Internet Pornography on Irish websites

Irish websites are unwittingly hosting child and adult pornogrophy on their user forums. Internet spammers who sign up to become members at unmanaged websites that have hidden webpages can post images of children and explicit pornography. Drugs are also advertised via links to other websites.

At the time of writing, the Limerick County Golf and Country Club website, unwittingly, had several such posts, including several images of pornography and children in bathing suits on a redundent user forum. The forum is not linked to the main homepage, rather it resembles an older forum that has been discontinued. Because the forum has not been completely deleted, it allows paedophiles and those selling drugs to conduct business on a seemingly legitimate website. This makes such activity more difficult to monitor.

The violations were uncovered by ‘The Web Watcher', a website that monitors unmanaged websites and user forums. Last year The Web Watcher notified the Irish Association of Corporate Treasurers that its forum was unknowingly ‘riddled with images of extreme pornography' – the material was swiftly removed. The website attracted a huge volume of traffic while the pornographic material was available – over 300,000 hits per month. Its traffic is now at just over 30,000 hits per month.

Limerick County Golf Club also said that they would investigate the webpage. The website is registered to a Limerick based IT company, eScape Software. When contacted by Village, the company said that they will look into the issue and, as with the Limerick County Golf and Country Club, there is no suggestion that they were in any way involved themselves in pornography.
Website forums can prevent spam and illicit posts by management of live forums using anti-spam software. Redundent user forums can be deleted.