No and i guess never will. We have had legal threats from disgruntled users and banned users in the past. Easy solution, rock solid terms and conditions of use.
@toby78 I doubt that. You might be talking about law in Germany which says that IPs are private information.
Anything in the public domain, is no longer private.
Data protection laws, generally say, you must fulfil a request on any private information you have on someone. You must remove it on request. In most countries IPs are not considered private, but rather a public address. It is a grey area though. Basically if you have ex-members, then clearing IPs is no bad thing, but the law mainly concerns ISPs. But to be honest in reality Germany simply is barking up the wrong tree.
an IP is like a pointer a physical address, although it can also be dynamically assigned. If you are on a truly closed network, and only communicate outside on arrangement, then you might have a point.
You get people who try to argue trademark on domain names. You can't a domain is simply an address reference. Lawsuits have succeed only in the cases where someone is impersonating, committing fraud, etc. But even those are controversial.
What is wrong is how organisation like Facebook mine private information, by being ambiguous about who is going to have access to it.
Also members often misunderstand the nature of forums. The need to understand that what they post is published through you, and you the publisher is the one the is exercising your free speech. They have the right to choose their publisher. I think if you open the floodgates a little tend people forget that they a publishing through a publisher, it is worth reminding them.
The other thing is removal of accounts. Yes you can do it. But if someone is addicted to posting, it is them that needs to block themselves from posting. You are not a therapist (unless you are).
On one of our forums a mod left under a cloud, with some 120,000 plus posts. He demanded they be deleted, i refused. He issued proceedings against me, he lost.
For the fact that our terms and conditions stated once the pst comment / thread button is pressed that post belongs in the public realm, and he forogoes any right to its content , replies and argument.
We've had this question in the past and programmed our user delete options with this in mind. Users can not delete their accounts themselves, but an administrator can and the user can request this.
This seemed to satisfy the other people that asked just fine. I'm not making any legal rulings though!
Answers
There was an error rendering this rich post.
Anything in the public domain, is no longer private.
Data protection laws, generally say, you must fulfil a request on any private information you have on someone. You must remove it on request. In most countries IPs are not considered private, but rather a public address. It is a grey area though. Basically if you have ex-members, then clearing IPs is no bad thing, but the law mainly concerns ISPs. But to be honest in reality Germany simply is barking up the wrong tree.
an IP is like a pointer a physical address, although it can also be dynamically assigned. If you are on a truly closed network, and only communicate outside on arrangement, then you might have a point.
You get people who try to argue trademark on domain names. You can't a domain is simply an address reference. Lawsuits have succeed only in the cases where someone is impersonating, committing fraud, etc. But even those are controversial.
grep is your friend.
Also members often misunderstand the nature of forums. The need to understand that what they post is published through you, and you the publisher is the one the is exercising your free speech. They have the right to choose their publisher. I think if you open the floodgates a little tend people forget that they a publishing through a publisher, it is worth reminding them.
The other thing is removal of accounts. Yes you can do it. But if someone is addicted to posting, it is them that needs to block themselves from posting. You are not a therapist (unless you are).
grep is your friend.
He demanded they be deleted, i refused.
He issued proceedings against me, he lost.
For the fact that our terms and conditions stated once the pst comment / thread button is pressed that post belongs in the public realm, and he forogoes any right to its content , replies and argument.
There was an error rendering this rich post.
This seemed to satisfy the other people that asked just fine. I'm not making any legal rulings though!