legal logs kept on servers?

[Kevin Jones]

Hi, I am looking for some advice regarding what logs are kept about the usage of my forum.

Firstly my forum is hosted on a USA based site and what I need to know is how long hosts retain ip logs and what information can be extracted from them to identify a person to a user name.

The reason I ask this is that the forum discusses employment issues and obviously alot of people like to remain anon as they may fear backlash in the workplace.

So how secure is thier identity? Should a company wish to pursue identification of a user through a court order how would this be done and is the information stored in the host of past ip actions sufficiant to personally identify a person to a user name?

Also, is such information stored within vBulletin.

Any links or advice is appreciated.

Many thanks

[john2k]

On the hosting side, you can simply turn off logging to prevent any activity on your site from being saved in web server access logs.

vB does save IP data. You can see that from within your admincp. Search for any user then select to view their IPs from the pull-down menu. I'm not sure if there is a way to turn off the IP logging by default.