Comment by nerdile
1 day ago
Summary: The UK has some Online Safety Act, any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks. The law applies to any site that targets UK citizens or has a substantial number of UK users, where "substantial number" is not defined.
I'm going to guess this forum is UK-based just based on all the blimey's. Also the forum seems to have been locked from new users for some time, so it was already in its sunset era.
The admin could just make it read only except to users who manually reach out somehow to verify their age, but at the same time, what an oppressive law for small UK forums. Maybe that's the point.
IANAL
> any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks.
But I believe you only need age verification if pornography is posted. There's also a bunch of caveats about the size of user base - Ofcom have strongly hinted that this is primarily aimed at services with millions of users but haven't (yet) actually clarified whether it applies to / will be policed for, e.g., single-user self-hosted Fediverse instances or small forums.
I don't blame people for not wanting to take the risk. Personally I'm just putting up a page with answers to their self-assessment risk questionnaire for each of my hosted services (I have a surprising number that could technically come under OSA) and hoping that is good enough.