29 September 2008
Recently we were asked by a client about their forum and their responsibilty as a web site owner and the comments published. Our client had been told that if the comments were inappropriate on their forum, that they could be sued.

Recently we were asked by a client about their forum and their responsibilty as a web site owner and the comments published. Our client had been told that if the comments were inappropriate on their forum, that they could be sued. They were under the impression that the people who put the comments up were responsible.
You would think that forum poster would be responsible right?

Basically anything on your site is your responsibility and yes, that includes you could be sued. It is far more likely you will be sued, than the person who actually posted the comments as you are providing the vehicle in which they are published.
So what do you do?

You have to moderate your forums, which can be time consuming and laborious. It also results in a lag time between the forum posting and you approving it. You will need to provide this moderating task to someone who will dileggently approve or delete posts.

If you are a not for profit, or community organisation, why not appoint a member of your community to watch their specific topic area and block people and delete any comments that are litigious or malicious or just plain spam!

You also have to watch your forums for other forms of negative postings. Some posters plant comments in your forums with links back to their own web site as this boosts their ranking in the search engines. They can have a negative impact on your forum and your own site rankings.

Other negative impacts on your forum are spam bots and in particular forum spam bots. A Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and any other web forms to submit spam links to the any web forms it finds. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Not all of the spam posts are meant for the readers; some spam messages are simply hyperlinks intended to boost search engine ranking, as discussed above.

It's great providing the opportunity for your vistors to provide you with feedback, but with forums comes responsibility.