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

nonamethanks said:

So... How exactly is it gonna work if a post is not actually a paid reward and gets banned, given that there will be three people in all the site looking at them?

Yeah, for further control it would be good to give approvers a look into that as well as there are multiple very active ones who know how to help out.
Meaning a good amount of people can be bothered about that and approvers are in constant exchange (at least some of them) and they're doing moderative work already (even more than mods, I dare say besides the banning part).

evazion said:

Here's what I'd be willing to do:

• Uploading new paid rewards is against the rules. Any new rewards that get uploaded are marked as banned. Uploaders who keep uploading paid rewards get warned then banned. This includes Builders.
• Banned paid rewards are made visible to Admins only.
• Existing paid rewards aren't marked as banned unless the artist requests them to be banned.

I'm more comfortable saying that paid rewards aren't allowed going forward than I am nuking existing posts. And I realize that making these posts Admin-only may cause certain problems for us. That's what the banned artist system is meant to avoid, but if we don't want that system, then this is what we get.

This is a good solution if we want to ban paid rewards from being uploaded, although it'll run into the same issue as those banned artists that constantly get uploaded without artist tags or such, I think.

Also,

ArcieA said:

This, though, unleashes a collateral damage scenario out of those artists like Hews Hack who had spoken out on being laissez-faire about their paid rewards being hosted here.

That's what I think too, although I think it's safe to assume that the number of artists with such a laissez-faire attitude is a lot lesser than the amount of artists who would be bothered by paid rewards being uploaded elsewhere - especially within the same month of release or such. I don't think most artists would have much of an issue with paid rewards from 2018 or 2019 being reuploaded even if they never made them public but I can be wrong there, considering how many artists wouldn't want their art reposted full stop.

Can't we have tri-state "paid reward ok" flag for an artist? Since it's pretty much clear what to do with those who explicitly allow/disallow reposting from fanclub-like services. For everyone else keep status quo until artist clearly state their intentions.

evazion, might think of creating a separate type for artists after confirming their right to work?
1) After receiving a quality-level complaint, we issue a username and password, or send a unique link to create them;
2) The created account is associated with a specific artist tag;
3) For the account, the rights to manage the image (publication) are granted: deletion (sent to the administrator’s archive), setting the date of publication of the work (including the current time), permission to download only previews (prohibition of full size), replacing the image with resize capabilities of the site with a link (descriptions) for downloading pictures or other purposes (marked by a special commentary by the artist and edited only by the artist / administrator), a check mark "not my job" to delete the artist tag;
4) When you upload a picture to the site, it is not published in the general list, but is added to the waiting list from artists. A notification is sent to artists on the mail specified in the profile to download a picture with a link to it. After the transition, a picture and a list of actions from point 3 above the picture are displayed. If the tag of the associated artist is added to an already published work, then send the link without access to the action to delete the time;
5) Artist accounts by default with the download function disabled. To download works, when you click the download button, a notification is displayed that you must agree to the rules for using the site to download works and that it is not recommended to upload your works for their promotion because of the high quality control of the downloaded images.
_____
I know that at the moment the site is not intended for the distribution of works from artists. The proposed option can help improve the loyalty of artists in terms of publishing works, by analogy with Pixiv and other sites, in the future become a platform for publishing quality work.
-------
A simpler option:
After the complaint, send a link to allow the publication of works in the mode of approval by the artist;
If the artist follows the link and indicates the mail, then it is associated with the tag of the banned artist, in addition, you can specify the frequency of receipt of the notification (for each picture, daily, weekly, monthly);
Then, after blocking the work, the artist is sent a message to the mail with a small preview of the picture and the link "allow publication of the picture" - after the picture is clicked, the block is removed from the specified work and the flag is set to unlock the artist;
Re-blocking is possible with the artist’s personal appeal with a repeated request for blocking and the second blocking is not removed.
Additionally, in the message you can add the link "unsubscribe from notifications and prohibit the publication of works" - new works will be blocked, approved by the artist earlier only if there is such a request.
_____
P.S. Of course, the proposed options are more difficult to implement, but they will allow artists to increase their popularity when they show loyalty to the site.

