Shady Characters

In October 2023, the UK government passed into law the Online Safety Act, a set of regulations intended to make online services more responsible for the content they carry. It is a laudable aim, but unfortunately the distinctions the Act draws between large sites such as Facebook and Google and smaller sites such as this one are insufficiently well defined. The upshot is that complying with the Act places a much larger burden on the owners of sites such as Shady Characters than it does on the owners of those larger sites.

Compounding the problem is that the guidance provided by Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, is not entirely clear on exactly which sites must comply with the Act. The good news, inasmuch as I understand the Act and its consequences, is that Shady Characters is already very close to being a site which does not need to comply. Commenters cannot upload images, which removes one vector for potentially offensive or graphic content. Problematic textual comments are generally caught by moderation filters, and the volume of comments is low enough so that I can read and respond to each one individually — and remove or edit them if necessary.

The one feature that does fall foul of the act is the ability for commenters to reply to one another. From the OSA’s perspective, this makes Shady Characters into a “user-to-user” service, which would bring it under the purview of the Act. As such, I will be removing the ability to reply to other users’ comments from today onwards. (Existing comments and replies will be retained.) I’m sorry that this has to be done, but I don’t think I have a great deal of choice.

I’ll be keeping abreast of news about the OSA and how smaller sites must comply with it, and it may be that I can reenable replies at some point in the future. For now, though, thank you for reading (and commenting!), and I hope that this doesn’t affect your enjoyment of the site too greatly.