Free Traffic Legal Advice

Well depending on how desperate the aggrieved party are to acquire the information from the admin/host whatever running the website they can apply for a Norwich Pharmacal order.

Of course that requires there to be a defendant who is subject to the jurisdiction of the courts of England & Wales, upon whom such an order could even be served.

It's also a civil law remedy, it's not something the police would bother with.

And how will the UK police demand anything from me?

The user's IP address is logged here by the forum software (bottom right of the user's post).

The police will get a Court Order and serve that Order on whoever is named as the owner of this site.

When the site owner hands the IP address over, the police will then serve a Court Order on the ISP who owns that IP address.

At that point, the name and address of whoever the account relates to is disclosed.  Note that the person who pays the bill might not be the person who has been posting nasty words.

It's a long shot to get the Police to jump through such hoops but it does happen occasionally.

It's not usually the Police who get involved in these types of things, it's agencies higher up the chain (so you have to have been downloading copious amounts of illegal material or posting that you're planning on blowing up the Government before you draw attention to yourself).

The police will get a Court Order and serve that Order on whoever is named as the owner of this site.

Great. I’m not in the UK, so I have no obligation to comply with an order issued by a UK court.

I am not at all happy with this situation.

What situation?

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but for what it's worth:

1) Pepipoo is buggy as hell. My primary issue with pepipoo is that if you go through unread threads in reverse date order, it will randomly mark a bunch of read threads as unread, so you have no idea how far you've got. There are workarounds, like opening every unread thread in a new tab, but that is hardly a practical solution. Other issues are that it often becomes randomly unresponsive, it limits the number of PMs that can be sent, it's horrendously insecure (basically anyone with basic hacking skills could break it and do whatever they want), and the media consistently refuse to mention it for somewhat obvious reasons.

2) We've got a pretty good thing going here: we have all sorts of nice features like the embedded youtube functionality, we can tweak the admin settings, and moderation activity is shared amongst a number of competent people. For instance when people post broken links, or try and fail to embed images into a post or whatever else (which happens a lot), there's a number of people who can simply fix that. On pepipoo, we'd be reliant on southpaw fixing everything for everyone, which is unrealistic.

3) Ultimately this site is maintained, the old one isn't. There are no admins around on pepipoo, and even when there were around they didn't exactly do much. During the last couple of outages, there was complete radio silence which has not ended. By contrast when we had a DNS issue on here (did anyone even notice?), I was able to get it fixed within 30 minutes and we were back online.

4) Unless something changes, we all agree pepipoo will fall over eventually.

Now, when we had no alternative I had to put up with all the issues at point 1 as there was no alternative. Now that we have an alternative that is technically and functionally better, I see no reason to give advice to people on a website that is creaking along while we wait for the wheels to come off.

I understand some people have a very strong emotional attachment to pepipoo, but ultimately our mission is to provide free and impartial legal advice to members of the public who are in need of such advice in areas of law where seeking paid legal advice is simply unviable, as Parliament has decided that legal aid should not be available and the commercial market is unable to provide such advice at affordable rates. The website to be used for such purposes is simply a means to an end, I think it is somewhat misguided to lose sight of the end and focus so much on the means.

Certainly for the area i have an interest and limited expertise in (civil parking/ moving traffic this site is now doing the better work, I find it no easier to use than pepipoo but no harder either

What is happening now more than it did some years ago is people representing user through to tribunal, this is fine and i have taken on some cases myself but what is detrimental to the greater community is that once a case is taken discussion on the way forward ceases We see the outcomes but do not always see the arguments put forward perhaps this could change

[quote date=Sat, 4 Nov 2023 - 18:00]
Frankly, I am not of the opinion that pepipoo should not be usurped in this manner by the other site.  It leads to duplication of effort and, indeed, mix ups as to who is representing whom.

I would also state that pepipoo is, essentially, a forum which acts in a collegiate manner;  but, sadly, it appears to me that this is no longer the case.

[/quote]

Andy, this is yet another perfect example of conflation.