Long time lurker, felt like it was time to make an ass of myself.

To be quite frank, I find it extremely annoying when artists remove content from e621 when the same content is available in the same resolutions at the same qualities on other sites. All they're doing is depriving people of an easy way to search the content.

Now obviously, if they don't want e621 to host this content, that's up to them. They own the art and they can do whatever they please with it, including attempting to selectively remove it from the internet.

What I'm thinking of doing is creating a site that pulls data from e621 about a post's last known source + last known tags. That data would be used to display the content from other sources (such as furaffinity) without me ever touching the image data itself. There are many ways to do this, ranging from fetching the FA page on the server and delivering the current content url (d.facdn.net) to simply using an iframe (would be uglier, but no way for FA to block it). All I'm interested in doing is allowing users to search through the posts using e621's tag system.

I'm curious as to what people think of this idea, and more importantly, if anyone can see any immediate legal issues with this idea. I'm of course not asking for any endorsement from e621 or any of its members.

*EDIT* Re-reading this, it's not as clear as I want it to be. I want to reiterate that I would not be hosting any content and wouldn't be allowing users to bypass patreon or other similar systems. It would simply be displaying publicly available content on another site.

Not a personal fan of the idea, and if you did it I wouldn't be surprised if e6 blocked the IP of said site so that it couldn't pull data directly from their servers.

1.) It'd be a drain on bandwidth that already stutters at times.
2.) I don't see them just letting it happen given their stance on respecting artists' decisions and slapping people that try to share links to removed content.

Wodahseht said:
Not a personal fan of the idea, and if you did it I wouldn't be surprised if e6 blocked the IP of said site so that it couldn't pull data directly from their servers.

1.) It'd be a drain on bandwidth that already stutters at times.
2.) I don't see them just letting it happen given their stance on respecting artists' decisions and slapping people that try to share links to removed content.

1.) I honestly don't think it would be that much of a drain on bandwidth, considering there is a publicly available API (and even a forum section for showing off apps you make with it!). They seem to be fond of the idea of side projects by users (albeit I can understand them not liking the idea of a site like this)
2.) If this were the case, why do the majority of deleted posts still have source links? www.e621.net/post/index/1/status:deleted%20hassource:true for all of them, or a more specific example is www.e621.net/post/index/1/status:deleted%20hassource:true%20strype

I believe only those of Janitor+ rank can view these deleted images, because they're the ones approving/deleting them.

And even then, I'm certain that they're respectful of paid content that is inadvertently or unnecessarily uploaded here.

From a legal standpoint, you can link whatever you want. Although some people don't know the law, even the law don't know the law, and The Pirate Bay gets taken down regularly despite never hosting content themself and only linking, as such being in the clear the whole time. Links themselves have no copyright and it's up to the web host to decide if those the user visiting the link is authorized to view the content or not.

From what I read, you do not intend to host the images, so you are in the clear. However e621, being the provider of the data, may prevent you at any time of using such data at their discretion. If you receive a cease and desist order from e621 for using such data, you must stop or you will be in violation of the terms of service(which may result in termination of your account and permanent shunning from the site).

_{I am not affiliated, or endorsed by, nor do I work for e621 or dragon fruit. My written text is not the word of e621 or dragon fruit and as such may not be fully or even partially valid. Please read the site's full terms of service for referencing of acceptable use.}

GameManiac said:
I believe only those of Janitor+ rank can view these deleted images, because they're the ones approving/deleting them.

And even then, I'm certain that they're respectful of paid content that is inadvertently or unnecessarily uploaded here.

I wouldn't be using the images hosted here. I'd be using the images hosted on furaffinity or elsewhere. For example: www.e621.net/post/show/597498/2014-antennae-anthro-arthropod-avoid_posting-beep-

The image may be deleted, but anyone can just click the source link to view the image.

asw_xxx said:
2.) If this were the case, why do the majority of deleted posts still have source links?

Not on staff, so I don't know, but most likely it's because those links usually go to the artist's source site. Meaning that people have to go to where the artist chooses to have their art to see it - which is what the artists wanted generally when they pulled their art.

Shared links that get slapped are ones that tell people how to get around going to source.

I don't know the legal and I don't know what e6's stance will actually be. I was just stating my piece.

I really don't have anything else to add on this topic so I'll leave it at that.

Wodahseht said:
Not on staff, so I don't know, but most likely it's because those links usually go to the artist's source site. Meaning that people have to go to where the artist chooses to have their art to see it - which is what the artists wanted generally when they pulled their art.

Shared links that get slapped are ones that tell people how to get around going to source.

I don't know the legal and I don't know what e6's stance will actually be. I was just stating my piece.

I really don't have anything else to add on this topic so I'll leave it at that.

