Guidance wanted (personal, sort of)

[Richard Russell]

OfCom have announced that, as of Q2 this year, they are increasingly turning their attention to small niche forums such as this one, rather than the large high-profile forums which have previously been their prime target, if the requirements of the Online Safety Act are not being adhered to. They are primarily focused on small but high-risk forums, and something which puts a forum into that category is the ability to upload images (which might for example include child pornography) that anybody can view.

That is exactly the case with this forum. Anybody can attach an image, of any sort, to a post and it will appear in the public forum for anybody else to view, even non-members. There is no evidence that there is effective (or indeed any) monitoring or moderation of posted messages by the forum's administrators to prevent 'unsuitable' posts or images appearing. I have tried contacting them by Private Message to raise this issue, but they don't reply to, or even acknowledge, my concerns.

Before somebody says that the explanation is probably that the admins haven't seen my messages, the way Private Messaging works in phpBB is that sent messages initially end up in one's Outbox and only when read by the recipient(s) do they move into the Sent folder, so it's easy to tell that they have been seen - but not responded to. But even if the admins haven't seen my messages, that in itself is suggestive that no effective monitoring is taking place.

So that leaves me in a very difficult position. I have no administrative access to the forum myself, so if OfCom were to come calling I could try to argue that I am not a 'responsible party'. But if the admins are 'absent' or at least ineffective, OfCom might reasonably argue that responsibility then passes down to the owner of the website at which the forum is hosted, and that is me!

This is not a trivial concern. Failure to comply with the Online Safety Act is a criminal offence, and although it is likely to lead initially to a fine, the amount would be more than I could afford and defaulting on such a fine could lead to imprisonment (if it was a civil offence it would probably lead to bailiffs confiscating property to the value of the fine, which would include my house).

So what should I do? Pretty much the only thing I can do is to forcibly take the forum offline in the only way I - as a non-administrator - can, which is to delete the phpBB files on my website which contain the forum's code. That is what I will do if I don't receive any guidance to the contrary.

[jgharston]

If you don't have Admin access you can't even do the simple thing of disabling image uploads.

(deleted tests)

By "uploading images" do you know if OfCom include /linking/ to images?
There's (url=blahblahimagepath)link(/url)
There's (img)blahblahimagepath(/img) which appears in the post
There's Attachments -> upload image -> display inline which also appears in the post, but this is the sole option that is "upload" images, and which results in the image being on the forum server.

[Richard Russell]

If you don't have Admin access you can't even do the simple thing of disabling image uploads.

Indeed not, and I'm not sure that it's an ideal solution, TBH, because often images are valuable here - especially to illustrate the output from a program. There are also ways that a post could fall foul of the Online Safety Act without including an image.