I thought Danbooru was, first and foremost, an archival site. To archive anime-artwork from Japan. That was how it's been for over a decade. To upload good art from Japan in order to preserve it. So that if something happens to the artist or the platforms that they host the art on, they can still exist elsewhere.

Danbooru currently accommodates artists if it's confronted by them, but otherwise users uploaded for the sake of the site (and self-interest). This is even reflected in the moderation style of Danbooru, which is something like "Approve what you like" if I'm not mistaken?

Having such a rule as "banning all future paid artwork" goes against what this site has been trying to achieve for years: Archiving good anime artwork. What does that kind of rule even solve if you're gonna keep existing paid artwork?

If Danbooru bans all future paid uploads, people will just go elsewhere to view uploaded paid content. Danbooru will miss out on a rapidly growing trend of online artwork sharing (paywalls), cause less users to browse Danbooru in the future as they seek the several other existing alternatives with more complete collections, and ultimately won't truly satisfy the artists they're trying to satisfy in the first place.
You may as well tell everyone to stop using Danbooru and just browse art from their sources from now on.

It's no coincidence that all the good art these days are behind paywalls, so of course people want to upload it if it's well drawn. If there was a horribly drawn artwork that was behind a paywall, there wouldn't be many people bothering to upload it, much less pay for it. And if they did upload it, users should be able to flag it as poor quality anyways.
If Danbooru is just okay for settling with incomplete, or lower quality artwork for their collection from now on, then I suppose it's time to change Danbooru's tagline of "most comprehensively indexed and moderated repositories" to "most selectively indexed and moderated repositories."

Also, trying to fight internet piracy in this way will go just as well as it has been since the inception of the web: if people don't want to pay for it, they'll find a way around it. No amount of moral policing is going to change that. In fact, doing so in such a fashion will just stir them to search even harder elsewhere (and there's no lack of alternatives run by like-minded individuals).

Dysprosium said:

I thought Danbooru was, first and foremost, an archival site. To archive anime-artwork from Japan. That was how it's been for over a decade. To upload good art from Japan in order to preserve it. So that if something happens to the artist or the platforms that they host the art on, they can still exist elsewhere.

That's actually the way it should be: a de facto archive that can serve as backup if any untoward thing happens to the original source links from whence they came from. I mean, it's how we got a virtual library of Lolicept/Belko's works as an example.
But the whole system where artists can just request their works to be hidden on the site is counter-intuitive to this archiving (which Belko, unfortunately, invoked so anons have had to resort to using ex-h to uncover his older works prior to 03/2019). It's this system that results in this whole dilemma we all face at the moment and the crux of the problems being discussed here.

For me (as an artist myself), it just feels selfish to ask DB for an artwork takedown when all it's doing is just to archive it (and provide a ready source for others). DB is a way to get exposure since there are safeguards in place to ensure the traffic ultimately goes to the original post, and this system of banning artists is what's going to ruin this whole mission of the site.

ArcieA said:
DB is a way to get exposure since there are safeguards in place to ensure the traffic ultimately goes to the original post, and this system of banning artists is what's going to ruin this whole mission of the site.

Not taking any sides, but you're missing the point. The ultimate purpose of sites like fanbox/patreon/fantia/enty are for artists to find economic independence doing what they like. Increasing traffic to a website whose rewards have already been uploaded via ripping-sites serves very little purpose except to the most innocent/generous of users - the ones who say "even if I don't need to pay to find these rewards, I still want to support these artists".

They use Pixiv and Twitter to spread exposure, websites that upload all of their paid rewards - which are usually just their free images in higher resolution - don't really do much to that end that imageboards weren't already doing re-hosting pixiv/twitter images, it's just taking away any potential income. Not liking that is not selfish by any means.

As for those artists who demand 'all' their work be banned, well, that is childish and meaningless.

Dysprosium said:

I thought Danbooru was, first and foremost, an archival site. To archive anime-artwork from Japan. That was how it's been for over a decade. To upload good art from Japan in order to preserve it. So that if something happens to the artist or the platforms that they host the art on, they can still exist elsewhere.

(...)

