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Recent legal developments

andrew

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A few days ago Congress passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or "FOSTA", which (assuming Trump signs it) makes website owners liable for sex trafficking that is facilitated through their website, whether they have any involvement in or even awareness of such conduct. Craigslist has already taken down their personals sections, and 4thefamily.us has taken down their whole site indefinitely.

Biblical Families has no 'personal ads' section and actively discourages any kind of online matchmaking or dating, let alone hookups. There should not be an exposure here for us; however, (a) we'll need to review this and see what exposure we would have if any due to the private messaging facility (which virtually every online discussion forum has, so if it applies to us, it should apply to any online forum), and (b) we never know what the end game of our overlords is, so any legal maneuvering that increases the ability of our rulers to persecute minorities and subcultures through the use of plants or patsies has to be taken seriously.

Nathan and Ron and I will have to look at this together and monitor the situation as it evolves. Maybe Trump won't sign it (maybe I'll win the lottery…). The DOJ was opposed to it, so enforcement resources will be an issues, and we're just not their target. Craigslist's legendary personals ads, I get; our online discussion of what the bible teaches about marriage and family, not so much.

Further bulletins as events warrant. If y'all have any info or come across any interesting commentary that could help us evaluate this latest attack on the Constitution, please post it here.

Light bedtime reading: How Congress Censored the Internet
 
As of my typing this, Google still has some of the forum threads from 4thefamily.us in their cache. Archive.org doesn't seem to have any.
If there are any pages from 4thfamily that you would like to try to recover a copy of, go to Google and type into the search box
4thefamily TITLE_OF_PAGE_OF_INTEREST
On the search results page, it shows the title of the search hit and then below that the URL (web address) of the page. If there is a small green down arrow at the right end of the URL, then click on it, and a box should appear, then click on "Cached", and you should see Google's cache of that page. Don't delay. Google updates this sort of thing really fast.

If Google is not returning the page of interest, try putting quotes around the page title, or remove words like AND, OR, and other common words. If there is no green arrow, there is probably no cached copy You can also try typing in other words from the URL of the page of interest like "general polygamy discussion", to find the page, or maybe a different version that is in the cache.
 
I didn't use the forums at 4thefamily.us but I did use the polygamy news tracker.

Maybe I'm showing my ignorance, but what would be a good substitute?
 
Hi, Jeff! Maybe I'm showing my ignorance, but what's a polygamy news tracker? Is that something we should add here?
 
Someone would try to keep up with current poly news events. I think we do it here to a certain degree but we could probably give it its own category
 
Ah. I thought that was like an RSS feed or some kind of news aggregator applet or something.
 
A news tracker is an automated tool that searches the web for news articles and other media related to some search criteria. Typically they will sort, organize, remove duplicates, and otherwise make it easier to quickly find what you are searching for.

I found it very helpful for finding polygamy articles as soon as they came out, which is important if you want to participate in the comments before they go stale.
 
I think you can set up that kind of tracker on your email too.
 
Different technology, @Mojo. Email is to tracker script as doorbell is to pizza delivery guy.

4thefam's aggregator was how I found some nifty news articles on polygamy in Africa that show there's a whole world of discussions we aren't even a part of.
 
I must be thinking of email alerts through the email provider. I've received email alerts for certain news topics I signed up for. I forgot how I set that up before.
 
4thefam's aggregator was how I found some nifty news articles on polygamy in Africa that show there's a whole world of discussions we aren't even a part
I wish i would have known that the ones i found have been from using search engines like webcrawler.
 
It can't be too difficult to set one up, does anyone know how to do it? We could add one to this site.
 
Perhaps the simplest start would be to see if the owner of 4thefamily.us would be willing to give BF the code they used?

I don't know how to do this, I assume all you web site owners have regular meetings in a treehouse or atomic bunker somewhere to discuss these matters.
 
The WHOIS database seems to have the owner's actual contact info, with no privacy protection.
Go to http://www.whois.us/ and type in 4thefamily.us it should give you the domain owners's contact info.
I will refrain from doing a copy 'n paste and further spreading his info around the Internet.
 
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