New Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Community Rules

The Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and site rules have been updated. The changes are summarized in this thread. If you have any questions, you can post them here.

The short version is this:

• The Terms of Service have been rewritten. Most of the site rules have been moved to the wiki. The ToS is now mainly about legal concerns.
• The Privacy Policy has also been rewritten. It now goes into much greater detail about how data is collected and used.
• The upload rules are now at help:upload rules.
• The community rules are now at help:community rules. These rules cover comments, the forum, and all other interactions between users.

See below for more details.

Terms of Service

The Terms of Service have been totally rewritten. The key points are:

• You must be 18 years old to use Danbooru. This is for legal reasons. Don't post your age and it won't be a problem.
• Using multiple accounts to break rules or evade bans isn't allowed. If you have multiple accounts but aren't causing any trouble (for example, you have multiple accounts to separate favorites), then it's fine.
• Selling or sharing accounts isn't allowed.
• Harming the site or other users isn't allowed.
• Everything uploaded to Danbooru is the sole responsibility of the uploader. We take no responsibility for any content uploaded by users.
• By submitting content to Danbooru, you give us the necessary rights to use that content, now and in the future.
• Other rules are described in help:upload rules and help:community rules.

Privacy Policy

The Privacy Policy has also been rewritten. The key points are:

• Almost everything you do on Danbooru is public, unless stated otherwise.
• Even things that are private, such as private favorites, downvotes, or private messages, may be visible to Moderators or Admins for moderation purposes.
• You can't delete your Danbooru activity. You can rename or deactivate your account to disassociate your name from your Danbooru activity, but you can't delete your Danbooru activity entirely.
• We keep server logs of all activity on the site. This is for monitoring and operational purposes. These logs are only kept for a limited amount of time (currently only a few days, but possibly longer in the future).
• We store your IP address whenever you edit something on the site. Moderators can see these IP addresses.
• We don't sell your data to advertisers or to any other third parties.
• We only provide user data to third parties as necessary to run the site, for example, as part of using services like Stripe, Cloudflare, and NewRelic.
• There are some clauses about linked accounts, for example, linking your Danbooru account to Discord or Twitter. This feature isn't available yet, but will be in the future.

There haven't been any changes to our actual data collection or privacy practices. These new policies are just a more detailed description of our current practices.

Community Rules

The community rules are now at help:community rules. These rules cover all interactions across the entire site. They replace the forum rules (topic #4782, topic #6690) and the old comment rules (howto:comment). Key points:

• The main rule is: don't be an asshole.
• The new rules are mostly an extension of the previous comment and forum rules.
• If you're wondering about some of the new rules, most of them are in response to issues we've had in the past.
• The "no hate speech or slurs" rule is an extension of the previous "no racism" rule for comments. I know some people will wonder what counts as hate speech. This will be up to the Mods. The intent of this rule is to say that we're not 4chan, so don't act like it.
• Some of the old rules from howto:comment have been removed. These include the rules about jokes, one-liners, and emoticons. This is intentional. The community rules are focused on things that are ban-worthy. Dumb comments may be annoying, but they're not usually ban-worthy by themselves. They should just be downvoted instead.

Upload Rules

• See topic #17092 for discussion of the new upload rules.

Sorry for a weird question but the legalese in the new TOS is kind of spooking me

By submitting, posting, or uploading any Content to the Site, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. You agree you are responsible for any Content you provide to the Site, including compliance with any applicable laws, rules, and regulations. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.

By submitting Content to the Site, you grant Danbooru a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, create derivative works from, allow downloads of, and display Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed.

Don't uploaders (with the exception of self-uploaders) by definition NOT have these rights and authorities? How can we grant Danbooru the right to copy/modify/etc. when those rights belong to the artist? There was a lot of talk in the paid reward thread about hypothetical copyright lawsuits; if that were to happen now, does this mean it will be individual contributors facing legal action rather than the site itself?

fossilnix said:

Don't uploaders (with the exception of self-uploaders) by definition NOT have these rights and authorities? How can we grant Danbooru the right to copy/modify/etc. when those rights belong to the artist? There was a lot of talk in the paid reward thread about hypothetical copyright lawsuits; if that were to happen now, does this mean it will be individual contributors facing legal action rather than the site itself?

It's legal speak to basically say that Danbooru is not legally liable for content users upload, as long as copyright infringing content is removed as soon as a legal notice is received.

Needs verification / updating:
help:upload
howto:contribute
| Mention about banned artists and paid works.
howto:deletion_appeals
| Link to help:upload_rules, if need Terms of Service & Privacy Policy.
help:deletion_appeals
help:home

Should howto:comment be blanked/redirect to the new rules, given that they've been superseded as per OP?

nonamethanks said:

Should howto:comment be blanked/redirect to the new rules, given that they've been superseded as per OP?