I see it as less of an archival site and more of a curated gallery that just happens to have a verbose tagging system. Archival implies that we save almost everything under the sun when it comes to artists or content -- which some users may believe. But the whole business of the approval system negates that just by nature of the fact.

In fact, that brings me to another good point about contention over the nature of paid rewards here. Paid rewards are like any other form of paid digital media that makes it onto this site, like scans of artbooks and doujinshi. The one truly meaningful disparity is the fact that creators may rely greatly on the continued support of their patrons -- selling a digital copy of their work (whether it's doujinshi or something else) usually doesn't guarantee the kind of steady income that paywall sites like Patreon and Fanbox do. And while digital works are often a source of third-party redistribution, the rather frequent reuploading of paywalled content is not -- not until recently, anyway.

ArcieA said:
(...) But the whole system where artists can just request their works to be hidden on the site is counter-intuitive to this archiving (which Belko, unfortunately, invoked so anons have had to resort to using ex-h to uncover his older works prior to 03/2019). It's this system that results in this whole dilemma we all face at the moment and the crux of the problems being discussed here.

It's a patchwork solution that offers the pretense that danbooru support the artist(s). Any Gold+ user of the website knows that that's not actually happening, and like evazion said, certain artists actually request their content be permanently deleted to the effect it can be.

Personal etude, but I admit that it sucks to lose good art to the digital abyss. I was a fanbox supporter of Belko even before he debuted as that name and I was pretty distraught at how he reacted. And while I never was a supporter of kuro/gloomylynx, I was shocked to see his legitimate content disappear entirely. So I do see a reason and a place for piracy, to sort of negate or soften the blow on stuff like this; I just don't necessarily think danbooru is the right site for those kinds of things. Besides, usually when an artist gets "banned", it's not really a good thing. Regular contributors stop reuploading their public work under the understanding that banned artists are off limits, and privileged users will be burdened with the onus of that cleanup or just let it be.

I don't think DB will always side by the artist -- that's fine. But as nonamethanks mentioned, most of what we find and re-upload isn't even ours. Users who know the right sites or the right communities/users will be able to get paywalled content for free, so it's not really as if danbooru is the sort of content bastion that some of us seem to be making out. Time and time again the same discussions have gone around and no solution has ever really been found, with moderators continuing to handle things on a case-by-case basis. It may very well be the case this discussion will happen again and nothing will change, but I do believe danbooru has the potential to serve as a better force for positive change in the anime art field as long as the right steps are taken. It's just that as pirated paywall content becomes easier to find, this issue will continue to be harder to ignore.

FWIW I generally support the measures that evazion has outlined, but I do think there needs to be some outlining of those guidelines programmatically. Creators like kaedeko_(kaedelic) are actually in the interesting circumstance that they actually post high-resolution PSDs on their fanbox for about a month or two until they gate it behind a 500円 plan (non-paid reward -> paid_reward). OTOH, other creators use it as an early release platform for their content, which means detagging paid_reward. The approach definitely will need some carving out, and maybe we can start iteratively working on that process if enough of us back it.

.grey said:
...but I do believe danbooru has the potential to serve as a better force for positive change in the anime art field as long as the right steps are taken.

Well, parroting what you said, I don't necessarily think Danbooru is the right site for that kind of thing either. That is, to become a "positive force" for anime art.

Wanting Danbooru to be another "force" for anime art is close to wanting Danbooru to be another pixiv, where art can only be uploaded by the respective artists. They have full control over what get's uploaded or deleted. That way, there's 0 chance of incurring the anger of artists. Users can only browse and upvote on art they like, and don't get to upload anything that isn't theirs.

99% of artists in Japan don't want any of their artwork reuploaded anywhere, by anyone other than themselves, paid or otherwise. Banning one form of artwork distribution while allowing all the others is only surface level "care" and disingenuous at best. We didn't care for their re-upload rules before paid artwork became a thing, and I don't see why that has to be the case now even if the stakes are higher.

.grey said:
I see it as less of an archival site and more of a curated gallery that just happens to have a verbose tagging system.

