What do you mean by “contribute to the community”? If you mean (only) creating/uploading scripts, then no, I don’t contribute. I don’t know how to create a script and to be honest, I’m not hugely motivated to learn.
However if you look at my post history you’ll find that I’ve replaced a lot of missing video files from people’s posts after Mega links expired or tube take-downs and that I’ve imported and re-shared other people’s videos so they can delete their copies or I’ve uploaded higher-res versions of the original scene. Doesn’t all that count as contributing, even if I don’t do anything with scripts?
I don’t like blanket statements such as “people don’t contribute” where unless you’ve looked at each persons’ site history and know what they’ve done, you can’t possibly say truthfully that it is the case.
Regardless, we shouldn’t be sniping at each other - the majority verdict seems to be to allow editing on posts for extended/unlimited time so the focus should be communicating that, not taking shots on each other.
I’m not sure he knows what’s mean of “contribute to the community”… if he criticizes people who don’t script, who script for money, and enlightened amateurs who script 3-4 things to try, there won’t be many people left. It’s obvious that if you spend 10-12 hours a week making scripts, paid or free, it’s obviously for the community. Who else would it benefit?
Doing work for the community is just as important as ensuring benevolence towards them, because without you, we’re not going anywhere, and if we’re mistreated, we won’t stay.
Anyway, thanks a lot to help us in the discussion.
Speaking strictly for myself, I’m only ever benevolent towards people on here, mainly because:
a) I appreciate what people do on here
b) I don’t want to get banned
c) Just because it’s the internet doesn’t mean we can’t be nice to each other.
I have no beef with anyone on this site, about anything. If for some reason I don’t “like” you or your content, I just won’t look at what you created. It’s that simple - at least for me.
You’re not being mistreated. Site rules have changed, perhaps without due consultation, you don’t like it and you think you’re being ignored. That’s not mistreated. If you feel so badly about the situation, I’m sure the mods will delete your account if you ask nicely then you can put all your scripts etc on a site of your choosing that runs the way you want it to. Or you can build your own version of this site where you have full control. You have options. Or you can just work within the framework that is provided.
We’ll just have to see what happens when @Hugecat gets back.
(This is a repeat of my post here, for visibility on what I believe is becoming the main area of feedback on the issue for mods/admins. If you’ve already read that one, this is the same)
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My main issue with the wiki-post solution is the whole “editable by anyone” aspect. If they wanted, someone could right now just essentially nuke most of the howto section, and it’d likely be a lot of work to get it back the way it was. Now take that, and expand it across all the Scripts/Script Collections/other posts. All it would take is one person with a grudge to effectively wipe out the entire site, assuming everyone makes their posts into wiki-posts to preserve the ability to edit them in the future. Sure, nobody’s had a reason to do this yet. But I’d like to not give them the opportunity, if possible.
If there were a way to make it so certain wiki-posts were only editable by specific people (plus mods/admins probably), I’d be more on board with it. And maybe that’s possible? I don’t know. But right now it feels like we’re about to just take out our front door entirely and just assume nobody will try to rob us because it hasn’t happened before.
I’m annoyed about the rule, because we wasn’t concerted before deciding, and that obviously I am not alone in this case, in not approving a restriction of freedom at this level.
I don’t blame anyone, but as I said, we have no better union than ourselves, creators, to defend our working conditions. It’s a debate that we can obviously have, and I would actually feel better if unanimity had voted for maintaining this rule (in terms of accepting the whole thing), otherwise obviously I would prefer that we listen to the majority who would agree with me).
There is nothing ad nominem. As for being hassled, I was thinking about the person I was talking to who seemed a little too eager for the tone of the conversation.
But everything is fine.
The polls are starting to materialize and I hope that the mods will make the best decision which will be the result of the vote.
I posted in the other thread (Boycott), but thought about some other things over the course of reading the topics that I’d like to comment on.
Firstly, on the topic of scripts and works being “creative commons” and ownership rights.
(My opinion) In the case of the TOS and how this is stated, ownership implies that the site will not take the works of the creators and sell them outside of the creators knowledge to make a profit. That is my take on what “ownership” is in this case due to the fact that said scripts have already been freely distributed. Simply not removing content that has previously been freely distributed by the creator does not imply taking ownership.
