To admins of R-rated sites- what made you choose to rate your site as such? Did you launch the site as R-rated and encourage more adult material or did the rating change based on how the roleplay went?

I'm also interested in rough percentages of how many topics contain R-rated material. Do members have to mark certain topics as mature or does anything go because of the nature of the board? If topics need to be marked, how do you determine the difference between a PG-13 topic and an R-rated topic, especially in terms of violence?

War game. All grown ups. Freedom to choose.

Those are my main reasons. I want to be able to choose and my forum allows me to make that choice legally. Though considering we're rated mature, the game has remained completely respectable, content-wise, with only a couple of M rated threads in 12 months. My members are old enough to watch what they read and only read what they want to.

Yeah--war, drugs, sex, violence, torture, rape... we're about 20 years old on average (the players), so I figure we might as well be rated-R. We're theoretically PG-13, but if you label a thread R, no holds are barred.

We didn't really rate the site in response to demand: we've had a grand total of something like two sex scenes in three months. We rated the site because we have mature members and like to grant ourselves and others freedom to post as they like, and to post what we think is realistic content given the site setting.

I don't admin R-rated RPs because I don't really condone that behaviour especially since it blatantly goes against IF TOS.

*agrees with above*

I've been on sites that condone adult content. It's usually not so much adult as hormone-driven teenager content.

most of my sites are rated R for several reasons. mostly, it's because of the violence, language, and sexual content. i don't encourage that last one but the first two are given considering the boards are usually vampire or gang related. the sex... well, that's up to whoever but i don't like to see every thread being about someone hooking up and i prefer that the threads be marked as a warning. we appeal to older crowds so stuff happens and i generally just rate the boards R and leave a warning in the advertisement for the younger kids looking at boards or for those that don't want the setting. it's just to cover our own backs, mostly.

there's also stuff like drug use and just other adult situations that aren't bad but mature. just because we're rated R, we don't expect it but it can happen, hence the rating.

i've seen sites that encourage it and there was even one that had it in their rules that said 'yup! that means all the swearing, sex, and violence you can put out!' i don't even remember what the site was, anymore, but that's always stuck with me and i'm pretty sure it got deleted.

My plots provoke mature situations (for the most obvious example, the entire existence of refugees and the resistance in a fascist police state). I expect my players to be mature enough to play with and handle those themes; they haven't let me down so far.

I don't think you have to condone the actual behavior to write about it. That's a little ridiculous, in my mind. Just because I'm writing about socialist dictator doesn't mean that's what I personally believe in or support. :b Fantasy != Reality.

Mines is probably a combination, one character is very "weed" orientated. There's a lot of language and a HELLUVA lot of violence.

Althea is rated R, but we keep within the limit of ZB ToS - namely, no graphic sex. I don't mind since I'm not really a fan of cybering anyways, but we make up for it with violence, and oodles of it. And foul language, of course: can't disembowel someone without making disparaging remarks about their parentage!

A combination of the above. I prefer having the 'freedom' to post an R-rated piece, than to keep shushing my muse. And the irony is that on R-rated boards, I hardly post smut, blood and gore, etc. Simply knowing that I could post these sorts of stuffs if I wished is enough. The non R-rated boards are the ones which tempt me to force the rating system... something like what's forbidden tastes better? *shrugs*

the reason my sites are always r-rated is because simply, i would like to give freedom to all my players to write whatever they wish to write. i personally like to have mature roleplays and personally, i would be pretty upset if i was limited to pg-13. my forums always have sex, drugs, language-- you know, rock n' roll. recently, i have been creating secrets forums, which just in them have mature subject matter.

in conclusion, i choose all of the above.

The reason ours was rated R was because my co admin loves violence, and gore. I guess thatwhen you see R you automatically assume sexual stuff, but we just both like bloody things, and you have to warn people hey we do fight in a grotesque manner so beware

My site's 18+, on a personally-owned server, etc, so we don't have TOS, and I prefer it that way. Sure, some people join just to RP sex (just had one quit because I chastised him for it), but most people are really good about keeping it to a minimum.

I do find it interesting in our culture, however, that we find violence all right and even appropriate for children to a degree, but sexuality(which if done correctly is in no way actually harmful to anyone) is distasteful and taboo. We have no problem talking about a car accident where a semi sheared off the top of the car and killed everyone within, or a gunfight where someone was shot in the heart, but we get titilated talking about who's sleeping with whom. We get this message across our culture: Violence is ok, sex is not. I always wonder why this is.

Were my sites to be "R" rating, they would be a combination of all four choices above the combination poll choice.

Beautifully put. Sex really is one of those tabus that people seem to find "inapropriate", when it is actually a far more natural part of life than, say, a head being chopped off by a flying window.
I don't personally mind sex scenes being played out, nor violent ones or ones that involve drug use, which is why I generally rate my forums R. Of course, not all threads have this sort of content, and not all people are entirely comfortable with it, so I require people to put up a warning in the thread description so that others may skip it if they don't want to read anything of a sexual or violent nature. It's all up to the members.

All of the above. Yet violence isn't always R-rated; it simply depends on the depth of it, like a video game. Some kind of chainsaw-weilding, head-shooting, body-dismembering forum like Grand Theft Auto would obviously be R-rated. Yet violence can just be a fist-fight, which isn't as terrible, though still not good.

But I only say all of the above because the majority of forums nowadays are R-rated anyway, and so you find all of those things on the forum, and you have no idea what would be R-rated and what wouldn't.

I think you phrased this all very well. It's not the matter of encouraging "R rated writing", but more of a privilege. If someone can't handle it, then the proper procedures will be put in place.

A lot of people mentioned freedoms, and I think that's a great point. My character is a heroin addict, and on a lower rated board that's an immediate "no no", which I understand- but then again, it's not like every single post he's graphically shooting the drug between his toes or anything. In fact, I RARELY even get that graphic. Same with sex. God, sex-namely if you play a man-gets so old to write out after a while.

Language happens in real life. Some people swear like sailors and other people hate it. Some people are promiscuous and others aren't. Some people have harsher vices while others don't. While I can't argue with those boards with a lower rating, I can't help but feel restricted and even [sometimes] discriminated against. This of course is only in extreme cases where, for instance, when two testosterone-filled males can't throw a punch or the word "damn" can't slip out, or other extremes. It just doesn't promote the drama and plot twists I cater to.

And, like Seanu above mentioned, not ALL violence/drugs/even sex is rated R. Innuendos left and right are in the child's movie Scooby Doo, Robots, and I'm sure plenty others. That show Degrassi pretty much fades out and fades back in when it comes to sex, and that show i's for, what, pre-teens?