Quite a brouhaha brewing in the XenForo community.

There’s a forum known as Tattle Life which exists to “allow commentary and critiques of people with a significant following that choose to monetise their personal life as a business.”

In other words, they gossip about influencers.

You can imagine where that typically goes and what goes on there, and the potential for abuse.  You might be surprised how lucrative it is: the owners net £500,000 a year.

To protect themselves from the obvious potential avalanche of defamation lawsuits, the owners hid ownership of the forum through a complex web of legal entities.

In 2023, the inevitable happened.  An influencer’s feelings were hurt and they sued.  The suit apparently had some merit, as they were awarded £300,000 in a Northern Ireland court.  You can read the decision here.  During the legal process, the plaintiffs attempted to find out who the real owners of Tattle Life are.

Since Tattle Life runs XenForo, the plaintiffs hit upon the idea of asking XenForo who owned the license for that site.

Still with me and wondering where the drama is?  Well, we’ve arrived at it:

Discovery has revealed emails passing between the first plaintiff and a confidential source who appears to have been working for Xenforo, a forum software provider used by Tattle Life until December 2021. The first of these was dated 22 March 2023 but it was clearly preceded by previous email correspondence which has not been located as it is believed to have involved a different email address. The emails indicate the source has identified an IP address said to be hosting the Tattle Life site. The first plaintiff asked if he should proceed with a court order against Xenforo and is advised that he should.

In other words, the “confidential source” at Xenforo did not wait for a court order to reveal the owner of the Tattle Life Xenforo license.  Instead, he just leaked it.

Now, if someone had a court order and went to Xenforo and said “legally, you’re required to tell us who owns the license in use by the Tattle Life forum,” then that would be completely proper.  Xenforo must comply with the law.  But by the same token, they should comply with their own privacy policy, which states:

XenForo Limited will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your explicit permission or are required by law to do so.

On the plaintiff’s side, they appear to have engaged a private investigation firm:

In September 2022, the first plaintiff was engaging directly with Nardello & Co LLP (“Nardello”), an internationally renowned investigations firm, seeking to identify a woman referred to as “Helen W” who was at that time believed to be an administrator of the website.

Private eyes have all sorts of tricks to ferret out info – that’s their job, after all – and it’s not clear exactly how the “confidential source” at XenForo was made to comply.  It could be anything from just asking nicely to passing an envelope of cash.

Eight pages in, the thread on the Xenforo forum rages.  There’s also been some chatter on The Admin Zone.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

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