Hello The UK government are planning to change the laws of online safety and I was curious what measures Discourse are taking to address this or if there is a suggested response for anyone who is hosting in the UK? https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/time-for-tech-fi…

I’m interested too so if anyone can find it out I’d like to know too. Although I can’t find a specific definition it appears that different sized services are treated slightly differently to larger service providers. “we aren’t requiring small services with limited functionality to take the same act…

Can the forum software readily provide a list of mod actions over a year? Or perhaps mod actions filtered by, say, responding to flags? I wouldn’t want to have to keep a separate record. (Sometimes I will delete a user because of a flag - that isn’t an option when responding to a flag.)

[image] Sean: For all of the things that are on us, do you have suggested processes and copy? No and I’m afraid it’s unlikely that we will provide those. As with GDPR we provide the tools to comply but you will need to seek your own legal advice.

[image] Jakke Flemming: how is UK defining small, medium and large service providers? There’s a discussion on HN here (concerning a specific case where a person running 300 forums has decided to close them all) which contains useful information and links to official docs. AFAICT, 700 thousan…

Thanks. So, it apply only to a few, in its full power anyway. One of my friend living in UK is partly reason why I’m curious, because she in panicking quite a lot because of this.

Here are the risk assessment guidelines: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/risk-assessment-guidance-and-risk-profiles.pdf?v=387549

Thanks Hawk. (I see the pdf link resolves to the latest, despite looking like a link to a specific version.) Here’s a sensible (but not authoritative) description of what the new laws might mean to self-hosted small-scale forums which don’t specifically target children or offer porn. The main poin…

By now everyone should have all the information required from OfCom in order to carry out risk assessments. Once you have carried out your risk assessment you will have a list of identified risks that you may want to mitigate for. I am pretty confident that we have all the tools in place, but if any…

[image] Ed S: AFAICT, 700 thousand monthly active UK users is the threshold for medium. 7 million is the threshold for large. Do you have a reference for this? We did extensive searching and couldn’t find anything that defined number of users to “size” (which honestly is one of my biggest c…

I also found that one of the most difficult things to ascertain. I wasn’t sure whether we were responsible for assessing risk on Meta (as administrators of the community), or the risk of using Discourse more generally (the risk for our customers). If the latter, I didn’t know what size category tha…

Online Safety Act (New OfCom Rules)

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ahaiku (Alexander von Gluck) February 27, 2025, 2:13am 22

Do you have a reference for this? We did extensive searching and couldn’t find anything that defined number of users to “size” (which honestly is one of my biggest complaints about the OSA as written.)

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Online Safety Act (New OfCom Rules)

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