Legalities and making changes to your BBS

Even if you do not use your BBS for commercial purposes, you still have to follow certain laws. YOU can be sued for slander if one user says something hateful about another user. This is why it is important for you to make sure that people use proper conduct when using your BBS. You can also be held accountable for credit card information given to you by a user. You will be sued for copyrights if you are caught with copyrighted material in your files. To avoid these problems, you should scan the messages to find out what the people are talking about, and you should review the uploaded files to make sure that they are all shareware or public domain. If this is too much for you to do on your own, then you can ask some of your trusted co-sysops to help out when they can.

If you are concerned about the legalities of a BBS, there are several books in print that go over all of the legal aspects of being a BBS sysop. They are pretty cheap compared to how much you might pay if you break one of the laws presented in the books.

If you are going to make some changes, you should run them by your users first. See what they think of the changes. If they do not want anything changed, then you will want to keep the BBS the same.

If changes are necessary and your users agree, make a couple of back up copies of your BBS. NEVER make changes to your only copy of the BBS. After you have made copies, experiment with the changes and see how they work. After that, go back through and make sure that the BBS is still in working order, and that you haven’t messed it up.

If you are happy with the changes, then you will need to test the security again. Make sure that it is as safe as it was before. Make another copy of the working BBS. At this point, save that program in the archives. This way, if the changes don’t work out, you can just go back to the original BBS.

After that, you can install the changes to the BBS. You should then check the security again and also check the BBS to make sure all legalities are in order, just in case you make any changes in the way you installed it this time. If you don’t test the BBS’s security, your users will!