not big into AO3. Maybe they are foolhardy. But, still, clearly a range of responses is possible.
I don’t and can’t speak for the IFTF; I’m not in their shoes[3], they’ve explained to some extent their decision process, and while I’m pretty upset with the results, I believe they are good people doing their best. But the tragedy of this stuff is that good people doing their best can still be coerced or talked into making the world a worse place.
(If this is what happens in response to the actions of an allied but foreign jurisdiction, what happens when Uncle Sam comes knocking?)
And then, once your organisation has decided to get into the nitty gritty, and especially if they’ve decided to classify content on a case-by-case basis (rather than, say, geoblocking the entire UK and moving on), there’s the detailed decisions about what side of the line things are on.
Once you’re devoting a significant proportion of your organisational effort to worrying about this, you’ve got a lot of individuals having to come up with their own understanding to make tagging decisions, and the tendency is almost inevitably to expand blocks a little bit “to be on the safe side”, since the requirements are hard to interpret and the perceived penalties are so severe.
You’ve got the IFComp volunteers running themselves ragged trying to keep their show on the road; you’ve got a handful of IF Archive volunteers trying to classify ~20,000 files before the UK can be let back in; you’ve got folks like zarf trying to come up with least-worst technical and organisational workarounds in their spare time. None of whom want to be spending time and effort doing this, or thinking about it.
(Full disclosure: I am currently an IF Archive volunteer, and I am still trying to decide whether I can and want to face this.)
So, say, do you carefully play through all branches of the work in front of you to convince yourself that it is at no point (say) glorifying and/or facilitating suicide[4], or do you tag it as soon as it mentions suicide, maybe intending to come back later, and move onto the next one?
All the incentives are to over-comply.
Take IFComp 2025. Under the constraint[5] of turning this around in a month after learning about the OSA, after authors had started their work, and sticking to the original competition schedule (with its 3-day window between seeing the works and publishing them), I think there was never going to be a way to get a good result.
But I have to say that a system which has blocked nearly a third of IFComp entries (not a venue I think of as especially racy or edgy) is pretty objectively over-blocking, compared to my (uninformed) understanding of the OSA. (I haven’t tried to experience any of the blocked works yet, maybe I’m wrong and this is just the year IFComp got spicy.)
I see what I read as tendency to self-censorship all over these threads; it’s pretty natural. For example (and I’m sorry to pick on @mathbrush, he’s far from the only person who’s expressed this sort of thing in these discussions, this just seems like a particularly clear example to me):
Each of us are putting ourselves in the position of the government bogeyman, each according to our personal interpretation of what they want, and acting or speaking accordingly. Easy to end up anticipating things we think the bogeyman wouldn’t approve of, even if we haven’t actually managed to find them in the pages and pages of densely-written legislation and guidance. Easy to take what someone else in the same boat said on trust, and for it to expand it just a little bit as it settles into your own understanding.
So, is it complying in advance? What’s the threat level?
I think the main threat is that we don’t get to continue having and contributing to this community and sharing our works and craft and our reactions to them and keeping our libraries of institutional knowledge. That we implode the IFTF and everything that now hangs off it. The risk of personal ruin is nonzero, but unlikely, I think.
If it were your responsibility, if you’d put years into this community, would you decide to risk no more NarraScope, no more IFComp, losing thirty years of historical artifacts etc, for the sake of not introducing a few tags and inconveniencing some users on a rainy faraway island? (Would I?)
(And once all this effort is expended, and we can say that the UK OSA is no longer a threat, isn’t what we have built a smoothly-running censorship machine? Even if you agree that the sorts of things the UK OSA seems concerned about are reasonable things to filter for, after spending all this effort, it’ll be the tool to naturally reach for when new requirements come from the UK government, or the EU, or individual US states, or the USA as a whole. How do we react when Uncle Sam comes knocking, requiring us not to corrupt the youth with gender ideology? Can I honestly say now, as a volunteer, that the IF Archive is a safe place to put things?)
I don’t have a point or a call to action or anything, really. I doubt any of this is particularly insightful or even coherent. It’s all just a sort of extended keening noise about the world coming for my joy and my pastimes. It’s not like they’ve even taken my work or my expression. Thank you for your attention.
(in response to the 2023 Hugo Awards debacle; I don’t thereby mean to impute anything similarly sordid happening here in the IF community) ↩︎
(From late July; maybe I’ve missed something since. But I can still access AO3 works from the UK by clicking through an interstitial.) ↩︎
er, except inasmuch as I’m a UK resident currently listed on the IF Archive website, so in theory a potential target for Ofcom ↩︎
Or whatever the precise thing is that we think the OSA/Ofcom are worried about. ↩︎
(at least I guess this is roughly what happened, but I may well be wrong) ↩︎
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Thank you @zarf and everyone at the IFTF for the work you are putting in to address this matter. This is a deeply tedious, depressing and worrying situation. I voted Labour because I wanted to put an end to fourteen years of Conservative government. When Labour won, I expected things to get better, not worse. I will never vote for them again. This is yet another in a long list of reasons to be ashamed to be British.
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Hopefully Corbyn gives the Left in the UK a bit more hope in the future 
But seriously, I think we should be a bit worried, not just because of our pastimes. There are a lot of movements of this kind in the world, in a very short amount of time:
- The Online Safety Act in the UK that we have all been talking about.
- Australia’s new age verification laws.
- Canada, Denmark, France, and Germany have made legal progress in this direction.
- The proposed EU law “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”, which will be voted on in a few months and seems to have the approval of my own country, Spain.
