GNOME Software and Age Ratings

After all the tarballs for GNOME 3.22 the master branch of gnome-software is now open to new features. Along with the usual cleanups and speedups one new feature I’ve been working on is finally merging the age ratings work.

The age ratings are provided by the upstream-supplied OARS metadata in the AppData file (which can be generated easily online) and then an age classification is generated automatically using the advice from the appropriately-named Common Sense Media group. At the moment I’m not doing any country-specific mapping, although something like this will be required to show appropriate ratings when handling topics like alcohol and drugs.

At the moment the only applications with ratings in Fedora 26 will be Steam games, but I’ve also emailed any maintainer that includes an <update_contact> email address in the appdata file that also identifies as a game in the desktop categories. If you ship an application with an AppData and you think you should have an age rating please use the generator and add the extra few lines to your AppData file. At the moment there’s no requirement for the extra data, although that might be something we introduce just for games in the future.

I don’t think many other applications will need the extra application metadata, but if you know of any adult only applications (e.g. in Fedora there’s an application for the sole purpose of downloading p0rn) please let me know and I’ll contact the maintainer and ask what they think about the idea. Comments, as always, welcome. Thanks!