LFGSS and Microcosm shutting down 16th March 2025 (the day before the Online Safety Act is enforced)

How exactly does this work? From skimming the article it seems like as long as you respond to people reporting horrendous behaviour and revenge porn, have an active moderation team, and complying with Ofcom request, it shouldn't change much? What exactly have I missed here - IE how does this add any more administrative overhead than say, responding to DMCA requests.

Also, could the site be set up and owned by a Ltds so that if they did get fined, the risk is to the company not anyone personally?

Terrorism
Harassment, stalking, threats and abuse offences
Coercive and controlling behaviour
Hate offences
Intimate image abuse
Extreme pornography
Child sexual exploitation and abuse
Sexual exploitation of adults
Unlawful immigration
Human trafficking
Fraud and financial offences
Proceeds of crime
Assisting or encouraging suicide
Drugs and psychoactive substances
Weapons offences (knives, firearms, and other weapons)
Foreign interference
Animal welfare

Surely most of these things are against the forum rules anyway and any fines would be only levied at forums who repeatedly don't bother to try and take stuff down?

I'm looking over some of the supporting document, most of the requirements seem to be only applicable to large providers, not small communities.

The ones that do apply:

Providers should have systems and processes designed
to review and assess content the provider has reason
to suspect may be illegal content (part of its ‘content
moderation function’)

This is just having a moderation system, surely?

Providers should have systems and processes designed
to swiftly take down illegal content and/or illegal
content proxy of which they are aware (part of their
‘content moderation function’), unless it is currently
not technically feasible for them to achieve this
outcome.

All forums have this anyway

All providers of U2U and search services should have
complaints systems and processes

All forums have this anyway, maybe needs be formalised

Providers should handle complaints about suspected
illegal content in accordance with their content
prioritisation processes a

Pretty sure any forum admin would respond to PMs about this with haste.

Without going through the full document it seems like if you have a small, moderated forum with responsive admins most of this shouldn't really affect you. I think the legislation is more targeted at large providers who allow shitloads of terrible stuff through without accountability, and smaller providers who don't really bother moderating their own content properly or ignore it when someone complains their ex uploaded nudes etc.

I'm not sure forum software (i.e. microcosm) is really threatened by the act and as long as it provides moderation tools, surely it's up to the people that run the boards to be liable.

It seems like an incredible amount of value could be lost, and perhaps reaching out to Ofcom directly to establish compliance and dialogue could be a better solution - I doubt very much that they're just going to hit people with huge fines without first trying to rectify the problem.