IN BYGONE days rugby team mates might have swapped ribald jokes in the shower or recounted stories of X-rated exploits at club dinners.

As more and more of our lives are shared online, so it seems are the explicit jokes of the rugby hearties.

And police have described a recent Swindon Crown Court case that landed a club coach in the dock on an animal pornography charge as a lesson for anyone sharing information on social media.

That case concerned 22-year-old Mark Glew, a player with Minety RFC. He pleaded guilty to possession of 10 videos and two images of adults engaged in sex acts with various animals, including a snake.

The issue? Glew hadn’t made the videos. Nor had he searched for them on his phone. The vile footage had been automatically downloaded to his smartphone’s camera roll after being shared on a rugby club WhatsApp group chat by others.

Following the case, a spokeswoman for the Wiltshire Police Digital Investigations Unit said: “This case is a lesson to anyone involved in large group chats on apps such as WhatsApp to be mindful of what information and content you decide to send or store on your mobile phone.”

Glew was arrested in Wiltshire in 2017 for another matter, which was never proceeded with, and the police confiscated his phone.

Among the thousands of files on the device, detectives found the offending material.

Swindon Crown Court was told that, after getting into the first team, Glew joined their WhatsApp group to get details of matches and other events.But one of the other players uploaded the files, including bestiality involving a snake, as well as pictures of people’s genitals apparently being injured.

Glew, of Hatherley, Yate, was given a one year conditional discharge after he admitted possessing six extreme pornographic images portraying an act which resulted or was likely to result in serious injury to a person’s genitals.

Sentencing Glew, Judge Robert Pawson paused to consider the implications of the case: “One suspects that images such as these are probably widely available and probably wrongly distributed among WhatsApp groups throughout the country, perhaps out of some misplaced bravado or humour.”

WhatsApp was approached for comment.

How to change your WhatsApp storage settings

Unless you’ve changed your settings, WhatsApp will automatically save every media file to your phone’s internal or cloud storage - including photographs and videos.

The good news is that you can change that very easily.

Click the Settings button at the bottom of the screen. That should take you to the Settings page. Scroll down and click on Chats. Click on the toggle button beside the words Save to Camera roll. Videos and photographs are no longer automatically saved to your phone.