Bearing in mind that I am a developer and NOT A LAWYER, it is my understanding that if:

• You host a discussion forum.

and

• You, or any of your users, are based in the UK.

Then the UK government considers you subject to the UK Online Safety Act. Even if your forum is about hamsters. Failing to comply could get you a fine of up to £18 million or 10% of the company’s global revenue, whichever is greater.

That got your attention, didn’t it?

How can you be subject to UK law if you don’t have a presence in the UK? Good question. Are they going to extradite you or grab you if you come to the UK on holiday? I have no idea. Isn’t it all a bit over the top for a small customer forum? I think so. What if every country starts trying to apply their laws to citizens in other countries? Bigger yachts for the partners in law companies, I guess.

If you are outside the UK, you will have to make your own decision about whether to care about this law. But I am based in the UK. So I definitely need to care about it – even though my Discourse forum is a highly moderated, technical forum about data cleaning, transformation and analysis, with no porn, violence or gambling content.

There are hundreds of pages of guidance about this new law, which covers massive companies, such as Google and PornHub, as well as my little company. But my understanding is that the minimum a forum owner needs to do is:

• Have an online safety policy
• Assess the likelihood of children accessing your site
• Assess the risk of harmful content
• Take appropriate measure based on the above
• Regularly update your assessments

Depending on your assessment and the type of content, you may need age verification checks or other measures. I assess that my data wrangling forum is not attractive to children and very unlikely to have harmful content, so I have not gone through the massive ball-ache of adding age verification.

For good measure, I have also disabled the ability of customers to direct message each other. As that is something I can’t moderate and don’t want to be responsible for.

This is 2025, so I generated my online safety policy and assessments with some help from Microsoft CoPilot. Feel free to use them for some inspiration if you need to generate your own policy. But please don’t copy them word-for-word.

Incidentally, generating documents that none of my customers will ever read seems the perfect use case for LLMs.

I really hope I don’t get forced to add age verification. I would rather shut down the forum.

For more details, start with the official Online Safety Act Explainer.

I see Wikimedia is pushing back against the UK government. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

If you think I have got anything wrong here, please post in the comments.

** Update: 29-Jul-2025 **

The Online Safety Act probably also applies to this blog. Oh boy…