If Danbooru doesn't serve as an archival site, then what is it? If it's a curated gallery of art people think is good, well, people often pay for art they think is good. That's why they paid for it. They'll want to share what they paid for, one way or another. Having it on Danbooru at least means it can be properly sourced and redirected to the actual artist's profile.

"But reuploading paid artwork is killing their livelihood" you say?
I want to know how many of these artists who are popular enough to get all their paid artwork re-uploaded so quickly, are quitting drawing in droves in favor of getting a stable income job instead?
The idea that reuploading artwork that was initially paid for is as bad as literally stealing 500 yen from an artist's wallet for every person that views it, is as ridiculous as the notion that every copy of a video game pirated, or playthrough viewed on Youtube, is money taken directly from the game publishers/devs.
Here's the thing, if users went out of their way to pirate it, they weren't going to buy it in the first place.

The majority of an artist's paywall money doesn't come from people who subscribe just to selectively buy a few pictures from an artists' fanbox or fantia and then cancel, their money comes from monthly repeat subscriptions. People who subscribe to them, not because of a picture or two, but because they like the artist's artstyle and wish to continually support the artist in order to see them grow and develop their skills, that's where the real money comes from: their talent. Not for the "picture of the month" that most artists put out as a bare minimum these days.
If the artist slacks, people cancel their subscriptions. If the artist continues to improve, they get more popular and have more repeat subscriptions. That's how their system should be working.

Also, if the moral quandary is Danbooru profiting off of paid artwork by locking said artwork behind Gold+ accounts, the solution is simple: Don't lock paid rewards behind Gold+ accounts.
We don't need to do that in order to please the artists, because they won't be pleased unless everything is purged anyways.
I'm pretty sure the main purpose of buying upgraded accounts was to support Danbooru and its servers anyways, and anything else was (or should be) a bonus. Once again, their shouldn't be even more restrictions on Danbooru for the sake of artists' unending dissatisfaction and misguided attempts at controlling the flow of the internet.

As long as there are other sites archiving Patreon-only content, I don't believe there's a need for Danbooru to pick up slack. They can deal with the inevitable fallout from that, not us. It's similar to how we translate a lot of webcomics and doujins, but close to zero commercial comics (which have loads of other resources).

.grey said:

FWIW I generally support the measures that evazion has outlined, but I do think there needs to be some outlining of those guidelines programmatically. Creators like kaedeko_(kaedelic) are actually in the interesting circumstance that they actually post high-resolution PSDs on their fanbox for about a month or two until they gate it behind a 500円 plan (non-paid reward -> paid_reward). OTOH, other creators use it as an early release platform for their content, which means detagging paid_reward. The approach definitely will need some carving out, and maybe we can start iteratively working on that process if enough of us back it.

It would probably be ideal to avoid posting any content that is or will be paywalled just to avoid the hassle that comes with that. Paid content that later becomes free could be uploaded when it actually does go free. That's just ideally speaking, though - in practice, we'd probably be using the post ban request thread as well as a hypothetical whitelist request thread for the mistakes.

One question is what would happen if the artist got banned or closed their account entirely, making all of their images technically no longer paid content. I would tentatively suggest allowing that to be posted in some capacity.

@Dysprosium I appreciate the straw man argument.

What I originally said was with the intention of working to make this site less controversial. I don't want Danbooru to be a "a positive force" for anime artists, because it can't. Since its' conception, sites like danbooru have always been controversial. Not arguing that, but like others here I just think that uploading paid content like what's happening right now is very problematic in question to the site's preservation. Dehumanizing creators and asking them to just go suck it up is not the right way to go about this; hence it's worth taking a look at the options we have.

At that, I'd like to really take a look at the "how" instead of the "why". We should already be in agreement that the rampant uploading of paid rewards is infact a huge problem; for the fact that our relationship with creators is a sort of push-pull rhythm. They create content, we help them be discovered. But it is insanely scummy the circumstances right now.

Most artists, CJK, western or otherwise, when they make note of the fact that their paid content is being uploaded somewhere else for free (especially only within a day or two in some circumstances), they immediately request or demand either part or all of their content be removed. Right, so we mark them as "banned users" or we simply ban the offending content (as in dishwasher's case). But we're not really removing it; we're gating the content behind privileges that can be acquired by simply paying for a membership on this site.