On the topic of distribution of scripts, removing scripts, and/or making them paid instead of free you could argue that the site is not responsible for how a creator shares their work. Making a post and attaching a free script to the post is done at the creators discretion. Another option which allows the creator to stay in control of distribution of the script is to link to a site like mega allowing for downloads. A link that no longer points to Mega allows the creator to stop sharing without an edit to the original post. I wanted to show that there has always been an option as a creator to limit access to scripts without the need to edit a post here. For the future, this may become a “best practice” way to do things.
As for the collections threads, I 100% would hate if anyone could edit a thread containing a massive collection of all the work(s) I’ve done. That would be something I would not agree with.
The topic of GDPR came up in the other thread. I did read some of the details linked to me and also wondered where these posts would contain protected personal information covered by the law. I think that many people assume this covers anything and everything involving an individual… from comments to posts, works of art, etc. The way I read the law is that it involves personal data that makes someone identifiable. (Addresses, tax number, ID number, SSN, etc.) In a few posts, I view the comments about GDPR as a threat instead of civil discussion. Letting someone know they are not in compliance to a law and how they are not specifically compliant is very different than saying there will be a complaint filed because of your actions. Let’s be very clear, hiring a lawyer to review the details to make an educated suggestion on the topic would cost thousands of dollars/currency you use. If you want to use this in the discussion, please be more specific in how this applies rather than linking the law and saying you are not following it. Perhaps even link historical cases as reference to show how it has been previously decided to help in making decisions without the use of expensive lawyer fees.
I don’t think that @hugecat has been uncivil during these discussions, and I understand that it has been a decision to “preserve” the site.
I would like to say that if the ability to grief is there, at some point you WILL have an issue. Please do not assume this can and will not happen.
Take this time now, as a mod/owner of the site or whatever. Create a site account and redo the posts for what people would deem “necessary or required information” How to" posts, information threads, etc. Should never been under a specific person. As such to anyone who makes these threads or involves themselves, know that these should never be removed. No one expects someone else to stay here forever. Should @hugecat decide to leave at some point or anyone else (and choose to delete) the community should not be negatively affected by the decision from an information stand point. This account should never be up for deletion.
A final note for @hugecat and the mods. Please understand that the idea of historical preservation of a persons content for betterment of the site is a bit misguided in the case of actually being achievable. People will eventually leave, move on, etc. and some may decided to leave their content forever for the community and others may decided to do a massive wipe of everything they did. Both decisions should be respected. From a mod’s position, try to preserve community information and posts rather than an individuals. More people will come and develop content as others leave…and thats ok.
I support the ability to edit a post.
I see no difference from that and someone saying they want a full delete (when it comes to how it will affect the site, links, references, and community as a whole). I would suggest, at least for now to revert the change.
Please let me be very clear in the fact that nothing I’ve said here is to attack anyone or their thoughts on the subject. Yes you can consider me one of these
If anyone wants to consider me this. That is fine. Check my date on when I joined. The fact that I’m posting now is because I support the community and want to help in resolving the issue.
Imagine the situation that someone will write a script that will simply go through all the topics with scripts in a few seconds and in several iterations (5-10-20-20-50-100) on each page will change the content - this applies to wiki pages. This is in the case that the change will be applied automatically, and moderators then roll back these hundreds of thousands of changes.
Imagine a situation where a moderator has to manually apply a change to every change that the scriptors want to make - this again applies to wiki pages - that would be dozens of people with a 24/7 work schedule.
Maybe you should have just banned the user - so that he doesn’t delete his topics, rather than blocking the changes for the whole site. But this is just an assumption - I don’t know how it was in reality.
By the way it is probably the right idea - to limit users to change their topics/messages no more than 5 changes per day + ban for a week in case of multiple (even 20) attempts with a message to the moderator with attention to the activity.
Again, the quoted sentences are a reply to hugecat arguing that posting something here automatically license it under creative commons, which is not the case (and anyways there are plenty of CC licenses to choose from).
Putting something for free on the internet doesn’t remove your copyright on it, if not expressly licensed (or governed by some ToS) it just falls under regular copyright rules, where the recipient is only granted private usage and fair use (or equivalent).
If this becomes best practice, I’d say that it would be worse than what hugecat is currently trying to prevent. Now scripts could disappear for whatever reason on the host side without any indication on ES whether a script is still available or not.
Also, I don’t think anyone is really arguing for editing as a tool to be able to delete a script, since that script was always available in the history anyway.
Editing later on is useful for plenty of use cases as already mentioned in this thread:
I don’t disagree with anything here. I was clarifying my opinion on the TOS ownership statement. I believe some people may have took the inability to remove their work as taking over ownership.
