The extension becomes useless if the ratings don't keep up with content (in other words, if some dude posts a nudie picture of his girlfriend, it's got to be rated before I get to it or your extension doesn't help me).
Seems like this should be settable. If I want to be uber-cautious, not rated should default to NSFW. Also, maybe a white/black list of domains the user knows to be safe/unsafe for themselves?
That's really my point though: it's not being über-cautious to default to NSFW, because the point is to not get fired for accidentally clicking on a landmine.
If you can't give some sense of confidence that the tool will prevent that scenario, then it's usefulness is limited.
But the info about links being safe of not are contained in the server links.
I could pre-emptively get info about all links, but that would slow down Firefox.
Traversing the entire DOM on page load and rewriting all links for large pages would also slow down the page though.
Also rewriting links seems too intrusive for my tastes and means I cant "Copy link location" which I frequently do. I like the idea, but I personally would have just used a single "click" event handler on the entire page using the capturing phase and hijack links to redirect through your site first, rather than doing a rewrite for every link in the dom
Gotcha. Well maybe you could do this asynchronously, after page load? Once the page is done loading, extension fires off for info about links on the page? Assuming this didn't take to long, it might be doable before they clicked a new link.
Also, extensions have access to cookies per domain? Maybe the extension could use this to cache results for a given page client-side?
If the site contained a strong privacy guarantee on the front page -- basically, no data about individuals' surfing habits will be stored, but aggregate data about overall traffic will be stored unless you opt out -- I would use it if I needed it.
Instead of rewriting the links, can you asynchronously (without holding up the browser) check all the external links after the page loads and mark all the nsfw links in red or something like that? This way, privacy concerns can be addressed to a certain extent (if you can also don't store the current url that I am on).
[edit:oops, just noticed that Husafan comment says pretty much the same thing.]
or may be offer both? People who want speed but aren't concerned about privacy can use the current set up. May be this can be a monetization idea too... the more private path = $5 per month "a small insurance against getting fired"
IMHO you have to offer the more private option (regardless of your monetization plan) just to get the early adopters who usually are geekier than the masses and hence care about privacy.
It is still available.
http://www.whois.net/dnr/index.php?d=notnsfw&tld=com