Banned artists/paid rewards should only be accessible to Moderator+ users

As it currently stands, it is not against the rules to upload paid rewards and content from banned artists. However, doing so is an inherently immoral practice and it's especially scummy when you consider that anyone can simply pay for an account upgrade to view a large gallery of posts that these artists wanted removed. In the case of paid rewards, it is very easy to see it as Danbooru essentially profiting off of artists' stolen wares.

While it is discouraged to upload this content, such warnings fall flat when there are no real consequences to doing so. As such, I move to make paid_reward posts banned by default (like banned_artist posts already are) and have banned posts only accessible to Moderators and above.

I'd support making paid rewards (not as sure about status:banned) visible to mod+ (or admin if needed) if only for the shitstorm it would cause. Though the issue is that not all artists are against paid rewards being uploaded so a blanket ban would be bad as well.

Although I would also vouch for the uploader to be able to see their own upload because it wouldn't hurt.

This would be an ethical course of action. The uploading habits of some of the users on this site non-negligibly detract from certain artists’ bottom lines by uploading paid_reward images, which can be part of the reason why some artists ask to be banned in the first place.

If we’re going through with this, there’s another matter of ethics which I think should be taken into account as well. Some premium users may have taken the ability to see banned work into account when deciding whether to purchase gold or silver accounts. If we’re going to be stripping privileges away from those roles, it’s only right to offer refunds to anyone who wants them.

For me there are only two possible options:
In my personal opinion and as I only know about artist that hated on danbooru, because we´re hiding stuff behind a paywall, I think the best way to be kinda "fair" to them is, by making banned/paid stuff Builders+. As Zapdos already mentioned, it´s kinda "theft" taking money from people for stuff we didn´t make to let them see it. This only applies to gold and platinum users, while being a builder isn´t about paying. It´s about improving the website, either by tagging, translating, uploading and so on. People don´t work on Danbooru for a year or more, just to search and upload banned/paid images. And even if there are Builders who upload paid_images, it´s easier to check on them, warning them, etc. than to penalize users who paid for danbooru.
On another matter: IMO banned artist should be Builders+ anyway, even if we change nothing about paid-rewards.
(I would also be fine with admin+, if that´s the option evazion wants it to be, because I´m only interested in those images like.. a little)

But I also know, that Evazion is not a friend of this option, so I´m goin for the second possible way:

It´s also not very user friendly, starting gettin rid of those images, because there´s some angst that people with shit on danbooru in twitter-manners. There are alot of websites still uploading stuff they shouldn´t, not givin a damn about what the artist wants. If artists wants their stuff hard-deleted, then we can still do that, like evaz did some time ago. It´s not like we´re a super evil company, tryin to get all the money and penalize artist with that. We are able to work with them. Also, a argument made by evaz was, that we don´t know what artist are okay with and what they want to be deleted, so it would be better to wait for any artist to demand a deletion, rather than to delete it, just to be artist friendly.

And maybe, we should penalize members who upload paid-rewards more, if we are so eager to do something about that problem.

Given Moderator+ would remove these images from the public space even more than Gold+ does, I think there's a strong preservation argument here. I would even argue this as being more important than the wishes of any one artist in the long term. For example, there are video game publishers who would prefer you didn't use emulators, ROMs, or cartridge replication, for their 40+ year old games. However, if preservationists strictly adhered to this then thousands of games would be lost forever. In the same way, Danbooru's quality moderation means that, by definition, every undeleted post here is worthy of preservation. I don't think it's reasonable for an artist to expect all their art to remain entirely within their control forever.

I think the better solution is to make paid_reward only unviewable for x amount of time after being uploaded. This maintains the incentive for people to provide money for the artist's paywall in the short term, while having the art preserved and maintained here in the long term. In fact, I'm sure I've seen other sites do this already, I just can't recall an example right now. How long these posts should remain unviewable would be a matter of debate, but I see this is a good compromise overall.

I forgot to mention before, so I’ll just say it now: paid_reward really ought to be auto-banned regardless of whether the permissions for viewing banned works change. The majority of artists will prefer this. It’s been mentioned that there are artists who don’t mind their paid rewards being distributed for free on this site. If this is actually the case, we could consider implementing a system for making those artists exceptions.

Edit: Obstetrics’ suggestion also sounds like a good idea to me.

Rather than mod+ it should be tied to approver rights, since approval rights is what decides if something can be directly banned/deleted/etc.

This said, I agree on hiding banned paid rewards. I don't agree on ALL paid rewards or all banned posts. As Albert said some years ago (forum #133738), Danbooru is a site for the users, not for the artists. It makes sense to remove art behind a paywall after an artist requests it, but removing every single post completely and losing years of content because someone threw a temper tantrum and deleted their twitter actively hurts the quality of our gallery. At some point we have to strike a balance between what artists want and what everyone else wants.

Also see here to see how often people make mistakes in adding the paid_reward tag. Babysitting content because in theory someone out there does not want it on this site is not in our interest. It's up to an artist to contact us if they want something removed. That's how every other site out there does it. If you want to look at how bad automated removal is just look at YouTube and the drama surrounding its copyright strike automation.
The alternative is policing every single post manually and check it against every single patreon/enty/fantia account out there. It's insane. I sure as hell am not going to waste time doing it.
Not to mention that this adds more chances to have a post being lost forever because someone made a mistake, except now instead of it being visible to all gold+ it's visible to about 10 people in the entire site, so chances it'll be spotted and fixed are next to none.

