This is the Appeal Court ruling in the Harry Miller v Humberside Police hate speech court case.
I subscribe to the Free Speech Union, who helped to fund this case, & they have covered this is more depth.
Basically the Court of Appeal have ruled that saying something generally offensive isn't an offence, it's only an offence if directed at a specific person / persons with the intent of upsetting them.
Therefore any complaint from a passer-by, or scurrilous forum member, who takes offence at what they deem to be an offensive comment, no longer holds water.
https://bit.ly/3H1tXsj
but if a moderator on a forum felt a poster was going down The Deep or Siatico route they should have the power to delete, but perhaps not to alter...
Quote from: crabbyob on December 21, 2021, 01:37:40 PM
but if a moderator on a forum felt a poster was going down The Deep or Siatico route they should have the power to delete, but perhaps not to alter...
I suppose a moderator can delete or change any post they wish to.
I understand that, in years gone by, the "official" PF suffered from a few power-mad moderators who didn't like views that contradicted their own.
What this Appeal Court ruling means is that The Deep is no longer able to use the threat of reporting to the police, posts that call illegal immigrants parasites etc.
Also, should I post or retweet a limerick about gays, as did Harry Miller, this does not represent a hate crime & it's now illegal for the police to record it as such.
I saw this ex-policeman on TV, he knows his stuff and I'm so pleased he won his case. :upvote:
Quote from: Alex on December 21, 2021, 01:47:43 PM
I saw this ex-policeman on TV, he knows his stuff and I'm so pleased he won his case.
The Free Speech Union, who supported Harry Miller, has a top Barrister who knows his stuff as well.
The non-vocal majority are starting to fight back.
Quote from: Diasi on December 21, 2021, 01:51:12 PM
The Free Speech Union, who supported Harry Miller, has a top Barrister who knows his stuff as well.
That makes a change :wink:
Good news indeed. It was high time all this "I am offended" rubbish got booted into the garbage can.
Mind you I'm still hedging my bets. Anybody bar Phil who I am sure is probably a trustee try typing in wеароns grаdе рrаt :grin:
An earlier post mentioned mods being able to delete posts or alter content? Delete is fine but allowing alterations sounds potentially very troublesome, even dangerous so I'd not be in favour of that.
Nor me
Mike
I'm pretty much certain that any altered post is shown as having been altered. IMO a deleted post should at least remain with a note in it saying the content was deleted and why. Having stuff vanish and not knowing why drove me to distraction during the bad times. It was even the prime reason I binned the fortyone id and why I said I'd probably be joining somebody who said they'd be taking a long break during the latest episode.
I've been busy today and haven't spent much time on PF but if I notice that posts about this place vanish I won't be posting there again whatever happens. For me bad moderation is a no-no.
I'd go along with that providing altered messages had a clear explanation as to why. I'm more than willing to leave you to decide the parameters Mark. Just wanted to be clear. :smiley:
The question may never arise if PF gets fixed then there will be no mods.
OTOH should this be the only PF then I'd probably like to have some just in case. I don't want to be doing what Chris has done during the last two epsidodes of trouble which is to simply get a complaint and delete a post or thread. I'll guarantee that most think did I lose a post? at some point. I know I did and although I knew the reason some had gone others were a mystery. Collateral damage? No idea.
Some sort of group decision at the time is probably best. It's my Raspberry Pi but it's not my forum is my view. Some stuff like the unfortunate need to remove the PM facility I'll just do but I will try to reinstate that if I can do so reasonably easily.
As I understand it, Chris took it off because certain members were doing a Fletcher Christian on him and poaching members to boot.?
Yes that's what I read. I know now how he knew what was happening :smiley:
I'm doing it because of the limitations of my home hosting. I will check what it would cost to add a mailbox to my digitalham domain which should allow me to reinstate it but it could be just as cheap to go for full hosting.
Thank you for taking the trouble K. I wasn't aware of it costing you money and I'm happy to cough up a few quid as, I'm sure, are others..
As it stands it costs me nowt extra which fits my nature. Hmmm is it racist to wonder if that's why Lumbago Sciatico didn't like me?
I like doing projects like this as it stops my brain from ossifying. Mostlyit is just monkey see monkey do from stuff on the web anyway with the odd cursing and hair pulling finding out why things aren't working as they should.
The usual problem with running your own mailserver is that stuff sent from it gets treated as spam and mail either goes directly to the spam folder or doesn't get delivered at all. I've found a tutorial that supposedly gets around that so will have a play and see if the little pi can take on another task.
If it does come to it, I would be very happy to lob in a bit of funding
Mike
It really isn't necessary. There is no cost at the moment and I enjoy the challenge of keeping it that way. As I expected the demands of the forum are tiny and don't tax the pi in the slightest - look at the stats at the bottom of each page *footnote on the time that page took to create. The problems that PF is having are nothing to do with the load that the forum places on the server it is that the server is probably hosting thousands of other sites.
I have used free hosting for my own personal sites - the reason I gave up on that and setup the Pi as a webserver in the first place was the limitations placed on what I could do - for instance I would not have been able to have it run the regular stats downloads and backups that the pi does. To get an SSL certificate I would have needed to use the free Cloudflare one which means using their DNS instead of the domain name registrar's ones I do now and that rules out doing things I use like forwarding email addresses. It also used to have periodic outages. I don't think they were as bad as PF sees but I only occasionally use my stuff once in a while - not like a forum reading and posting session.
I tried twohosters the first being https://www.000webhost.com/#feature-table I was less than impressed when this happened https://www.zdnet.com/article/000webhost-hacked-13-million-customers-exposed/ and even less inpressed when I found that they had been storing passwords in plain text on their servers. I'm not sure if that was because they are idiots or to save the piddling amount of processor time using encryption costs.
*footnote For the initial post - Page created in 0.084 seconds with 20 queries.
So at least 10 such pages could be handled per second or possibly 40 as it has 4 cores. It might get a bit warm doing so I suppose.