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This appears to be the thing that will finally take my sites offline. I'm an individual who runs 300 forums. I do this because I believe that forums organised
by buro9 5y ago
This appears to be the thing that will finally take my sites offline.
I'm an individual who runs 300 forums. I do this because I believe that forums organised around an interest bring people together and help address loneliness. Further I believe that if you do that, you also help minimise the impact of depression and things like the suicide rate for middle aged men.
The forums are things like this: https://www.lfgss.com/ https://www.lfgss.com/ Cycling related. So that people come together, build friendships, and take those friendships into the real world through the interest - to go on a cycle ride.
I can't really see how I could comply with this bill at a low cost (the forums all run a deficit that I cover), and even if I did the paperwork side of things there are risks created that come with large and scary penalties for me... too large for me to consider bearing them.
There is no exemption I fit in... I run forums, and these are defined by the bill as being a regulated service.
- 3np 5y agoI think you should contact the press. Maybe The Guardian? You seem like the kind of person that could help bring light and counterweight to this
- 908B64B197 5y agoTransfer them to the United States and simply ban European members?
- viccuad 5y agoor better, transfer them to Europe and simply ban UK.
- throwaway3699 5y agoThere is a good chance a significant portion of those forums have UK members. You can't just hollow out a community like that and expect it to survive.
- brokenmachine 5y agoA tickbox asking, "If you are in the UK you cannot access this site, are you in the UK?"
- d110af5ccf 5y agoIf it really came to this, transfer ownership wholesale to someone who resides outside of both the UK and the EU and who isn't worried about risking UK legal ire. That way none of the current members need to be banned. (I hear Seychelles is a good jurisdiction for such things.) Of course, the UK government might attempt to filter the website. But if SciHub is anything to go by then that might not be very effective.
- nprateem 5y agoOFCOM will recommend thresholds in terms of the number of users a service needs to have for the legislation to apply to it. Hopefully they'll set the threshold at Twitter scale, so unless you've got 100k/millions of users you'll probably be OK.