Dear all,
As you all know then the GDPR regulative goes into effect Friday May 25th.This also means that DUG will have to obey by this. And even if we legally only have to do it for our EU citizens who are members, then it will work for everyone who uses the site.
The new functionality includes functionality to allow you to leave the community. Well it has never been a problem to leave. Before if someone wanted to leave and have their account deleted, then they just had to write a message to me or one of the moderators, then we have taken care of it. But now we will put “button” to do it. Thanks to EU!
Then there will be something called Terms of Service (TOS) Consent Tracking. That is basically a requirement that we need to track the last time you as a member as gave consent to our terms of service page. Until now a consent is only given when signing up your account. Some of you have 20 some years old account and did never giver consent since then, despite the pages has been updated many times since then. I will have to give these terms a GDPR update before this will be started.
The final new function allows a member to export everything DUG has registered on you. The result is a zipped file containing json files with all we have on YOU. Every post, reply, comment, every conversation or file you have uploaded. If you have used DUG a lot, then this file may be very big and take a bit to time to compile. So please don’t do it too often! [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]
Personally I am a bit ambivalent about the whole GDPR thing. Sure most of EU’s requirements make sense, they are good business ethics to protect the consumers. Instead they really are try to “hurt” are the companies like FaceBook. What they really are doing is hurting a lot of small businesses with a long set of requirements of good business ethics. And if you don’t obey by them then big EU comes after you with big fines (even if your company is not registered in the EU, but you allow EU citizens to join). But it cost billions upon billions to implement. Most Microsoft customers would have to upgrade to get the functionality. So I shouldn’t really complain, as much of it ends in the partner channel, where I am.
But I do as I will have to spend most of the upcoming weekend to implement it. I didn’t the the updated version from Telligent, until last week and with prebooked customer tasks, this was the first option to install it. I hope EU doesn’t fine me for being too late.
The site is therefor going to be offline most of Saturday May 26th.
Not quite sure what times, but since this update only contains GDPR changes, then I don’t expect it to take all day. I plan to start around 10:00 AM CET. And if we’re lucky, then we are back around, 2:00 PM CET. But some instability may be expected this weekend.