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Nope. All are planning to move on.

Only Pignole Fixe is an exception, they like the software and don't see why they need to comply given it's all french

Not by me

Not sure why.

Life got in the way

I don't really know what 'edgelord' means (probably someone who gets close to the edge), but I don't think it was around as a term at the time.

Will someone explain it to Oliver? 👀

I have an expectation that posts I have made in non-public areas of the forum are not made public.

They're not.

Members area has never, is not, and will not be public.
DMs have never, are not, and will not be public.
Other very explicitly named areas that might exist have never, are not, and will not be public.

Everything else on the forum has always been public... and the only thing that changed earlier this year is that I blocked AI scrapers and all bots from even accessing the public... but I've undone that, to allow archiving to occur, because archiving involves bots.

I don't know what you thought happened, but it's certainly not a change from anything that has existed since forever on the site. The only thing is undoing a block only recently put in place to stop bots. If you posted a year ago and it wasn't in an explicitly private forum... then it was already public.

I just logged out and the private areas remain private, the public areas remain public.

Was there any announcement about what was being opened up to the entire Internet and archives?

There wasn't, but the only things I opened up were the things I had closed to AI scrapers and bots in March of this year, these things were historically open.

Members area remains closed, and if anything else shadowy existed then that remains closed and permanently hidden, and of course DMs remain private.

I do support any content that was ever public being archived.

But it's because I don't support opening anything else that I'm against the OSA and find it incompatible with my ethics. I'm not opening the private stuff, and I won't ever implement something to scan it either.

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/238964/

Lol, this is barely a fraction of what I knew, I told some people in the pub some of the other stuff on Sunday.

A lot will fall on Yahoo, but Yahoo will hold you to account for moderation of your community, and if you fail to moderate they will likely just cut you off as it's the lowest risk thing to do.

In essence:

• Do you run the actual software (whether or not you wrote the software)? Then you're 100% on the hook for everything identified in the risk assessment as part of the OSA.
  
  

So if someone else runs the software, i.e. you're a Facebook group, a Google group, a Yahoo group, all these kinds of scenario are they are the platform provider and they have to do full compliance.

It's interesting as if you downloaded phpBB and ran it, you're the provider... you would be fully responsible. But if you purchased phpBB from a hosted platform then they're the provider. But if you installed phpBB via Cpanel on your own server then you're the provider, etc.

Who runs it matters.

And whoever is running it will limit their risk exposure by implementing tools and enforcing quite strictly... so they will push some degree of "as a moderator for your community you must... " onto yourselves, but ultimately if you fail to do it they'd likely just delete your community as it's more cost effective for them to do so.

They must mean pirate movies surely.

I work in advertising and I love this element

Singletrack actually pre-check "legitimate interest" on a number of those... which clearly shows they don't know what legitimate interest means.

I've always liked my own approach to cookie consent, data protection and GDPR... just don't collect anything at all, simples.

Though we did have some outbound links to a few sites for a while that would add affiliate tracking that was done so via query string components and did not use any cookies or anything on this site... so things were only ever set it you followed the link, but then... things would be set at the destination anyway.

Who here is below the age of 40 and has the knees and alcohol tolerance for that?!

I think "a couple of people" are being ambitious and no longer reflect the majority 🤣

Finally got around, after 6+ years, to updating https://microcosm.app so that it no longer looks like a company.

Should've done that ages ago, but with the announcement it's clearly led to confusion.

lolz at SingleTrackWorld.

Nice and respectful of their users there.

Lolz.

If Ofcom, the home secretary and the houses of parliament and lords don't want small sites to interpret what they're saying in their own words when they write a law and issue guidance then they do have a way to do something about it... They can declare all entities with a global turnover less than and a global staff count less than, exempt except in the most egregious cases.

That would immediately dispel my fears.

But that's not happening, instead we have a fact checker threading a needle through a slim hole by interpretating the risk and likelihood for themselves without having skin in the game.

All I'm using is Ofcoms own guidance, linked right there in the first two posts, the guidance they issued for does who fall in scope, the definitions of multi risk as defined in there, the definitions of harmful but not illegal content that would trigger it, and reasonable questions that arises from those docs like "could a child register on your site?", "might anyone ever harass another person via the site?", "could fraud occur via your site?", "might someone be racist or homophobic or transphobia via your site"?... And I conclude, given the guidance, that yes, technically they could.

Based on the guidance, and my interpretation of it as published by Ofcom, we are multi risk and medium risk... If I'm wrong, and I may be, then it's the published materials that have led me to that conclusion.

Telling me that the likelihood of receiving a fine is low, etc... really ignores the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and everything Ofcom has said about it. From that perspective the fact checking ignores the vast majority of facts, and resorts instead to speculation based on past enforcement for another Act.

I think I had lower, I should check 😂

I absolutely agree with this.

LFGSS needs a few leaders who are tirelessly motivated in addition to accepting the risks identified and working through it.

I know I cannot, I have no time or energy to beyond the little I was doing... but this is what is needed.

