Hi everyone,
We are continuing to work in the background to make sure we are compliant with the new Online Safety Act that is due to come into effect on the 16th March.
As part of this work we’ve been looking at our current profile functionality and weighing up the usefulness of certain functionality against their potential moderation risks. On this basis we have decided to remove the VM ( Visitor Message ) functionality and album functionality on profiles.
We believe that offering a third way of communicating to individual users outside of forum functionality and private messaging is unnecessary considering visitor messages sit outside of our improved moderation and safeguarding processes that have been implemented over the last year.
Similarly, we will be removing photo albums on profiles. They are almost entirely unused by our userbase but represent a safeguarding and moderation risk.
We understand that for some of our longer standing members there might be some attachment to the historic Visitor Messages and Photo Albums on your profiles. We are therefore committing to removing these features on the 7th Feb. This should allow any users to save anything they would like to before they are removed.
EH