Returned from a lovely day in the sun to lots of replies to respond to. Thanks for taking an interest.
Suggestion: Please give LFC_SL a raise.
I'll double it. 2 x 0 = 0.
But seriously we really appreciate our moderators and how they work so hard for us.
It's a good feature (and thanks for the video). However I cannot get my head around the basic premise of a moderator deciding if content is libelous.
Thank you. We have simplified the solution by having rules which state that certain language is not permitted. So for example, nobody is allowed to say
company x are a bunch of crooks. or
company x are a bunch of cowboys. This is obviously unreasonable language. Similarly we state in our rules that unqualified or unsubstantiated criticism of a company is not allowed. Saying
company x have really bad customer service and never answer the phone is against our rules unless the poster accompanies the statement with some kind of evidence like email exchanges, though we actually don't enforce those rules unless we need to.
If you think about it, it is very easy for an unscrupulous employee of a company to post negative criticism of a competitor, and we have no way of knowing whether it is a genuine complaint or a false one.
have there not been numerous libel cases which were lost because the site owner, once notified, removed the content? I agree that a disclaimer is not worth the paper it is written on, but don't agree that ALL content has to be pro-actively checked. Your forum is about a million time bigger than mine, so no doubt you have first hand experience of this as legal fact in the UK (ie. you've been sued?).
Usually an organisation will ask us to remove content and we will look at it and make a decision. Most of the time it breaks our rules (as specified above) and we ask the poster for more evidence, which they often can't provide, so we delete the post. Sometimes we stand by our guns when someone's comments are purely opinion, and we refuse to remove it. We have been told we will be taken to court a number of times, but it has never happened.
But that's not the whole point. If a judge were to ever consider whether we are being responsible about how we moderate our forum, the moderator checkpoint system would be a strong sign that we take our role of publisher very seriously.
Then there is the aspect of getting advertising. In order to get the real big money from advertisers, you need to get the big organisations on board. (We have had Microsoft advertise with us.) However, advertisers are often nervous about advertising on and engaging with forums because they are worried that the community will blast them with negative comments and criticism. If we can demonstrate to potential advertisers that we have a strong moderating team, armed with powerful tools to efficiently check all posts on the forum and remove unreasonable language, then the potential advertisers will feel reassured and are more likely to spend money with us.
We ask in our forum rules to contact us if any copyright protected material is found on our forums and this has always worked out fine. One time (in 8 years) we got an e-mail claiming 1500 euro's because one of our members posted a copyright protected portret. Later on I found out the guy asking for the money was just an impostor (luckily we didn't pay him). It's actually very unlikely you would get in trouble as an admin, as long as you remove any copyright protected content when asked to. Of course I do not know the exact risk in the U.S., it could very well be that administrators have to be more careful there, because law suits may be filed more often there.
Checking every single post would of course be better, but I do not feel the need to do this, so I do not need this system. But I hope for those who do want it, that it can be done either by XenForo or the modding community.
Copyright infringement is not a significant problem on AVForums.
everybody else I spoke about this subject matter stated very clearly that I as a forum owner are NOT responsible for the opinions of other people. It changes however when the posting can be seen as 'slander/defamation/libel' (?) (<--- I don't know if this is the correct word in English). To deliberately 'harm' another person or company. (Don't quite know how to express is, because English is not my mother language and this is difficult material).
Even then... the other party has to PROVE the posting by a member of my platform is in fact lawfully incorrect.
You are not responsible for their opinions, and posting opinions on forums is not a problem. You can post
I hate x company or
I think x company are hopeless because those are both opinion. But if you were to post that
the chairman of x company is a paedophile, then that is a statement made as fact and could obviously get you a into serious trouble. Libel is defined as communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group, government or nation a negative image. It is usually a requirement that this claim be false and that the publication is communicated to someone other than the person defamed (the claimant). More information at
wikipedia. The defences against an accusation of libel include that the statement was true, or made in a good faith and reasonable belief that they were true, the statement is opinion or fair comment on a matter of public interest. This last one is a good reason why someone might warn other forum members about an organisation they have had a bad experience with, and is probably the most common reason why someone posts a potentially libellous statement.
One thing I am not sure I understand is why there is a need for a second activation? Why doesn't enabling the moderation mode enable active checking automatically? Is there a reason why you would do one but not the other?
Moderation mode allows a moderator to see the checked status of posts without automatically checking them when viewing them. A supermoderator might want to, for example, check the work of a moderator. Active checking is used when a moderator is specifically there to check posts.
I am sorry, but this is exactly the reason why there is a [Report] functionality integrated into XenForo. Do I need to (pro)-actively check every single postings on my platform just to know if the forum rules have been followed? My God... I would not get out of my house for a year
. Again... my opinion: I am NOT responsible for the contents of what people post in my forums.
I do not know what the laws are in your country, but if your statement here is only your opinion, then you ought to check for sure. You may find yourself getting sued. And if there is lots of work to do, recruit more moderators.
Stuart you bring up valid points about lawsuits ... can you give examples of any that you may have been a target of ?
So far, because we have a responsible and active moderating procedure and team, we have avoided any lawsuits to date, despite being a very visible forum with thousands of new posts daily.
Because we have a good Google penetration, if you search for some companies, we are at the top of the natural search results. For example
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=si...ial&client=firefox-a
As a result, some companies monitor comments made about them on AVForums and if we do not make sure that potentially libellous comments are kept to a minimum, we will get an email from the legal departments of those companies.
If you are thinking that this will never be a problem for you, then you ought to consider that if your goal is to build a successful forum, then if you are successful, eventually this *will* happen to you.
. Because I simply refused to delete postings of my members who are just expressing their experiences with those companies. I setup my website exactly for that goal! To give people a platform where they can share their experiences with those companies (a fair amount of those companies deliver very questionable products and services). 9 years ago I saw that this was badly needed in my country and something needed to be done about it. So I did. All the lawyers I was in contact with and everybody else I spoke about this subject matter stated very clearly that I as a forum owner are NOT responsible for the opinions of other people. It changes however when the posting can be seen as 'slander/defamation/libel' (?) (<--- I don't know if this is the correct word in English). To deliberately 'harm' another person or company. (Don't quite know how to express is, because English is not my mother language and this is difficult material).
