www.happyday.demon.co.uk

Please be aware that this site is rated 4 4 4 4 by RSACi.


I regret that this is likely to make it inaccessible to children whose parents believe that having set some browser preference levels, they can abdicate their responsibilities and leave their kids to wander the web alone, with no other framework to guide them in the choice of places to visit, other than a rating scheme of dubious applicability to this medium, randomly applied by webmasters who have far more interesting things to do.

There is little else on the rest of the site for these children, so their loss will be extremely limited. In my opinion, the 'net' is not a place for unsupervised children, and the addition of meta tags to a small minority of web pages is not going to change that.

The rating will also make the site inaccessible to those adults who set a rating level in their browser as an experiment and, realising how foolish this was, have now forgotten the password. You may view this sentence as me laughing at them behind their backs. They cannot of course view it at all.


The site is rated at violence level "4" because it contains wanton and gratuitous violence towards sentient beings.

Should you have difficulty agreeing with this notion I would have to kill you... or at least scratch my nails over this handily placed blackboard.

Regrettably, the RSACi rating system did not ask me any questions which would allow for the notion that not everything written may be meant to be read literally.

I expect that sites containing fairytales or Roald Dahl stories will encounter just the same question answering problems that I did.... my apologies, by the way, for the blackboard threat, since you will know that this extreme form of torture (another matter of RSACi concern) has been outlawed by several Geneva conventions, which is why so few police forces around the planet use it in their daily work.

The high language rating of "4" also comes directly from the hatred of apparently sentient beings implicit in the threat above.

The RSACi makes no distinction between 'hate speech' and the use of sexual profanities, which might, I suppose, be seen as progressive, but I fear that a rating scheme which merely asks after the presence of material without considering the context is going to score almost every Shakespeare play at the "4" level.


The other two dimensions of the RSACi rating scheme refer to nudity and the representation of sexual acts. Once again this site rates at "4" because of the presence of provocative frontal nudity and explicit sexual activity.

This page contains no images, which is fortunate because they must be even harder to rate than the textual content I was considering when acquiring my rating for this site. I hope that the following little story will illustrate the difficulty that people can have:

A man who is having trouble in his marriage goes to visit a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist decides, as psychiatrists in such stories often do, to assess his patient by drawing a few pictures and thus getting the man to articulate his thought processes.

He draws a square on a piece of paper.

"That's a bed", says the man.

The psychiatrist now draws a triangle.

"That's a woman lying naked upon the bed."

The psychiatrist thinks for a moment and then draws an X shape.

"That's a man and a woman lying naked on a bed, making love."

"It's clear to me now", says the psychiatrist, who is known for leaping to instant and obvious conclusions. "You're obsessed with sex."

"Absolute nonsense", replies the man. "You're the one who is drawing the dirty pictures!"


I trust that I have not inconvenienced anyone who found this site by means of a search engine which considered that RSACi tags were any guide to the real-world content of the web.

I welcome links to this page... provided that people always make clear on these links, the type of highly rated material which can be found here.


Those with further interest in such matters can find the RSACi questionnaire at http://www.rsac.org/start.html and you can return to the www.happyday.demon.co.uk home page here

JULY 2002: RSACi no longer exists though there is a stub website remaining at http://www.rsac.org. You can still find the old questionnaire archived at archive.org. The replacement organisation is ICRA (http://www.icra.org) and their (same but different) questionnaire can be found here.


© 1996 Richard Clayton
19th October 1996

[ICRA tag added Jan 2001, broken links fixed July 2002]

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