Regarding my forum, we are a Role Playing community. We also have an OOC (out of character) section, where people can post thoughts and ideas when they're not role playing.
For the most part, our community is very peaceful. People who register and just disrespect all the other members, we will usually kick them out before it gets out of control.
I like Immediate Registration, because it allows role players to register as many names as they want, and easily. So, any role player can have any number of characters.
For the registration settings, I put that members must be 18 years of age to register. How legal is that?? Now, with that there... I, as the owner of the forum, can assume all members are legally 18 years of age, correct?? And, if they admit to being younger, I can remove them from the community, right??
Also... look in our OOC board called "Chat Town" ...where even I have posted some very strong opinions about various things I was thinking at the time. Now, those are just my thoughts. I'm not degrading any member of the forum. Can I post topics like that?? If not, I will remove them all. I just don't understand how much freedom I actually have on my own forum community.
Here is the link to Aoyn... www.aoyn.org/forum
Cuss words on Aoyn are censored. Hopefully, that will help... but, read some of the material in the Chat Town board. These are just random opinions and random things.
Tell me what you think, everybody. I think it's OK, because we are keeping to ourselves in our own community, not threatening anybody, simply expressing opinions and Role Playing... but if something is crossing the line, TELL ME!!
Thank you!!
SMF cannot and does not impose its rules and values onto forums that make use of its software. So you're under no legal conditions as to how you run your site.
That being said, I see nothing wrong with the practices you've put in place. It's completely within your purview to kick out disruptive users and to censor words. And you're the site owner, you can write anything you want, even if they are strong opinions.
Now I wouldn't go so far as to say you can assume all members are over 18. And since you've got areas of your site that are public, I'm not sure you could really assume that the only viewers are over 18. I can't really see any visible disclaimer on your site regarding a rating or age limit, not without digging anyhow. How you handle that is up to you, but I would consider making a visible rating so that you're safe from prying parents who want their children to be safe on the net and not wander into any mature discussions.
If you want your forum to be 18+ you can set it in the registration settings to reject anyone under 18 but of course people don't always tell the true about their age, so you can't really assume anything.
If it's your forum, you get to set your own rules, just make sure everyone reads them before starting to post on the forum and then there will be no misunderstandings later
indeed, your rules are your rules. that is all there really is to it. If they are paying for the service, then you might need to actually need to write up something on the legal side to prevent being sued for Denial of Service, but otherwise its generally considered "at-will".