I have the original board 'agreement' on my message board:
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I have recently banned some of my moderators. They had access to a board that only management was allowed to be in. IP's, email addresses, and some information was discussed. I have banned them, but kept their usernames active. If I read any of their private messages, what legal leg do they have to stand on? Since I own the site, and made everyone agree to the terms before allowed activation, what do I need to do? I have kept them on to make sure none of my members personal information, IP, or email address were compromised. I plan on keeping their username on my site in case I need their private messages to be given to a lawyer.
Does anyone have an experience of going through this? IF so, what did you do? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. I don't want to have to hire a lawyer if I don't need to.
Thanks for your help and insight. :)
Well, I really doubt anyone is going to pursue a legal case against you. You are the site owner, and ultimately, you have ownership over every aspect of your site. The members agreed to follow the rules of your site, and if they break them, you are free to punish them as you see fit. So long as you don't publish information that would warrant an invasion of privacy, you should be fine. Information shared with a lawyer, I believe, is confidential, so privacy issues shouldn't really arise. But I don't have any legal background to back that up.
Thanks! Does anyone else have some advice?
Is there someone, or some website (besides cyberlaw.com) that would be able to assist me with this? My members are pretty much harrassing me everyday with emails asking me why their posts have not been deleted. I have not posted any of their private messages, nor shared them with anyone. What they have posted on the site was entirely done by them, and them only. If anyone else has some information, I'd love to hear it. I tried doing a search on this subject, but couldnt find exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for your help! :)
Let's try and keep this on one topic. I'm locking this, please keep responses over at the other topic (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=206623.0).