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

NWF_Renim said:

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.

I'm with Renim on this.

Yeah I'd be fine if it's either Builder+ or Gold/Plat users that have grandfathered access.

This topic is bogus. The very nature of this moral concern is conflicting with itself.
While I agree that paid rewards are something should probably be delayed as others have pointed out, taking action purely off of ethics goes against the heart of the site (along with other booru-like branches) to do anything at all about it.

If you want to do it for the sake of showing courtesy to the authors, I'm afraid you're in the wrong. It's disrespectful to reupload art artists haven't given you consent to. Assuming it's fine because they haven't said anything about it is a bogus point that shows you're selectively determining what's moral and what's not. For that matter, bad id posts should all be hidden off the site entirely. Absolutely nobody should be able to see those anymore. You're not taking into account how they feel. Clearly the artist doesn't want anybody to see them for they have gotten rid of their artwork, ignoring the fact that someone else has gone ahead to preserve it indefinitely for everyone else to see.

Is it self-integrity that concerns you? Let's do it the correct way: Nobody gets to upload anything anymore; users are now required to bind their artist accounts (e.g., pixiv, deviantart), and only these users ought to be authorized to upload and delete artwork. Give them full control over how to handle it so that they can do whatever they want anytime, as long as it is their art they're fiddling with.

Danbooru is a big website, but at the end of the day this won't really accomplish anything. There's other pages that also reupload out there, there's even some bigger ones with less "integrity", but I don't think I've ever found anybody complain about that. Users are consumers, they see what they want, enjoy what they get, and move on with their lives. Such is the cruel nature of the internet, it's not something you can really stop.

To close off, I would like for us to through a moral excercise together: How many anime series or manga have you financially supported to have the right to watch or read against those that you have acquired for "free"?

Zupi said:

This topic is bogus. The very nature of this moral concern is conflicting with itself.
While I agree that paid rewards are something should probably be delayed as others have pointed out, taking action purely off of ethics goes against the heart of the site (along with other booru-like branches) to do anything at all about it.

If you want to do it for the sake of showing courtesy to the authors, I'm afraid you're in the wrong. It's disrespectful to reupload art artists haven't given you consent to. Assuming it's fine because they haven't said anything about it is a bogus point that shows you're selectively determining what's moral and what's not. For that matter, bad id posts should all be hidden off the site entirely. Absolutely nobody should be able to see those anymore. You're not taking into account how they feel. Clearly the artist doesn't want anybody to see them for they have gotten rid of their artwork, ignoring the fact that someone else has gone ahead to preserve it indefinitely for everyone else to see.

Is it self-integrity that concerns you? Let's do it the correct way: Nobody gets to upload anything anymore; users are now required to bind their artist accounts (e.g., pixiv, deviantart), and only these users ought to be authorized to upload and delete artwork. Give them full control over how to handle it so that they can do whatever they want anytime, as long as it is their art they're fiddling with.

Danbooru is a big website, but at the end of the day this won't really accomplish anything. There's other pages that also reupload out there, there's even some bigger ones with less "integrity", but I don't think I've ever found anybody complain about that. Users are consumers, they see what they want, enjoy what they get, and move on with their lives. Such is the cruel nature of the internet, it's not something you can really stop.

To close off, I would like for us to through a moral excercise together: How many anime series or manga have you financially supported to have the right to watch or read against those that you have acquired for "free"?

Morality is not a ledge where you're either the bastion of integrity on top or fetid scum down below. It is a sliding scale akin to a mountain, and we are not required to be at its pinnacle. That being said, we can still strive to reach greater heights, and this is an easy way to do so.

For that matter, bad id posts should all be hidden off the site entirely. Absolutely nobody should be able to see those anymore. You're not taking into account how they feel. Clearly the artist doesn't want anybody to see them for they have gotten rid of their artwork, ignoring the fact that someone else has gone ahead to preserve it indefinitely for everyone else to see.

The decision that results in a bad_id tag is not always made by the artist. Plenty of them have had their accounts suspended (especially on sites like Tumblr and Twitter) against their wishes. Trying to sort through all of that is an impossible task that requires knowledge we have no way of obtaining.

