So I have two questions of a somewhat serious nature;
Can we get more mods in the Minishops forum? I am finding myself in a bit of a situation that I somewhat resent. A while back a friend and I started a joint shop where we were doing some fanart in poses similar to the original poses of the characters involved but were clearly our own, unique pieces because they were templated lineart and the originals were sprite sheets. A few people came in and complained, caused a lot of drama, and the thread got shut down as breaking Gaia's Minishops ToS for use of copywritten images without permission within a week.
Now, a couple years later, I find this rule being violated EVERYWHERE far more blatently. I find shops that have art
so close to the original versions I can't tell it apart. Especially for styles such as My Little Pony, Adventure Time, and other easy-to-draw cartoons. People who draw fanart (and I'm not talking about making avatars into it but characters from the series) or use bases in the styles are everywhere. Further more, when I report them I never see anything done about them! I have been waiting a month for a shop selling nearly pixel-perfect MLP ripoffs that I reported to be taken down. Does it now take drama and a fight in a thread to get it taken down for ToS violations? Or could I rightfully re-start my own shop and expect the moderators to NOT take it down this time?
Not to mention the atrocity that is Personalized Graphics. I counted on the front page alone half the shops that were using graphics from professionally taken photos of celebrities for things like magazines, movies, and news reports.... These were pictures just snatched off of the first few pages of Google for chrissakes! If I went through the first 10 pages of shops in Personalized graphics and reported every ToS violation I'd be reporting 50 shops. And almost NONE of them give brush and texture credits. It's now commonly considered perfectly acceptable to pull whatever image you want off of Google to use in your personalized graphics shop. I'd happily report them all were it not for my fear of falling into the category of "abusing the report system" for reporting 50 shops! And I doubt many of them would be pulled.
The second thing I'd like to address is if you guys have any plans to change the <3</3 system. It's becoming a common problem for trolls to gather mule accounts and friends to mass-downvote topics. I saw a
charity today that had dropped from a rating of 118 to 86 in a matter of a few hours thanks to this sort of thing. I've experienced similar acts in my own threads and I'm not alone. I know of absolutely no one who likes this rating system better and dozens of people who absolutely hate it. The whole thing has just become a way for people to troll anonymously and bring people down. In fact if you have a troll on your tail for whatever reason you can frequently find a topic that has nothing but reserved posts and a rating of -5 without any content. There was even a period in time when people were selling downvotes in the services forum and you could buy up to 20 downvotes from a single shop!
I'd like to personally suggest the ability to simply turn off the voting system on your own individual topics to stop trolling. But there's tons of other ideas out there and I know lots of people for whom it has become a big problem... And I'd love to see some sort of change come to it.
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