A group of 10 Directors isn't really functional... ultimately 1 or 2 will run everything... but Directors alone can't actually run anything, you need someone to do sysadmin things, and I believe (hope to be proven wrong) that you also need programmers to get the systems compliant with whatever is identified.

Then of course fundraising... and everything spoken about adds to the amount you have to fundraise. Want a CIC? Fees, post office box, annual accounts via accountant... all which cost. Want transparent fundraising? Platform fees, payment provider fees... you receive about 10-20% less of the donation, you need to raise more. Want insurance against some of the risks? No idea what that will cost.

The costs we had were incredibly low, given that this site is massive and every page is a dynamically generated page for the signed-in users (cached for the guests). LFGSS makes up 80% of the usage of the Microcosm platform, then comes PignoleFixe with less than 15% usage, Espruino with 3%, Islington with < 2%... and all of the other sites, on the instances I run, account for less than 1% of usage. Costs follow "active users", a site where no-one is active costs nothing at all (just a row in the database)... so LFGSS carries everyone, and either it works for LFGSS, or it works for no-one.

This all sounds negative, it's not... just reality. It can be done, but needs a strong leadership to do it.

You were 260

• Actually setting up an Open Collective = not hard.
  
• Doing a donation drive = not hard.
  
• Paying bills, you need someone to pay the bills, someone willing to have a £1k slush fund in a Wise account... and that person would be reimbursed when they file receipts = moderately hard as it's a PITA chore and someone needs enough spare cash to cover the bills and be willing for their name to be public.
  
  

Open Collective is not a bank account, and is best used as a fund raising and transparency platform, that collects the money (the hard part) and then reimburses the money.

None of this is hard... the hardest bit is identifying who is going to handle paying the bills and filing the invoices and being reimbursed.

But you can't reasonably do this stuff before you know you're going to run the site after 16th March.

Bear in mind that the good will of a few people saying "I'll put my name to being a Director" isn't enough.

If the legal folk here conclude the same as I did, that we'd be in the zone of having to implement age verification, scanning of file attachments, scanning of DMs, new reporting tools, etc... then you need to also identify engineers who can give time to building these things, as well as additional costs to pay for third party services to do these things... hence the decision to set things up and move forward is linked to how realistic it is that we could comply with whatever recommendations arise from the Ofcom risk assessment, or to have a reasonable story why we don't have to.

How hard is it to move to the collective now, anyway?

Needs a named individual to go set it all up (not me), cannot migrate existing subscriptions from PayPal, at the moment PayPal has about £300 in it and so doesn't have an excess beyond March.

The group deciding on whether they want to form a collective should make that decision first, ideally by end of January with named people in place... and then, then the Open Collective should be set up by end of February (with all the KYC checks done, etc, and a named secretary / treasurer or two), and then fund raise prior to the switchover date so that you can collectively pay the bills the month later.

It makes no sense for me to try and do this for you all, because I don't know that you're actually going to go forward with running the forum, I don't know that you'll agree on who takes the risk and the form of how you're doing it, and I don't know who the treasurer / secretary is who should be on the account... and as I say, I do not want my name on it after the 16th March. It is also making a false promise, to start new fundraising when there's no clear path beyond the 17th March today.

But finally, the simple reason I never set up an open collective: I already subsidise costs most months (except for the months that a big donation or two close the gap), changing things will temporarily result in an even lower total amount of donations, meaning the amount I would subsidise in Feb and March would be even higher... why would I volunteer for that?

The cleanest way forward:

• The lawyers on here do their reading of the OSA guidance and the risks we face, and share that with this group (though, in more secret / hidden forum).
  
• The group here decides if they're actually going to form a CIC or company to run it, and who is doing which roles.
  
• Then... and only then, when you have a clear path forward... create the Open Collective and use the community-wide euphoric feeling of having dodged a bullet to do a donation drive to firmly get the forum to a healthy bank balance of 6-12 months money in the bank, rather than limping month to month like we do.
  
  

It's easy to do... but do it when you know that you're going to go forward, otherwise it's a lot of false promises, and you may be in the messy position of having to return money and not knowing how to (if we still shut down).

It's really messy to mix and match, from a transparency perspective, from an idea of what your balance is... But mostly because when people did this it inevitably mixed with my personal funds which opens it to being income taxable... I.e. the two people who were insistent on not using PayPal, one of which could only donate in dollars.

It's all just a mess, open collective solves all of that. I wish I had moved to them years ago , I hope that I'd this survives that the future organisers / owners do move to open collective

would you still have access to people’s original member/id numbers from when they joined the forum first time round. Remember there was a thread where people posted them up, but my search fu is weak. I’d like to include my number in my tattoo if possible.

If you don't know what it is and no one else does, then you can claim it was anything and probably consider it right enough 😂

But yes, I possibly do have the original identifiers as there might be redirects within the database from the old URLs to the new.

It's possible to hide the backend, and have visible public access that doesn't require hiding.

The law doesn't apply to proxies and ISPs, only to the platforms themselves and those who run the platforms.

One could easily envision multiple domain names all being a proxy to a backend, and those proxies don't have to be hidden, and they wouldn't know where the actual platform was, they could proxy by listening rather than forwarding, and then "mere conduit" applies again.