If you want a "real" reason to do this that isn't part of the "be nicer to artists" campaign, then this could potentially prevent Danbooru being the target of a huge shitstorm should motivated people find out that Danbooru essentially offers pirated paid rewards for its own financial gain. Imagine if an artist with the reach of Sakimichan discovered this, became (justifiably) outraged on Twitter and managed to motivate a large number of artists to get their art purged (not banned) from the site. While unlikely, the end result is a big loss of quality art on Danbooru and the potential for related trolling/abuse for years afterwards. A relatively simple change now could nip that problem in the bud.

NWF_Renim said:

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.

The whole reason I made this topic is because it's wrong to be offering content that artists are selling for free. Usually I would agree that yes, removing features that could have been a deciding factor in one's decision to make a purchase is wrong. However, the premise of a decision motivated as such is inherently wrong to begin with, since it's to see stolen content. I don't exactly have a problem with removing access in this case. That being said, if the only way to proceed is to have a grandfather clause I would begrudgingly accept it.

AngryZapdos said:

If you want a "real" reason to do this that isn't part of the "be nicer to artists" campaign, then this could potentially prevent Danbooru being the target of a huge shitstorm should motivated people find out that Danbooru essentially offers pirated paid rewards for its own financial gain. Imagine if an artist with the reach of Sakimichan discovered this, became (justifiably) outraged on Twitter and managed to motivate a large number of artists to get their art purged (not banned) from the site. While unlikely, the end result is a big loss of quality art on Danbooru and the potential for related trolling/abuse for years afterwards. A relatively simple change now could nip that problem in the bud.

Banned artists aren't listed anywhere as a perk for gold+, officially it's just loli + shota + toddlercon. Someone looking for that kind of content is more likely to go search for it on Gelbooru or Sankaku than buy an account here just for them.
But besides that, are we talking about paid rewards or all status:banned here? Because paid rewards are 5% of all banned posts. It makes no sense to hide everything else too for that kind of concern, when there's no money to be even hypotetically gained for 95% of those posts.

And again, the same kind of argument can be made for doujinshi, scans and game cg. If one has to be banned the the rest needs to be too.

nonamethanks said:

And again, the same kind of argument can be made for doujinshi, scans and game cgs. If paid rewards have to be banned the the rest needs to be too.

There are plenty of game cgs, doujinshi pages etc. that are uploaded for free in order to promote the work.

skylightcrystal said:

There are plenty of game cgs, doujinshi pages etc. that are uploaded for free in order to promote the work.

Sure, but that's the minority of what we have. Most are pirated rips or scans uploaded to exhentai and similar sites.
game_cg source:none: 24k posts.
game_cg source:*e*hentai.org*: 3k posts.

scan source:*yande.re*: 10k posts.
scan doujinshi: 8.6k posts

And the vast majority of what's under source:*e*hentai.org* (30k posts) are pirated content (artbooks & doujinshi scans from comiket/reitaisai/similar events).

Then of course there's all the artists that have "do not repost" notices in their accounts. Some even put it in their commentary: see this commentary search or this. These are incomplete results and only show a small fraction, because when commentary was optional most people didn't include it.

As for the grandfather arguments: there's almost 20k gold+ accounts. If a shitstorm like that happens then it will happen regardless of whether new users will be able to see them or not. Of course allowing existing gold accounts to see them makes tools like Decensooru trivial to keep using and demonstrate to further fuel such a shitstorm. One only has to periodically collect all image urls for inaccessible posts from an old account, and there's no way to trace it back to whoever did it.

For context, I ran some statistics on the danbooru BigQuery, here's some interesting results:

We have 326 banned artists, but the number grows to 709 artists with at least one banned post (they probably asked for specific content to be removed but not all of their works).

number of artists with at least one paid reward banned: 29
for game_cg: 22
for doujinshi: 17
for scans: 32
for official art: 44

I believe that you can add a new function to the description of a blocked artist. This feature is visible and editable only to users with elevated rights, regardless of whether there is a general lock on the artist.

Description of the function.
On the description page, a list of options for accessing content:
Access blocked
Access in the form of blurry pictures is allowed;
Access to previews is allowed only - i.e. access to the full picture is blocked and an even smaller preview is created for pictures the size of a preview.
The second parameter is the ban duration:
Constantly;
X days from the date the picture was uploaded;
X days from the ban date (ban status) - i.e. after the expiration of the ban artist is removed.

