Online Safety Act

As Inkbunny is legally based in the UK, and UK visitors form ~5% of its traffic, it must follow UK law, including the Online Safety Act.

Preamble

The provisions of the Online Safety Act cover a variety of websites accessible to UK viewers, but due to this many of them do not apply to Inkbunny, either due to size – the Act focuses on medium-to-large sites under corporate ownership – or irrelevance (e.g. no knife sales).

Inkbunny does not consider itself to be a large, multi-risk or categorised service for the purpose of the Act and its secondary legislation – nor does it believe it attracts a significant number of child users, from the UK or elsewhere. This is in part because Inkbunny uses RTA labelling throughout the site to limit search engine visibility, which might otherwise be seen to encourage viewing of its content by children due to its focus on cartoon characters, and also due to the relative infrequency of reports or discovery of children accessing the service.

Regardless, Inkbunny does restrict access with an eye to reducing the risk of UK children encountering content which the UK government considers unsuitable for them.

Age assurance

Inkbunny operates a mixed content-rating regime, including but not focused on the delivery of cartoon pornographic content (Ofcom code AA3). Access via the site to content rated above Mature (mild violence) requires both visitors and members to affirm that they are of age – i.e. 18 or older, as required by their jurisdiction – and agree to the site terms and philosophy.

For UK visitors (as determined by best-effort IP geolocation):

• The visitor route to enable higher ratings is unavailable.
• Registered users are directed to file a support ticket requesting to change their allowed ratings, providing a link to a resource that links back to or otherwise mentions the member's Inkbunny account, and which is either:
  • An account on a recognized website, forum or social media platform with a 13+ registration requirement (e.g. Fur Affinity or Twitter/X, not Roblox), which can be seen to have been created at least five years ago, or,
  • Evidence of attendance at a UK furry convention or other 18+ event which performs online or in-person ID verification.

This approach, the first part of which is roughly analogous to email-based age estimation, has been taken based on a consultation with Inkbunny members, elements of which were included within Inkbunny's response to Ofcom's consultation "Protecting children from harms online", that indicated members' strong reluctance to associate their accounts with real-life identities – combined with Inkbunny's limited resources and capacity as a volunteer-run community platform to safeguard or verify official documents, or to purchase related services.

Recommender systems

Inkbunny's rating restrictions are integrated within its recommendation system, and thus follows its restrictions (Ofcom code AA5). The "recommendation on +fav" feature is also designed to return content of the same rating as the original work, which the member or visitor would have had access to already.

Risk assessments

Assessments for Illegal content and risks to children are available to Ofcom on request.

Support mechanism

Members of the site may file a support ticket. Registration of an account is free and does not require any identifying information beyond an email address. Tickets are answered by a small group of volunteer staff, as their time, skills and access allow – not all staff have access to private messages or IP addresses.

Accountable person

Inkbunny is a volunteer-based organisation and does not have a formal board or senior governance body per se to report to (Ofcom code GA2), however the lead administrator responsible for enforcement of safety policies is Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry.