3 ms·

I run just under 300 forums on much the same basis and have been sued in the past in the UK. Feel free to co-opt my very expensive lawyer T&Cs which were desig

by buro9 9y ago

I run just under 300 forums on much the same basis and have been sued in the past in the UK. Feel free to co-opt my very expensive lawyer T&Cs which were designed specifically for this scenario (if you haven't actually had a lawyer draw up yours they may be a better default for you): https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal Ultimately in Europe I now feel fine: + EU e-commerce directive has "mere conduit" + Reactive moderation sets you aside from a publishing company and fits into "mere conduit" + Key thing for you is to not engage in any incidents as a participant, deny you even know that they are occurring... but if someone contacts you and tells you something is shady, etc you should shut that down ASAP - bear in mind that to some extent this does mean the admin of a forum shouldn't be an active user of the forum. So for just shutting stuff down within a reasonable time, you basically get to be very immune from any libel, defamation, slander, etc that occurs as a result of your users. Together with the change in UK law that shifted burden onto those raising a claim (they must prove actual damages - a surprisingly hard thing to do), I have not now had any legal threats in about 4 years despite still running as many forums that are barely (if at all) moderated.

alex_hitchins 9y ago
Side questions, but what sort of hardware & connectivity do you have for supporting that number of forums? I'd have thought at that level you would be in to duplicate hardware etc.
- buro9 9y ago
  Just a few linodes run them all and we tend to have low thousands of concurrent users at any time but can comfortably handle high hundreds of thousands of guests. A friend and I wrote a forum platform for them :) As a startup that didn't get anywhere, but the main premise was that forum hosting is expensive (almost 1 server per forum, not very optimised for caching, every page is dynamic, etc) due to them not being on a true platform (shared costs, optimisations, and less waste in CPU and bandwidth), and we also hypothesised that forums have a natural life and when they die they cross-pollinate new forums (total growth in user engagement across communities continues even when a single community dies)... hence it's best to make a platform, and that the reduced costs for all actually makes them financially viable (though when we shut the startup I chose non-advertising and to do donations instead). This is the forum platform: https://microco.sm https://microco.sm but it's not really open for new forums, as I manually have to enable them and I'm concerned about future offboarding requests (not something I support at all). This is an example of a forum on the platform: https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com which is the largest, but there are just shy of 300 on a wide range of topics.
  - alex_hitchins 9y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to give a detailed answer. I'll have a look at the links you included. Sounds like you were on to a decent idea with regards to re-thinking how forums can be built/operate.
    - buro9 9y ago
      It gets even weirder when you look at the fact that we put structured objects in forums... such as events: https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ We thought we were on to a good thing... but couldn't secure the A round in London. The seed only gets you so far.
      - alex_hitchins 9y ago
        Are you looking to make this open source or keep it under wraps and try again?
        buro9 9y ago
        It already is open-source... https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ but as it was designed to be a platform I cannot claim it is easy for anyone to install or get started with it. I have a slow burning background task to move it from PostgreSQL + Go + Python + Django to PostgreSQL + Go. This will make it a super easy single-binary install, that can also scale out by simply running multiple versions of the Go binary in different modes (API or Web). But frankly... this is a very slow burning background task :)
soufron 9y ago
Also EU Courts are very defensive of Online players and apply the Law mostly in their favor.

by buro9 9y ago

alex_hitchins 9y ago

Side questions, but what sort of hardware & connectivity do you have for supporting that number of forums? I'd have thought at that level you would be in to duplicate hardware etc.

buro9 9y ago
Just a few linodes run them all and we tend to have low thousands of concurrent users at any time but can comfortably handle high hundreds of thousands of guests. A friend and I wrote a forum platform for them :) As a startup that didn't get anywhere, but the main premise was that forum hosting is expensive (almost 1 server per forum, not very optimised for caching, every page is dynamic, etc) due to them not being on a true platform (shared costs, optimisations, and less waste in CPU and bandwidth), and we also hypothesised that forums have a natural life and when they die they cross-pollinate new forums (total growth in user engagement across communities continues even when a single community dies)... hence it's best to make a platform, and that the reduced costs for all actually makes them financially viable (though when we shut the startup I chose non-advertising and to do donations instead). This is the forum platform: https://microco.sm https://microco.sm but it's not really open for new forums, as I manually have to enable them and I'm concerned about future offboarding requests (not something I support at all). This is an example of a forum on the platform: https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com which is the largest, but there are just shy of 300 on a wide range of topics.
- alex_hitchins 9y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to give a detailed answer. I'll have a look at the links you included. Sounds like you were on to a decent idea with regards to re-thinking how forums can be built/operate.
  - buro9 9y ago
    It gets even weirder when you look at the fact that we put structured objects in forums... such as events: https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ We thought we were on to a good thing... but couldn't secure the A round in London. The seed only gets you so far.
    - alex_hitchins 9y ago
      Are you looking to make this open source or keep it under wraps and try again?
      - buro9 9y ago
        It already is open-source... https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ but as it was designed to be a platform I cannot claim it is easy for anyone to install or get started with it. I have a slow burning background task to move it from PostgreSQL + Go + Python + Django to PostgreSQL + Go. This will make it a super easy single-binary install, that can also scale out by simply running multiple versions of the Go binary in different modes (API or Web). But frankly... this is a very slow burning background task :)

soufron 9y ago

Also EU Courts are very defensive of Online players and apply the Law mostly in their favor.