When I say best practice, I mean for a creator who wants complete control over what they produce. Will it eventually leave holes when people leave? Yes. This leaves us with questions…
In the same respect, people who still have the content could post their copy as a replacement for the link. We see this all the time with a video that may have gone down on older posts. The problem I see here is when a creator doesn’t want their free script shared anymore or they moved it to paid.
I don’t think there is an easy solution to moving a free script to paid. Marking to not share a paid script is easily understandable. Moving forward, if someone leaves the site and someone wants to share a historical (free), no longer available script how do you propose that is handled? Should anyone be able to share in the requested thread? What about in the case of non-responsive creators who may have moved on?
My point here is that there are many situations to be taken into consideration here in the effort to preserve the site. Again this is in response to people either choosing to delete or who may just disappear from the community.
As I stated before, I’m for being able to edit. I see the benefits. From a user standpoint I wouldn’t mind having all the information at the top, however I do scroll down a thread to look for better quality videos. So perhaps it is on the user to check for updates after the initial post. Maybe that is too much to ask. There have been times where someone within a thread makes a suggestion to another creators version and I’ve found that amazing. I would have never seen it without reading through.
I will add though. Updating an old post will almost always get less attention than making a new post. I tend to only look at new posts most of the time. When a script gets an update or multi axis, the only time I catch it is when I look at the latest posts (every once in a while). I wish I had an SR6 to check those out, but that probably wont happen till the launch finally dies. When that happens I expect to have to search for multi axis updates which will be a pain.
Thanks for the convo.
Again I hope we all work this out civilly without the massive freaking out. I don’t want to go to multiple sites for scripts tbh.
Firstly, thank you for the work you do to keep this site running. However, knee-jerk reactions are often misguided. Knee-jerk reactions without consulting other stakeholders are worse. Knee-jerk reactions that upset so many of the people very important to the site are even worse. Ignoring those complaints and doubling down on a knee-jerk reaction by leaving it up while you are absent for several weeks is, imho, a big mistake.
If it was truly a knee-jerk reaction, you should roll it back and have a better conversation with the community that doesn’t lead to a hasty solo decision. With SLR currently ruining the scripting market, the last thing we need is for you to chase off the excellent scripters we have here for a hasty mistake. We already have that SLR boss acting like this to his customers (e.g., insisting his bad ideas are somehow for our own good) - we don’t need it here.
I don’t see how chasing off some of the most talented and prolific scripters on the site to preserve the occasional old thread is worthwhile. I want to see new scripts as VR evolves, and have them in one place. I dont want a museum of old archived scripts from blurry 2016 porn, while all of the current scripters head off to who knows where. You should be more concerned with keeping creators than with keeping old posts.
I assume only hugecat is the site admin that can revert these changes? Not even the moderators could revert this change?
Seems pretty bad to make a knee jerk reaction change to a large and active community without a conversation first then unable to revert or converse with the community for 2 weeks right after you made this change that you have no clue whether the community will absolutely hate it or are ok with it to some extent.
Hi all, I just wanted to post here and say that we (the mod team) definitely didn’t expect this much backlash when discussing the change amongst ourselves, which was probably short-sighted of us, but that’s what you get when your site is run by a handful of volunteers and not a team of professionals
I’ve reverted the changes - once hugecat is back from overseas we’ll take another look at the issue that we were trying to address.
The text you post on here is, the scripts (attachments/links) are not. But creative commons still means you have ownership of your post.
Creative commons is a fallback for anything that doesnt have explicit ownership. It is more about protecting your content from bigger companies by giving basic ownership rights and therefor limitations for those companies. They can refer to this site for example, but cannot make profits doing so.
As they now know that anything posted on here isnt something free for them to use. They must ask permission if they want to do anything with it. Creative commons doesnt mean the site becomes the owner, it just sets the default licence. And this means that if you dont mentioned the licence, it uses creative commons as its default.
(note, i might have some mistakes on details here, but its about the rough lines: you still become owner, yet the licence is CC)
No it’s not. Please don’t spread misinformation if you don’t know what you’re talking about. Creative Commons (CC) are a series licenses that you can choose to apply to your content. There’s nothing automatic about it. If you read the ToS you’ll see that CC is only mentioned as an example of licenses you can apply to your content.
Also, as mentioned, CC are a series of licenses, CC BY-SA is a very different license than CC BY-NC-ND, so saying that something is under CC doesn’t mean anything.
See About CC Licenses - Creative Commons for details.
