Great Western Coffee Shop

Changes come in tonight - see my summary, and links to the act itself and the BBC's take - at
http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4234_Change-to-Libel-and-Defamation-laws-from-1st-January-2014.html

As far as the Coffee Shop is concerned, first indication is that it's 'no change'.  Our acceptable user policy and forum agreement require you to make no personal attacks / not to defame people and our team of moderators always have and will step in on those very, very few occasions before it's necessary ... long before anything gets out of hand.   

The new law does appear to give the site admins / operators better protection should such a situation ever get out of hand, provided that we help the person / company who feels defamed sort it out with the alleged defamer.  Welcome, but not something we've needed in the past (and please don't try us out  ;) )

As grahame has observed, we on the Coffee Shop forum are probably not in any particular need of this apparently improved protection.  ;)

However, if anyone has any concerns over anything that is posted, please do let us know - our e-mail addresses are available, for that very reason.  :D

Actually, Chris, I stand slightly corrected by Lisa, who reminded me of two incidents in the past where the improved  protection would have offered us an opportunity to be fair to our posting members rather than having to pragmatically roll over on the basis of a thread of action.  Both caused a degree of heartache / worry in our household - had me up all night - and so they're etched on Lisa's memory.

The first was where a quotation from a newspaper article (!) concerning parking at a station on the very edge of the old Network South East area was considered to be the forum (and the member who posted the quote) to be maligning one of the people mentioned in the article.  The second was a post that was taken as being a critical reference to a campaign in the BaNES area.  In both cases, whilst I strongly disagreed with the complainant, I also noted that the complainant had a track record of taking things a very long way, and apparently the time and means to do so; as neither was what I would describe as a 'core' issue on the forum, or a vital post / thread, we deleted the thread with the permission of the original poster, making it very clear to both him and the complainant that we viewed the post are fair and reasonable, but didn't want to have our time wasted fighting to uphold that view.

I don't know what decision would be made if and when we were to get a similar (i.e. in my view unjustified in the extreme) request to pull a post or thread in the future, but we do have that extra strength for such specific and unusual cases.   Overall, for 99.95% (ish) of the time, we don't need the extra protection and it won't effect our operation.