a somewhat legal EULA/TOU question

[Desolator144]

I'll give the super simple summary of this situation before asking my question. I'm writing an app for people to write stuff offline for an online writing site. They can save and edit and the usual Word kind of stuff and it auto-saves and checks for really specific, site-related stuff as well as providing a nice template. They've had A TON of problems on the site with people breaking the rules and repeatedly writing absolute crap with disregard for the rules. Since I'm one of the moderators that has to clean it up, I figure I'd make my job a lot easier and just write the software to warn them if they're violating a rule like typing in all caps or using the wrong version of words, etc. So now I've got more text AI in there than that walking robot from Japan lol.
But then I determined from experience that the people breaking the rules aren't just oblivious, they're just lazy and greedy (they get paid to write). You can tell em they're breaking rules and violating quality standards and they'll just complain and threaten to leave then write more of the same garbage instead. It sounds like a mere annoyance but it's costing the company behind the site soooooo much money to take care of it, it's unreal. For some reason, they're not as vicious when it comes to banned as me. They're on like a 10 strikes and you're out if I feel like it but probably not system :( So to help the problem, I was thinking that if they have a certain number of violations and the rather conservative AI determines that they have no business writing and will never meet the quality standards, it adds a line to their host files to loop back the site's domain to themselves so it doesn't load.
Now you probably just spilled your coffee on your keyboard after reading that but calm down. I'm no malware writer and if you knew these fat, greedy, PMSing, middle-aged housewives who want to write what they want, how they want, when they want, and re-register 10 times to harrass people after they're banned, you'd be considering the same thing.
So to C.M.A., if I put a line in the software's EULA that says the user agrees to give the program permission to modify their hosts files and add entries in order to block websites and I'm not responsible for any damages or interferences caused by my program, does that make it legal? I mean I'm telling people literally what it's going to specifically do and asking them if they agree to it or not. Is that any different than an internet filter software EULA? So would they still all take me to court on it and stand a chance when I basically ban them from the site stealthily? Btw I also don't own the site myself in case that's important.

[chris128]

If these people are not IT literate enough to change their hosts file back then I'm sure they do not know how to use proxy servers and therefore just banning their external IP from the forum (a feature that pretty much any forum has) would be a much better way wouldnt it?

[mendhak]

What you're attempting to do counts as 'business logic' and you're exposing it to the user. Even if one person figures out what's happening (and they will when Windows Defender comes up warning them of something going on in the hosts file), then it'll take a simple search to figure out how to bypass it.

I'd say that if you have access to the code that they use to submit the stories, then you should prevent them from posting from that app itself, so that it's all contained and inaccessible to most of them. The website, too, should contain some sort of logic to prevent this, but that could be out of your hands.

[Desolator144]

well I'll kinda fill you in on the exact details. The company behind the website doesn't want to IP ban people because they're afraid of some support nightmare when they accidentally ban an entire apartment building or a non-semi-static IP like a dialup address. I said they should ban based on the cookie and the IP so they double hit em but so far they're busy implementing stupid, unnecessary website alterations. If I had access to the website's code, I'd be making soooooo many changes, trust me!
But unfortunately I don't so I decided to write this software to help. Also people were asking for an offline writing program. Dunno why they can't just use Word or open office!!! But this one's gonna check for the most common mistakes and quality problems and not let them even so much as save their work if it's not acceptable so that's good at least.
When they're done, it's going to have an advanced copy and paste interface but that's it because interacting with the actual site the content is published on would be really, really hard. There's no API's or anything and I think any sort of automated publishing software would be frowned upon by them because it could be modified to spam.
The plan right now is to load the website into a hidden VB browser control and read the "Hello, ____" username part of the html and figure out who they are. If I think they should have been banned a long time ago, then the software says "Sorry, you're not authorized to use this software" then writes text files to several permanent locations on the hard drive and possibly some registry entries that the software will always check for even if it's uninstalled and reinstalled and still disallow them from using it if those files are found. There are some people that literally stole articles word for word from a book and published them on the site and just got a slap on the wrist and were allowed to keep writing. I dunno what that company is thinking but those people should be in jail or bankrupt from a law suit let alone not allowed to write anymore!
So besides that, I wanted to manually ban these people since the site admins won't do it but that might be a little cold up front. It'd make more sense to wait for someone to break the rules a whole bunch of times then just give up and modify their hosts file. I know a lot of protection programs will stop it but it's worth a try :P I just don't want these people suing me.

[penagate]

Give each user a unique licence key which you can then deactivate. It is not in the users' interests to share licence keys because people don't like having other people's garbage attributed to them.


(I hope that addresses your problem. I had trouble understanding what exactly it was because your posts are giant walls of text. Try breaking them up into paragraphs next time.)