A customer of mine had a Forum hosted on our Servers. It had to do with a particular company. I made them put our Rules for Forum use on thier board to protect us from any liability.

Well, someone, who we have no idea who it is, posted personal information regarding the Employees, Start Dates, and Salaries on the Forum and needless to say, the phone calls and e-mails started to flood in.

We completely shut down the board, contacted thier CPS department and resolved our side of the issue. The other "criminal" issue will be dealt with by them regarding the person who posted it.

The ironic part is, the board is normally dead, had I think 3 members and 1 post, our rules, then all of a sudden it took off and all of a sudden we find ourselves dealing with Privacy people and others who were majorly pissed at us.

Moral of the story - Message forums are a great offering to attract customers but they can bite you in the a$$ when you least expect it.

Regards,

ProNorthern

Wow that sounds like a miniature nightmare.

Was it one of those "(companyname)sucks.com" type of sites?

Yikes, sorry to read this. Hope it all works out.

Sloop - yes, it was one of those type of domains,etc.. It was a nightmare that I hope never to experience again.

Thanks for your support... I'll let you all know how it ends up if there is anything further to report.

Regards,

ProNorthern

That sounds like me a few years back. Got ripped off by a boat dealer for my $7000 deposit. Posted in the newsgroups, and come to find out there were many others that got ripped off to in a variety of ways.

So I registered the sucks.com domain, and setup a message board, and traffic grew VERY fast by word of mouth, and the newsgroups. I was very surprised and so was our attorney who gave us the go ahead from the get go to start the sucks.com "consumer opinion and rights" website.

Nobody posted any personal info like they did on your server. This was basically a consumer opinion forum. Somebody emailed the company and told them about it. They very soon realized the power of the internet, and a week later I had a check for my $7000 back, and ended up selling them the sucks.com domain for another $1000 :D :D :D