It looks like using likenesses is a murky area to begin with (specifically, whether it's okay to use someone's likeness depends on the manner in which it is used), and one of the standards we have at OGA is that we want our assets not to be legally murky. It seems to me that we probably ought to be treating likenesses (be they political or otherwise) the same way we treat trademarks, and not allow them.
At this point I'm guessing that all of the likenesses of people on the site fall into one of two categories:
Posts of a political nature
Posts where the subject of the likeness has given permission for their likeness to be used (there are some posts where people have been drawn in a sci-fi or fantasy style, and since the people in question commissioned those works for that purpose, then there's no issue there)
I think what's important is if that we make a policy on this, we need to enforce it evenly, which means we'll have to enforce it on any post of someone's likeness where there isn't permission, and not just political ones (on the off chance that such posts exist).
As far as how describe your handling of political submissions:
I have been trying to be gentle with political submissions, but I don't know if it's as gentle/harsh as I should be. I have had success with requesting that the submitter "tone down" the political aspects of the comments, title, and description. I've tried to avoid asking for the removal of political aspects of the artwork itself, though. I don't know if that's best or not.
This is exactly how I think we ought to be doing it. By and large, my sense is that the community is willing to put up with art that has political aspects, provided the discussion centers around the work itself and not whatever political or moral concept the artist may be trying to convey. If someone starts getting really obnoxious or is trying to "test" the rules (as trolls often do), then we can take individual action.
Given your specific example of Dorothea the Cat Lady, it's my opinion that you did the right thing by asking them to remove political terminology. Likewise with the jam session post.
That being said, if these policies start driving people away in large numbers (or we get posts of one political persuasion or another dominating the archives of the front page) then we might need reevaluate how we enforce this stuff and be a bit more strict about it.
If it still exists, can you do me a favor and link to what MikeeUSA did to get banned (if it hasn't been deleted), and a place where he was given a warning that he would be banned? If we're missing some of this stuff, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, but I'd like to be able to refer to it if we need to clarify anything about this to the community. (Also, in general, in the event that we ban people, we need to be sure to preserve a record of the post that brought on the warning, the warning itself, and the post that resulted in the ban, so that we can explain our actions if we need to and be sure to act as consistently as possible.)
Thanks for all your help with the site. I really appreciate it. :)
Quick edit: To be clear, that post with Trump's likeness will probably have to come down based on the legal issues with likenesses. Unfortunately, we're going to have to thoroughly explain any reversals of admin decision, because people tend to get mad about that.
That was the right call. Once we issue a ban warning, we need to follow through with it. I don't want to set a precedent that we're going to allow people to walk all over us.
Status update: All nodes are indexed, and I just succesfully searched for something submitted on December 30th. Looks like search is working, but let me know here if there are any other problems.
Update; We're down to about 36,000 more things to index, so maybe I've caught all of the edge cases. Hopefully new items will appear in the search when all is said and done.
I'm sure it's way too late for feedback to on this to be useful, but generally my thoughts for dealing with this kind of thing is that once you warn someone and they continue to behave in the same way, it's clear that they're not willing to play by the rules. I'd recommend the following steps:
Remove the extra threads and ask them clearly not to do that again.
Warn them that doing this again will result in a ban. Lock the thread and preserve it so that we can point to the warning if someone accuses us of banning without warning in the future.
Ban them, with an explanation of why they were banned and a link back to the thread with the warning. Optionally, edit their posts to remove outgoing links so they don't get the SEO benefit from having spammed OGA.
I find that most people will respond to steps 1 or 2.
@MedicineStorm: The latest node to cause a problem doesn't appear to actually exist. I don't recall the node ID number, but further node IDs will be added to the watchdog log so I can go back and figure out what's up with them. My first guess is that when nodes are deleted, some orphaned data is being left somewhere in tthe database. Thus far, it seems like one or two nodes here and there that appear to have been deleted, as opposed to, say, an ton of nodes that should still be indexed.
Just a quick update: We've got some data corruption on a few nodes, and that's causing the indexing process to fail. I'm trying to alter the behavior of the indexing process so that it logs the corrupt nodes and then skips over them, which seems to me like a more intelligent way to do it.
Out of the roughly 60,000 items we need to index, a couple thousand got done last night before it failed again. There are multple cases that might cause it to fail, so I'm working on finding all of them.