By default, a permanent ban on access to the picture at the request of the artist and in the absence of limited access conditions. A notification about the ability to change the level of restrictions should be sent in response to the request of the artist.
Full access with this prohibition is valid for users with content management rights - for example, a moderator to check the correctness of the artist’s tag relative to the image. Alternatively, you can generate a picture of a certain size and quality, sufficient for verification.

https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/help%3Ausers
As previously written, no one promised access to such images to paid accounts. I think there’s a request from the administration to send a link to the wiki to the page https://danbooru.donmai.us/user_upgrade/new - it can be made as a separate "help" button in the menu. Perhaps it’s worth creating a separate wiki page "help: user_upgrade" with a mention that the rights (opportunities) of users can be viewed at the link (above), as well as a brief summary about paid accounts.
If paid accounts now have access to banned data beyond the agreed one, then:
Change conditions for new payments.
Older account options have two options:
Leave the current option with access, or deny access and apologize for the inconvenience with the increase in limit levels (compensation).

{(Used google translate for write large comment)}

If we're gonna be talking about possibly banning paid rewards, then we should probably clarify something related to it first; should images from sites like patreon/fantia/fanbox/etc be tagged with paid reward even if they're freely available? I've seen posts on here before with the tag even though you don't actually have to pay any money to see the images from their source site and was always bewildered by this.

Ars said:

If we're gonna be talking about possibly banning paid rewards, then we should probably clarify something related to it first; should images from sites like patreon/fantia/fanbox/etc be tagged with paid reward even if they're freely available? I've seen posts on here before with the tag even though you don't actually have to pay any money to see the images from their source site and was always bewildered by this.

No, paid reward should only be used if you had/have to pay money to get it.

At the very least, I feel that artists that have directly requested their art to be removed and have been set as banned artists because of it should have their artwork removed from view for any purpose outside duplication detection; whether that means Mod+ or Admin-only access, I'm fine with either. The fact that it could even be interpreted that the site profits off of paywalling art that has had a removal request filed for it is negative in all sorts of ways.

When it comes to paid rewards, it's a slightly more grey area. The argument could be made that uploading any art is theft at its core, stealing clicks and views away from the artist even when the original is posted "for free." I feel our sourcing, tagging, and artist entries do a good job of negating that. However, when the viewer is specifically and directly intended to pay for access to an image and we host it, that's clear-cut piracy. A lot of internet users are obviously okay with that; personally I'm not.

From my point of view the basic reason behind any argument for keeping access open in either case is personal greed, whether it's behind the excuse of a desire for a "perfect" image backup repository or a more direct feeling that one shouldn't have to pay to see pictures.

One thing with regards paid content - there are quite a few cases where a paid version of an image is uploaded to the site, when a free (often lower resolution) version is also available - which then isn't uploaded because it's an inferior version to something already on the site. It's largely for this reason that I stopped refusing to favourite any paid rewards on this site. If paid rewards are to be blocked, then perhaps we should actively seek out these versions of the images that are made freely available by artists to upload for a while before the actual blockage happens, so that people can move their favourites over to this version of the image that continues to be available. Perhaps a notification could be sent out to users regarding this as well, although that could create drama...

Regarding banned art it's always been my view that when an artist actually requests something to be banned then that should be respected properly, and simply sticking an image behind a flimsy paywall is certainly not respecting it properly. If people want to make official art for works where the artist is not the copyright holder (as some have argued in the past) then I don't care about that, but this shouldn't be used as an argument to justify continuing to make the rest of these works available.

I agree with Zupi, paid rewards should not be hidden. If the artist wants it gone nothing is stopping them requesting removal. It's sad to see the morality plague going around has made it here too.

I'm not against this mostly because we don't need to give reason for an army of artists a reason to ask for their content to be removed and the bad PR and fallout that could come from that. As far as image boards go, we have a fairly decent reputation and respect artist's requests to ban content when they make them. It'd be good to keep it that way.

Danbooru doesn't work without a "ask forgiveness rather than permission" policy, but I try not to go out of my way to post things that the artist clearly marks as "do not repost". It's not strictly against the rules, but it feels disrespectful and something that might lead an artist to complain on social media about us or put in a request for all of their content (even when not marked) removed. Paid content gives me the same feeling, but even moreso since there is even more of an incentive for the artist to react.

