Disclaimer section on the "about" page

By German law, a site owner has to provide a disclaimer with address information, limitation of liability and privacy infos.

I think this would be the best place to add this information. Does someone already wrote a plugin / hack for this use case?

Thanks you all in advance,
Markus

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Why not on the Privacy Policy page?

https://meta.discourse.org/privacy

That content is editable on your newly installed forum.

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The page is not directly linked in the main menu. The only place you’ll alway expect such kind of information. There should be at least a static link from the about page to this three pages (FAQ, Terms of Service, Privacy).

Supplement:
Requirement by law is: “leicht erkennbar, unmittelbar erreichbar und ständig verfügbar”
(engl.: easy to find, directly to reach and always available)

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You can provide this in the footer like we do.

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Thanks @downey,
that’s not what I’m looking for.

Discouse has a pretty impressive clean ui design. I won’t punish my users by looking day after day on unnecessary information they (and myself too) are not interested in. A disclaimer is something you’ll have to setup up in case of emergency or in other urgent situations. Nobody won’t actually look into this until something went wrong.

If I’m going to run websites, all of them are designed for easy to use and great user experience. This is why I love Discouse so much. It’s just perfect as it is. I won’t change the whole ui concept. I just need some more info on the about page :wink:

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What exactly are you looking for then? :slight_smile:

The footer is admin-customizable, and you can put whatever text, links, or HTML you want to there. It takes about 30 seconds to edit. The links there are easy to find, direct to reach, and always available. And most of all, it doesn’t require a source code edit to make happen.

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I know. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

But as I mentioned, I won’t destroy the design. I think this is not the right place for that. I’d like to leave it cleared up. Fact is, there is a main menu and a about page. On the about page is currently a notice on contact information, owner, moderators and so on. This is exactly the right place in my opinion and that’s why I’d like to invest half hour or even more to convince developers and and other enthusiastic Discourse admins like me :heart:

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I think the only way to cover all your bases is to stick a position: fixed footer on your forum that is always visible, unlike the default footer that only becomes visible after scrolling all the way down through several content updates.

For a quick test, I put this in the </body> section of my customization:

<div class="imprint">put links to more legal cruft here</div>

And this is the corresponding CSS with some basic but ugly styling that somewhat blends in with my overall customization:

.imprint {
    position: fixed;
    bottom: 0;
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
    width: 1140px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    height: 20px;
    background-color: #eee;
    color: #666;
    text-align: center;
    border-top: 1px solid #888;
    z-index: 100;
}

And if you want it to cover the entire viewport width, get rid of left, right and margin and set width to 100%.

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It’s actually pretty hard to destroy the design if you just add a footer. You only see it at the bottom of topic pages and other pages with an “end”, it doesn’t show up on the topic list.

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@riking, this is right but I’m one of those minimalistic guys who are always looking for form and function, fit and finish :wink:

Indeed, you can put this information easily to the footer. Can you explain me why do think, this is right place for that? Because 90% of all shity websites has it? – I’m on different opinion. – That’s just a bunch of static and uninteresting information for my target group and me.

I’d like a disclaimer section for people who are explicitly looking for that. (On the right place.)
Like lawyers, urgent contacts… at least to avoid expensive lawsuits.

You can save traffic, focus on you’re content – not regulatory affairs, have everything on place you’ll expected. And what about mobile users?

Too bad, that the common behaviour of overblowing webpages with ads and regulatory content is still you’re first choice. It reminds me on the big debate on Wikipedia to use a new image viewer. Off course, you can show all users every information staticly on each page. Is this the intend to use a dynamically driven forum? I don’t think so.

Every information has their right place to be there :wink:

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Okay, so why not use the FAQ, Privacy Policy, and Terms Of Service pages as previously mentioned?

I think maybe @terraboss didn’t look at the http://talk.openmrs.org/about page which so tidily displays that required info right where someone will be looking for it and not burden the other pages that don’t need it.

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@techapj can you make sure the about page links to

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • FAQ
  • Guidelines (if FAQ is specified elsewhere)

Actually now that I am thinking about this, perhaps About should work with the existing Privacy / ToS / FAQ topnav for these pages.

Yes! Let’s make that so @techAPJ – I believe there was a request to add full names / titles to avatars on the about page as well so let’s do that too.

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Only if the use_real_names setting is set :smile:

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Yes, precisely. :smirk:

People form expectations that links to such pages are at the bottom of the page, so that’s where they look for them.

Fundamental rule of usability: Put your information where people expect it to be.

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I had thought about suggesting adding the about page to topnav for faq etc pages - that would be really helpful.

Yes, please! Here’s that request:

Okay, made it so :bouquet:

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Thank you @techAPJ & @codinghorror :kissing_heart: :sunflower:

Small notice:
If I stay on about page the translation of the nav items are correct. But if I jump to one of the other pages, the about page item is in English.

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That’s because the /about page is rendered client side, while other pages are rendered server side. So I added a new server side translation for “About” string, that needs to be translated on Transifex.

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Just for others (like me…) who are searching Meta for something similar, here are some keywords:

  • “Disclaimer” is the English word for the German word “Haftungsausschluss”.
  • What I’m looking for is “Impressum” which is German for the English words “Legal Note” or “Imprint”.

I love the idea of having an editable “About” page where I could enter additional Legal Note information.

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