And then sprouts the idea in some regular uploaders' minds, hey! If we just **upload** the paid rewards, get the artists' content banned automatically, then we can continue to upload their paid rewards willynilly, without fear of repercussion or reprisal. Then we'll have it tagged, archived, zipped and sent off to the races. Problem solved, yes?

Except empirically looking at it, there's no way other users won't figure out something is up, much less the artist themselves. Then it becomes a pain in the ass for everyone; there's precedence that we're indirectly "selling" a membership to view paid "curated" content (which sounds pretty illegal to me); regular users no longer can view their work; and it negatively affects creators' operations and might possibly cause the closure of many of their own accounts, even to their legitimate patrons, because one way or another it gets out there.

I get that we're clear on this much. But then either all of it is okay, and we go full blown piracy website and risk some serious trouble with hosting and legal issues, or we discourage it as much as we can, because there are clearly better sites to get this stuff from (see nonamethanks' comment). People who want to find it will be able to.

I will not talk about the circumstances in which or how effective artists gain income from their patrons or to the extent that digital piracy affects them, because it's speculative. And I know this problem is not unique to paid rewards. But the reason people feel so strongly about this is because of how much it affects creators directly. They don't take a commission or offer of work from a larger company, they're literally just doing what they love and providing a special service for their fans.

Leaks will happen. Hell, even I've leaked a ton of paid content (and continue to do so in more private and personal settings, as I've subbed to many creators on fanbox/fantia/patreon and crave more). Honestly I wish every artist out there wasn't so annoyed about it and would just acknowledge that it happens, but not everyone who does it is bad. It's just our appetite for beautiful, sexy, or lewd art is insatiable, such that it would be **impossible** for anyone without a decently high salary. This article is something I agree with and refer back to at times, so I understand this much; but until that understanding is commonplace it's better just to curtail it.

(Or not. Convince everyone here that a digital piracy free-for-all is the way to go, and that's that.)

I'll close out with this -- the notice on the paid_reward tag is really to put up the facade that we're doing what we can to get offending posts out the eye of any rampant leechers and people with the wrong idea. But as OP mentioned, there are no real consequences to doing this. The circumstances allow nothing to be done to an offending user. There ought to be at least some measure of determent.

P.S. Danbooru is FOSS code. If someone wanted, they could just create their own derivative where paid rewards are uploaded without repercussion. Hint.

EDIT: thing, and another thing

As long as there are other sites archiving Patreon-only content, I don't believe there's a need for Danbooru to pick up slack. They can deal with the inevitable fallout from that, not us. It's similar to how we translate a lot of webcomics and doujins, but close to zero commercial comics (which have loads of other resources).

Indeed! While it's a pain to not be able to find it on danbooru, I keep mentioning that other sites exist for this kind of thing.

It would probably be ideal to avoid posting any content that is or will be paywalled just to avoid the hassle that comes with that. Paid content that later becomes free could be uploaded when it actually does go free. That's just ideally speaking, though - in practice, we'd probably be using the post ban request thread as well as a hypothetical whitelist request thread for the mistakes.

One question is what would happen if the artist got banned or closed their account entirely, making all of their images technically no longer paid content. I would tentatively suggest allowing that to be posted in some capacity.

A post ban request thread would be fine -- it really wouldn't be used that often because that's a pretty rare occurrence anyway. We'd likely see more "post unban" threads from the rampant lack of care being used with the paid_reward tag (as some taggers fail to check the original link, or mistakenly mark it as such).

If a bad id or spirited away artist has paid content, I'm fine with saying it's fair game. They'd have to come out of the woodworks to dispute it, so... yeah.

Dysprosium said:

I thought Danbooru was, first and foremost, an archival site. To archive anime-artwork from Japan. That was how it's been for over a decade. To upload good art from Japan in order to preserve it. So that if something happens to the artist or the platforms that they host the art on, they can still exist elsewhere.

