Moderation Changes and New Regulations

General
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Moderation changes

@pyj has stepped down as a moderator. Thank you for providing a sounding board for me for the last year and helping to foster a lively community.

With this, I’m the sole moderator, which doesn’t seem right. I think the forum should have at least two moderators aside from myself. I’m going to hold off on defining a process for selecting or electing new moderators until we see how the following discussion goes.

New Regulations

The UK Online Safety Act 2023 will be taking effect in a few months. This law requires operators of “user-to-user” services to perform a risk assessment and police the site for 17 different categories of illegal content or face significant penalties.

There is a bill proposing a similar law that will work it’s way through the US congress later this year, though it is facing strong opposition.

Proposed changes

We’d need to make some changes to be compliant with the new UK law:

  1. User to user private messaging is disabled, as we cannot moderate the content of these messages without running afoul of privacy laws.
  2. Any post containing an image, video, or file upload requires moderator approval.

The risk assessment also requires that we determine how many (if any) users are children. We’d need to collect location information to determine who is subject to UK laws. Collecting and retaining this demographic information is almost certainly in conflict with other privacy laws.

Avatar and profile photos present a risk, as Discourse (the forum software) doesn’t provide a good mechanism for moderating these images aside from disabling them completely.

Any post containing a link to an external site might also need to require approval. This seems to me like an excessive amount of work for moderators, so I’d be willing to rely on user flags to report links to illegal content.

Alternatives

My opinion is that it might be impossible to comply with these regulations in a way that reduces the liability of operating this forum to an acceptable level. To that end, I’ve compiled a list of alternative actions I could take:

  1. Do nothing. We aren’t the only site facing these challenges and there has been quite a bit of discussion about how the law is impractical for small sites. It is possible that the requirements may change before the law takes effect.
  2. Block UK users. If satisfying UK regulators requires violating the privacy and rights of users elsewhere, we may need to simply deny access to UK residents.
  3. Partial compliance. Implement a reasonable subset of these proposed changes and rely on the community to flag and report illegal content.
  4. Transfer ownership of the forum to another organization. The Ada Users Society seems like a logical choice, but I’m not sure that operating the forum is in their best interest or aligned with their goals.
  5. Shut down the forum. Obviously a last resort, but there are other platforms (eg. Reddit) that have more substantial resources (a legal department) to comply with these regulations.

What next

I’m not really sure where to go from here. I started working through the risk assessment process, but I have no idea how to prove things like “This site does not facilitate terrorism.” in a way that would hold up in a courtroom. I am not a lawyer.

I’d like to get feedback from the community before I make any decisions here. Please keep the politics in this thread to a minimum.

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Very funny. Banning PMs ? Sure, no way in hell. As far as I understand, Discourse is in the US, and this hasn’t been passed. My suggestion: do nothing. Users living under a dictatorship use a VPN anyway.

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This forum runs on a server paid for by my company, Legitimate Data Company, LLC, which is incorporated in the State of Washington in the US. Discourse only provides the open source software. They have no liability here and their jurisdiction is irrelevant.

Banning PMs is my proposed action here. Other sites may choose to do things differently. The law has exceptions for email and SMS services.

VPNs are irrelevant. I’d have no choice but to suspend any user I suspect of living in the UK.

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Banning PMs would be a terrible course of action. Some of the best conversations I’ve had on this forum have been private, and should have been private because they wouldn’t have interested the general forum audience. I don’t know about the privacy laws; would it possible to navigate this Scylla and Charybdis by stating plainly in the user agreement that, while you can send a direct message to someone and it is not visible to the general forum, there are no private messages, and moderators reserve the right, and by law have the responsibility, to review direct messages?

No, please, @simonjwright is irreplaceable. (I’d list other users, but he’s the only one I know is UK.)

I hope the “do nothing” option becomes feasible; I really enjoy this site as is and would hate it to change in any of the proposed ways.

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Hi Jeremy,
by the way, thanks to you and your company to run this forum and pay for it.

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Thanks @pyj for all the effort and support you have given Ada and Ada-Lang <3!

Every developed country has regulations nowadays… UK, USA, EU (and individual member states too!!! Spain for example wants to pass a truth law, so missinformation posted in the web would be illegal, I will not comment on this point…), Russia, China, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand… The point I am trying to make is that the UK is not exceptional and these rules are not surprising. Choosing this specific set of rules is not something special, there are plenty more that we could focus on.

