OK, will do. In future it’s prob best to DM requests to the moderator inbox as it’s less easy for them to get missed. Hope the week away helps
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I’ve spent about 15 hours this week responding to this thread, and that isn’t time I have have when working full time jobs and managing artists in recent years. And anything major has been addressed either here or with the mods.
I only posted about some of these issues as there are a lot of smart people here who might have a better solution/workaround or a weird amount of knowledge about GDPR because of their dayjob (there are GDPR compliant ways of doing things from what I understand).
I’ll be totally honest, when someone threatened legal action over this I was in a panic as the developer gave me an hint how expensive it would be (and I had already had months of money issues) and we were trying to work out if there was an alternative to a nuclear option. Like, one idea is as consider was people paying a small donation to delete everything, in a pay what you want style to help contribute toward the cost.
You’re totally right it isn’t something I should have discussed so openly but I don’t think doing so is out of character for other users to do so. And I certainly wouldn’t have ignored legal obligations because of opinions of the community.
I think you’re right to note that there’s been a shift in thinking, on certain matters, over time.
With reference to the following comment, from a couple of posts up, which is a repeat of prior claims (not tagging in the user, due to their apparent wish to disengage):
my recollection was there were numerous discussions about the old boards and I don’t remember any strong attachment to keeping them, everyone thought for numerous reasons it was time to let them go
On that specific point, my recollection is rather different. I recall, pretty much right up to the point we jumped ship to Discourse, a fairly substantial cohort leaning toward the presumption that the archive/threads generally should be maintained rather than torched (with deletions being facilitated, but not the presumed norm).
But since moving to Discourse, there’s certainly been a collective shift in attitude toward the priority on retaining things.
For that reason, I can understand why @sean has provided the responses he has, then and now.
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Could we perhaps find an alternative phrase for ‘nuking accounts’?
Just in case you’re under a misapprehension here Sean; the server and user location doesn’t have any impact on GDPR obligations, it’s whether DiS is a data controller based in the EU or UK (and I assume you’re still based in the UK) and/or whether the user is a citizen of the EU/UK. Non-EU/British citizens also have some of the rights if they’re living in the EU, but not the full set.
And tbh while companies could deny some GDPR rights to non EU/UK citizens, most have decided its easier to just treat anyone the same regardless, as you have to have the processes in place anyway to handle some people’s rights.
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Apologies. Old habits die hard. Will try and remember in future 
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Totally agree with all this. However, there was some allowances for small businesses in terms of the time you had to address this and it required a lot of parsing quite dense legal documents in order to forward plan.
It’s worth remembering (and this isn’t meant as an excuse) that DiS was built in the year 2000 before there were any social media platforms and very few online forums, so we built our own. It has mostly been done as a collective hobby (with a brief period of advanced ad revenue employing a small editorial team) and the forum is a community project on the scale of a small chain of pubs (based on footfall). However, the forums have always generated far less income than a local pub, due to the volume of pageviews per user in the forums and the low level of users, it doesn’t worked as an ad supported project (unless we want to sell really annoying ads). So investing in lawyers (around £250 an hour) and developer time (around £350 per day for the old site) it is quite a complex house of cards.
I’m happy to continue discussing these issues but I’m not sure how much progress we’re making now.
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I do like the irony of Web3 outlining its vision of an internet where everything belongs to its creator, while at the same time attempting to effectively steal ownership of the term ‘Web 3.0’ that had already been used to propose a broader vision for the evolution of the internet. Start as you mean to go on etc.
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Apologies.
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Yeah, that’s all grand, I just wanted to make sure you weren’t under the misapprehension that your servers being in the US mattered regarding how it affects your brand (and new business!). 