Sounds like you'll need to police things very carefully in order to avoid breaking the law yourself. Good luck.
Speaking as a Moderator, I have to say that we've had our hands full simply moderating the subforums that we already have. We all cover at least two (mine are Linguistics and Art & Culture), and some have more. I don't think we have the resources to increase the number of subforums. Unless a lot of you start volunteering to be moderators!
This is a Science Forum... an from what i understand the site traffic is good enuff that more garbage-type sub forums ant needed to attract more new posters.!!!
Their trade is science. I can't see them taking it much further than that. My model is YouTube. It's nearly impossible to get banned from that site, and the variety of ideas are nearly limitless,
Few things are so effective at succeeding as setting one's bar as low as possible. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
If it works, why not? I'm quite appreciative when I can listen to alternative ideas. And when they are censored, I search for them elsewhere. YouTube is quite liberal with what it allows, which speaks for its success. Some think setting the bar means higher standards, when in reality, it's just an excuse to exclude others.
I need to give Kudos to the developers and support people of phpBB. Every question I've posted on their forums has been answered within five minutes, and the issues were resolved shortly afterwards. Everything from making my forum compatible with mobile devices to changing the php documents were addressed with knowledgeable replies. I don't believe I could get better service had I purchased some other package. Also, it's kind of fun to tweak the forum.
It waxes and wanes. There was a time a couple of years ago when I spent about 3 hours a week on it. On the other hand, I haven't had to clean up any spam all this year. I can't speak for the other moderators.
It seems to be an issue for many forums. I'm looking at alternatives for my forum registrations. I believe they have an extension that improves the registration process, making it tougher for bots to exploit common methods.
Mine is account activation by admin only. Gives you the option of checking their IP against a list of baddies.
I use Google to check and address against several sources for bad actors. You'll find lots of resources that way. I also use utrace, at http://en.utrace.de/ and Hurricane Electric's site at http://bgp.he.net/ If you search Google for netblocks you can find lists pertinent to countries famous for not respecting other websites. PM me and I'll give you my drop table in a zipped text file.
