Notes In The Margin

I run a website whereon there is a discussion board. I've mentioned this numerous times. Having been away from Kenya for 19 years now, the majority of the discussion that goes on there is meaningless to me - about current events that I have no context for understanding. Thus, as time goes on, I spend less time reading anything there, and when it intrudes on my life, I have yet less context for grasping what it's about.

Yesterday morning, around 9am, I received angry email from an individual claiming to be a "Barrister & Solicitor" from Toronto, Ontario. I've received email from him before. He is always rude and threatening. He seems to think that it is his right and responsibility, as a lawyer, to be rude and threatening. He appears not to have heard the honey/vinegar maxim.

But that's neither here nor there.

The point is that he felt that he had been defamed on my site, and I was instructed to remove all articles defaming him, immediately, or he would "take action against you and your company." He further demanded that I modify the software such that no article can ever again be posted containing his name.

I replied that I would look at the articles referenced, and make a judgment about them on an individual basis, to see if his claim had any merit, but that this was not my full-time job, and so it would take me some time to get to this. I further stated that I wouldn't forbid the mention if his name. If he is, as he claims, a "Barrister & Solicitor", then he is a public figure, and so discussion of his antics and character are fair game. I simply won't get into the game of blocking this name or that name, and all mutations of it. It's an endless task. Not going to go there.

Over the following 9 hours, I received 4 further messages from him, in greater degrees of threatening tones, demanding that I take immediate action.

So far, I have read roughly half of the articles he pointed to. One of them calls him a sheep. Not complimentary, but not libelous. Several of them say that he's an idiot. Likewise, not complimentary, but not libel, as it expresses an opinion, and can't be construed as a medical diagnosis of idiocy.

One of them states that he had charges brought against him of committing a certain act against a client. This one is a little more dicey. The poster (anonymous, and impossible for me to identify, for whatever that's worth) didn't claim that the charges were accurate, and did not make the charge themselves. They merely stated that such charges had been brought. If this is true, then it can't be libelous. If it's not true, then I think it might be, but I'm not at all certain. And since I have no way to verify its truth, I'm not quite sure what my actual legal obligation is, if any.

Several of the posts contain the full text of legal documents filed by this character in the court of Canada. These are, as far as I can tell, documents of public record. They certainly would be in the USA, which is, coincidentally, where I happen to reside and run my website. But Mr. Barrister claims that posting them constitutes violating lawyer/client confidentiality. Which, of course, makes me wonder how they got hold of these documents in the first place, if not from either the lawyer or the client.

The courts of the USA appear to have stated that, as a service provider, I am not responsible for the words of folks posting on my site. This is what I firmly believe. And, since I value free speech far more than I value the reputation of an exceedingly impolite "Barrister & Solicitor" from Toronto, it is my inclination to do nothing at all.

If he had asked politely for me to remove a posting which makes unfortunate and unsubstantiated allegations, I would likely have been more cooperative. I find his threatening stance to undermine his credibility.

So the question is, loyal reader, what, if any, legal responsibility I have to police my content, and whether I have any reason whatever to think that this quack's claims have any merit whatever. I'm reasonably sure he's full of beans, and thinks that by threatening me he can cover up for his complete lack of any grounds for his claims. This, in turn, makes me less cooperative. There is a nagging suspicion that I'm actually opening myself up for legal action, but he's pulled these tactics in the past, and nothing has ever come of them, so it's a pretty small and quiet suspicion.

For years now, I have run a discussion forum at http://kenya.rcbowen.com/
It runs on Perl cgi code that I wrote back before the turn of the century, and I no longer understand. It is hugely inefficient, and every time someone hits index.cgi, it uses 70% of the CPU.

Well, this has been going on for more than 10 years, and recently the server that it's running on has decided that it just can't take the load any more.

So this morning I pulled the plug on the forum. I've got to find something more efficient to replace it with.

I'm technology-agnostic, but would prefer Perl or PHP. It doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles. Standard threaded discussion board, allowing for anonymous participation, but perhaps supporting user accounts and a certain amount of voting/moderating, although this is optional.

Any suggestions, loyal reader?

As many of you know, I run a Kenya website. It's the oldest Kenya website, and the most popular, at least by my informal unscientific surveys. What makes it that way is the discussion forum, which allows anonymous posting, is unmoderated, and unrestricted, and does not require any kind of sign-up, login, or verification.

It is running on software that I wrote almost ten years ago now, and before that, was running on Matt Wright's WWWBoard. (*shudder*)

On a fairly regular basis, these things happen.

1) One person posts an article posing as another person, in order to defame that person's character. This often results in that person having a heated debate with themself, or, just as often, the imposter conducting both sides of the argument.

-or-

2) Someone, or a group of someones, post unpopular views. There is a public outcry to ban them. If I do ban them, I'm accused of censorship. If I don't, I'm accused of favortism. In either case, I'm a communist, fascist, nazi, and all-around evil person.

-or-

3) Someone claims to know the *real* identity of one of the regular posters, and mounts a campaign to unmask that person. These often reach quite comic proportions, almost as though it mattered.

-or-

4) Someone discovers the statistics page, and claims to have compromised the site in order to gain that information. The latest version of this, the person discovered the referer information (hence removed) which contained large amounts of very unsavory referer spam. This civic-minded individual then proceeded to pin the blame for these referers on one particular scape goat, and launched a heightened version of #3, above.

-or-

5) People generally demanding that one person or another be banned, or that I institute moderation of one variety of another. Although having a panel of moderators is universally rejected, because the panel would be chosen via favortism, would represent one view or another, would ostracise this tribe or that, and so on.

Well, it's getting a little out of hand. I've long thought about installing some more full-featured community-type software solution, and I'm looking at that approach again. I'm likely to go with bbpress as the main discussion engine. And I've been recommended to look at drupal as another possible framework. Although I'm not sure that my audience needs that kind of site, it might be interesting anyway.

My audience, in case you couldn't guess from the above discription, is *primarily* Kenyan college kids, and, as such, they can be forgiven for many of their excesses. But sometimes I just wish they would grow up a little.