I think the EA Forum software does a poor job at communicating the license terms of forum posts. (For context, all new forum content published on or after 1 December 2022 has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.)
The current license statement is buried in the forum terms of use which can be reached from the āHow to use the Forumā page in the navigation sidebar, so many readers may be unaware of the license terms if they have not registered on the forum and clicked through the license agreement. By contrast, many sites that use CC licenses, like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, display a link to the license in the footer:
I suggest adding a footer to each new post or the sidebar stating something like the following:
EA Forum user content posted on or after 1 December 2022 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. This license only covers content created by Forum users; third-party content may be subject to other copyright restrictions.
The second part of this statement is relevant for content such as linkposts and posts that incorporate quotes, where there has been confusion about whether the CC license would apply to third-party content incorporated into forum posts (the license text explicitly states that it does not grant rights that the licensor does not control).
Note that rel=ālicenseā should be added to the license link. If itās necessary to explain more, you could link to another page, like how Stack Overflow links to this page stating that content from different periods of time are subject to different versions of CC BY-SA.
Somewhat relatedly, the forum terms of use addendum currently does not mention the ForumMagnum software, which is GPL-v3. CEA itself might have obligations under the GPL to other contributors to the forum software (i.e. anyone who contributed to it and was not a CEA employee), like informing forum users of the terms and conditions of the GPL and not imposing further restrictions on them. I suggest looking into this to see if the EA Forum terms of service need to be modified in order to comply with the GPL. [edit: reworded to avoid being interpreted as legal advice]
I think the EA Forum software does a poor job at communicating the license terms of forum posts. (For context, all new forum content published on or after 1 December 2022 has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.)
The current license statement is buried in the forum terms of use which can be reached from the āHow to use the Forumā page in the navigation sidebar, so many readers may be unaware of the license terms if they have not registered on the forum and clicked through the license agreement. By contrast, many sites that use CC licenses, like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, display a link to the license in the footer:
I suggest adding a footer to each new post or the sidebar stating something like the following:
The second part of this statement is relevant for content such as linkposts and posts that incorporate quotes, where there has been confusion about whether the CC license would apply to third-party content incorporated into forum posts (the license text explicitly states that it does not grant rights that the licensor does not control).
Note that rel=ālicenseā should be added to the license link. If itās necessary to explain more, you could link to another page, like how Stack Overflow links to this page stating that content from different periods of time are subject to different versions of CC BY-SA.
Somewhat relatedly, the forum terms of use addendum currently does not mention the ForumMagnum software, which is GPL-v3. CEA itself might have obligations under the GPL to other contributors to the forum software (i.e. anyone who contributed to it and was not a CEA employee), like informing forum users of the terms and conditions of the GPL and not imposing further restrictions on them. I suggest looking into this to see if the EA Forum terms of service need to be modified in order to comply with the GPL. [edit: reworded to avoid being interpreted as legal advice]