After a few years of building PuzzlePixies.com for the under 13s, I've finally gotten around to creating a website specifically for a mature audience!

 This had actually been my long-term plan but recent events have sped things up:

• I got notified by a US kids website monitor CARU that PuzzlePixies.com did not comply with US COPPA or advertising restrictions.  Up until then I hadn't even heard of COPPA and we don't have an equivalent in the UK or even EU.  The website was started as a small hobby site and the vistor numbers have just kept growing ever since - I suppose it was only a matter of time before we appeared on the radar!  Fortunately they were very helpful and I've been able to get things into order.  It is good to be reminded that the web is global - about 30% of the traffic comes from USA and Canada.
• While COPPA and advertising restrictions are generally a great idea and I fully support it, it does cause problems:

1. Sites wanting to implement complex interactive features require constant monitoring and have to be careful about the data they collect (e.g. only first names or nicknames can be captured - asking for a full name is actually illegal in the US).  To collect more information, parental consent is required which requires written permission or credit card confirmation.  If I provided these features, I would spend all my time chasing paperwork and not get any time to add content (especially as I don't accept credit cards!).  For these reasons I am going to restrict the complex interactive features on the kids site.  It sounds a bit unfair, but I don't have unlimited amounts of time for maintenance and the penalty for getting it wrong is a strong deterrant.  Also having, for example, a top scores list for a particular puzzle doesn't really mean much when all it says is "Rick from US" or "Harry from UK".
2. Restrictions on advertising mean that all adverts should be monitored.  For small websites this is not feasible as the website is not constantly monitored.  There is also difficulty in getting advertisers interested.  They usually will not even consider sites with < 500000 unique visits per month and most do not run ad content suitable for children.  Using services such as Google Ads also do not provide enough control in screening ALL ads before they are displayed.  At best, the ads explicitly requested to be shown on your particular site can be reviewed for 24 hours before being automatically added.  Not good if you want to get away with the kids for a weekend.  Context specific ads can only be blocked after they have been displayed.  There is also the problem that ads are geographically targetted so tracking all the ads in all the countries quickly becomes impossible.   In future, I'll restrict ads on the kids site to specific advertisers that I can arrange suitable agreements with.

• On PuzzleGenie.com, all interactive features will be for logged-in users only with minimum age checks in place to stop children registering.  Logging in will give access to interactive features, top scores for time challenges, forums, multi-player games and, in the future, hopefully competitions.
• I intend to fund this site by supplying high quality targetted advertising and offering paid-for-content for other websites.  Maybe in future I'll add a two-tier system where paying subscribers don't see adverts.

In the future, this blog will cover both PuzzlePixies and PuzzleGenies - mainly for the inside story on puzzle development and website development.