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.
After deletion, make sure that you also remove the upload (and the associated optimized images, if any) from services like Cloudflare by purging the cache, in case you’re using that.
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.
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 police was 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 legal intervention. Deleting a picture doesn’t mean it never existed
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?
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.
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.
Hello, I have been experimenting with this site plugin and I noticed that for some reason, when I use the delete uploads function to delete an image from the post, it says Uploads successfully deleted., yet the image is still present in the post and navigating to the image URL directly also shows the image still present. I’ve cleared my cache and even tried on different devices, which the image persists even though the plugin says it was deleted successfully.
Is anyone else encountering this issue, and is there a possible solution for this? Thanks.
For those who are using the plugin and notice that when you delete an image through the Legal Compliance Plugin, yet the image appears to persist on the server, make sure you are not using any cache service for your forum such as Cloudflare.
