If you are a regular StumbleUpon, then you are familiar with the Yes or No ‘Safe for work?’ options, when discovering (submitting) content to StumbleUpon.
However, when I went to discover a recent news story I read from BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/), I noticed something a little different.
It appears that StumbleUpon has decided that content from BBC is always safe for work, and thus eliminating the ability to tag it as not safe.
As you will notice in the picture below, the ‘Safe for work?’ option only allows for the Yes answer, which is already selected for you.
I thought initially, that this might be associated with StumbleUpon’s Partnership Program, but after reviewing the sites included in the program, only one other site was on the ‘Auto Safe’ list; the Huffington Post.
I also thought it was interesting that Huffington Post was on the safe list, since the first link I clicked on when visiting their site showed me this image:
A quick check to verified that StumbleUpon considered this image ‘safe for work‘.
Now clearly no program is perfect, but it does make you wonder why StumbleUpon decided to remove the option to flag content as adult from certain sites. Especially sites that allow independent authors to publish to their platform, which could contain adult orientated material.
Have you seen any other sites that are on the StumbleUpon ‘Auto Safe” list?
I saw this happening after the latest submission method came out. I just assumed that the more popular sites that already have a lot of posts submitted as "Safe for work" automatically became as such…
I’m familiar with this feature in StumbleUpon. The two sites you mentioned are definitely not the only ones automatically considered “safe for work”. I’ve come across many such sites although I can’t name any off the top of my head.
I have seen lots of these sites as well. You would be surprised which ones came up as auto tagged.
Like you said, its not perfect.
I’m assuming if enough people select “SFW” submits on a particular domain – like you saw with BBC, SU is set to handle that as SFW 100% of the time.
Cool to point this out.
this really isn’t anything new. I’ve noticed it for quite awhile. And there are other sites that have this always safe feature, such as CNN and the New York Times. My guess is that it’s mostly news sites that have been given this rating.
Good observation as always. I can’t' say that I have personally seen this while discovering new content to SU, but I will certainly keep my eyes open for this.
Must be something that's not being picked up correctly in their function calls; possible parameters being missed, or not being passed.
Good Find… BBC is an authority website…
I have never had any luck with stumleupon, but have a great success with Digg..Will try again in next few days and submit some more quality stories
Stumbleupon is good for a surge in traffic, but haven't found it to be consistent for my sites.
Youtube has been auto-safe for ages. I'm to believe they do this after a review of major terms of services from many major websites. This allows them to take a step out of the equation. Just to share my opinion though, a girl fingering the camera isn't all that bad. Bang Bros is.