Thanks for the input. This entire post thread is just here to explore the possibility of creating a site like this, I'm not aiming to get myself banned or put myself on bad terms with e621, its staff, or its users.

Flygon said:
From my point of view, a system where posts can be made, essentially, as automatic redirects to Fur Affinity posts would be neat.

I would assume it would settle a lot of artists issues with e621, and generate them additional traffic.

[To be clear, this means redirecting to the actual FA /view/ page, not the e621 server retrieving the image then showing it.]

Implementation is something I'm totally not sure about. It would be a neat feature, however.

Regarding the portion of your statement that I bolded; He's not saying either of these really, and especially not the second part about e621's site having anything to do with retrieving or touching the artist's content.

He's basically talking about something like a browser plugin/extension/script on your own machine, or a stand-alone website(though it would probably be better as the former option if possible), that would make use of the public availability of the following information on e621 and FA:

• e621, for deleted posts like post #875113, still contains all the previous tag data and source links. Anyone can go to that post's page, look at the tags, and see the link addresses (such as the direct FA image link which is: http://d.facdn.net/art/coffinberry/1309697158/1309697158.coffinberry_bbbbbbbbbb.png ) in the source field that lead to the image/submission hosted on FA.

• FA is hosting the actual image from post #875113 at the previously mentioned link. It's on FA's server, even though e621 has the link written down on their page for the deleted post.

So, with both of those bits of data being available to the public, he is proposing that his site/plugin will simply do the following:

• 1.) Go to e621, request and collect the publicly available tag and source-link data for some deleted post that anyone can get by going to that deleted post page.

• 2.) Go to FA, and request that FA send the publicly available image data from the source-link that was found on e621, just like if you clicked on that direct d.facdn.net link above with your normal browser.

• 3.) Take both sets of information/image data collected in steps 1 and 2, and simply redirect them to display alongside one another in a single-page format.

You can think of the final result as being almost identical to if you went to post #875113, hovered over the direct-image "facdn" source link, right-clicked it, selected "open in new tab" and then pulled that resulting tab with the image in it out into it's own window, resized it to be smaller than the e621 page, and floated that little window with the image in over the top of the e621 page for the deleted post, so that you could still see the tags to it's left. That looks like this:

http://imgur.com/X25EyST

At no point in that image did e621 touch anything of FA's, and FA had nothing to do with e621. A third party (me in this case) just decided to display their public info next to each other.

The only difference between what I just did there in that image and what I assume asw_xxx is proposing his thing will do, is that his would be faster, probably a bit prettier, and automatic.

Qmannn said:
The problem with this idea is that a post's information can't be edited after it's been deleted, at least not by Members. Imagine attempting this with a post that had only a handful of tags or no source. Then there's the possibility for wrong information that can never be corrected.

This is why I feel a free to edit external database would be helpful.

Or perhaps let deleted posts be edited? They obviously still have value as the OP seems to be indicating.

Qmannn said:
The problem with this idea is that a post's information can't be edited after it's been deleted, at least not by Members. Imagine attempting this with a post that had only a handful of tags or no source. Then there's the possibility for wrong information that can never be corrected.

This is why I feel a free to edit external database would be helpful.

...but how do you know what has been deleted if it only had handful of tags and no sources?

Idea itself is actually fantastic, because images are publicly available already by artist themselves - and that's exactly the reason why I do not understand someone not wanting their art not posted here specifically when they are literally everywhere else. Here are just the boorus from first google search alone:
http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=strype
https://uberbooru.com/posts?page=1&tags=strype
http://furry.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=strype
https://uberbooru.com/posts?page=1&tags=strype
http://rule34.xxx/?page=post&s=list&tags=strype
http://xbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=strype

Issue I can see arising from this is content that is actually not available publicly and post having source to image/file sharing site or some chan. But if the plugin/site/whatever only acts with the whitelisting idealogy (e.g. only posts from art sites allowed) then I don't see any problems with it, unless some artist starts throwing tables from the idea about users watching their stuff from location they themselves put it.

What I would do is expand Crispixis idea by doing browser plugin which simply replaces the white "deleted" image with the one from source automatically. Just add red borders to even more clearly indicate that it was deleted and text with link where the image is fetched from. Thing is, how useful will the idea be in the end? Because if artist is DNP, the amount of art there are posted here is quite small and it's just easier to click on source link at that point.

It's pretty clear asw xxx wants to make this site so personal opinions on why it is a "bad" idea needn't apply.

