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I'm just wondering what others think about this. Now mIRC is very commonly used by children. There are probably 100,000+ people under 18 using mIRC. Anyway, 6.1 contains a link to searchirc.com in the new URL list. This site (can) contain pornographic material. The site has a feature where it displays images that were mentioned in the topics of channels on IRC. If you go through the images, you'll see that many of the pictures contain rather explicit pictures. I don't think this is appropriate for mIRC. Granted, the site is IRC related, and it is a useful tool, but I don't think mIRC, a program used by many children, should contain a link to a site that contains porn.

BTW, if you don't know what I'm talking about, go to searchirc.com and click on "IRC Images," but be warned, as I said, many of the images are very explicit.
Anyone else agree, or am I just reading too much into this?
I don't think it's mIRC's job to coddle young people on IRC or to censor large sites of relevant information because one section of it can contain things that certain people could find offensive. The site provides a warning before that section can be entered, if people choose to ignore that then that's their choice. Lets not pretend children are idiots, they know what kind of things are on the net and they know enough to understand what a disclaimer and a content warning is.
I'm not saying mIRC should coddle them, I'm just saying it shouldn't list sites that contain porn.
It's a link to a site which contains links to images which can (and admittedly probably will) contain explicit images. I'm just saying that mIRC isn't linking to the images section. It's linking to the site. If someone chooses to visit that site, go to the images section, acknowledge the content disclaimer, then they've basically stated that they are able to 'handle' that content. If not then it's their own fault and nobody else's. A more direct link between mIRC and porn is that it connects to IRC servers - more porn passes through the average IRC server in 5 seconds than gets put on that site in a whole day. (Stats provided by ItCouldBeTrue Inc.)
http://images.google.com/ contains even more porn just 2 clicks away.

Lets face it, nude images of the opposite gender are appealing to most people. To anyone who says otherwise, then perhaps nude images of the same gender are more to your liking.

Lets all just take a moment and look at naked people. See, no harm done.

- Raccoon
where is there a link in mirc to this? i havnt seen it
Put a filter on your kids computer then, you can control this yourself!
I agree with codemastr because he's not seeking censorship just exclusion of the URL and I can't see why that can't happen. The 'Net should be a place where we help each other, not pass the buck. I don't care whose moral responsibility it is to protect children from the world's woes. (Fact is, liberally minded do-gooders whose chorus of "Children have rights" are the cause of most of the problems anyway) The fact remains that if someone is able to assist with keeping the 'Net safe for all users then they should provide that assistance. I, for one, contribute by refusing to offer advertising space on my site for adult services and it is no doubt costing me in terms of site exposure and the chance to make an income from the Web. I also refuse to link to sites that I find objectionable, regardless of whatever the main purpose of the site is. The biggest cause of all the problems society faces today is liberalism and if it means that whatever I do becomes the last bastion of civil communications in the world then I will proudly be able to say that I did my bit to provide an alternative to what some people in the world do/see/watch/hear simply because they are told it's 'cool'.

My own personal opinion is that IRC related websites should be kept clean as IRC is an activity clearly used by people of all ages. Of course people have the option of leaving a site if they don't like it but does every site in the world have to be plastered with filth simply because the owner is able to do it?
Download the mIRC 6.1 if you havn't and click on the URL list icon on the top... smile
I guess you havn't checked teen channels lately... they get the bigger channels in most networks, peoples from 10 to 50+ years old are in there talking about sex all day long... the topics are all links to porn websites... You can't really stop teens from doing so, and I don't think removing searchirc from the url list will do the change. + Most of the users who use mIRC don't even use the URL links thingy...
It's not about passing the buck, it's about people being repsonsible for their own actions. Treating people under 18 like they are incapable of understanding those warnings and that they don't have the emotional/mental capacity to make a decision on their own about whether to follow it or not is not only utterly wrong, it's also incredibly insulting to those people under 18. Just under 6 months ago I was less than 18 years old, if someone had suggested then that a completely valid IRC resource should be removed from exposure as a result of that image section because children need to be protected from themselves (which is basically what you're saying by supporting the link to be removed) I would be pretty damn offended. I'm pretty damn offended now as a matter of fact.

