UK Online Safety Act: impact on SFN

[swansont]

As some of you may already know, the SFN server hardware is currently located in the UK. 

I will quote from what was announced to the staff:

“This year the UK government passed a bill called the Online Safety Act. A brief description of the Act is set out here, but the tl;dr of it is that there are now a set of laws in place in the UK that put a duty of care on operators of social media sites in order to make them accountable for the things that are posted on those sites, which could be harmful to children and other users. The focus in the media has mostly been around the larger sites like Facebook, but actually, the act is extremely broad”

The upshot of this is that a modest operation like ours can’t be hosted in the UK on servers run by SFN; the requirements are too onerous and no individuals should be asked to take on the liability should someone find that weren’t compliant in some detail. It’s not enough to think we’re taking the right steps, and we don’t have lawyers on retainer to make sure of things. (Small UK bulletin board sites might be shuttering by the end of this week if their owners are aware of what’s going on)

Shifting to a hosting option that avoids this is moving forward. This might end up being completely transparent to our members and visitors, but Murphy always seems to pop up and invoke their law, so there might be disruptions. We will keep you apprised as more information becomes available.

[TheVat]

OSA was enacted into law in October 2023, almost eighteen months ago.  Must be moving pretty slowly if we're only now getting marching orders.  

A friend was pretty happy with LiquidWeb, FWIW.  They handle transfers well.  From personal experience (with a site that went belly up recently, and we members were not treated well when trying to get information), I would avoid A Small Orange.  

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

15 hours ago, TheVat said:

OSA was enacted into law in October 2023, almost eighteen months ago.  Must be moving pretty slowly if we're only now getting marching orders.  

Some of the key provisions only take effect in the coming weeks, which is why it becomes important now.

We're looking into a hosting service provided by Invision, who make the forum software we use. They have a specialized service for forums, and if it proves suitable, we'll use that for the ease of transition.