Our forum recieved a member registering and then made the following post within our help and support forum on our forum at teenforumz.com "Hello. My name is C***** W****, and I am from that other community. I have noticed along with another administrator and countless members, that you have ripped off our forum layout and posts and countless other stuff. As you know, TeenHut's work is protected under sections of the Copyleft and Copyright, including the GNU license. I am working with a lawyer to send your administrators a Cease and Desist Letter letter to fix these issues, if not, I shall be escalating the situation. Infringements of our copyright must be removed or changed. Its all find and dandy that you create your own community, but not at the expense of ours. Ignore this post all you want, delete it or ban me, but it will only hurt you. Regards, C***** W****" Basically, this is a member from another teen community and has come along and said that. Firstly, our forum is powered using vBulletin the same software and we also paid for the same premium skin from completevb. Our skin is highly customised so that it does not appear the same as the default untouched skin like theirs. With us being a teenage community a lot of our threads may be similar but we have checked and no one has posted any content from their site other than a member posted one of their own articles on both communities in the past. Naturally some of our forum categories and forum names are very similar as we are both teen forums. I was just wondering what digital point makes of this, is this something serious or an empty threat as we have not got any of their content on our site, just similar content due to being the same niche. Our site is hosted within the UK and their site is hosted in the USA if that makes any difference. I hope to get your opinions and thoughts on this. Since this we have not had any letters to ourselves nor has our host. Thanks for reading.
Tell your host to ignore the C&D when/if you receive it, So there wont be any downtime for a scared host.
I have asked our host what they will do if they get such a letter and they said they would pass it onto ourselves and also ignore it. Thanks for the advice.
I would post exactly what you wrote above in that thread on your forum. It seems like somebody was a little over eager to defend their forum and does not understand what would be the basis for a legitimate complaint.