- A multitude of age verification laws across much of the United States, with proposals for federal legislation.
It seems unlikely that so many people would wake up at the same time feeling that they must “protect children.” In my opinion, this is yet another attempt to eliminate privacy and anonymity on social media. The target, obviously, is not us, but Reddit or Facebook or Tik-Tok (specifically, the goal is to more easily tie a user with their subsequent interactions in order to have a clearer profile of what they do or think). We are just collateral damage.
As for what can be done in our specific case, I think we should consider resistance to a certain extent. It is probably too much to ask the organizers of this competition to risk a possible future lawsuit, but UK users can do something: use a VPN and disobey. For starters, it will allow you to play the geo-blocked entries in this contest. (And I’m sure it will enable you to give less information about yourselves in the future.)
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included, for example, covering up a near-fatal hit on a battlecruiser, leading to the eventual loss, less than an year after, of another, much more important battlecruiser because, seems, the Admiral leading the most important battlecruiser witnessed the near-fatal hit to that other battlecruiser the prior year ?
Naval OT aside, the effort of IFTF in managing the archive and the 'Comp notwithstanding the current issue, is why I have offered what I think is a good compromise, but I think Zarf fully understand that I’m against censorship AND self-censorship (and everyone who follow my dev diary know that I have done a good effort in appeasement…), and that about First Contact and Preview of Isekai I have offered a more than generous compromise on CW and censor tagging.
now, back on reviewing IFComp stories…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Well, in the tradition of other famous UK moral panics like The Video Nasties, people with inclinations like my own could use this list as a guide as to what to play 
The films that were prosecuted as Video Nasties ended up being immortalised. Almost five decades later, people still use it as as a too-see list. There are of course plenty of films on it that were the kind Mary Whitehouse wanted to ban, like The Evil Dead, SS Experiment Camp and Zombi 2. Then there are all the others that slipped in because of their title, poster or one scene that was edited into the gore megamix played to parliamanterians (Yeah, that’s how they did it. They literally edited together all the goriest scenes from a heap of the films they wanted to ban, out of context). You watch one of these ‘accidentally got swept up in it’ films today and are baffled that video store owners who stocked them could have been (and were) sent to jail. And you also realise you’d never have watched the film in the first place if it wasn’t on the list.
My favourite unlikely film discovered only because of the Video Nasties list is Don’t Go In The Woods (1981) (slightly NSFW trailer here). To be fair, it is a slasher film, with both intentional and unintentional comedy, but it was one of the ones that made me cry, ‘Someone banned THIS?’
-Wade
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Off topic:
As an American I didn’t know about this, but your post reminded me of my favorite episode of The Young Ones: “Nasty”. Vyvyan is awesome in this one.
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Now that three IFTF projects have commented on the UK’s OSA law (IF Archive, IF Wiki, and IF Comp), IFDB is probably what most of us are waiting to hear about next.
So can we get a comment from @dfabulich or other IFDB members, assuming they’re actively dealing with the matter?
We already have restrictions on pornographic cover art. Since we don’t host games themselves, IFArchive is doing most of the work there. The only thing left that we could possibly cover could be games with obscene names (like the esteemed Hugh Janus trilogy) or reviews with inappropriate content in them. I haven’t heard any discussion about those two, though. BG recently made some edits (for completely different reasons in a project that’s been going on for a long time) to allow people to put a filter on all searches (so their own games don’t come up, or so only german games come up), but that’s completely opt-in.
But I’m not currently aware of any actions being taken on IFDB right now outside of the IFarchive tagging. (I may have missed a discussion as I’ve been pretty busy the last week; my place of employment was close to shutting down so I was distracted!)
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Thanks. I was under the impression that some sites were restricting content that was linked, not just hosted.
Reddit, for example, marks certain links as 18+ and seems to apply the UK rules to those. (Though I’m not in the UK and haven’t tested this).
I don’t know the law enough to know whether that’s actually required or if some sites are doing it to be extra cautious.
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I’m not British and don’t know the details here - I’m sure Labour was involved in drafting, etc - but the Act itself was passed by a Conservative Parliament, wasn’t it?
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Yes; see earlier in the thread. But the current Labour government has been fairly enthusiastic in pursuing it (“If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that” – Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology).
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Yeah, what can you expect from the same people of “Palestine Action are a terrorist organization”. With left parties like that, who needs conservatives…
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haha, you might enjoy my entry then
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Parchment will now show a more specific error when it’s loading a geoblocked storyfile from the IF Archive:
(Previously it could only show a generic CORS error.)
Thank you @zarf for implementing some changes to the IF Archive’s config to allow Parchment to detect geoblocking.
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Starting now, you will see a slight change for files in the if-archive/games directory. When you click on such a link, you will be redirected to the ukrestrict.ifarchive.org domain. (This happens to everybody.) This domain then does the geolocation check – UK users will get a second redirect to the block page.
The double redirect is messy; sorry about that. It’s the best way I could think of to separate the logic of which games get blocked (decided on the archive machine) from the logic of which origins get blocked (has to be decided at the Cloudflare level).
I’ve tested Parchment with this new setup, but I haven’t tested the “more specific error” bit that Dannii mentions above.
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It’s possible that this will break some old interpreters that try to integrate with the IF Archive but are not smart enough to handle redirects. I don’t know if there are any such interpreters! I guess this is how we find out.
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Some updates. The UK parliament has set an OSA debate for Dec. 15.
Parliament will debate this petition on 15 December 2025. You’ll be able to watch online on the UK Parliament YouTube channel
Meanwhile, the US has advanced KOSA.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5645395-online-privacy-protection-teens/