Hey y'all!

I've been posting art here for sometime but the Rule34 repost bot bothers me a little. Personally I don't want my work re-uploaded to another site outside of this one, so is there a way to prevent it from reposting my work there? thanks!

and in case you don't know what I mean, here is 1 of 17 examples:

https://rule34.xxx/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=9324016

If there are any tags I can use so I can avoid any further incidents let me know please!

nothing you can really do about it,
you can try contacting them via the DMCA button they have at the bottom of the sites homepage or via the DMCA button near the top of the webpage when you are under the post tab.
From what I have heard it doesn't always do much though.

(also a little tip if you dont already know, if your art software allows you to export as "APNG" that is MUCH better quality then a GIF,
Mairo would be able to explain better then me, but, one of the major benfits is that you won't need to deal with the color bands that you get from GIFs)

yetanothertemp said:
nothing you can really do about it,
you can try contacting them via the DMCA button they have at the bottom of the sites homepage or via the DMCA button near the top of the webpage when you are under the post tab.
From what I have heard it doesn't always do much though.

(also a little tip if you dont already know, if your art software allows you to export as "APNG" that is MUCH better quality then a GIF,
Mairo would be able to explain better then me, but, one of the major benfits is that you won't need to deal with the color bands that you get from GIFs)

I was worried so, I just sent out some DMCAs recently to their support email as instructed, I hope i manage to hear back from them.

Also thanks for the tip on the APNG format! I'll be sure to utilize it on future animations when my opportunity arises!

Not really new news, they have been leaching content from us for years.
Basically same post and some tags, with zero effort and all the ad revenue traffic.

If you are the artist, you can pursue a DMCA takedown of your artworks from the site. That is if they even respond to those to begin with.

There is really not much you can do to prevent bots from scraping publicly accessible content.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Not really new news, they have been leaching content from us for years.
Basically same post and some tags, with zero effort and all the ad revenue traffic.

If you are the artist, you can pursue a DMCA takedown of your artworks from the site. That is if they even respond to those to begin with.

There is really not much you can do to prevent bots from scraping publicly accessible content.

Ugh.... you gotta be kidding me. I mean I kind of assumed that, but wow, that sucks.

Looks like I might as well just DMCA everything from now on whenever I upload a new post if that's the case :(

verkonos said:
Ugh.... you gotta be kidding me. I mean I kind of assumed that, but wow, that sucks.

Looks like I might as well just DMCA everything from now on whenever I upload a new post if that's the case :(

There is a way around it, I think. You can get them to automatically reject anything with your artist tag? Depending on stupid or lazy (or good) the admins are there, they'll cooperate or not. XD The real problem is that there's 7 billion people out there, a not small number can run a page, and it's trivial to just copy files.

An interesting aspect of this is that it's got a sort of node structure. Some sites scrape a specific other site, that in turn aggregates from a popular one like e621. It gets weird when you see the watermarking sites (scummier than slime molds). Point is, if you get the few well-known ones cooperating, in theory you can reduce the odds of smaller sites having it greatly.

If the admins (at rule34.whateverTLD) want to reduce work, they'll just blacklist the tag. Which is also why it's kind of important to source your uploads, originator or not!

R34 doesn't permit underage content, so in theory I guess you could include, in the corner of the image, a kitten as part of your signature to make it technically qualify for the "young" tag, which would probably make the bot skip it like it does Safe posts.

yetanothertemp said:
nothing you can really do about it,
you can try contacting them via the DMCA button they have at the bottom of the sites homepage or via the DMCA button near the top of the webpage when you are under the post tab.
From what I have heard it doesn't always do much though.

(also a little tip if you dont already know, if your art software allows you to export as "APNG" that is MUCH better quality then a GIF,
Mairo would be able to explain better then me, but, one of the major benfits is that you won't need to deal with the color bands that you get from GIFs)

Gonna quickly add that Twitter dosn't support APNG, but. e6 does.

votp said:
R34 doesn't permit underage content, so in theory I guess you could include, in the corner of the image, a kitten as part of your signature to make it technically qualify for the "young" tag, which would probably make the bot skip it like it does Safe posts.

LOL, the human tag on AGN.PH's Dexter-bot works that way. It's on a Discord bridge so to play it safe... they block anything remotely likely to trigger a forbidden image.

yetanothertemp said:
Gonna quickly add that Twitter dosn't support APNG, but. e6 does.

Hell, they have the worst compression quality settings on JPEGs, too. I think they support WEPB, at least. Twitter is a replacement for phone (text) SMS/MMS, and thus is not exactly aimed at preserving quality. There's a reason that cell phones resize images you send, too.

I agree that there needs to be a more automated way of preventing the bot from uploading them in the first place. On the plus side, there's few upload bots, right? Like, AFAIK, AGN.PH makes it easy to get a tag excluded. Sane way is to make DNP automatically add a filter. Add MD5's to blacklist, to be even more sure, in case non-bot user tries to do it? But then you run into malicious tag edits. Sigh, this is why we can't have nice things.

