Closing the Forum to New Posts
Why We’re Closing the Forum to New Posts
Over recent months, the UK government’s Online Safety Act 2023 has introduced extensive new requirements for any online service that allows user-generated content. Designed to protect users from illegal or harmful material, particularly minors, the Act imposes major new duties on platforms that offer any form of posting, messaging, images, or comments.
The Reality for Small Online Communities
Large social media companies typically have teams of lawyers, moderators, technical infrastructure, and multi-million-pound budgets to manage compliance. But for smaller community-driven spaces, like niche forums, these new obligations can be overwhelming with mandatory content risk assessments, robust moderation systems (including private messages), age verification and harm detection and heavy fines up to £18 million or 10% of annual turnover for failing to comply.
Why We’re Taking This Step
While it’s disheartening to limit our forum’s openness, several factors underpin our decision:
- Responsibility & Liability
Hosting any form of user-generated content now requires continual monitoring, even of private messages. The risk of missing illegal or harmful content and being held accountable is too great. - Operational Complexity
We don’t have the resources to conduct ongoing risk assessments, deploy AI moderation or maintain robust age verification systems. - Protecting Our Community
Rather than risk inadvertent breaches of law with serious consequences, we are choosing to close the forum to new posts and replies, removing the risk entirely.
What This Means for You
Our forum is now closed to new posts & replies and no fresh threads or comments can be added. Existing content will remain available so you can still read past discussions and reference them.
If you need help you can still email us using our Contact Form or check our Knowledge Base for helpful articles and documentation.
We deeply value the Raspberry Pi community. This has been a tough but necessary decision to protect both our users and our platform. We remain committed to supporting you, just in a more secure, focused way.
Thank you for your understanding and ongoing trust in AB Electronics UK.