UK Online Safety Regulations and impact on Forums

MentaL said:
what about bogus sign ups?
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Well I'd hope spam filters would stop those before they got that far! But on a big site - yes that could be an issue, in terms of being charged a fee for an attempted sign up but it would get rejected. So could be a good spam filter as well maybe?
 
Alvin63 said:
I rarely had that issue but not a big site. Maybe one or two a month.
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I have spam filters, numerous, but they still get around. Even if you are blocking ranges, asn or whatever - what's not to say a user knows there is a paid fee per attempted sign up and decides to just, go ham?
 
That is certainly a consideration for bigger sites or people who get a lot of fakes trying to join up. In that situation, the face age id would be better but haven't found an affordable option for that. Not that $700 is affordable either 🤣 . It's something I'd risk if it was affordable as it was a rare thing once I had Cloudflare Turnstile turned on. I wonder if the fake email would bounce BEFORE the age ID kicked in though? If it bounced first (on triggering an activation email) then it wouldn't get checked for age ID.
 
Verifymy are very slow with giving any information or replying - tedious. I've arranged a phone call with them to try and speed up getting information and prices.
 
Yep, can't say I'm impressed with the support ticket speed from VerifyMy. If I had to guess I wonder if they are maybe more of a virtual company sat on top of one of the other large identity providers? Meetings with Shufti and OneID tomorrow. Of those two I think there is probably more milage in Shufti. OneID looks very UK centric.

EDIT - maybe not re VeryifyMy looking at LinkedIn, but it seems like the backend developers are mostly in Brazil so it may just be the UK company element is smaller? Anyhow frustrating.
 
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I found Shufti very helpful by email. However their pricing is "up front" as mentioned above. 20 cents per verification but $1000 upfront (although they did reduce the upfront cost to $700 dollars and said she would ask a manager about instalments). Still waiting for a response to query on that.
 
That's the question I'm waiting for a reply on! ie is i 1k upfront covering about 3 years of 20 cent verifications (based on 100 verifications a month). Or is it just giving them 1k and then 20cm per verification. I read it as the 1k buying 5000 verifications, but wanted to be sure ..........
 
Of course any of these companies could go bust or close down at any time, leaving you in the lurch with age verification - which is why it would be better of Xenforo could implement it within the software.
 
Well morning meetings with Shufti and OneID were good. Waiting on actual numbers and docs from them now.

Shufti is indeed a "buy credits and use them model" - typically starting with about £1000 (or maybe $) spend and using that up over whatever time period you like. I don't have actual pricing yet, but assume it'll come back at the 20c "per credit". Meeting was quite light weight, more of a "we'll send you stuff now"... so we'll see what comes through.

OneID were very nice, the age verification is primarily their banking and mobile systems. Banking is UK only really, but a neat solution. So probably not ideal for us as I think we need global coverage. Mobile (which I think was global - but just checking) as discussed has some limitations - so if you as an adult buy a phone and SIM and you are the one on the contract and you just give it to your kid then the check is going to say 18+, apparently in that situation of buying a contract you're supposed to have have details of the actual device user so. It's a limitation you do have to bear in mind. Ofcom seem happy from their docs with mobile checking, so make of that what you will. The other age checking is via document scanning (ie an ID check). Generally they have a minimum monthly commit, but they said they were happy to be flexible and if you were paid upfront you could use that commit over a longer period. So for Bank/Mobile that commit was £17.50 a month for 50 checks, but if you were happy to do the £210 upfront they were happy to treat that as 600 checks over a year. So that might work for some of us. The document scanning had a minimum commit of £87.50/month again for 50 checks making each one £1.75. Again open to flexibility on that over a year rather than per month. Also open to a bit of flexibility on combining the two but not at 17.50 + 87.50. We didn't delve into quite what that might look like. Still they did seem like they were keen to solve problems and they have been in discussions with Ofcom, so at least they have channels to them.

Banking and mobile solutions were very privacy focused - so you could really minimise what you got back. The document scanning less so - you did end up with access to the scans.

I've a 3 day trial starting with Shufti on Monday apparently to have a look at their docs/API.

Both sounded like they might be options given the flexibility in how you used your purchased checks, but obviously do have the overhead of buying upfront - which I know isn't going to work for everyone. Still more likely to work perhaps than those where it's 'x' hundred a month fixed. So I think we're starting to get a list of possible options.
 
I may have misunderstood the laws, but I thought if you were age-restricting anything (be that registration or just features) that their location didn't matter to Ofcom. I might need to re-check if it's only <18 in the UK I need to "keep safe" and if you are outside the UK and <18 that's not a problem that does change the landscape a bit.
 
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