UK Online Safety Regulations and impact on Forums

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AI Costs for my forum with the AI Moderation installed. Hopefully the newer model will work out cheaper once that's enabled.
 
Lee said:
Footer :)
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Thanks. Mine is very short. Do you think this is enough?

"Complaints Procedure - Online Safety Act

If you have a complaint, about your content being removed as illegal or harmful, or about software removing your content as illegal or harmful, and you consider it was not illegal or harmful, or you have a complaint about illegal content, you can contact the administrator here. (link).

If you are not in agreement with the decision, you can appeal to the administrator. Unreasonable or vexatious complaints will not be accepted."
 
Well after trying to decide whether to set the age to 16 or 18, I've decided to leave it as 13 and over as before. Turns out one of the group of former members is only 14! We had assumed she was about 20. Who was probably only 12 when they joined, by my reckoning....
 
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Alvin63 said:
Do you think this is enough?

"Complaints Procedure - Online Safety Act

If you have a complaint, about your content being removed as illegal or harmful, or about software removing your content as illegal or harmful, and you consider it was not illegal or harmful, or you have a complaint about illegal content, you can contact the administrator here. (link).

If you are not in agreement with the decision, you can appeal to the administrator. Unreasonable or vexatious complaints will not be accepted."
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It’s very good. If it says everything it’s supposed to that’s all you need. I might copy it if you don’t mind.
 
Alvin63 said:
Thanks. Mine is very short. Do you think this is enough?

"Complaints Procedure - Online Safety Act

If you have a complaint, about your content being removed as illegal or harmful, or about software removing your content as illegal or harmful, and you consider it was not illegal or harmful, or you have a complaint about illegal content, you can contact the administrator here. (link).

If you are not in agreement with the decision, you can appeal to the administrator. Unreasonable or vexatious complaints will not be accepted."
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Your contact link doesn't work, it points to /help/complaints-policy/%7BcontactUrl%7D
 
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MattW said:
View attachment 322425

AI Costs for my forum with the AI Moderation installed. Hopefully the newer model will work out cheaper once that's enabled.
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Mine is still $0.01 after 27 checks. I doubt mine will get used much so am happy with the pricing 😊 I guess you have a very big forum - which would make a difference.

Still - 0.04 dollars for 187 checks isn’t bad either 😊
 
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So what are others doing for stripping exif data for existing photos in the site? Would converting all photos to webp strip exif data?

Also I think Ofcom have some things a bit back to front in the CRA. One part talks about anonymous usernames being a risk saying research says people get nastier (or something like that) when using anonymous usernames.

So they want everyone to use real names? Which puts many people, including children, at risk of a lot more harms! They can be looked up online, targeted on other sites or even tracked down in real life. It impacts their privacy. Which is why my users were required to use an anonymous username - to protect themselves.

Just seems a bit sinister (or badly thought out). Like they want to know exactly who everyone is online - for some gov database maybe?
 
Alvin63 said:
So what are others doing for stripping exif data for existing photos in the site? Would converting all photos to webp strip exif data?

Also I think Ofcom have some things a bit back to front in the CRA. One part talks about anonymous usernames being a risk saying research says people get nastier (or something like that) when using anonymous usernames.

So they want everyone to use real names? Which puts many people, including children, at risk of a lot more harms! They can be looked up online, targeted on other sites or even tracked down in real life. It impacts their privacy. Which is why my users were required to use an anonymous username - to protect themselves.

Just seems a bit sinister (or badly thought out). Like they want to know exactly who everyone is online - for some gov database maybe?
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seems current bug removes EXIF heh https://xenforo.com/community/threads/xf-attachmentmanager-xf-imagetools-destroys-exif-data.230738/ edit: they fixed it

or Xon's addon https://xenforo.com/community/resources/attachment-improvements-by-xon.6629/
 
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What about this?

Remove EXIF data: Use the following command to remove all metadata from images in a directory and its subdirectories: exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r .

"exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r .<br>

This command will remove all supported tags from all supported file types in the current directory and all sub-directories. Be careful with this (remove -overwrite_original if you're not sure) and read the documentation first."


Also my site is set up to automatically resize images, which apparently removes exif data - unless photos are small enough that they don't need resizing. Where can I check in ACP whether images have metada or not? Or do I need to look in the server?
 
