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Forum Administration/Legal Help
Steve Bennett
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This question is for forum admins of big popular forums, and particularly admins of PA forums if they're reading.
I run a small forum on a website for a video game that my team and I are making. We often have random spam threads posted on our forums, which I find within a couple days and delete. The spammers are able to overcome CAPTCHA verification, and email confirmation to register.
Today, one or many people/bots spamed the forums with a couple dozen threads with titles and content pertaining to things of an illegal pornographic nature. Pictures were also linked, although I'm not certain if they were actually illegal as I didn't analyze them - I just deleted the posts as fast as I fucking could.
I have recorded the IP address of the user accounts that made the threads (all the same IP). I have also shut down the forums entirely.
My question is, what do I do now? What am I required to do now? Technically, I'm honestly not certain anything illegal actually occurred. I guess I want to know if there is an established, expected course of action that forum admins are supposed to do in this situation.
Some might think I should definitely report this to police, but that may be a bit naive.. about 5 years ago a friend of mine ended up with similar content on a file server of his which, despite deleting and banning of users, it took 2 years of court trials and $10k in legal fees to prove his innocence, and he and his family will never recover from the public humiliation (it was on the news, and they were all pariahs after.. serious shit). I don't want that, thanks.
I run a small forum on a website for a video game that my team and I are making. We often have random spam threads posted on our forums, which I find within a couple days and delete. The spammers are able to overcome CAPTCHA verification, and email confirmation to register.
Today, one or many people/bots spamed the forums with a couple dozen threads with titles and content pertaining to things of an illegal pornographic nature. Pictures were also linked, although I'm not certain if they were actually illegal as I didn't analyze them - I just deleted the posts as fast as I fucking could.
I have recorded the IP address of the user accounts that made the threads (all the same IP). I have also shut down the forums entirely.
My question is, what do I do now? What am I required to do now? Technically, I'm honestly not certain anything illegal actually occurred. I guess I want to know if there is an established, expected course of action that forum admins are supposed to do in this situation.
Some might think I should definitely report this to police, but that may be a bit naive.. about 5 years ago a friend of mine ended up with similar content on a file server of his which, despite deleting and banning of users, it took 2 years of court trials and $10k in legal fees to prove his innocence, and he and his family will never recover from the public humiliation (it was on the news, and they were all pariahs after.. serious shit). I don't want that, thanks.
Steve Bennett on
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Also, most of these work by having someone go around signing up on these forums to bypass these captcha sort of systems and then they give the pws and stuff over to bots. Just an fyi.
Having infringing content hosted on your servers as opposed to linked from your site is different though; that's Serious Business to a much higher degree.
Again, IANAL, and you may wish to call someone who is.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Distribution, son. Criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Legal fees were to pay a lawyer to defend him.
Which is probably why PA doesn't allow people to upload files.
Out of curiosity, are these the same people that advertise those online data entry jobs?
I've actually hear it passed around here and other forums. They probably are linked somehow. A paycheck is a paycheck I guess.
It is something of unexplored legal territory, to my knowledge, but I really don't see why a prosecutor would press charges for something like that, unless they were being completely unreasonable (which, don't get me wrong, has been known to happen with prosecutors).
It was my good friend, and I can answer any detail about it. Rest assured it was real. Part of the issue was that when it was found, a large scale investigation was launched (the unit of police fighting that was newly formed and granted tons of funding). My friend cleared the content within a couple days of the incident (it was found by/reported to police same day), but they kept monitoring for the next month, I suppose thinking he was some kind of kingpin or something. After nothing more turned up, and they had spent so much money, they decided to move forward against him anyway, and didn't want to turn back for looking stupid I suppose. The laws were somewhat gray at the time, and people are blinded by fear/anger when it comes to that stuff.
But, Thanatos, as a mod, what is your defined procedure if you were to find something like that on these forums?
If it's something more serious than warez/goldfarmer/ch34p v14gr4 spam, then we file a complaint with the holder of the domain/ISP of the poster.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Probably ban the account, trashcan it, maybe report the IP to the police & ban it, but odds are they're using a proxy, anyway, so it probably wouldn't do much good.