Question United Kingdom users - important - please read

If you are in the United Kingdom, you may have heard that the Online Safety Act becomes law on Monday 17th March 2025.

This discussion forum is accessible in the UK, and is operated by a citizen of the UK (me).

I will need to comply with this law, or face fines of up to £18000000.

Here is an official 84 page summary of what the law requires from me.

If you search for "uk osa forum closing", you will find that hundreds/thousands of UK based online forums have announced that they will close because it is not possible for individuals or small community organisation to comply with this law.

So before the law comes into force, I plan to add a "geo-block" to the website.  This will block access from all UK IP addresses.

If you are outside the UK, then you won't see any difference.  But if you are in the UK then you will be blocked.

Sorry.  I don't really have a choice.

Surely there is a workaround to this. Could the forum be hosted outside the UK and "operated by a non UK citizen?

I think the site is not hosted in the UK, but it is accessible in the UK ( sitereport.netcraft.com/?url=http://www.webtrees.net ). And the law doesn't care where it is located. There will be for sure a lot of movement on all forums to clarify what this law means exactly for small hobbyists. It might be that laws like this will eventually result in everyone moving to Reddit or similar large sites that can handle the requirements of this.

I totally understand that £18M is a lot for Greg to take on his shoulders.. I would not like to live with a £18M Damocles sword over my head..

I'm not against safety online and all. I do sometimes feel that the pendulum swings so excessively in an opposite direction to whatever threat is/may be out there.

It is so troubling that as normal citizens of the world we are confronted with this stuff..

Greg I feel for you and am sure there are some bout who may be able to assist in some way through this..

I doubt I can do much at all, however I happy more than happy to make some noise where ever you might feel it needs directing..

And IMHO I would contact your local MP suggesting he/she looks into having the site scrutinised at the Governments cost. Why should law abiding citizens pay an impossible amount to have a service they provide scrutinised when there is nothing that even comes close to what they are suggesting.. Me I would be hammering the MP and Government..

For UK folk, get a decent VPN..

 

Greg, since www.webtrees.net is hosted in the US, would temporarily changing ownership of the forum to a non-UK owner help until this matter is sorted out?

This problem also affects other communities, and in some  cases forums with considerably more users than this. 
From this , I get that others believe this law to be so broad that:

The Online Safety Act regulates most sites where users can interact with each other. The law explicitly claims authority over all forums with  visitors located in the UK , regardless of where they are hosted or the nationality of their owners.

So if it all stays like this without some further clarification from the UK side, it is very possible that the OSA will see most forums geoblocking the UK to prevent having to eventually pay some UK-based lawyers to prevent default "up to" £18M judgements against them.

I think eventually the reality will sink in, and an updated bill will come up that simplifies the processes on the parts of small sites, but until that happens, it may actually be that March 17 arrives, and this forum will need to be blocked away. If that happens, maybe some steps could be done to reduce the problem:

1. Split the site into www.webtrees.net with the Github pages and forum.webtrees.net with the Joomla!/Kunema Forum part. If the geoblock happens, then only the forum will be geoblocked.
2. Create a webtrees sub-reddit at  www.reddit.com/r/webtrees , that UK-based individuals can access. Or a Discord sever, or anything similar, as long as the legal responsibility is no longer on any member of the community.
3. Advise in the release notes of future versions that turning on the "Messages" module of webtrees may expose them to fall under the OSA scope, and advise on turning it off unless the site owner personally knows every user and is 100% sure that none of those users that are based in the UK will ever want to report them to be investigated under this law.

So couldn't an alternative be to have the discussions in the GitHub repository (and by that reduce the amount of places to "monitor")?
github.com/fisharebest/webtrees/discussions