I messaged Mirko about this because when I just tried clicking ANY pages, member pages, subforums, topics, whatever it said the page didn't exist and redirected me to the home page of EC. And now everything's working again so I'm posting it here to let you guys know.
Tis all good. The site is just having some work being done which keeps causing a few errors due to the sites customisations. Hopefully twill all be sorted soon. Martin. Ps. Mirko resigned a while ago, so he'll be just as bewildered as the rest of you by the error messages.
Oh right my bad. And is that why it has the "Empty Closets - a safe community..." instead of just Empty Closets for the forum?
I wonder if that might make the site more susceptible to filers, particularly filers from governments. I know there are some posters here from the Middle East and those countries have strong censorship policies.
^ Judging from the Map Analytics of traffic, any government filters are already doing a good job at keeping people from those countries blocked from the site. That risk also exists and increases every time a new thread is made because it's a new search result on Google, and is one extra link to risk being censored. It's no longer feasible with EC's size to try and prevent filters from taking effect because many already do, and there are even states in USA which are filtering us at schools (although the ACLU are sorting that out ). The only thing we can do is make the content we submit as friendly and clean as possible to ensure that any additional filters won't block it thinking that its adult material. It's actually a great shame that countries are blocking the site, but that is something sadly beyond the control of admins. We just have to hope that people from regions that have such filters are able to find ways to continue accessing the site as it continues to grow.
My understanding is that most of the major filters filter by domain, not by page content. The larger providers have a room full of people who look at sites all day and manually add them to their filtering databases. As far as automated filtering, there's plenty of content in our articles section and in the 800,000 posts we have already to get us blocked by anyone that is filtering gay-themed sites, and unfortunately there isn't much we can do about that.
I'm noticing a distinct lack of bisexual in the EmptyClosets headder. I know the community is much larger than just Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender, but for the most part, LGBT is how this site is described more often than not, so I just find it odd to be missing one of said groups.