About.com Showing Graphic Images on its Website
I received in my inbox yesterday an email forward regarding a grizzly bear. The email contained a powerpoint presentation of the story of a hunter who had killed the supposed largest grizzly bear in the world. The email contained amongst several images, one particularly gruesome image which was quite awful and which I will not link to.
I decided to Google “Giant Grizzly” in order to find out if it was all one big hoax, in the hope that it was. The first result on the list was a page on About.com’s own directory of urban legends. The About.com page regarding this email forward actually contained the same graphic image that I was so apalled by. About.com did place a warning above the image warning viewers it was a graphic and it was not suitable for people of a sensitive disposition.
The trouble with About.com’s warning was that it was on a page designed for 800*600 resolution and the warning was “above the fold” for that resolution. On my 1920*1200 resolution screen the image was dead centre, meaning that their warning was completely useless, and that the majority of users using (1024*768 or 1280*1024) would have seen some part of the image whether they wanted to or not.
This is not a post about email forwards, because these things will happen. This is about a large corporation hosting images which are quite frankly sick and gruesome and also failing to protect users. Just imagining what effect this image would have on a 7 year old child is quite upsetting. If About.com insist on hosting this image at the very least have a blur filter on it until it is clicked and give people the chance to bypass the page. Just guessing people’s screen resolution and putting it below the fold is not good enough. This is lazy web programming and poor customer relations.
Update your Website! (before you get sued)
Posted 06.12.07