What this site will and will not do about what you say on it.
Most sites that promise free speech are promising something they cannot deliver, and quietly rely on you not reading the small print. This page is the small print. It is written so you can decide what risk you are taking before you take it, rather than afterwards.
Three different things
People usually mean three separate things by speaking freely, and this site can deliver two of them completely and the third not at all. Being clear about which is which is the whole point of this page.
Censorship — we will not
No post is removed here for being wrong, unpopular, offensive, heretical or hostile to the UKJP. Moderators act on conduct, never on conclusions. That is a commitment we control absolutely, and we keep it.
Persecution — we will prevent it where we can
You will not be pile-oned, brigaded or hounded off this forum for a view. That is what the conduct rules are for, and they are enforced in your favour as readily as against you.
Prosecution — we cannot protect you
UK law reaches what you post here regardless of what we would prefer. We cannot place you above it and will not pretend to. What we can do is hold as little about you as possible, and tell you exactly what that is.
What the law actually reaches
This is not legal advice and it is not exhaustive, but you should know the shape of it. In the UK, criminal liability can attach to threats, to harassment, to inciting violence, to communications that stir up hatred on racial or religious grounds, and to a handful of other categories. Civil liability — chiefly defamation — can attach to stating damaging untruths of fact about identifiable people.
The Online Safety Act 2023 also places duties on us. Where content is illegal we are obliged to remove it. That is not a moderation preference we could change our minds about; it is a legal duty with a regulator attached.
The practical upshot: argue any position you like, and be careful about threats and factual assertions about real people. Those are where the law actually bites. Opinion, however unwelcome, very rarely is.
What we hold about you
Deliberately, very little.
- No real name. The field does not exist at signup. Use any handle you like.
- An email address, because accounts need one. It is never shown publicly and never sold or shared.
- Your posts, which are public by design — that is what a forum is.
- IP addresses, recorded by the forum software for spam and abuse defence.
- Nothing else. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts of any kind.
That last point is verifiable rather than assertable. Load any page on this site or the forum with your browser's network inspector open: every single request goes to ukjp.org.uk and nowhere else. The typefaces are served from our own server rather than Google's. There is no Cloudflare proxy reading your traffic. Nothing about your visit reaches a third party, because there is no third party.
If we are compelled
A valid court order or lawful police request for user data is not something we can refuse, and a site that tells you otherwise is lying to you. What we will do:
- Require that any request is actually valid, and resist ones that are not.
- Disclose only what is specifically demanded, never a bulk handover.
- Tell you it happened, wherever we are not legally prohibited from doing so.
The strongest protection is not a promise; it is that there is very little to hand over in the first place. That is the reason for the list above.
You can leave
You can delete your own account, and your posts with it, without asking anyone's permission and without explaining yourself. Anonymous posting is also available for subjects where you would rather not have a view attached to your usual handle.
If we get it wrong
Every moderation decision can be appealed, and appeals are read by someone other than the person who made the call wherever that is possible. If you think a post was removed for its conclusion rather than its conduct, say so publicly in Site Feedback. That is not a courtesy — a rule against censorship that cannot be tested in public is not worth much.