Older Teens. How to Catagorize Them?

I previously suggested a new age catagory, Young Adults, 18 to early 20's.. The response seemed to be that it would be useful but that it would an great deal of work to recatagorize all the stories already posted in order to keep the information in the Library consistent which is a valid point.

However one of the reasons I suggested a Young Adult catagory was to correct the inconsistent placing of 18 and 19 year olds, sometimes as Adults and sometimes as Teens. The age guidelines state that anybody over 17 should be catagorized as an Adult but often that is not being done now. I will give you a few examples to illustrate what I mean. Following are a few stories as they are listed in the Library now with the Title, Author's Name, Age, Gender and the age of the youngest character in the story.

PRUDENCE & THE WOODSHED PART 1 by ChardT TEEN M/F The two girls are 18
PRUDENCE & THE WOODSHED PART 2 by ChardT TEEN M/F The two girls are 18
SPANKED BY THE BOSS by Katie B TEEN M/f The girl is a college sophomore
A SERIOUS LESSON by Flogmaster TEEN F/f The girl is 18
THE QUEUE by Mike from London TEEN F/ff The main girl is 18. The ages of the two other girls are not specified but they appear to be the same age.
A READING LESSON by Flogmaster TEEN F/F The girl is 18
THE RIGHT STUFF by Alex Birch TEEN M/F The girl is 19
SLACKS by Flogmaster TEEN M/f The girl is a college student.

These 8 stories are just those that I can remember from reading them recently but the are many more that I have read where the characters are 18 or 19 but are in the Teen catagory. In other stories 18 and 19 year olds are put in the Adult catagory. So the question is; what should be done about this? I can only think of 3 options although others may be able to suggest more.

One. Add a new catagory for older teens/young adults as I suggested.

Two. Continually check to make sure that the validators are correctly placing 18 and 19 year olds in the Adult catagory and recatagorize the Teen stories already in the Library. But that also would require much work as there are about 2000 Teen stories.

Three. Just ignore the whole problem and accept the fact that the Teen catagory will forevermore be consistently inconsistent since people can not agree as where to place 18 and 19 year olds.

So what do other people think?

By the way, I think that the Library is one of the best set up on the web. I enjoy using it as it has far more information in it than other sites. My suggestions are made to further improve it and in no way am I intending to disparage the work of Februs and the other administrators which is brilliant.

To me an 18 yo is an adult, so any character 18 or over is classified as F or M. I tend to differentiate a little by using the category of tf or tm, which denotes a character between the ages of 13 - 18, the category of f or m is a pre teen child.

As far as the library are concerned 13-17 year olds are teens and therefore f or m. Anyone who is 18 or older is an adult so M or F. If there are some errors then they can be fixed and I will look at the ones highlighted.

Another issue may be that for us in the UK we do not always know at what age a sophomore or a college student is in the US. We have tried to ensure people are all doing the same by posting ages of these things on the validators forum. Sometimes the age isn't actually given but is merely implied which can also be a problem.

I do not see us adding another age category as it would, as previously said, be far too time consuming so the only option is to ensure that all validators are categorising 18-19 year olds as adults.

I agree one hundred percent with PinkAngel. With over 11,000 items to be categorised, yes, errors are probably inevitable, but if they are pointed out to us, we will fix them.

As Pink pointed out, age isn't always specified. We assume that a married couple are adults, while in fact, in this country at least, they could be 16. Schools and colleges also present a problem. A student in first year at University in the UK could be as young as 17, though more likely to be older. A secondary school senior pupil in the UK could be 17 or 18.

We do try to research the ages of freshman, sophomore etc, but the information available is not always consistent.

In searching I have found the following:

Q. What age is someone when they're a sophomore in america? In high school, not college.
A. 15-16

Q. What is the exact average age of a college sophomore? I am twenty-one and a sophomore. I will be a junior after this coming summer, but I will also be twenty two by then. Is this bad, relatively normal, or does it matter?
A. I'm gonna be a college sophomore in fall and I just turned 17 last month. I know a 56 year old guy who's a sophomore. But, I think 20 something is like the average age of college sophomores.

Perhaps you can see our difficulty?

As Pink and I have both pointed out, errors will be corrected in time, if they are pointed out to us. However, since it seems to trouble you so much, tiptopper, I suggest you volunteer to assist in this immense task, then you can fix them yourself!

So.. the first two, orientation is correct... Icons are amended.

According to my list a sophomore is 16-17 so also correct?

A serious lesson... is changed.

The queue... orientation was correct, icon was incorrect.

A Reading Lesson and The Right Stuff are now corrected.

Slacks... I did this one and I can't see anywhere that it says she is an adult, so I stick with my thought that she could well be younger and it is better to err on the side of caution!

I think the current classification system is plenty adequate - it achieves it's primary purpose of sorting out minors from adults for those readers for whom that is an issue. If we were to add 'young' adult, then why not 'not-quite-so-young adult,' and then 'older adult,' and then 'senior citizen.?' The same thing goes with the sub-genres. And imlements. Come to think of it, we could ask the staff to put in enough details (ages, situations, implements, positions, tone, etc) that we wouldn't even have to read the stories at all. The classfication system could serve as our Cliff's notes. That would make it SO much easier for us writers, too(particularly those of us who suffer from bouts of writer's block) - we wouldn't actually have to write stories, we could just send in detailed summaries!

Title - This Will Teach You, You Extremely Naughty Boy- female spanker- exasperated aunt 36yo short blonde hair 5' 10" wearing cream blouse, turquoise slacks: male spankee - nephew wearing burgundy check shirt grey trousers light brown hair 5' 9" 18yo otk 25 smacks right handed moderately hard on nicely bared fundament followed by 12 smacks with size 7 slipper (red) whilst otk on aunts lap on navy blue sofa in living room. Punishment recieved for constantly and repetitiously asking for new categories in spanking library. Set in 1960's Darlington semi detached council house. Laura Ashley wallpaper-Gnome with fishing rod in front garden. This product is brought to you by Blimp Enterprises Ltd.

Wonderful story, Mr Blimp! Now, if you would just change the setting to the room in the contest pic, I declare you the winner!

It is inevitable given the sheer volume of stories and the difficulties encountered in validating some of them that there will be some errors found. The best way to correct these and thereby improve the quality of the validations is if people report them to us so we can investigate and, where appropriate, correct any mistakes.

In order to make this as painless as possible I have added a fault reporting facility. To submit a fault report (for incorrectly validated items) all you need to do is click the tick icon found at the end of listed stories (stories which have yet to be validated won't have one). You will then be presented with a small popup into which you can enter the details of the error. These error reports will then be reviewed by the admins and corrections made where needed.

Februs,
Very clever solution. The Fault Report makes every reader a pseudo validator. That means that people who are a little anal-retentive like me, and possibly you, will be able to easily point out errors.

If there are enough of us fussy people out there the long term effect will be to reduce errors in the Library. Well done.

To PinkAngel,
About the story "Slacks". 3/4 of the way through, in the paragraph that starts with "Wondering", it says "But college students hate laundry." College students are rarely under 18, probably less than 1%.

About "Spanked by the Boss" an American high school sophomore would be about 15 but a college sohomore, as stated in the story, would be about 19.