And how do we deal with people like hews hack who said they're fine with patreon content being public after a few months?

Every time this issue is brought up it's always because someone thought of "what could happen", it's never been because of a real issue or an artist complaining about it. But nothing has happened. The status quo is fine because if an artist wants their content completely deleted we do delete them. Changing it to proactively police the gallery for anything that might break this kind of fuzzy rule is just going to cause ton of work and in the end it'll change nothing, because our content is disseminated to every other website out there.

We're not even the real source for this kind of content. 99% of it comes from https://yande.re, https://e-hentai.org or https://yiff.party.

Zurreak said:

Some premium users may have taken the ability to see banned work into account when deciding whether to purchase gold or silver accounts. If we’re going to be stripping privileges away from those roles, it’s only right to offer refunds to anyone who wants them.

Access to banned posts is not written anywhere to be one of the perks of gold+ so that doesn't make much sense.

While I may agree on limiting the exposure of paid reward uploads for the sake of being fair to the artists, I have to agree on the stated sentiments above this comment that it's (unfortunately) a case-to-case basis, it's all been tackled before in topic #11399.

However, having these kinds of uploads made visible after a given amount of time is also a viable option, but up to how many of us can support that initiative is anyone's guess.

-1 I'm against making it Moderator+ only. In my opinion, moderation permissions should really be focused user moderation. Some privileges have been elevated to that level because certain Builders/Approvers abused those privileges, but I see no evidence of that here. If a restriction is put in place, I would support Builder+ or Approvers. Otherwise, we'd be forcing Moderators to curate any and all past and future banned content that ever gets uploaded. That's just not tenable with the number of active moderators we have right now. They're busy enough right now as is.

That being said, if we're going to go down this avenue, then we should start handing out negative records and bans to users that upload this kind of content, regardless of their user level. I'm tired of being one of the few users that obeys the rule of not uploading banned content, only to see others religiously uploading from these banned artists and being rewarded for it with high scores and favcounts.

BrokenEagle98 said:

then we should start handing out negative records and bans to users that upload this kind of content, regardless of their user level

I disagree. I find it absurd that content like official_art status:banned should be actively discouraged simply because an artist asked us to generically remove their content.

See: status:banned kantai_collection official_art for example. You can't even tell who the artist is at first glance if you're uploading official art and aren't an immediate fan of said artist.

Double post, but another point since the concern is monetary: do we also ban all game cg, all content from artbooks, all doujinshi and scans ? Those are all paid content.

nonamethanks said:

I disagree. I find it absurd that content like official_art status:banned should be actively discouraged simply because an artist asked us to generically remove their content.

See: status:banned kantai_collection official_art for example. You can't even tell who the artist is at first glance if you're uploading official art and aren't an immediate fan of said artist.

Yeah, but that's not always the case. That isn't even 5% of the case. It's 1.5% of the case.

• status:banned : 28092
• status:banned official_art : 433

I also wasn't speaking of accidental uploads, but deliberate uploads. There's a difference. You can only claim that you're accidentally breaking the rules so many times before that excuse wears thin. I expect that our discerning moderation staff would know the difference.

Well, discouraging people from uploading status:banned means that you'll also have to completely hide them, otherwise people will see the posts and make the logical connection that it's ok to upload them. Which brings us back to square one.

nonamethanks said:

Well, discouraging people from uploading status:banned means that you'll also have to completely hide them, otherwise people will see the posts and make the logical connection that it's ok to upload them. Which brings us back to square one.

I'd be fine with completely hiding them except for those that are allowed to curate them. In fact, I thought that was the very point of this thread. If not, then I fail to see the point of this whole endeavor. I mean, what are you all even trying to accomplish here?

BrokenEagle98 said:

I'd be fine with completely hiding them except for those that are allowed to curate them. In fact, I thought that was the very point of this thread.

But then it shouldn't be Mod+ but Approver+.

The real question is, will any of this actually stop the throwaway accounts uploading Sakimi-chan, etc. banned art?

Kikimaru said:

The real question is, will any of this actually stop the throwaway accounts uploading Sakimi-chan, etc. banned art?

It would certainly defeat the purpose of doing so if only a handful of people (or in the case of approvers only 45 users) on the site can see them.

Unbreakable said:

It would certainly defeat the purpose of doing so if only a handful of people (or in the case of approvers only 45 users) on the site can see them.

Those people upload it without tagging it in the first point, so no, there would be no difference from their point of view as the time it takes for them to be banned would be the same, and from a member/anonymous perspective the effect would be the same too.

nonamethanks said:

Those people upload it without tagging it in the first point, so no, there would be no difference from their point of view as the time it takes for them to be banned would be the same, and from a member/anonymous perspective the effect would be the same too.

If you put it that way, yes. It would still be a noticeable change for the majority of the site (all gold and platinum users)

Personally I think if we're going to be more restrictive on the access of banned content then all existing Gold and Platinum users should be grandfathered to retain access to this content. Striping their access to something that was included (even if not stated) in the features of what they paid for seems wrong as well.

Outside of that, I have no issue with these types of uploads being limited to builder+. All user levels at that level and above are those only obtained through contributing to the operations of the site. It would make sense that users who are active in the operations of the site should have access to all the content to aid in their activities.