Board Thread:2015 - A Year of Community/@comment-4897796-20150303214044/@comment-4139585-20150303234459

I know I've been inactive, but I'm just dropping in with a few thoughts:

People have misinterpreted COPPA for a long time on this wiki. It is not a law that prevents people under the age of 13 from using the internet, rather, it is a law that prevents companies, such as Wikia, from collecting personal information, including IP addresses and e-mail addresses, from people under the age of 13, hence the name Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. That said, the reason why accounts that have been used by people under the age of 13 are permanently blocked by Wikia is because the company cannot be sure that the IPs and emails associated with the account come from someone at least 13 years of age. The same applies to why anonymous editing was disabled; Wikia does not want to unknowingly collect the IP addresses of clients under the age of 13.

Despite this, Wikia has made it absolutely clear that the community is in no way obligated to report accounts operated by people under the age of 13.

To specifically address what you want discussed in this forum post, I believe that a user should think twice before revealing that he/she was once under 13 years old while operating his/her account, as to prevent drama, but if this does happen, there will not necessarily be any consequences. As for people who reveal that they are currently underage, I only ask that we either block all underage accounts permanently, or block no underage accounts permanently. We should not selectively choose who should be allowed on the wiki, nor should we use age as a determining factor in whether or not someone should be blocked for a different offense (for example: we should not decide to block someone permanently after they troll on chat just because we know they're underage, when they would not have been blocked just for being underage).