Dear all,

First, I would like to thank you for the support that you offered me until know in the creation of my research forum. It has been reviewed by a research ethics committee and they are worried about the following:

- In which country/state are the servers of Forumotion located and which laws do apply to the forum?

- Is it possible for future members to register in my forum without using their e-mails (so that I do not have any access to their personal information) but still create a profile that they can use?

Best wishes,

Elvis

Hello.

Our main servers are in France but we do have other's in other parts of the world Them ones I'm not sure about.
I am really not sure why this would be a problem to you as No one has Access to them servers in any way other then out tech team and Pro admin.

As for your Question about making an account without an Email address.

Well this will never happen as we need that data to make sure the member to be is really a person and not a bot.

None of the data on the forum is used by a third party it is not even used by us in any way it's just there to help you and your members. ID news letters, Emailing your members with change of password's, sending other info from your forum.

There is nothing for them to worry about.

On the email part I suppose the members could put in fake email addresses then you could manually activate the account. Honestly though an email address is hardly considered personal information these days. I only use mine to sign up for websites. Every website requires email addresses.

-Brandon

The committee want to know the servers' location because of legal matters and whether this would interfere with UK laws. They just want to be sure that my research is safe and ethical.

Do you know whether another researcher ever used Forumotion for a study? I think it would be useful to see how they were able to get ethical approval.

Thanks a lot

Do we know for sure? No not really, however, we host millions upon millions of forums (possibly even billions), so it is definitelly possible someone has used a forum of ours for a research study. But not everyone who creates a forum comes here for help and we dont have a record of every type of forum ever made and for what purposes they made for, sorry.

-Brandon

most forums are made for gaming and other basic stuff online. You are my first member that has used the forums system to do research study's. but before my time maybe their has been more but I have not been staff for that long really.

As for the law side off things well we basic EU law's as far as I know The only thing we really hold all our members / founders to is not to have porn or any sexual contents on our forums and selling drugs or hacking.
The TOS will tell you all your need to know about our rules and as long as you stick to them then you will not ever have a problem.

Hmmmm... what exactly do you understand by sexual contents? Contents that discuss any sexuality related topics or content that is meant to sexually arouse people (e.g. visual pornography, literary erotica, etc.)? Because my forum will deal with a community of people who suffer from a sub-type of OCD related to sexuality.

If your just talking about sex then that's fine but if it goes in to detail then it would be breaking the rules of our TOS

The problem is all or forums can be seen by under 13 so we would like you and your members to keep this in mind when making a forum and letting your members talk about things that an under 18 would see.

Any one can make an account on your forum and they can say they are 18 and be under 13.
it's just a change of the date of birth.

I'm really sorry if I am nagging you on this, but could you elaborate on your "If your just talking about sex then that's fine but if it goes in to detail then it would be breaking the rules of our TOS".

What do you mean by 'in to detail'?

In the terms of service it only says that 'sexual elements' is prohibited, but that can be overly reductionist.
I completely agree that one has to save the kids from shocking sexual content that might disturb them. For me this entails especially any type of pornographic visuals (videos, pictures, GIFs, etc.). But if people are talking about their sexual desires/confusions/anxieties in order to gain some pedagogical insight from other people, is that considered to be problematic?

Please read this prototypical post of the kind of messages that I am expecting in my forum:
https://www.psychforums.com/obsessive-compulsive/topic203161.html#p2109142

Do you consider this to be problematic?

After reading your post you pointed out......
Yes that sort of thing would be seen as ok as it's mostly talking about a problem with not knowing if they are gay, straight. bi.


What we mean is like
If one of your members was to say they was having sex with a loved one or maybe a boyfriend, girlfriend and they go in to detail on what they was doing to each other in a porn kind of way then this would be seen as breaking the TOS (It's seen as pornographic)

The word (masturbating, masturbation) with out going in to to-much information on what they was doing would be fine as long as they did not go in to depth.

Sadly most of laws say that if a kid of 13 can see it and they don't have this in sex ed at school then it's seen as wrong for them to see it online (on the internet)

Thank you very much for your clarification, which reassures me.

I chose to open this forum at forumotion, because in the terms of service it says: "Forums that does welcome or promote warez, piracy, hacking, cracking, spamming, attacks against networks or servers, pornography, racial hatred, crimes against humanity, inappropriate activities on the servers, or any other actions which violate any applicable laws, aren't allowed. Any forum which contains texts, links, pictures, animations, videos, classified ads or any other content recognized as Illegal will be deleted without notice or warning."

And the meaning of pornography, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, is "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement". So it needs the two highlighted elements for something to be pornographic. I can assure you that the aim of my study is not to know how people have sex (details of such activity), but to see how they negotiate their sexual identity in relation to their experience of OCD.

As I have said in a PM what we would class as pornographic.

I would say use your own Discretion on things. if you Think it's a little over the top then you can always edit the posts your self or you can put word blocks on your site to stop some words that could be seen as pornographic

Problem solved & topic archived. member asked to mark this as solved by PM Please read our forum rules: ESF General Rules