> there are laws governing how certain text is handled

Is that true?? In the US?

My instinctive metric[0] for NSFW is: Could a casual passerby see something that falls into a class of designated offensivenesses (e.g. sex of any kind, but not violence unless it's also sexual)?

Text in a giant font could certainly qualify. But I would not think that ordinary-sized body text would be problematic -- if the passerby has to pause and snoop, they are breaking other equally-important protocols to ascertain SFW or lack thereof.

0: I have not run this by an HR department, and I've worked from a home office for more than twenty years, so I may know nothing of which I speak!

A better metric might be “could a casual network filtering program pick up something that would be forbidden at work”.

Wouldn't such a network filter also trigger on random (in the sense of unpredictable to the reader) pages here on HN though? Or Reddit, etc?

I've never lived under such a regime, but all of the trigger words I can imagine at OP's site are also present in generally-SFW discussion forums.

Yeah but the IT bod looking into it would see the rest of the site as context

If they check on a site and it's heavy on the NSFW maybe things get looked into with a bit more of a "... is this person browsing porn at work?" attitude

Good point. I have never suffered such indignity, but I forget my privilege.

This is 100% the correct answer. It’s unfortunate nsfw was framed as a political question.