Prohibited are any links to sites containing:

• Pornography,
• Glorification, manufacture or procurement of illegal drugs,¹
• Glorification, manufacture or procurement of illegal weaponry,¹
• Profanity and abusive language,
• Promotion of intolerance, hate and violence towards others,
• Online gambling.
• JavaScript site spamming, pop-ups or prominent links leading to any of the above. ²

Setting PICS filters

Because most everything here is labeled, parents have the option of tailoring the online experience for every user individually by way of PICS controls. This is especially useful if children of widely varied ages use the same computer. To help you with this, we have included two chapters from the book "Child Safety-Net: How to protect your children from harm online" with step by step instructions; one for users of Netscape, the other for Microsoft Internet Explorer. It's amazingly easy and time very well spent. Just click the related link below to begin.

General guidelines

PICS labeling is a voluntary system so Please label your material truthfully. Complaints received regarding gross falsification of PICS information will be dealt with by suspension of the domain from the index until corrected. Repeat offenses will result in your domain being forever barred from the index. See our Terms of Use policy for complete details.

Parents who follow our instruction on the usage of PICS will set their browsers to block all unrated content. That's what makes the index at SURFSAFELY.COM so powerful. You must rate your content to be seen by our users. That's why we say everyone should rate regardless of content. If you omit rating you may be excluding a substantial size audience.

Description and keywords for your listings are scanned from those meta tags on pages submitted. Keep in mind that the worst thing you can do with your keyword and description meta tags is to use the exact same text for them throughout your web site and, next to being unlabeled, is the quickest way to have pages from your site excluded from our directory. We need unique content for the directory to be of value to our users. The last thing they need is page after page of exactly the same information. If no description and keyword meta tags are found, the first text found in the body of the document is used instead.

Titles, descriptions and keywords may be updated in our directory by simply resubmitting the same URL after changes have been made. Listings will be refreshed the next time we run a batch update. Newest submissions always prevail over older ones.

Labeling with multiple systems

Labeling with both systems can help to ensure you do not exclude users who may have installed only one filter type in their web browser. The text book answer is to include multiple PICS labels but this can cause problems with Internet Explorer's Content Advisor. Shown below is an example of separate SafeSurf and RSACi Meta tags as one might normally see them used:

Internet Explorer's Content Advisor will only recognize the first PICS label it comes across, ignoring any subsequent ones. In the example above, because Internet Explorer comes bundled only with the RSACi filter (SafeSurf must be added manually if desired), someone browsing this site with Content Advisor enabled to block unlabeled sites would still receive an error that the page was unrated because the tag it does recognize did not come first. One solution is to place the RSACi tag above all others but a better solution is to combine the two systems into one meta tag. This is known as concatenating the tags.

In this example the two labeling systems are rolled into one PICS Meta tag. They are shown on separate lines only for greater clarity. You may, in fact, deploy it this way but be very careful. Breaking up code like this into multiple lines can cause problems with the labeling authority when their spider comes to visit and double check to make sure the code is in place and the syntax correct. As is always the case with computer code, be very careful about punctuation! Test the concatenated tag on your pages by enabling the various systems in your browsers individually and then together to make sure. Once you're certain all is well, save your tags as part of a template. It will make applying the tags to your pages a joy rather than a burden.

Geocities users

You too can label your sites using the tools provided in PageBuilder. To demonstrate, a page has been created there with instructions on just how to do it. Click here to find out more.

Site wide labeling

The original ICRA white paper I used to link to here gave instruction on how to apply ICRA (and anyone else's for that matter) PICS labels at the server level instead of having to apply labels to each and every page. Since their move to RDF exclusively, this information has been withdrawn. I'm not in complete agreement with their decision to abandon PICS entirely. Server wide labeling made it possible to label entire sites without changing or adding meta tags to any HTML documents within the site, but required an understanding of web server administration and access to the web server configuration files. Like server wide labeling, RDF does allow one to change or adjust the rating of an entire site by altering one descriptor file. Unlike server wide labeling, RDF again makes it necessary to add and maintain RDF meta tag placeholders to each and every page within a site.

So, the new URL to label using ICRA RDF is here.

Known issues:

XHTML/XML

SurfSafely.com is now fully compatible with XML and XHTML content.

Other errors

If you receive an error that your page is not presenting a proper title, chances are good it's buried too far down on the page. Moving <title> to the very top line inside the <head> of your documents should correct the problem.

Other tips:

If you cannot apply PICS labels to the <head> of your html documents because your pages are constructed at community sites that do not allow access to it, one way we have found around this problem is to encase the PICS label inside a comment tag like this:

<!--
<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
-->

This method still hides the tag from normal view but allows the browser to act on values in it. Keep in mind, it still should be placed as close to the top of your html document as possible.

ICRA maintains an extensive library of technical information regarding the use and application of PICS labeling in English, Deutsch, Français, and Español which is updated constantly, most of which will apply to other labeling systems as well. Please visit the ICRA website directly for the latest info.

Notes:

1) The term "illegal" shall be defined by the existing federal laws of the Unites States of America.
2) "Site spamming" is the term used when users become bombarded with numerous new browser windows just by going to a page and is a favorite tool of porn predators. What then appears is entirely at the discretion of the web site operator and often against our terms for inclusion in this directory. Sites given to such practices, even though their material may be suitable, will be barred from this directory until such time as they discontinue this practice. Our rule of thumb for determining how much is too much will be - Only one pop-up window allowed, pointing only to content within the same domain to material suitable for our directory.

Back to top