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I'm curious, Jim, if by moderating the boards you're an 'active publisher' (ie. a newspaper) as opposed to a 'passive publisher' (ie. an ISP), and thus more likely to be held responsible (for things that are libelous but for one reason or another are not removed)?

In the "early" days of the Internet, chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc courts definitely considered whether the person, etc responsible for the site engaged in editing, removing posts & so on. If they did, they were more likely to be held liable re: this issue of defamation, etc.

However, I have not researched the issue for a few years & I'm sure there have been many more courts & cases to have examined this point.

Guess we'll find out if someone attempts to use it against me in some future lawsuit. Hey, this is a big board with thousands of people from the general public posting thousands of posts every day. We make no attempt to vet the posters and absolutely no attempt to read each and every post much less to research them for libel, slander, etc. That would be impossible. And the moderators are all volunteers and only fill in when they can. There's no way we can see everything. We do not guarantee that every post that should be pulled is pulled. None of us spend much time reading the threads. As moderators, we usually only react to abuse reports, and even then we don't get to all of them or act on all of them. Some of these reports come in on threads or series of threads containing thousands of posts with many interlocking and overlapping long-running feuds amd dozens or even hundreds of warring posters with constantly changing alliances and contradictory opinions fading in and out. Way too much for me to keep track of. Sorry, we are not a court of law and we are not an investigative agency and we are not all seeing, all knowing miracle workers. All we can do is try to keep the worst of it out and the worst of the trolls and violent posters out.