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My own tool uses exiftool to do the removing, I'm a bit more specific in that I only remove the location metadata with -location:all= rather than everything. You'll find however if you just go ahead and strip the data you break the attachments very quickly. They are named for the MD5 hash of the file - which would be different after the file has been edited by exiftool so really you need to update the xf_attachments_data table and rename the data file and thumbnail appropriately as I think (and it's been a while since I checked) that XF does check the hash before displaying the file - so if there is a miss-match you wont get an image shown.

You could safely use exiftool however to see if you have anything with location metadata encoded in it by running exiftool, for example lets assume you had your XF install at /var/www/forum.example.com and the directory structure is standard. You might for instance run exiftool -location:all -G -a -j /var/www/forum.example.com/internal_data/attachments/6/*.data In that example I'm just scanning one directory (6) - you'll find numbered directories in the internal_data/attachments directory - they are named for data_id of each upload. I expect if I tried to scan all the directories the argument list would be too long (best use find to process the whole lot) so it seemed silly to suggest that as an example. Anyhow that would kick out results in JSON format, which would look something like:
JSON: 
{
  "SourceFile": "internal_data/attachments/6/6269-4c3e3cc924b72acc7bf11357fb1546a4.data"
},
{
  "SourceFile": "internal_data/attachments/6/6270-d732e4806c17c4d635d53c30189dc383.data",
  "MakerNotes:Location": "",
  "MakerNotes:Country": "",
  "MakerNotes:State": "",
  "MakerNotes:City": "",
  "MakerNotes:Landmark": "",
  "MakerNotes:City2": ""
}
So the first file there has no location data, the second one has location data, although it's all blank in that example.

So that's a long winded way of saying, yes you can use exiftool, but you need to be careful and know what you're doing with the XF data structure.
 
chillibear said:
My own tool uses exiftool to do the removing, I'm a bit more specific in that I only remove the location metadata with -location:all= rather than everything. You'll find however if you just go ahead and strip the data you break the attachments very quickly. They are named for the MD5 hash of the file - which would be different after the file has been edited by exiftool so really you need to update the xf_attachments_data table and rename the data file and thumbnail appropriately as I think (and it's been a while since I checked) that XF does check the hash before displaying the file - so if there is a miss-match you wont get an image shown.

You could safely use exiftool however to see if you have anything with location metadata encoded in it by running exiftool, for example lets assume you had your XF install at /var/www/forum.example.com and the directory structure is standard. You might for instance run exiftool -location:all -G -a -j /var/www/forum.example.com/internal_data/attachments/6/*.data In that example I'm just scanning one directory (6) - you'll find numbered directories in the internal_data/attachments directory - they are named for data_id of each upload. I expect if I tried to scan all the directories the argument list would be too long (best use find to process the whole lot) so it seemed silly to suggest that as an example. Anyhow that would kick out results in JSON format, which would look something like:
JSON: 
{
  "SourceFile": "internal_data/attachments/6/6269-4c3e3cc924b72acc7bf11357fb1546a4.data"
},
{
  "SourceFile": "internal_data/attachments/6/6270-d732e4806c17c4d635d53c30189dc383.data",
  "MakerNotes:Location": "",
  "MakerNotes:Country": "",
  "MakerNotes:State": "",
  "MakerNotes:City": "",
  "MakerNotes:Landmark": "",
  "MakerNotes:City2": ""
}
So the first file there has no location data, the second one has location data, although it's all blank in that example.

So that's a long winded way of saying, yes you can use exiftool, but you need to be careful and know what you're doing with the XF data structure.
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Thank you for your help :-) I didn't quite understand all that :-) Are these directories in the server or part of XF? And presumably that would tell me how many directories there were to know which number of directory to check? Also where do you run that code? Sorry for asking so many questions. And yes it is just the location I want to remove.
 
Neal said:
Your contact link doesn't work, it points to /help/complaints-policy/%7BcontactUrl%7D
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This is the html I have for it - I copied the format from Terms and Rules and the link and colour part from elsewhere - does that look right?

<p>Complaints Procedure - Online Safety Act</p>

<p>If you have a complaint, about your content being removed as illegal or harmful, or about software removing your content as illegal or harmful, and you consider it was not illegal or harmful, or you have a complaint about illegal content, you can contact the administrator <a style="color:green" href="{contactUrl}">here</a>.</p>

<p>If you are not in agreement with the decision, you can appeal to the administrator. Unreasonable or vexatious complaints will not be accepted.</p>
 
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