Nicholas Knight said:
Tag controversial images, preferably into a couple categories (nudity,
blood/gore, could probably think of one or two other good ones). Let
the user set a preference for their defaults (maybe give them a toggle
they can hit at will while browsing to turn all on/off), and then let
them easily select single controversial images to display. There are
several options for the last part, Javascript being the easiest, and
it can be combined with a server-side mechanism for those that have
disabled or lack Javascript support.
I think this is a sensible solution, though the tagging leaves it open to
some abuse. For instance the category of images containing nudity contains
some images that most of us would probably agree the user would not expect
to be blocked--some sacred pictures from the Sistine Chapel ceiling are in
there because they happen to contain representations of naked people.
This isn't an unsolvable problem, but we would get some edit wars arising
and the effect of such tag wars on individual browsing experiences could
be quite widespread. Perhaps the browsing categories should be protected
and some kind of VfD/RfM-style process used for placing images into
categories.
That does look like a very workable approach.