I may have figured out why indexing is failing. I'm running a test right now that might fix it, but I expect it to take all night, if not longer. I'll post a status update tomorrow.
If this doesn't work, we'll talk about getting people set up with developer access.
As it has been explained why mikeeusa's page is blocked and we seem to be rehashing the same stuff over and over again, this thread is now locked. Bringing up this topic again will result in a ban.
So, wanted to post a quick note about this... I did a bit of googling on copyright law as it relates to likenesses of people, and I came up with this:
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-another
It looks like using likenesses is a murky area to begin with (specifically, whether it's okay to use someone's likeness depends on the manner in which it is used), and one of the standards we have at OGA is that we want our assets not to be legally murky. It seems to me that we probably ought to be treating likenesses (be they political or otherwise) the same way we treat trademarks, and not allow them.
At this point I'm guessing that all of the likenesses of people on the site fall into one of two categories:
I think what's important is if that we make a policy on this, we need to enforce it evenly, which means we'll have to enforce it on any post of someone's likeness where there isn't permission, and not just political ones (on the off chance that such posts exist).
As far as how describe your handling of political submissions:
This is exactly how I think we ought to be doing it. By and large, my sense is that the community is willing to put up with art that has political aspects, provided the discussion centers around the work itself and not whatever political or moral concept the artist may be trying to convey. If someone starts getting really obnoxious or is trying to "test" the rules (as trolls often do), then we can take individual action.
Given your specific example of Dorothea the Cat Lady, it's my opinion that you did the right thing by asking them to remove political terminology. Likewise with the jam session post.
That being said, if these policies start driving people away in large numbers (or we get posts of one political persuasion or another dominating the archives of the front page) then we might need reevaluate how we enforce this stuff and be a bit more strict about it.
If it still exists, can you do me a favor and link to what MikeeUSA did to get banned (if it hasn't been deleted), and a place where he was given a warning that he would be banned? If we're missing some of this stuff, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, but I'd like to be able to refer to it if we need to clarify anything about this to the community. (Also, in general, in the event that we ban people, we need to be sure to preserve a record of the post that brought on the warning, the warning itself, and the post that resulted in the ban, so that we can explain our actions if we need to and be sure to act as consistently as possible.)
Thanks for all your help with the site. I really appreciate it. :)
Quick edit: To be clear, that post with Trump's likeness will probably have to come down based on the legal issues with likenesses. Unfortunately, we're going to have to thoroughly explain any reversals of admin decision, because people tend to get mad about that.
That was the right call. Once we issue a ban warning, we need to follow through with it. I don't want to set a precedent that we're going to allow people to walk all over us.
Status update: All nodes are indexed, and I just succesfully searched for something submitted on December 30th. Looks like search is working, but let me know here if there are any other problems.
Update; We're down to about 36,000 more things to index, so maybe I've caught all of the edge cases. Hopefully new items will appear in the search when all is said and done.
I'm sure it's way too late for feedback to on this to be useful, but generally my thoughts for dealing with this kind of thing is that once you warn someone and they continue to behave in the same way, it's clear that they're not willing to play by the rules. I'd recommend the following steps:
I find that most people will respond to steps 1 or 2.
@MedicineStorm: The latest node to cause a problem doesn't appear to actually exist. I don't recall the node ID number, but further node IDs will be added to the watchdog log so I can go back and figure out what's up with them. My first guess is that when nodes are deleted, some orphaned data is being left somewhere in tthe database. Thus far, it seems like one or two nodes here and there that appear to have been deleted, as opposed to, say, an ton of nodes that should still be indexed.
I've found and added another possible failure case. 55509 nodes to left to index, as of this post. Might take a couple of days.
Just a quick update: We've got some data corruption on a few nodes, and that's causing the indexing process to fail. I'm trying to alter the behavior of the indexing process so that it logs the corrupt nodes and then skips over them, which seems to me like a more intelligent way to do it.
Out of the roughly 60,000 items we need to index, a couple thousand got done last night before it failed again. There are multple cases that might cause it to fail, so I'm working on finding all of them.
Hi folks,
I may have figured out why indexing is failing. I'm running a test right now that might fix it, but I expect it to take all night, if not longer. I'll post a status update tomorrow.
If this doesn't work, we'll talk about getting people set up with developer access.
Bart
As it has been explained why mikeeusa's page is blocked and we seem to be rehashing the same stuff over and over again, this thread is now locked. Bringing up this topic again will result in a ban.
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