I have just been personally hit with BLP issues, but from an unexpected source. A person in my extended family has posted to a genealogy.com message board extremely personal information concerning a scandal in my immediate family. It concerns people who are still living and is partially concerned with an adoption. Laws relating to the disclosure of information relating to adoptions might have been broken.

If this information was added to a Wikipedia BLP it would have been immediately oversighted. Meanwhile, on genealogy.com my requests to have the posting removed have been ignored, and I can't seem to find a law I can use which can force genealogy.com to remove the posting.

One of your relatives did this? Can you phone them and ask them to remove this information? I suppose you've already thought of, or have already tried that.

Yes. geneology.com does not allow the author to edit their messages after they have been posted. It is doubtful if the original poster would want to remove their posting.

This doesn't have anything to do with the vicious rumor going around that you and Mrs. Howell are actually Gilligan's biological parents...?

Sorry, I had to post that.

Anyway, most message boards, even fairly well-established ones, can be a little chaotic when it comes to dealing with defamation and privacy issues. Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right person, and usually that means someone over 35 who isn't some sort of free-speech crusader. (Not that such people are always bad, mind you.) Unfortunately, you often have complaints going into general-purpose shared e-mail buckets or message queues that are basically bureaucratic black holes. This board is actually better about things like that than most, believe it or not...

How many attempts have you made that were ignored, and how recent were the attempts? Even if you have to keep trying for what seems like an ungodly amount of time (until someone finally realizes that you're not going away), that's usually more effective than an outright legal threat. In fact, quite often if you mention the possibility of attorney involvement at the outset, that just slows things down, because they might actually turn everything over to their own lawyers, who inevitably will tell them to ignore you until you manage to come up with a subpoena.

Beyond that, I'm afraid it's probably like any other website - if you're attacked, quite often your best (and sometimes only) option is to attack right back. On the web, the best defense is a good offense. And needless to say, many smaller sites look to the Big Players like Wikipedia for precedents, and what they glean from it is obviously not Good News for Good People.

Jeez, that's awful. Maybe a letter from your lawyer would do the trick. I don't suspect they've had a lot of inputs that were defamatory. Most of their info is about dead people, so this might be something new.