I’ve never felt that asking a person’s age in order to allow access to a website was a very good way to protect our innocent children. Because honestly, if I wanted to visit a site and happened to be “underage”, I would just keep rolling back my birthday until I was “old” enough to enter the site. I just don’t think it’s very effective.

I’m not sure what the best method would be, as I’ve seen sites that have asked for a credit card number - assuming that I only have one of those if I’m over 18. And the last thing I’m going to do is give someone my Visa number, just to view their site. I realize that there ought to be something, I’m just not sure what.

I would make one suggestion though: If you’re going to ‘verify’ a user’s age before granting access to the site, at least make sure that the date actually exists, and is realistic. I’ve seen systems that won’t allow you to visit if you’re over 100 years old, which at least hopes that you’re not typing random numbers, and now I’ve seen this setup at SaintsRow.com. Which doesn’t care that I was born on the 45th day of the 73rd month. The only thing checked here is that I have some kind of value in the date and month fields, and that the year makes me old enough. I figure that if you’re going to bother with one of these systems to start with, at least make it look like you care.