option to hide NSFW rooms in directory

[uhoreg]

probably involving some sort of public tagging of rooms (though probably not called tags, since we already have room tags), and filtering the room directory based on tags

[Valodim]

Beware of overengineering: Simply filtering by NSFW keyword in the title might be a perfectly valid utility/effort tradeoff.

[turt2live]

Related: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4286

[lampholder]

I think this would be a really good thing to do (P3 just because as far as I'm aware it's not currently on our active agenda).

[uhoreg]

Beware of overengineering: Simply filtering by NSFW keyword in the title might be a perfectly valid utility/effort tradeoff.

A lot of NSFW rooms don't have "NSFW" in the room name, and filtering rooms that have "NSFW" in the topic will filter out rooms that say, e.g. "NSFW Uploads are banned" (#jupiterbroadcasting:matrix.org) or "Tag NSFW stuff" (#_foonetic_xkcd-compsci:matrix.org).

[ara4n]

i'm hearing instances of people who don't recommend Riot because of the NSFW rooms in the matrix.org roomdir. One solution is just to remove them from the list for now, but i'd rather fix this at higher priority. +1 to not overengineering it for now; although it does need an explicit tag on the room somehow rather than the 'look for NSFW in the topic'.

[rodneyrod]

I feel that this issue could be solved on the user end with custom tags, mentioned here: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/1373

Custom tags could include a NSFW option for the group that the user could check.

[uhoreg]

The tags referred to in vector-im/element-web#1373 actually are per-user tags (like the "Favourites" and "Low Priority" that you see in the left-hand side bar), so wouldn't really help with this issue. But some other global room tagging system might work (which is actually what I suggested in my first comment).

[BloodyIron]

Is this still a thing? Close maybe?

[turt2live]

we don't have this filter yet, so we shouldn't close it.

[BloodyIron]

Last update before my message was 2017 though, and this is marked "p1", is this actually a critical thing? If not, p1 seems overstating it.

[turt2live]

Our README describes our prioritization process. Let's not fill this issue with that discussion though.

[ghost]

although it does need an explicit tag on the room somehow rather than the 'look for NSFW in the topic'.

Rooms with pornographic icons are showing up in the list right now. A "show porn" box in the search, mercifully unchecked by default, is going to become a necessity as Matrix gains traction.

[BloodyIron]

Not everything NSFW is pornographic, categorising like that is not going to be the blanket solution.

[omentic]

I don't think a tag-based system is the right way forward here. Room admins as a whole can't be relied on to tag NSFW rooms to the degree fixing search would require, and manually tagging would put a large maintenance burden on the Matrix developers.

Since this is a blocker to recommending Element to friends and family for many people (myself included), I think the benefits of a quick-and-dirty keyword filter (no pornographic pictures in innocuous / literally all searches) would outweigh the detriments (the small number of SFW rooms erroneously filtered). Those SFW-filtered rooms could be added to a whitelist if they're of a certain size, change their descriptions, or just live with being invisible in search results.

[geckolinux]

How about just a simple option to disable the browsing of public rooms? Thanks for considering this.

[t3chguy]

How about just a simple option to disable the browsing of public rooms? Thanks for considering this.

This option is up to your server admin.

[SimonBrandner]

How about just a simple option to disable the browsing of public rooms? Thanks for considering this.

This option is up to your server admin.

Well, you can always do that client-side but I don't feel like it's not a good solution

[geckolinux]

How about just a simple option to disable the browsing of public rooms? Thanks for considering this.

This option is up to your server admin.

Hmm, that feels backwards to me. The whole reason that this improvement is desired is because there are many NSFW rooms in the large public Matrix servers that most "normal" users register on, and those servers will never disable browsing for public rooms. Whereas if it were a small locally controlled Matrix server with an accessible admin then there likely wouldn't be inappropriate rooms on it anyway.

In the most common usage scenario that I see, "non-techie" users prefer Element with the default matrix.org server, and they almost exclusively use it for 1-on-1 chats or private groups. So simply an option to disable Element's "Explore Public Rooms" panel seems like a quick and easy solution so that individual users can choose to disable it instead of requiring them to deal with the server admin.