A little advice please

Aladinsaneuk

I hope I have put this in the right place as it is a techy subject

I help run a small forum for motorbikes - ridersite - and until we clamped down on our security stuff we were innundated with spam bot advertising accounts

now we get very few - though recently we have had several new accounts that advertise - an example being an advert for solidwoodkitchens with a manchester telephone number

now this is different - we are fairly sure that the account has been created by an individual person, not a bot, and the company it is advertising is a UK company, that must have commissioned the advertising....

so, thinking laterally, we are considering adding the following to our terms and conditions that must be accepted prior to being able to post:

"Any company that is registered in the UK that you advertise on these forums with out permission of the admin team will be charged at a rate of £350 per advert post and this will be liable for payment with in 28 days of posting. By posting on their behalf they are accepting this charge and it is YOUR responsibility to ensure that they are informed - failure to inform them DOES NOT mean they are not liable for the charge, and such charges if not paid will be pursued through the small claims courts. This fee is to cover the administration to remove such an unsolicited advert and is NOT as payment for advertising"

Would i be correct in thinking that following that, any transgression would mean we can legally ask for payment, followed by a small claims court process for none payment?

I and we would welcome people's views on this - and please do suggest any wording changes necessary

I must point out that ridersite is not a company, has never charged for anything, and is totally funded by its members.... but i really hate spammers and as the company responsible for our advert problem is already known to this community as being a bunch of crooks I would love to hurt them in the wallet

S0litaire

Not sure if that's possible (I'm not a lawyer) but hopefully you can. Do it anyway see the response you get... ^_^

Depending on the forum software you should be able to moderate posts from new members (i.e. hold them for review) before posting to the forum. it puts extra work on you but over time it will stop the spamers or paid advertisers.

Though sending a nice invoice to the company in question may not result in payment it does feel good ^_^

Lucero_2

It's not legal I'm afraid. Technically you lease the forum software (assuming vbulletin or phpbb) so some of that revenue would have to be paid to them. You can get around this by setting up in your FAQ, a statement that reads:

No self promotion or promotion of business interests. Failure to adhere to this will result in suspension of your account and ultimately a ban.

or something like that

Figment

I've had a spate of these on a forum I manage. Although the sites mentioned had .co.uk domains, the IP addresses of the offending posts were from India