We have an ex-member who since being banned has emailed us with an order that we delete all his forum posts. The thing is he actually contributed much intelligent and entertaining debate until he lost the run of himself and thus we are loathe to erase the messages.

He also started many topics which developed into very interesting discussions. We would certainly hate to have to delete those as doing so will of course delete the whole topic!

What is your advise? Do we have to comply with this order? Did the member not give us copyright to his messages when publishing them to our forums?

Your help is appreciated

-James Corbett.
Trap4 Web Services

[THIS IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION OR ADVICE...JUST MY TWO CENTS]

I noted this sentence in your terms of service "All posts become the property of GlobalGreyhounds, except when copyrighted material is posted". Has that been in your TOS since that person signed up? If so, then I would think you have grounds to leave his posts up.

However, you might be causing yourself more grief than good by refusing to comply with his request. Regardless of your legal rights, he can make your life miserable by threatening you, so you need to balance that hassle against the loss of his messages.

I hate it when stuff like that happens....

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Rosemary O'Neill
Co-Founder, Infopop Corporation

I agree with Rosemary.

While legally you may have yourself covered, you have to decide if it is worth the grief or not to leave his posts up.

I would say chances are right now he's just pissed because he got banned. Leave the posts up, he might send you a bit of flack initially but there's really nothing he can do.

Write him back and point out that line in your TOS, and let him know that you have no intentions of upsetting your forums by removing his posts.

Julie

James, I'd stick to your guns here and actually leave the messages on the server.

... I'm pretty sure anything posted in a discussion forum (copyrighted articles and material exempted) becomes property of the board regardless even of whether a notice was posted or not.

I am also not an attorney, and would urge you as well to check with a lawyer.

Capitol Grilling - The Political Parlor Game
http://www.capitolgrilling.com

Whats his problem - leave em up.
If he is banned, could he view the forum to see if his posts were still there?

Thanks for all the great feedback and opinions.

Yes, he could view all his posts as we only restrict a few forums to registered members.

He's actually looking for us to delete them for his two aliases (which he sneakily used even though we suspected him).

So what I've done is deleted all for his older alias. I did a quick analysis and realised that his contributions under that alias were mostly garbage anyway. I have not however decided whether to delete the messages under his newer alias. I'd love to get the lowdown from a lawyer but the fact is we can't afford one

Is there any hope of InfoPop getting an independent law firm to contribute it's 2cents worth on questions of this nature here? I realise that you don't want be giving legal advise yourselves but surely there's a way for you to get the input of legal professionals here without being responsible for that advice? It would be an invaluable service to small operators like ourselves.

-James Corbett.
Trap4 Web Services

since he's banned, you have no more obligations to him. I'd ignore him and move on.

good luck,


WB

Personal opinion: ignore him. If he's really serious (and not a complete idiot), he'll have a lawyer threaten you by snail mail. Until then, I wouldn't worry about it..

Oh, and another personal opinion, it won't come to that..

Graeme

Moderator: UBB6 How Do I?

NOTE: Any email requests for support will be ignored.

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." --Douglas Adams

I recently encountered this situation with a valued member who is fed up with the forum and alienated by other users.

Bumping due to the fact that its an important topic that will most likely be encountered at some point during a forum's existence.

quote:

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Originally posted by Roberto:
Is there any hope of InfoPop getting an independent law firm to contribute it's 2cents worth on questions of this nature here? I realise that you don't want be giving legal advise yourselves but surely there's a way for you to get the input of legal professionals here without being responsible for that advice? It would be an invaluable service to small operators like ourselves.

-James Corbett.
http://james.corbett.net

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I don't think there would be much point since the UBB users and license holders are in various countries and states. The laws of each state, and even federal laws can be and many times are applied differently based on the district and presiding judge(s).

Doug
Moderator: Community Management
Captain Kirk: "Once again we've saved civilization as we know it."
Dr. McCoy: "And the good news is they're not going to prosecute."

Depending on how important the posts are, I would just delete them.

An angry x-member can easily resign under aliases and disrupt things.

------
Constitution Party - Help restore the U.S. Constitution. http://www.constitutionparty.com/

Yes, I'd love it if we had some lawyers who'd volunteer formal opinions here, but given the current state of things, I'm not even sure it would be safe for them to do that without fear of getting sued themselves: "you told me such-and-such on the Infopop board and I ended up losing a million dollar lawsuit"...

I'll try to keep posting recent legal developments here in the forum as I come across them, just so we can all stay up on the latest rulings generally.

We had a guy with over 1000 posts demand that they all be deleted.

We finally gave in, let him back in to do so himself.

He responded by posting a bunch of obcenities on the overnight LOL.

TheRx--Sportsgambling Information

Yahoo would not let you delete your old posts, just FYI.

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Boycott France: http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2003/3/11/144347

quote:

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Originally posted by ubbfan7:
Yahoo would not let you delete your old posts, just FYI.

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Nor would newsgroups, AOL, or mostly everything else. You can't recall sent email messages can you?

Remind people there is no taking back their words. If they don't like it, too bad.

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Steve
Volunteer Moderator - UBB™Central's Advanced UBB.classic™ Forum

#!/usr/bin/geek™ | BowlingFans.com™ | BowlingCommunity.com™
Since your questions could also be of benefit to other users, I won't answer support questions by e-mail, PM, or IM. Please post them to the board instead.

You can't take back what you say in any other medium, so why on the Internet?

Agreed.

And my personal thoughts on the issue are that users should realize that if they post to an online discussion which is owned by someone else, they loose their rights to that message. In addition, if you post something today that you don't want someone to read in a week, or a month, or a year's time, then you shouldn't be posting it in the first place.

I've gotten one or two similar requests in the past and I have never deleted the posts. I have seen users go through and delete their own posts, but I feel that is a pretty unhonorable thing to do.

-jlb