Forum Rules

Nice ruleset. You seem to have covered pretty much everything. However, I believe you can sefely remove the part about PunBB developers. There's a clause in the GPL that takes care of that:

IANAL, but I believe Paul is. What's your take on this? :)

In Sweden, there's a very nice law called "BBS-lagen" (the law on responsibilities for electronic bulletin boards). What is says is basically that if anything illegal is posted to an electronic bulletin board, the party hosting/administrating the bulletin boards must do their best to remove it as soon as possible, but they can not be held liable for the contents. I.e. YOU are responsible for what you post to a bulletin board, not the people who moderate/administrate it. The law only applies if the organisation doesn't have a registered editor-in-chief (hardly any Internet entusiast sites do). In that case, the constitutional law on freedom of expression applies instead.

That clause would probably get you off the hook with a free script. If there is a contract then such clauses don't necessarily work. You might still fall foul of the Supply of Goods and Services Act not to mention the relevant provisions about unfair contract terms. I'm not up to date with internet specific law so there could be exceptions.

As regards liability for whats written. British law is that anybody who publishes something defamatory can he held liable. In this instance that would be the writer of the post and the person running the board. It could also include people running other sites who linked to the post. The ISP could also be made liable if they were made aware of the defamatory content and took no action. In practice however taking appropriate remedial action and apologising will normally be sufficient to get you out of trouble. If a post were in breach of the criminal law then you would probably be screwed because it will be assumed that you knew or ought to have known about the post.

Just making rules saying that posters are not allowed to do something is never sufficient on its own. You always have to take reasonable steps to ensure the rules are being complied with.

There is no reason why the developers of a script should ever be held liable for the use the script is put to. That would be like making Ford liable because one of their cars was used to run somebody down.

Good thing you didn't use a gun as an example, because that is what they are trying to do here in the states. Hold gun companies liable for violence people cause with them... Sad.

Yeah, I heard about that too.

nice rulse, tho im not realy picky of whats said on my forums cuz its not that popular cept with my friends and some other ppl but i use/edit it. its good tho.