Forum libel and banning specifics

Clamping down on libel and flame wars

[Rosalind]

The problem of libel has raised its head in my forum, and not for the first time. Basically someone is calling another member a cheat and a liar. There's no way I'm going to investigate all the claims, find out who is telling the truth, and referree the ensuing slanging matches.

So I've decided to take a drastic approach, and just ban all specific references to companies and websites, except for a handful of obvious exceptions. It's going to mean editing a lot of earlier posts, and it will probably upset a few people. But if "no specifics" can work for Brett, it can't be forum suicide.

Has anyone else done something similar with a forum? Any tips on how to sensitively handle this kind of change would be appreciated.

[Leva]

I would identify sympathetic members of what I think of as "board royalty" and get them on your side. Explain, hey, look folks, I don't want to get sued here ...

Be CAREFUL with this. I used to have a forum with around a thousand users and around 2,000 posts/day, and this was back in the mid 90's. This was before advertising was really possible; I was paying for this board out of my own pocket and even took time off work to get it running when the community needed a home in a hurry ...

I had good evidence -- IPs, grammar structure and word usage, similar handles, etc. -- that an obnoxious user on the board was also behind some very bad behavior on a board frequented by children that I was running. I couldn't 100% prove it was the same guy because it was a moderately large network he was posting from, but I had strong suspicions. So I banned him -- his behavior was bad enough to warrant banning in that board alone anyway! (Also notified the cops, but that was another story, and nothing ever came up it.)

He wasn't even popular on the board -- he was generally known as a troll. But some of the board royalty took exception to my "censorship" ... and then someone jumped in and posted "evidence" that my board was installing spyware on people's computers. Said evidence was a link to my stats page and a claim that the stats page was proof I had access to their computers because it was showing things like browsers and countries and monitor settings. They made it sound good, anyway, and at first I laughed it off.

(This was a simple perl script, incidently, based on a hack of Matt Wright's board. It didn't even have cookies or ANY javascript!)

Then the entire board, lock stock and barrel, every single member, picked up and moved to another website. And guess who was running the website? The same woman who'd claimed I was spreading spyware. My @$%$ competition ... I lost a great deal of business, including some web design projects that I was doing for the community in mid project. It was sort've a mob-mentality thing.

And the new board owner? Is now doing dozens of websites a year for this community. Something smelled rather badly about that whole thing ...

My only consolation is that she's a very bad web designer.

So my point is, don't underestimate the power of mob mentality, or the ability of the average person to believe a good lie or concoct a nefarious plot.

To this day, those folks are convinced that I'm the bad guy and it's been many years. I went over to their board about two years ago to let them know a regular on their board had passed away -- he worked for the same large company as I do. Figured they would want to know. Despite the circumstances they still flamed me for appearing and asked me if I was spreading spyware with my post ... geesh. Dumb people.

Leva

[Rosalind]

Hmm, good point about the censorship thing. People can be very touchy about that. I've posted a page which explains my motivations, but I do expect a number of people to misunderstand. Legal distinctions such as libel are just not on most people's radar.

I feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place. I don't want people to use my forum to libel each other, but I don't want to be an ogre of censorship.

[Leva]

Just a tip, too -- something I learned from that event is that I never, ever, use the "ban" word if I can help it.

If I'm just banning a troll or someone I never want to see again for antisocial behavior ... they get served a blank white page with a "please wait ..." animated gif that never goes away. It just sits there with a clock spinning round and round and round ... No indication what happened. Most trolls and problem users simply assume the site's down. ;)

(An alternate to this is to simply redirect them to another page at random on the site whenver they try to log in to the forum.)

As far as censoring posts I'd simply e-mail the more sensible members of your board royalty who you judge likely to get the big picture and explain the issue. Ask them for their help if there's any fuss regarding the matter. Delete everything related. Then start deleting any comment on the matter -- have a "no comment" policy. And send a polite e-mail to anyone whose comment you delete explaining you're covering your butt and you're very sorry but that's the way it is.

Granted, I don't have exactly the best track record on this matter, but I sure wish I'd resolved the problem I was having this way then.

Levber

[rogerd]

Put a strict clause in your TOS, and enforce it vigorously. People will still post "XYZ is a scam" messages, but if you have a consistent policy and remove these posts promptly when found, you'll have a greater chance of avoiding lawsuits.

[Rosalind]

Thanks for your tips. I've sent out messages to those people whose posts I've had to edit or remove, and so far there have been no negative reactions. If there are no complaints by the end of the week, I'll be pleased.

Leva - I agree with you about the "ban" word being something to avoid at all costs. I made that mistake very early on when I encountered my first forum troublemaker, and he went nuts signing me up for spam and so forth. Finding the right mix of firmness and diplomacy in moderating a forum takes some practice.