Well, this is something I didn't want to do. At the end of June 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States made a ruling in favor of Texas' Age Verification law. At the same time, we have various other countries (UK comes to mind) has been steadily moving forward on limiting the access of pornography (erotica or whatever you want to call what I write).
There is a lot of issues with the law, but I have to follow the laws of the country and failured to abide by them is expensive. In more generic terms, I bring in an average of $80/month from subscribers. The fee for failing to lock adult content is $10,000/day or roughly 125 month of subscribers per day that access is given. And, if you read the laws, even having a Patron or SubscribeStar link could qualify as a “commercial site”.
(I would need a lawyer to find out, but since most of them start at $300/hour to talk, we are saying 4-12 months of subscriptions just to find out if I quality.)
So, I'm going to cover my ass. To do that, I need to age verification on readers of erotic content. Since a proper age verification service costs money per viewer, I can't really afford to stand up a service of my own. Not to mention, it is extra maintenance to keep that going.
(If you can't guess, money coming in verses money to conform to these laws is a major thing. This is the aspect I hate the most about these laws. They might be “reasonable” to large places like PornHub or larger places, I'm a tiny little fish in a very big ocean. And these laws are specifically designed to take out small shops, the mommy and daddy sites like mine.)
I'm going to “fake” age verification. Both Patreon and SubscribeStar both have age verification of their own, and you can't subscribe without passing that. Which means, I can comfortably assume if you are a member, then you are of age and that gives me the defense I need to say I'm obeying the law. It isn't a great solution and I hate it, mainly because I don't want to know who you are. I don't want to know what turns you on, only that it does. But, we are in a place where I have to do something if I want to keep this site alive.
What's Going to Happen
The blogs, table of contents, and series pages will remain free. There will be a little user icon (much like the lock and key icons) that indicate when you'll have to log in. To do that, go to the applicable subscription page, sign up, and look at the latest email. At the bottom, you'll see something like:
This also means the EPUB downloads are going to disappear again until I can find a way of filtering those out. Which also means the OPML feed for getting the books.
Alternatives
The alternative is I tear everything down and just disappear. I'd rather not do that.
It does mean that Rodo is going away. I haven't been really maintaining it for a while now, and the site has bit-rotted, but I'll try to bring it up later once I figure out a good solution. Ethically, I can't use my subscription for that site since it is specifically everyone but me.