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Age verification laws

In some areas we are required to follow age verification laws, as such only adults can use the service in the following locations after doing a check using Stripe to do a $0.00 credit card check to make sure the card and details are valid.

This block does not prevent people from browsing the site, viewing profiles, or seeing embeds, but does prevent sign in or sign up when the visitor IP is in the following locations and the account was not signed up with the new verification system.

What is a age verification law?

Several places for example Australia has implemented age-verification laws, banning children from social media platforms and requiring mandatory age checks. These laws, have massive fines for non-compliance. As such we are required to hold some assurance any user account in the regions affected are adults.

Why do you need my credit card?

There are a few ways to do age verification or estimation, and one of the main ways is to require a face scan and or sending a provider a copy of your government ID. As we really don't like the idea of this and have local privacy laws in Canada preventing collecting this information we must do the age check another way.

Since only adults are allowed to hold a credit card we use that as our verification, by doing a bank request for $0.00 to make sure the card and the details provided are valid.

This is the best privacy protecting age verification we can do, we do not store your card data and use the provider Stripe to validate the information.

What locations are affected?

  • Region / Mississippi (USA) (State Code: MS)
  • Region / Tennessee (USA) (State Code: TN)
  • Region / Connecticut (USA) (State Code: CT)
  • Region / Texas (USA) (State Code: TX)
  • Region / Virginia (USA) (State Code: VA)
  • Country / Australia (Country Code: AU)

I have an account but I am visiting a affected location and cant login?

This is just due to the fact of the location of the IP you are visiting, the way the laws in many of the areas work even visitors to the country or state must either do a age verification or a declaration of location.

If before you travel you set your country and province/state in your account settings we will use that as your declared location and you can use your account in other places when visiting.

I cant access the site and I am not in a location listed above

If you see the ban message and link to this page it may be due to you being on a VPN connection and our system detects the VPN IP as being hosted in a blocked location. There is no 100% way to detect this so we just go based on the network provider ASN list.

If you are NOT in a banned location and using a VPN change your VPN location settings to see if that helps.