No. I use PMs “often”, mostly as people can reach me here easily (due to all the things I help manage) and I like to not pollute forum threads when I like to discuss something particular with a single person. That is why PMs exist and have existed since forever. They help individuals and the forum quality.

I am against this. The Ada community is quite civilised. If someone posts something that should not be posted here (which includes more than illegal stuff, such as hamburger pictures, which have no place here), they will be reported and a moderator can/will delete their post or modify it.

I am against collecting personal data. I choose to share my name, age and nationality on my own terms, but that is my choice. I will defend other people’s rights to not share theirs.

Here in the forum, we do not discuss topics that should be +18 (or +21 or whatever), so age should not be considered. Topics that are +18 have no place here. Someone sending PMs with +18 content should be reported.

Ban people whose profiles are not fostering a healthy ecosystem in Ada, both on the profile picture or their posts. If someone takes offense on a profile picture, so be it, that is imho, not a bannable offense, as we are here to discuss Ada, not styles, not believes, not ugliness or beauty.

I believe this is the best way to go, let the community help itself. Flagging content is a great and democratic way in which the community can communicate their value on the posts made by an individual.

Yes, I would say we do nothing… Well… Actually, just keep on maintaining the standards we have. Those standards are good and healthy everywhere, so we should not be violating anybody’s laws with the way we work.

Please, no. There are a lot of Ada users in the UK. This should only be used as a last resort. Then they could choose to use VPNs to circumvent the ban, but do this as a last resort.

I believe this is the way things are nowadays and they seem to be working quite well.

I think this could also be beneficial. But for the time being, lets give the AUS a bit more time and let them set themselves up and we could start discussions about this in the future.

No, please, no :slight_smile: If the servers are not hosted in the UK, we do not have to comply with their rules. One country’s rules do not apply beyond their borders or sphere of influence.

I do not like moderation (I trust people to behave), but if you need help, here I am. I could become a moderator if necessary. I suppose that as the community grows, so will our challenges, but lets not face future problems now, lets focus on what is real for the time being.

Thank you for the financial support.

I would like to personally thank you and everybody else who is involved with the website. If you need any kind of help, I am here to help :slight_smile:

P.S: I tend not to be too vocal about my opinions and preferences, this post will hopefully be an exception.

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Perhaps some users don’t like to share an email but perhaps users profiles could provide an email address or chat app handle of some kind as an alternative?

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First of all thanks for everything!

I don’t know legal stuff, so I might be naive here, but I figured based on what I read on the UK law, we can be reactive (rely on reporting and just generally keeping an eye out, and adjudicating the issues as they are reported or found)?

I know that puts a burden on the moderators (which as you noted are just down to you currently), but perhaps we could see who might be interested in help moderate and if enough people offer to help to make you feel more comfy about it, we could go that route instead of preemptively locking out stuff. If not enough folks offer to help out, then maybe we re-evaluate it at that point?

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There is a discussion on lobste.rs on this subject. There might be some helpful insights there: https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help_with

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I would be happy to serve as a mod.

Of course that would be hard if you decide to block any user you suspect of being UK-based. That would be a decision I could completely understand, considering the way the Guidance is written - I don’t suppose the Act is any better.

Are there a ‘significant’ (undefined) number of UK users? I can think of myself and one other.

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… plus any future UK user that would have considered to join.

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I am based in the UK too (though I spend some time abroad during the year).

I guess access via a VPN would work…? :thinking:

PS: I believe VPN’s are currently legal under English law (not sure about the other nations)

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Outlawing any software is both infinitely dumb, and technically impossible to enforce. The people who voted that have 0 computer literacy. Even in China where it is illegal, 31% of netizens use it. And 31% in China is a whole lot of people…

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If the site runs on a single physical server, then it should only be subject to the laws of the location of that physical server.

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“Should”, yes, but if the UK government wanted to imprison me for posting on the server they could. And if they wanted to arrest Jeremy should he set foot on UK soil, they could do that too.

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I called my US Representative and one of my Senators about getting official word about this law for small sites, but haven’t heard anything back yet about it.

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