I don't know that we should necessarily make it a hard and fast rule worthy of punishment (since one might come across paid content in another channel and not realize that it is paid content), but it might be a good idea for us to set a good-faith policy not to intentionally upload paid content, to flag it if anyone notices it, and have it removed from public view. I agree with OOZ662 that even if we decide to allow people to continue to post paid material (sometimes the artist does release it with their blessing), that would should at least hide already banned content.

I do buy the argument that scans and doujinshi etc could also be construed as "paid material", but the level of access to western audiences makes me feel that it's different enough from easily available online content that we treat the two cases separately.

nonamethanks said:

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.

This isn't completely accurate. Even if it isn't officially mentioned anywhere today, long-time users know that years ago, the account upgrade page specifically listed access to banned posts as a feature of having a Gold or Platinum account. Users who upgraded during this time have the right to be upset about losing an advertised feature that they paid for. If access to banned posts is taken away, they'll need to be grandfathered or offered refunds.

Sorry for the delayed response, things have been keeping me from the forums lately.

I feel like grandfathering perms to gold users won't solve anything.
I feel the main problem about "gold/platinum users being able to see banned content" is that people can pay to access content that shouldn't be viewable to them. Builder+ makes sense because these users work for the site. If it's made mod+, my only complaint would be on an archivist point of view (bad_id banned_artist comes to mind, their artworks will be pretty much deleted off the face of internet unless someone saved them in advance), but as long as they're on the site they're not completely lost i guess.
Probably the best way of action would be to issue refunds.
As for doujinshi: minust and hajin requested to have their artworks removed after someone uploaded pool #15217. I feel that if we want to minimize losses they should be added in the paid_reward section too.

+1 for Builder+, -1 for leaving it as it is, and neutral on Mod+.

Making banned content Builder+ sounds like a good idea to me, and I fully support banning paid rewards. Danbooru is an archive site, not a piracy site, users shouldn't be encouraged to upload things an artist specifically put behind a paywall in order to make a living.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

As for doujinshi: minust and hajin requested to have their artworks removed after someone uploaded pool #15217. I feel that if we want to minimize losses they should be added in the paid_reward section too.

I strongly believe this would be more detrimental than beneficial, doujinshi are not inherently for profit. Some artists sell them at cons, some hand them out for free; Some sell them through online retailers, some don't; Some post them online for free at a later date. Blanket labeling anything tagged doujinshi or scan as a paid reward would needlessly include things that either weren't ever sold, or that the artist made free at some point after the fact.

You could instead go through each and every one and figure out which are actual sold products, but then what do we do if an artist makes it free later? Unban it and remove the paid reward tag? Everytime it happens? And all of this unnecessary babysitting because ocassionally an artist takes issue with us hosting art that the majority of the time isn't even available to English speakers.

Game CG, since it was mentioned, carries similar concerns. Not all Game CG come from a commercial game, and even for the ones that do, there's usually something more to it than just a collection of images, such as story or gameplay. You can't reasonably argue that hosting Game CG would seriously impact a game's ability to sell just because some art present in it is available for free viewing, unless that was the only appealing thing about it, but appeal is subjective.

Paid rewards from Patreon and similar sites differ because there's absolutely no doubt that they're trying to sell a product for profit. Doujinshi, even when sold, is not traditionally made solely for profit, but a Patreon reward is, and hosting that content for anyone to see without having paid for it directly undermines an artist's efforts to make a living off of their art.

blindVigil said:

Some paid rewards are released for free afterwards by some artists, and others don't mind them being shared (see hews' patreon intro for a very popular one). How is a paid reward whitelist different than a doujinshi whitelist?

blindVigil said:

I strongly believe this would be more detrimental than beneficial, doujinshi are not inherently for profit. Some artists sell them at cons, some hand them out for free; Some sell them through online retailers, some don't; Some post them online for free at a later date. Blanket labeling anything tagged doujinshi or scan as a paid reward would needlessly include things that either weren't ever sold, or that the artist made free at some point after the fact.

I never said "all of them", just those that aren't "publicly shared"