UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Promoting Your Community Disclaimers and "Terms of Use"

Hello All,

I was wondering if someone could point me to some good examples of disclaimers and "Terms of Service" at other sites - perhaps your own.

I am preparing a forum to discuss "mandatory activity fees" as well as other issues that students at my college are concerned with.

Just for peace of mind, I want to ensure that students who post to this forum indemnify me from all liablility of what they post.

For example, if a student decides to slam a professor with false (or even exagerated) remarks, I don't want to be sued for defamation.

In short, I just want to provide a means for a community of students to share their concerns freely but maturely.

I'm sure many folks here include such legal verbage on their sites.

Any suggestions/examples would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

Yeah, well I sure hope we all do have such terms of use "fine print" on our forums/sites... if anyone doesn't, please do yourself a favor and spend a few hours and make a public terms of use policy for your site, and save some trouble down the line if anything ever comes up...

But, while you need a terms of use disclaimer, I figure you might be interested in this little bit on the actual laws of forums, in re to your concern about defamation:

The United States Congress passed in 1996 United States Code 230 which has a key provision: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This congressionally imposed limitation goes on to say in section USC 230 (d)(3): “No cause of action may be brought and no liability imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.”

What this means is that in fact, as an operator of a discussion forum there is the strongest possible wording of a Federal Law which prevents you from being held liable for any of the content posted on your forum.

But, a disclaimer is more than a good idea… the best example I have found is at: http://intelforums.com/help/disclaimer.htm

Hope this helps,

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com

That's an excellent reference. I think a good place for this is in the FAQ and I also have a couple of other additions in there along the following lines:

Is there a code of conduct I should be aware of?
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I don't want to accidentally break any rules.

In line with standard web practice, we don't allow dangerous or offensive material or links. Young people visit the board so nothing "Adult" please.


I can't login. How do I delete the bad cookie?
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My Cookie has Crumbled. How can I delete it?

If your cookie goes bad and you want to delete it because you can't login any more, you can find it for Netscape at Program Files\Netscape\Users\yourname\cookies.txt. Delete the two lines containing "/cgi-bin/wwwthreads" and your name and password. For IE, in WindowsTemporary Internet Files, delete "wwwthreads/ - Cookie:[email protected]/cgi-bin/wwwthreads"

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Yeah, forum rules are also somewhere on intel's site... you should have guidelines posted either in the FAQ or somewhere on your forum.

Good line about the cookie.

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com