

Ask HN: How do you handle UGC when deleting a user from a group? - kunle

Building a group photosharing service and trying to figure out how to deal with users being deleted from a group, and their content. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated!
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A1kmm
It depends on your target audience and the expectations your design gives
user; some ideas will work in some situations, others will work in others, but
there is no general solution. Some ideas:

1\. Content belongs to the group; once a user is out of the group, they can't
get to it, even if they contributed it themselves. Possibly good if your app
will have a corporate focus (former employees losing access to confidential
company materials even if they created them is the norm). 2\. Users own
content, but grant irrevocable rights to access and modify the content to the
group. The rights persist even after the user has been removed. 3\. Creating
users own content, and can always get to it, even after they are removed.
Users can grant groups rights to access content. This permission can be
revoked even after the user has left the group, at which point the group can
no longer access the content. Revocation of rights is a separate action to
deletion from the group. 4\. Content is associated with the creator, and when
the creator is deleted from the group, their content is assumed to be
uninteresting and so is no longer part of the group. Perhaps good if you have
big groups, and expect spammers to try to join; deleting users from groups is
an anti-spam measure.

Note that users could save content outside of your site if they wanted to; if
you really needed to, you could fingerprint all images and detect if they were
later re-uploaded with a different purported creator.

Whatever you do, you should make sure to make users agree to grant you a
license to do what you want to do - UGC may be copyrighted by the user, and if
you don't let them retract content from groups they are no longer in, for
example, you had better have ensured they agreed to grant you an irrevocable
license. Getting an experienced lawyer to check the language would be a good
idea.

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kunle
Thanks for this - so priority number 1 would be making sure users are agreeing
to whatever content policy I adopt. In terms of the options you present - what
provides the optimal user experience in your opinion?

Option 1 works well for corporate groups, for photos however I'm thinking
option 3. My reasoning is that if an admin rejects a user, for whatever
reason, they should by default be rejecting the user's photos. In addition,
the user, if expelled from a group, should be able to deny the group access to
his/her photos. Does this make sense - you think this is coherent?

