Hello everyone, I'm a very infrequent reader here, any only registered to join in this discussion, I'd like to offer some experience and advice/observations. I was formally an IBM Distinguished Engineer and worked for both IBM UK 1987-2007, and IBM US 2008-2009, I'm currently an Executive Director and Senior Distinguished Engineer at Dell in Round Rock Texas.

I had one of the first ever(1996), and for a longtime only one of a few personal websites on ibm.com. I was ibm.com/europe/servers/corner for a while, then ibm.com/servers/corner. In about 2007, IBM told the few of us that had these personal pages that they no longer wanted personal web pages on ibm.com and at that time were starting developerworks blogs. Rather than move my blog/webpage to developerworks, I struck out on my own and setup ibmcorner.com

This ran fine until early 2009, when I got a letter from IBM's lawyers telling me to change my domain name or suffer the consequences, even though I was an IBM Executive and still working in IBM Austin, IBM would NOT approve the use of the letters IBM in a URL. I assume the IBM Club URL is ok as its actually owned by IBM UK.

1. Personally I think you'll have problems with IBMertalk; an alternative might be eyebeemtalk.com?

From 1997-2001 I was a founder and moderator of the triathlon-uk Yahoo group. The group ran fine for about 4-years, and then we got legal cease and desist letters from lawyers representing a UK based business. Although we had a top city attorney working pro bono, we were advised to shut the group down and go away quietly rather than fight. The problem was a sustained attack by an individual, even when we banned him and removed posts, he kept coming back. It's not the cost that will kill you, its the stress and the hassle. Yahoo groups provide email posting and also distribute via email. In the event of a legal challenge, the fact that Yahoo may have emailed out tens/hundreds of copys of the offending post doesn't help.

2. What is the Liability Insurance meant to cover? Online liable, slander etc.?

I have for the last 10-years been the primary administrator for the tritalk.co.uk website. We have a small crew of admins, and have had a few legal challenges, my Austin TX attorney just writes back and it usually gets quickly dropped if we clean up the offending posts. One of the things that helps is that any member to report posts as anything for legally questionable, sexual/inappropriate material, commercial etc. An email is sent to all the admins, anyone can review/change/delete and the members have no right of reply or complaint. Tritalk.co.uk is now run through a Ltd. company.

I live in the US, the whole law and the balance of proof to successfully prosecute for liable or slander is much higher.

3. I'd be willing to be listed as the owner; be an admin; and on would consider funding agreed expenses to get the site up and running. My advice would be to require a small charge, not via paypal, to authenticate membership. I know how/who can do this pretty simply.

Technical requirements, One of the biggest issues we have with tritalk is bogus spambot userids. Certain websites have been known to auto register dozens of new users and use those users to create and post commercial SPAM, often linked to pornography related sites.

4. I agree phpbb is an excellent choice. It can auto update and gets frequently fixed when spambots find a new way to break-in. Using credit card/bank card for small payments and forcing the use of real names that match the credit/band card would completely eliminate that.

5. While we cant stop people taking screen copies, using copy/paste etc. My experience is no email output/distribution of posts.

Mark Cathcart
http://about.me/markcathcart