Let's look at the legal side of this. In terms of copyright law iFraming is not hosting. You do however have to keep the site unaffected so that it not modification and you also can't make the iframe look like its part of yours without it being misrepresentation and possible trademark violation.
It can be limited by the terms of service. Since FAs ToS does not prohibit Iframe and it allows reproduction of copyrighted works through the use of the service (browsing the site in an iframe) you never trigger copyright but your users would which just means they must then follow FAs ToS which copyright holders had to give FA the ability to host their content.
Incidentally I do not think this is a legal issue because the copyright holders gave FA the right to reproduce the work in any manor that the service is provided. So as long as the ToS allows it (doesn't disallow it) it is not violation.

Qmannn said:
I'm not debating their value, I'm just saying that we currently don't have that ability.

Also, since there's no content associated with a deleted post anymore, who's to say whether any potentially incorrect information is wrong? A post could have been created with two sources pointing to two completely different images, but we'd have no idea which is correct short of using The ImageBoard Search Engine or a different booru that links back to the post where the post hasn't been taken down (assuming it's linking back to the right post). Plus, we'd still have no way to prevent anyone from completely changing the tags and sources to what's essentially a blank post.

As for using e621 for this in general, something else not taken into consideration is that we can't create blank posts. Any of an artist's work uploaded after they've been put on the DNP list would be either by somebody unaware or a martyr.
Well, that's why I said or. A post lacking both an artist tag and any sources would be worthless after it's deleted.

The sources have a history. I agree that if it never had a source or all are dead its a lost cause but essentially because the source is suppose to be.. the source it is canonical and can be used to tag the post. It just can't be loaded automatically on e621.

Thanks for all the discussion so far!

There are a few ongoing questions I think I can answer:

• This would very likely have to be an external site, or at the very least if it were a chrome extension it would probably require an external database's connection. I'd allow "editing" of deleted posts in this way. (Tracking the changes on my own database, which the chrome extension/site fetches).
• This obviously wouldn't work for all posts. There are a lot of posts that don't have sources directly to images, or could have sources to the wrong image. However, there is a partial solution: http://iqdb.harry.lu/ has all images from the past three years or so indexed, and has not deleted them if the posts have been deleted. This means that posts fetched from sources could be compared to make sure they're the same image as was originally uploaded to e621. I'd probably ask him to send me his database though so I don't end up ddosing him.

I'm not very familiar with the topic, since i've never really bothered to find why someone deletes his images from e621.

What i want to ask if e621 deletes sources from deleted images or not?

If it does, then as a "developer" using e621 API i'm pretty sure the only thing we need is source in deleted file's API.
I don't see anything bad in that information.
Here's an example of deleted API result:

https://e621.net/post/show.json?md5=6a2de39db1be57d120e77970c8e02544

Here's a result of active post's API:

https://e621.net/post/show.json?id=879468

Notice the missing "sources" block. If we get that back i can easily code (update mine) a tool that will download the image using it's source page.

If those sources usually don't exist because they are simply not tagged: well, too bad.

Two solutions for in that case:
1) Code a website that will search for blacklisted artists every n minutes and archive the page before it gets deleted. It's a pretty "evil" solution, but hell, i'm Russian.
2) Allow everyone to edit removed posts pages. Maybe someone will be bored enough to add sources for all deleted images.

Jackal32 said:
It's pretty clear asw xxx wants to make this site so personal opinions on why it is a "bad" idea needn't apply.

Let's look at the legal side of this. In terms of copyright law iFraming is not hosting. You do however have to keep the site unaffected so that it not modification and you also can't make the iframe look like its part of yours without it being misrepresentation and possible trademark violation.
It can be limited by the terms of service. Since FAs ToS does not prohibit Iframe and it allows reproduction of copyrighted works through the use of the service (browsing the site in an iframe) you never trigger copyright but your users would which just means they must then follow FAs ToS which copyright holders had to give FA the ability to host their content.
Incidentally I do not think this is a legal issue because the copyright holders gave FA the right to reproduce the work in any manor that the service is provided. So as long as the ToS allows it (doesn't disallow it) it is not violation.

Question. With such an external iFrame, if a user like myself no longer agrees to the ToS of FA and thus no longer uses their site, or another user happens to be banned from FA; Would I be correct in assuming that by viewing the externally linked image that this proposed site provides, I would be bound by FA's ToS or They would be evading the ban placed on their account?

I doubt FA's admins or IMVU would pick up the idiot ball again and throw legal nonsense at asw xxx as it'd be such a small fish and a waste of time and resources, but this obviously would bypass the account requirement to view adult or mature rated posts as someone above said. Which, personally I don't have anything against THAT, but I am somewhat curious.

Keito said:
-snip-

The sources are still accessible from the HTML page, they're just not accessible from the api currently. Not sure why this is. Another thing that would be super helpful is if I could get the MD5 sums of deleted posts, but I'm told this is off limit for some reason.