Freesound Forums

Hi,

This is my first post and not sure it should be on this section. I guess some moderator can move it to the right one if it is not.

I am starting some music technology lessons at a secondary school and was thinking on showing my pupils freesound, get some downloads and play around with them. My concern is that there is "inappropriate" sounds on the database and are easily accessible. Is there any way to block those sounds? Any way to work around this issue?

Many thanks in advance.

Hi @Zibnab,

Thanks for your message. Sounds in Freesound featuring "inappropriate" content are normally marked as such and they are displayed with a warning for users, but there is no way to force excluding such content.

I recommend downloading some larger sound packs. That way you can have assortments of thematically related sounds which have also been vetted. Most of my packs would qualify, except for "Voice Clips" and any file with "zephy" in it which may have accidentally been added to other packs.

I do try to tag things NSFW when necessary but I don't think profanity counts as "explicit content" unless something is being described in explicit detail. So, I seldom check the box to mark things as explicit content. Maybe there could be a toggle option: Have a "This sound is PG" checkbox below the NSFW one, and code it so a check can only be put in one of the two boxes at a time. Well, my description of this idea would probably be unwieldy to use, but you might be able to refine the idea into something actually worth coding in.

Freesound has changed since I last used it. I cannot see how to download clips. Anyone?

I post NSFW content and all of it gets marked accordingly.

Yeah, but this site's 18 years old now. It's infeasible to account for all the past uploaded sounds, thus the suggestion of a way to mark new sounds. Granted, making that 100% effective would require people to check every sound. I'd be willing to do that if there were a queue/review system that people could sign up for.

We auto-detected some of the nsfw content and marked it automatically when we introduced the nsfw flagging system, and also the Freesound moderators have the option to add the flag to new sounds that should have it and don't have it. Nevertheless, the main issue that @Zibnab was pointing out is that even when we show the nsfw warnings, these can be dismissed with a single click and that it would be good to have a way to completely filter nsfw content from search results and other pages. I'm not sure how should we approach this. We could remove explicit content from search results by default unless users have marked the "I'm an adult" checkbox in their account settings (which already exists and is used to stop showing the nsfw warnings), however this means that all non-logged in users would not have access to the nsfw content (and also all users who did not dig into account preferences). We could have an option in the advanced search panel to hide nsfw content, but then students could easily uncheck that. Nevertheless I'm not convinced by any of these solutions and maybe it is not our role to actually put any limitations there other than the warnings. What do you think?

Well yes, ideally parents and educators would teach children how to handle things instead of sheltering them. For instance, teach them where profanity comes from and why it's considered "bad" instead of just condemning them for using it. But, most people are not delicate or tactful enough to do this work so the rest of society has to do it for them.

It should definitely be up to the individual user to vet the items they're using... this is a resource for humanity, not an artificially sanitized, family-friendly environment where no one is allowed to be himself or speak his mind. We have enough of those already.