I really don't see how your personal moral judgements on pornography or that site (which isn't 'plastered with filth' by any stretch of anyone's highly distorted imagination) have any relevance on whether the site should remain there for the general mIRC userbase to use. Not everyone is so close-minded.
Speaking of SearchIRC and other channel list/searches, how can the URLs from them be used without cumbersome editing?
For example, clicking on, or pasting "irc://irc.quakenet.org/TotalRecoil" in mIRC doesn't open anything except the default IRC server; the link has to be edited manually, and "split" into server and channel name to be of use.
Yup images.google.com does have porn images, but guess what? The URL list doesn't contain a link to images.google.com or even www.google.com, so what is your point?
I was speaking generally, not specifically about the SearchIRC site, which I, incidentally, did not visit. Perhaps you have also forgotten that people aged 17 years and eleven months arn't the only Internet users under 18. There's also kids much younger. Yes they should be under parental supervision and people should generally know how to look after themselves but you can't expect that from someone that has not yet reached the mental age of reasoning. It's the reason that you have to be a certain age before being allowed to drive a car, drink, smoke, gamble, etc. I don't know about other countries but Australia also has laws about selling Playboys, etc to under 18's and Australian based websites are not permitted to host pornographic material on pages open to all visitors. Perhaps that is not up with the times or popularist but I certainly don't take offence to it.
The laws are pretty much the same in the US. Playboy can't be sold to people under 18, and websites that contain porn must first off have a disclaimer, have a thing to say "yes I'm over 18" and they must also not be a site that a normal person under 18 would visit. Meaning you can't have, "Here is some info on Nintendo" and then "here is some porn" on the same site.
I believe the functionality of the site outweighs the chance that *oh my* I see naked people.

I also feel that Khaled should add other search engines to the url list to offset the attention given to searchirc.com and to set a precident that people are responsible for their own surfing habbits, and that the responsibility does not rest on the content providers and web portals that make the internet go-round.

You might as well disable /list if that is the case, or barrage the user with more content warning dialogs.
  • WARNING! The command you have typed poses a slight risk that you may be accidentally exposed to materials of an adult nature. It is not the intention of the author of mIRC to subject his users to such horrid displays of human nature, so you thereby may not use this command.

    If you wish to disable this warning, you must register mIRC with a credit card and valid state issued photo id, along with a written age statement.
This warning would appear whenever a user types any of: /whois, /list, /join and yes.. even /quit (we wouldn't want the user leaving mIRC to go surf the interweb for porn).

This thread is silly.
Quote:
You might as well disable /list if that is the case, or barrage the user with more content warning dialogs.


alt+o | other | lock, "limit channels to"

mIRC already does allow you to prevent /list from working, so again, what's your point?
mIRC also allows you to delete searchirc.com from the url list.

What's YOUR point?
How functional can a site be that displays pornographic banners? Get real guys - For every site on the internet, theres 234 better ones. Just remove the stupid site and move along.
I have to make a confession... I never visited the site until just now, to see what all this fuss is about.

After 10 minutes, I have failed to locate a single nude image anywhere on the site... and not a single ad banner (porn or otherwise). I'm amazed, it thought my ad blocker wouldn't disable, but there are simply no banners or popups on that site.

I've just added searchirc's search form to my Quick Search toolbar.
Thanks for turning me onto it!
I found a fev dirty pictures on the page, but no "hard core" smirk
I have to say, i'm totally anti censorship, in my mind its a ridiculous idea. Anyone who had any kind of social life in a public school will know that the most... "unsuitable" subjects, photos, words, movies willl all be the #1 thing that is dealt with. Why do you think the interweb is so full of annoying idiots? Why so much porn? Why so much swearing? nonsense? death pictures? Other silly craziness? Simply because the average age of a interweb user is 14 years old. Its not the pedophiles you need be weary about - its other 14 year olds talking to little jenny, god you don't want to know what goes through a 14 year old kids mind.

Regardless, I think the Internet is totally unfiltered to such a bizarre and illogical extent to be dangerous to the user (given the average IQ of joe public). But searchirc.com seems like its mean't to allow you to search through whats said, talked about, shown, etc in irc rooms... so keeping that in mind, if a kid is using irc... and is interesting in the going's on in other irc rooms... Err... Do you see where this gets pointless?

In a way i do agree with the original point, but censorship doesn't work, and it'll simply mean kid's'll have to keep going to [some website] or whatever, instead of spending 40% of their pr0n time finding out about other irc users habits, social studies as it were.

As a final note, i went to the site, and couldn't be bothered to search for said pr0n by the time i'd clicked through all the agreements to selling my soul to guarantee my age and such typical interweb craziness. Any kid that goes through that much warning and still is surprised at what they find is simply a lost cause as far as anything mIRC can do. Creating a international government controlled and monitored Internet for the establishment and sharing of information and general knowledge on the otherhand, now thats an awesome idea. Though you'd have to totally revamp censorship laws and copyright laws to make it work. Try getting hollywood to hand out free avi's of their movies once they get a 200% return, now thats a task.
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