We recently got a bit of press for helping to highlight a holiday scam. A post on our forum led to more and more posts and eventually we contacted a few journos to point them in the direction of the story.

By this point the Met Police were involved and the people behind the company had fled. The story got picked up by a few of the national and regional papers and the BBC amongst others.

As I write there are still many people out there who have booked holidays with this crowd and still don’t know they’ve been scammed. They may not find out until they turn up at their hotel next summer!

The worrying part is we very nearly deleted the thread that led to all of this. Someone signs up to your site and for their first post accuses a company of running a scam. You’re kinda leaving yourself open for a bit of defamation there the way British law currently operates.

At the time the mumsnet v Gina Ford row was hot news, where Gina Ford, a childcare guru had her lawyers threatening to close down mumsnet due to some “defamatory” statements by some members in their forum. Add to that a recent brush with the defamation lawyers ourselves, it was a very close call.

We decided to let the page hit the search engines, and in this case it worked out for the best.

Imagine the consequences if we’d gotten in wrong. We could have been taken to the cleaners, even if we’d removed the thread at the first time of asking. If you publish user views / forum / comments on any part of your site, you should be aware of a few things:

• being a limited company doesn’t mean it won’t cost you your home!
• talking to your solicitor and barrister in a 15 minute conf. call is equivalent to a average month’s salary.
• your hosting company may in turn counter-sue you, as the defamed party will go after them too.

 Scary, huh?

If you do carry user views / forum / comments please make sure you have watertight Terms & Conditions, and never assume it won’t happen to you!

Disclaimer: The info above doesn’t constitute legal advice, and is merely my opinion and understanding of hypothetical events. Please don’t sue me; my lawyers are too bloody good, but very bloody expensive.

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