Forums and legal issues

I just want a bit of general advice for any members that host a furum. I am currently setting up an educational forum and just worried about legal issues.

I am writting up terms and conditions as I speak. All I really want to know is if somebody makes idol gossip about a certain company in (in this case Jarvis PLC) is it me that gets into trouble?

The reason for making this forum studentuk.com (for anybody that knows of it) is closing down leaving a lot of members with no replacement site. I think a forum will be ideal as a replacement.

I am worried about one or two sUk members that don't like me coming on making abusive threads, I would ban them but these people are clever and banning them would just make things worse.

I want to be a good moderator but I am not sure if I can be unbiased towards members. I already know who the moderators are going to be and so far the URL has not even been published.

Anyway here is the link (you lot are the first to see it).

http://www.robertson-i.co.uk/ripdog/forum/

Thanks for any advice

 

so amazingtrade, as a student myself, what kindof things do you discuss, anything then??

might join up......

 

Well basicaly anything at all really. Most the users will come form studentuk.com which is closing down but I hope to get other members as well. I would imagine the top up fees would be a popular discussion at the moment.

 

I tried signing up as "MO", but alas, need at least 3 characters so I tried "MO!", but not "!" allowed.

I gave up.

 

I am not sure why that is, I don't think there is any restrictions as far as I am aware. I'll check it out though.

 

Quite a few forums (including this one) require at least 3 characters for a user name, hence the "!". But after trying to use the exclimation on yours it gave a list os char's that are not allowed.

 

It must be a bug, I can't see anyreason why it should not allow the ! other than it being a bang operator (but this does not effect the way ASP works, it dosn't even apply to ASP).

There dosn't seem to be any options either to stop it.

The reason I went with Snitz is because I can code ASP but not PHP so I thought it would be easier to modify. Also I need somthing that is simple because I have limited bandwidth (well its unlimited but its hosted by fast hots so it means nothing).

 

Amazingtrade,

This is not my area of the law, but it does impinge slightly on my area (intellectual property). Some folk believe that the host of a website has the same responsibilities and duties as does a magazine store owner - to a large extent, s/he is not responsible for the content of what s/he sells. I believe that this is not the case - I think that a web-based forum is more like a "letters to the Editor" page, and no Editor would accept possibly scandalous or slanderous material for printing. In the case of a website, the moderator does not get to see it before it goes on the site (unless s/he chooses to review all posts for content prior to putting them on). In the former case, I think it is your duty to remove any such matter as soon as possible - common courtesy alone would dictate this.

If I find out any more, I'll let you know.

P.S. Found this:

http://www.foruminternet.org/en/publication/lire.phtml?id=9

It might be worth a look or a jump-off point for further investigation.

 

thanks that was the kind of thing I am looking for. There is also a twist I have just thought of, the account is not in my name and is in my university tutors name. I will ideally change hosts if it gets popular.

 

Coming to this late...

I've written an enterprise level ASP/Database-based interactive community engine and I'd be interested in talking forum development with someone clearly not in competition (my forum engine is well established, and I plan to make it generic soon, to compete with Infopop and vBulletin - long story, but whilst the aforementioned options are fine, they don't serve the needs of all organisations and my own forum engine can, being very flexible.

Have a keek at www.callcentrevoice.com if you're interested.

I've learned lots of lessons along the way, and the architecture is suitably advanced now to allow it to do automatic rules-based moderation, though that's something that hasn't been switched on 'cause I'm scared it goes on the rampage. My site has around 6000 members and is scaling well, and I'm starting to write a book about the development of interactive communities, and generating contacts with other community developers would be good.

Drop me a note via the contact page on my site or via this site, as this is something I'd be happier discussing off-line.

jtc

 

More...

Security reasons I should think - it could be some PHP reason. There's no reason you couldn't have ! in an ASP-solution.

I still rate Infopop as the forum to beat. Snitz is a bit of an oddball option (though certainly less work than rolling your own as I have done - mine runs to 25,000 lines of ASP and 100+ stored procedures); vBulletin is nice but there's something that jars when I use it as a member of a vB community. I modelled my own site on the best bits of Infopop with a unified, cross-forum view model which concentrates on getting to information rather than stuff like smileys. That's not to say that smileys aren't important, but too many community solutions put too much effort into the trimmings without really thinking about what people really want.

Interesting topic.

jtc

 

Even more...

Oh, and the last word on the subject is that rolling your own ASP community is fairly straightforward to get a basic thing going, but it quickly becomes very complex when you start to factor in things like tiered access levels, paging, searching, efficient navigation and so on.

If I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn't have bothered!

jtc

 

I'm starting an SQL and PHP module tomorrow morning. I know SQL is easy as I taught myself it for the shopping assignment. A lot of people had said PHP is easier than ASP is this true?

 

SQL and PHP

Don't know - my PHP is scarce, to say the least. ASP isn't difficult, but vanilla ASP (as opposed to .net driven .ASPX) requires a certain amount of developer discipline as sites become more complex. In my case I had to make maximum use of #include-d ASP scripts to try to seperate functionality and presentation as best I could. Despite my best efforts, though, it is frustratingly difficult to keep the two apart (something which .net addresses by the introduction of codebehind, amongst other things).

I'm surprised you cite SQL as 'easy' - it's not so easy once you start having to factor in performance when your hits increase. For instance, beginning SQL developers don't give much thought to indexing and the relative size of result sets, and when you're developing a larger application it's possible to hit the bottleneck of the ASP:SQL interface (usually ODBC via ADO). Also, depending on the version of ADO you might find that some functionality is denied - such as paged recordsets, which may or may not work depending upon the way that your query is constructed.

SQL is a very powerful language, but not always the best tool for the job. It can, ironically, be more efficient to implement your own cacheing rather than continually poll your database, and of course connection management is something to think about too.

Interested about your course- where is it, and what kind of course is it?

In my understanding, PHP is popular due to the fact that it doesn't lock you into a particular architecture in the way that ASP generally does. It also requires less by way of fast hardware, and the use of something like MySQL avoids the punitative SQL Server or Oracle internet licensing. I suspect you'll find PHP interesting and a challenging alternative to ASP.

Me? I'm an old dog who is learning a big new trick by way of C# and ASP.NET, which is tying my capacity for new tricks up a bit. However, I'd venture that Microsoft have made it more difficult for the average joe to create a simple website using .NET as opposed to classic ASP. For medium- and enterprise-level development, though, ASP.NET seems to be a quantum leap forward.

jtc

 

I'm half way through a Multimedia and Internet Technology degree course at Salford University. I've only really started on the serverside stuff since september. You're right about the traffic thing, the sites I have done so far get little traffic so just rely on simple SQL statements and there is no caching other than the what the browsers does.

The assignment I will have to do in PHP is to develop an auction site. I've not done any ASP.NET yet but we cover that next year. I've just started my first Java module today which I am looking foward. I have done basic command line C++ (had to program a naughts and crosses game) but that is it.

 

I'm half way through a Multimedia and Internet Technology degree course at Salford University. I've only really started on the serverside stuff since september. You're right about the traffic thing, the sites I have done so far get little traffic so just rely on simple SQL statements and there is no caching other than the what the browsers does.

The assignment I will have to do in PHP is to develop an auction site. I've not done any ASP.NET yet but we cover that next year. I've just started my first Java module today which I am looking foward. I have done basic command line C++ (had to program a naughts and crosses game) but that is it.