Hmm, gathered the info together for convenience:

alphamule said:
There is a way around it, I think. You can get them to automatically reject anything with your artist tag? Depending on stupid or lazy (or good) the admins are there, they'll cooperate or not.

They are not likely to do that.

They refuse to keep a DNP list like e6 does, since it's too much work.
At least, that was their justification last time I heard from those guys.

I've sent the rule34.xxx moderators a decent amount of takedowns in the past for my art, in which we have a dedicated email thread for it- I ask them to take down a post with my tag and they'll just do it since they know it's me. However I haven't had to take anything down in over a year, because their bot hasn't scraped my work in a good while. If you do enough takedowns [and, potentially, put yourself on CDNP] it seems like they blacklist your tag from the bot automatically to prevent further work on their end.

I wish you luck on dealing with this, it is extremely annoying.

alphamule said:

Hell, they have the worst compression quality settings on JPEGs, too. I think they support WEPB, at least. Twitter is a replacement for phone (text) SMS/MMS, and thus is not exactly aimed at preserving quality. There's a reason that cell phones resize images you send, too.

They actually used to support APNG. But they don't now. Mairo says it's probably because they realized it wasn't compressing it or something.

I think this whole topic has been discussed many times and main points are that if there's some obstacles or hinderances to avoid these bots from working, they will simply work around it. Pretty sure even e621 direct URL uploading has many bypasses for websites hotlink protections.
Additionally these obstacles can have negative effect on actual users of the site.

Also the content posted here is always public, site doesn't own any of it and a lot of it is sourced from other free and public sources, so dictating that it's now our content is wrong as well.
Sankaku Complex does that where they hide source of the post behind registeration, so if you like the content on their site, you have to register to know where it originated from.

votp said:
R34 doesn't permit underage content, so in theory I guess you could include, in the corner of the image, a kitten as part of your signature to make it technically qualify for the "young" tag, which would probably make the bot skip it like it does Safe posts.

Knowingly falsely tagging post here, regardless of reason, is againts rules. Regardless of the reason, so please don't tag posts as young just to avoid bot detection.

alphamule said:
Hell, they have the worst compression quality settings on JPEGs, too. I think they support WEPB, at least....

They do, but the file they host is still either JPG or PNG and that WebP is simply transcode from that file like all other samples.
It's to be seen if they flip this around and default to WebP hosting and start transcoding to JPG samples at some point.

yetanothertemp said:
They actually used to support APNG. But they don't now. Mairo says it's probably because they realized it wasn't compressing it or something.

Twitter started to support GIFs back in the day through MP4 conversion as that allows you to make them super small filesize and have additional controls like stop autoplaying and allow pausing (because they are now videos).
APNGs bypassed this system, so now Twitter had much larger files all of a sudden all over the place, people could post multiple on single tweet (they didn't use to allow multiple GIFs or videos in same tweet, only one), they were automatically downloading and playing and looping for everyone (because they are now animated images instead of video files), etc. so they had bunch of issues, including that epileptic people who had autoplay turned off now had epileptic files on their face.

Their official reasoning was the epileptic people part and explained that it didn't go through same "safeguard" (aka MP4 conversion pipeline) that GIFs do.
https://twitter.com/Support/status/1209171739374014465

cinder said:
They are not likely to do that.

They refuse to keep a DNP list like e6 does, since it's too much work.
At least, that was their justification last time I heard from those guys.

From what I have understood, a lot of boorus do not have DNP list or they have gotten rid of it over time.
I think Gelboorus reasoning was along the lines of if it's content that's shared freely online already, then it's not up to staff to enforce artists rights and they are already DMCA compliant, but [CITATION NEEDED].

It's definitely massive amount of extra work with only yelling from artists if it's not done properly and yelling from commissioners when their commission is once again deleted for no apparent reason.

mairo said:

Knowingly falsely tagging post here, regardless of reason, is againts rules. Regardless of the reason, so please don't tag posts as young just to avoid bot detection.

If it's in the image, it's in the image. I'm not talking about a false tag for something that isn't in the image, I'm talking about adding content to an image specifically to qualify for a tag.

votp said:
If it's in the image, it's in the image. I'm not talking about a false tag for something that isn't in the image, I'm talking about adding content to an image specifically to qualify for a tag.

you mean like how dumderg has a little character as her signature? if so than I encourage any artist who wants to do that to go for it! it'd be really funny to have some raunchy yiff but have an entirely unrelated little cub in diapers slapped over it just to contest scrappers lol

of course there's still some user-hostile trappings here aswell; that art it gonna also be hidden from both unregistered users and members who added young -rating:safe into their own blacklist, and if it's an edit not done by the artist themself then that's also probably gonna rub staff the wrong way. but if they're alright with the former and not commuting the latter than, again, go for it!