[bee_rider]

I don’t think there should be a law requiring companies to keep a forum up. But perhaps it would be nice if we could have a customer protection based requirement to have some sort of customer support, along with acknowledgement that a customer support forum that could go away at any moment doesn’t satisfy that requirement (so either include better customer service or take steps to preserve the community).

I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

[vineyardmike]

> I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

With the exception of maybe a transient bug, isn’t this exactly the point?

“We wouldn’t want a company to run afoul of [data preservation law] because they [neglected maintenance]” seems like the directly incorrect intent. We would want to compel the business to migrate or modernize any hosting to keep it active and viable. If their vendor goes out of business, they should’ve paid more or migrated the data.

If we’re discussing a local club then sure, they’re a victim to hardware failure or business changes, but this thread is full of billion-dollar-businesses. They can spend a few thousand dollars on a forum every few years. When I worked at $FAANG, my service had millions of users and cost like $10K/mo in hosting. Surely the Autodesk forum in read-only mode would cost a much less, and almost nothing if migrated to static HTML.

[knome]

It's a bad point. Forcing companies to maintain internet forums just because third parties may want the data in them isn't a reasonable thing to legislate.

[bee_rider]

They (or some other hypothetical company) might have some personally identifiable information (maybe in messages between users) or at least they might not know for sure that they don’t. We could at least imagine a company where the due diligence required to hang on to and continue serving up the info ethically isn’t free.

There are companies that have a forum, but it just seems to be a best-effort mostly community driven thing, or at least it isn’t tied to any paid product. It would be a shame, IMO, if they couldn’t offer that without signing up for some perpetual obligation. Even if it is small, somebody has to have an eye on it.