I think it was less for archival purposes, even if that element played a role, but rather to make the aforementioned good art from Japan more accessible. It wasn't until 2007 that Pixiv had launched, and by that point, Danbooru had been roughly around for 2 years. Nicoseiga wouldn't launch until late 2009, and Nijie launched in 2012. Prior to 2007, while there were likely services akin to Pixiv, they weren't nearly as widespread and, more often than not, art was contained on the blogs and websites of the artist or wider doujin group in question.

With users on imageboards reposting art from such sites, and regular folk being unable to navigate the webs that were Japanese websites due to their unfamiliarity with the language, Danbooru became the spot for properly sourced and credited art originating from Japan and elsewhere in Asia, that was also simultaneously more accessible than the original source, at least for non-Japanese speakers.

Dysprosium said:

99% of artists in Japan don't want any of their artwork reuploaded anywhere, by anyone other than themselves, paid or otherwise.

I'll also take the moment to bring up the diversity of reasons that may influence a Japanese artist's reasoning.

feline lump said:
One question is what would happen if the artist got banned or closed their account entirely, making all of their images technically no longer paid content. I would tentatively suggest allowing that to be posted in some capacity.

But that's the thing. If all paid rewards are barred from being uploaded from hereon, then by the time the source is gone or deleted, it's already too late.
There may be previous patrons who have it saved to their hard-drive and now they have an excuse to upload it, but they can no longer link a source anyways because the source is gone. It'd be that harder to confirm legitimacy.
We could scrape the images from other re-uploads on other sites, but that means the other sites are doing a better job of archiving/"curating" good art than we do (if they aren't already).

But that's the thing. If all paid rewards are barred from being uploaded from hereon, then by the time the source is gone or deleted, it's already too late.
There may be previous patrons who have it saved to their hard-drive and now they have an excuse to upload it, but they can no longer link a source anyways because the source is gone. It'd be that harder to confirm legitimacy.
We could scrape the images from other re-uploads on other sites, but that means the other sites are doing a better job of archiving/"curating" good art than we do (if they aren't already).

There.

Are.

Better.

Sites.

And ain't that the truth; if you dig around long enough you'll find third-party sources that do an even better job archiving the lost content of a dead patreon/fantia/fanbox paywall. Danbooru only keeps images; a lot of paid rewards you might be seeing are coming from PSD/clip files, which we absolutely don't handle. Nor is it every uploader or contributor's duty to contribute the accompanying title/caption text, which some of these sites do automatically when provided with a user's session ID, allowing automatic retrieval of content they've unlocked from who they're supporting. Seriously, these sites exist.

I can go on and on about it, but the best advice is kept simple and short: mind your business. If you know what I'm talking about, keep it here. We don't need to open Pandora's box.

Uh, so do we have reached the consensus? Following this thread since beginning and ended up switching sides for many times.

Ne_Obliviscaris said:

Uh, so do we have reached the consensus? Following this thread since beginning and ended up switching sides for many times.

There's never gonna be a consensus.

.grey said:

There.

Are.

Better.

Sites.

There's no better site than danbooru for tagged art. Yande.re doesn't tag, exhentai only offers stuff in bulk and gelbooru is gelbooru.

nonamethanks said:

There's no better site than danbooru for tagged art. Yande.re doesn't tag, exhentai only offers stuff in bulk and gelbooru is gelbooru.

There are significantly more active and comprehensive sites for archival of paid rewards, to the extent that Danbooru not hosting them wouldn't jeopardize their existence online.

Rule34.xxx / e621.net are bastardized DB-clones with more art, but much lower moderation quality.
I trawl the former quite often, and while you CAN find Patreon Reward art there, it's rarely tagged as such (assuming it's even tagged with the artist/characters/copyright).

While I understand that we need to do something about the Sakimi-chan (etc.) accounts, other people are right: if Patreon ever decide to ban 2D artists en-masse (e.g. how they already banned loli), all those sources are GONE and you better hope someone uploaded them to EH/EXH.

There are significantly more active and comprehensive sites for archival of paid rewards

And again, none of them of the quality of danbooru. Try searching by tag on exhentai or yiff.party and let me know how that works for you.
It's like saying that deviantart or pixiv are a better alternative to us for quality art - you gotta wade through 99.9% of shit to find that 0.1% you want.