Legal Compliance Plugin

Plugin
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:information_source: Summary Offers functions for legal compliance
:hammer_and_wrench: Repository Link https://github.com/communiteq/discourse-legal-compliance
:open_book: Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse

Features

There are quite some laws and regulations that apply to your Discourse forum. Although Discourse has a lot of functionality that helps you to adhere to these laws and regulations, some actions currently require you to get technical help and go into the database. This can be impeding in situations where it is necessary to act quickly.

This plugin will offer a number of functions to make your life as a forum admin easier. They will be added over time.

Upload removal

The first functionality is the ability to remove uploads quickly. This can be necessary when the upload contains personal information (CCPA, GDPR), contains upsetting content (the new UK Online Safety Act) or contains copyrighted content (DMCA and many other laws).

Currently, removing uploads from Discourse requires you to find the post that contains an image or an uploaded file, then empty the post, and then wait until the clean up job has ran. This will take 48 hours in a standard install (Clean orphan uploads grace period hours) while most situations demand a quicker resolution.

This plugin adds a “delete uploads” option at the post staff action menu.

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This functionality is also available from the flagged post review screen.

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Sometimes you get a takedown request with only the URL of the image, and you have no idea which post it belongs to. The plugin adds a upload: search prefix which allows you to find the post(s) that contain an image based on the URL.

9 Likes
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That’s great! A good addition to the permanent deleting of posts that was introduced officially a few years ago.

Not completely related, but would it be easy to create a new route that shows all recent uploads, especially pictures (as a mosaic/grid) - regardless of where they were uploaded to (any category, including PMs, chat…)?

I don’t have any issues on my forum, but I remember a site that allowed users to upload images. They had trouble because someone uploaded illegal stuff, and the police were involved.
For this reason, they closed their site, and decided to completely prevent image uploads on their other platform for years.

So the idea here is only to monitor and be more proactive, as illegal stuff could still potentially involve police. Deleting a picture doesn’t mean it never existed :slight_smile:

I guess it’s somewhat easy to achieve this using data explorer and the API, but I’m thinking of a page available inside Discourse.
Or unless data explorer can show pictures in the returned table, as it does with avatars?

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I can’t even imagine that in 12 years of Discourse nobody built a media library plugin that’s similar to what Wordpress has. It would be so cool! However, I think this would warrant its own plugin. It’s out of scope for this one.

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Very nice! Iirc you have created a few legal compliance plugins that were merged in core. Another great add to make things more ease if use for moderation.

:clinking_beer_mugs::smiling_face_with_sunglasses::+1::sparkles:

4 Likes