violation final response

I only signed up on this forum to report that other board was in violation. I am not a member of this site or it's services nor do I intend to be so do what you like but I will not go any further to report the issue then I already have so if you want to send the report to some resolution department then be my guest but I will not be doing so.

Additionally in the future I would highly suggest you make it easier for people to report such violations without them having to identify themselves and uploading screenshots as proof of the violation. The burden of proof should not lay in the hands of the person reporting the violation, but instead by the parties who are in violation and your company.

Your Welcome,
Anonymous

What's wrong with the litigation tool?
It's not as if we went to the other forum and said X sent us this

Caihlem, the litigation tool does not work.

First of all I tried using your tool but it requires me to send personal information about myself so that I can file the complaint which in this case was only doing "you" a favor. Secondly I must take the time to create a screenshot of the offending forum and then register for an account with your image hosting service just so I can upload the image which again requires me to share my email address which I do not feel comfortable doing so in short the whole process was a pain in the butt to be perfectly honest and needs a complete rethinking.

A better solution would simply be to create an anonymous reporting page where a person can simply provide the URL of the offending forum and add an (optional) description as to why they believe the forum is in violation and then this information is sent to the in boxes of whomever handles these sorts of things and they follow the link which was provided in the message and see if the forum is indeed in violation or not and take action accordingly.

Again as I said above the burden of proof should not lay in the hands of the person making the report "the good netitzen" but instead it should lay in the hands of the offending fourms administrator and with your company who is obligated by law to investigate such claims and to be perfectly honest this whole process should only take a few seconds to resolve so to me it seems like someone is just to lazy to do a little footwork themselves and wants to have all the evidence handed to them on a silver platter.

So to answer your question that is what is wrong with your litigation tool and again you are welcome.

Anonymous

You've made your point
I'll submit your remarks to the technicians


But just on the side lines:
> There are some image hosts (ex: ImageShack) where you don't need to register
> The law obliges "us" to act upon knowledge of the illegal forum

Caihlem

while you are at it you might want to add these forums to your list.

Links removed

And many many others. All of these were found by simply going to the free forums directory and looking at a few links (total time invested < 5mins) so as you can see you all really have a problem on your hands and really need to look more closely at that sites you have hosted on your servers.

As a further suggestion it may be a good idea to create a "report this forum" link at the bottom of every forum you host so that a person can simply click on the link and the forums address is automatically sent to the parties who deal with these sorts of things.

This should be easy to add to the already existing footer you have at the bottom of every forum you host and would make things easier for people reporting violations as well as deter those who would set out to create such forums in the first place knowing there is an easy way to report them but ofcourse this all depends on how diligent your company is about deleting such forums once they are found to be in violation of your TOS.

Anyway I will let you decide what to do about these links yourselves I just thought you might like to know about them and once again you are welcome.

Nos

i dont believe an anonymous page would be productive at all. There are quite a few people that have issues with other forums, that will report them for anything and everything, thus abusing the anonymous facility you are suggesting....as you can see, forumotion is fighting an ongoing battle with forums breaking terms of service, no sooner are some deleted as we are made aware of them, but other new ones are made, this is continuous, and whilst it may have only taken you 5 miins to go through the directory there are hundreds of forumotion forums out there that arent listed in the directory. The directory description of a forum can also be updated at any time, by the user of the site in , so one time we may check it will innocently say the forum is a games site...and when we check it is...then it adds some warez and we dont know till the next time it is checked or complained about. You have to understand the sheer scale of forums on forumotions server, forumotion does the best it can. Having time wasters abusing the anon faciliy of your suggestion will not help matters.

I just wanted to say that the current system also can be abused in much the same way (fake email accounts, fake names, ...) so there is no advantage for the current system then there is for the one I proposed, infact it makes things harder for the person reporting the offending forum.

Also the reason why things have become so out of hand is because the powers that be were simply sleeping on the job and did not tackle this problem when it first started and did not put into place any measures that would reduce this sort of abuse in the future, and now they feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of forums that are in violation that they do nothing about it themselves but instead rely on other people to do their work for them by reporting any forum they come across that is in violation of the TOS but as stated above they make this process uneccessarly time consuming on the would be reporter while letting the bad guy continue doing business as usual.

An example of this being the first post I made in this forum some 20 or so hours ago about the first board that I reported that was clearly in violation of the TOS (and at the time of this message still is) yet the offending forum is still up and running and will continue to be until someone does something about it and at this point I do not have much faith that anything will.

Finally, you may be asking yourselves at this point why does this person care anything at all about what happens on this site or the sites in which it host since they are neither a member of it's services nor do they have any obligation to report offending material to this sites administration. To answer this question I would like to say that

1.) It's the right thing to do (yes there are still people in this world that believe in doing the right thing)

2.) As a software developer I spend a great deal of time and resources developing my software and my bottom line depends on the sales of this software. So when someone makes available for free that which I never intended to be free, that bottom line is directly affected. So I am obligated to myself to do everything I can to prevent this from happening and this includes going to various websites and forums to see if this is happening which is how I ended up on the forum I first posted which thankfully is not at this time hosting any of my software, but as you know this can change at anytime so thats why I am concerned.

3.) As stated before now that your company has been made aware of this forum you are obliged to comply with the laws of your country to investigate all claims of illegal activity, copyright infringement, and software piracy that are brought forth to you and if nothing is done about this within a set limit of time you can have legal action taken upon you by the all parties involved and this would surely affect "your bottom line" and thus should be a concern for you as well so again I will say once and for all.

Your Welcome,
Nos1

Your complaint regarding the forums will no doubt be dealt with once it has been properly investigated, if this takes a few minutes to a few days, as i say forumotion does the best it can with the sheer number of ongoing terms of service breakers. It will be down to the litigation team to decide wether the forums are best with a warning to remove offending material or to be deleted for serious breach. We dont get a complaint and just delete a forum straight off without any investigation. If a warning is issued there will be a time limit set no doubt for the user to remove the offending material just as there will be a time scale for forumotion to need to act on complaints.

I am fairly sure there will be a priority as well, with the more serious forums breaking terms of service such as child pornography, dog fighting etc being looked at first at least i should hope there is. I do not deal with this side of things, only moderating the support boards so i dont know for certain. Your suggestion will be made as caihlem states, and we will see what happens from there on in.