Anyone help with laws and rules for a message board

[danDNA]

could anyone give me any advice on laying out rules of use for a message board? where did you get the legal wording for this site for instance, does it have to include certain terms etc. any help would be rewarded with an on the money of course..

[Max]

check others forums

take what you like and get rid of what you dont like

when its your forum your the boss...

[Loui Zoot]

Certainly phpbb and simple machines forum (SMF) software packages come with a pre-written legal agreement for all users to agree to, which as an admin to the software package, you can alter to your liking. I would guess that other forum packages out there do as well. It's been so long since I've installed anything else, so I can't confirm that.

The default legal wording is pretty decent. I usually just leave it as is.

[danDNA]

cool, thanks for the help. i thought that (make it up) but didn't know whether there was some protocol. is it a simple matter of etiquette or is there actual legal wrangling's that could result from not having rules up?

[Loui Zoot]

Personally I feel safer with some basic rules. Too many rules and people will probably ignore them, or not bother to stick around. No rules, and you might be potentially liable if some unexpected "disaster" happens to get linked to your forum. Unless you are running a really busy forum, I'd suspect it's mostly a non issue. I'm guessing this topic has been discussed on Web Hosting Talk, and other hosting/webmaster forums. My last remaining forum is virtually dead, so that's about the limit of my sharable knowledge on the topic.

I would suggest the SMF has been pretty good for me, and that there are some nice plugins, and lot's of themes. These forums here are SMF. http://www.simplemachines.org/

[danDNA]

cheers man, appreciate it.