Restricting community features by user age?

[Pupper Puppet]

Evening!

We've had to lock down the community we run on Invision as far as rules are concerned - some features available to our members in general, minors aren't allowed to use.  (We're a perv magnet and we take safety very seriously.)

That said, I'd like to ask what would be the easiest way to automate this.  Right now our only control is staff catching minors doing things they shouldn't.  This works well enough, but if it's possible I'd like to prevent them using these features entirely until the forum recognizes they're 18.  Multiple user groups is one way to do it, though that could get confusing on the admin end as both user groups would have to appear identical on the front end - if we're shielding minors from pervs, advertising they're minors kind of defeats the purpose.

Is this something anyone has done before?  If so, how did you implement?

[AlexWright]

I can give some pointers and tips. We're in the same boat. We use 1 user group to accomplish this, along with Kevin's plugin "Automation Rules". We created an "NSFW" switch using a custom data field (yes/no). When that switch is toggled, we have a rule that checks again the registered birthdate of the user activating it, and if that age is over 18 years old, will place a Secondary usergroup onto their account (NSFW Access). Only the NSFW access group has permissions to view NSFW areas, and nothing else (IE It only has permissions for NSFW areas, which is all it needs). It was fairly easy to figure it out, if you know how to use if/then logic (Automation  Rules does through it's GUI).

[Pupper Puppet]

I didn't even think of Automation Rules.  Thanks for the pointers!