I think since the new community rules are specifically things you can be punished for, howto:comment might still be useful for what is generally preferred behavior when commenting, even if they're not things that'll get you in trouble.

Reword them a bit to be guidelines rather than rules, and explain that these things may not get you banned, but they may earn you negative attention from other users. Just cause it's not ban worthy doesn't mean it will be tolerated by the rest of the site.

For now I left a note at the top of the rules section, and changed help:report notice to link to the community rules instead of howto:comment.

Can we update the howto:upload wiki already I feel like thats been on the back burner for far too long

iori98 said:

Can we update the howto:upload wiki already I feel like thats been on the back burner for far too long

I've added a "forbidden" section at the top. I've removed the notice about banned artists because it was completely wrong.

Is deleting the "banned artist" section the best idea though? People are still supposed to be discouraged from uploading them.

Shinjidude said:

Is deleting the "banned artist" section the best idea though? People are still supposed to be discouraged from uploading them.

Why? There are no rules about that anywhere.

Unbreakable said:

Why? There are no rules about that anywhere.

Same reason you shouldn't intentionally upload any content that's going to be deleted. I don't really get the section deletion, it seems more or less correct (if in need of a minor rewrite).

feline_lump said:

Same reason you shouldn't intentionally upload any content that's going to be deleted.

Banned artist posts doesn't get deleted though so I don't understand the reasoning.

Unbreakable said:

Banned artist posts doesn't get deleted though so I don't understand the reasoning.

If we're splitting hairs, then yes, status:banned is a separate, more severe status than status:deleted (visible to less people and requires more mod intervention). It still follows the same logic of not posting anything that's not supposed to be here.

That whole section was wrong:

• Banned posts aren't "unconditionally deleted", they're banned. When this line was originally added in 2010, status:banned didn't exist yet, so it really did mean that posts would be status:deleted.
• You can't search the wiki for "no-post artist" to find banned artists, most banned artist wikis don't contain that phrase (and it's not necessary anyway, there's already a banned artists index).
• Danbooru is not a "strictly non-profit site". We can't just call ourselves a non-profit organization, there are legal implications to calling yourself that when you're not.

howto:upload needs to be deleted and rewritten from scratch. The whole thing is way too wordy, poorly organized, and outdated. There's no way anyone who needs to read this is actually going to read it. I can't even read it myself without my eyes glazing over.

The official rules are in help:upload rules and help:community rules. Anything outside of these pages should be treated as non-binding advice.

evazion said:

howto:upload needs to be deleted and rewritten from scratch. The whole thing is way too wordy, poorly organized, and outdated. There's no way anyone who needs to read this is actually going to read it. I can't even read it myself without my eyes glazing over.

The official rules are in help:upload rules and help:community rules. Anything outside of these pages should be treated as non-binding advice.

Little changes for help:upload & howto:contribute for first time.
help:upload i find on Upload page (new post). Maybe need replace help:upload to help:upload rules with check old content from help:upload as migrate to "All In One".
I already write about pages, because after your message did this changes. Another text need full review.

P.S. After review this page need locked this.

feline_lump said:

If we're splitting hairs, then yes, status:banned is a separate, more severe status than status:deleted (visible to less people and requires more mod intervention). It still follows the same logic of not posting anything that's not supposed to be here.

Let's be frank, there's no rule against posting banned artists, as long as you tag them on upload. It's not "more severe" and it's not "not supposed to be here". They're hidden from anonymous and member users, not forbidden. Also most banned posts fall under status:banned status:active.

As for the upload howto, I'm tempted to try and rewrite it, but I think the current version, as evazion said, should basically be thrown away.
The primary points would be

• upload only high quality posts (we can go into details but nobody's gonna read an academic dissertation on anatomy)
• tag them well
• use the bookmarklet

I've seen a lot of people complain that it's hard to start uploading on danbooru because they are too scared of the high bar, and when you reassure them it'll be fine and direct them to the howto:upload page they go cross-eyed because it basically starts listing reasons why they shouldn't be uploading.

We should be encouraging people to contribute, not scare them away. The moderation queue will take care of the image quality.

The current page is ridden with messages like

Efficiently compressed images. Generally this means images that are clear and yet have a small file size for their quality.

Images with large file sizes without a good reason. When Danbooru receives a large file, we expect it to be a large print-quality poster-size illustration with hairline details. However, many images with large file sizes have been simply blurry scans saved in 24-bit PNG format.

Which are simply not true. I'm not even gonna talk about the "creed" section.

help:forum - like "See also" as table (link as button), or like old style as simple link as in about:upload_limits?
Since we are discussing here a little more than the new rules.
If moderators and administrators consider it necessary, then redirect discussion updates all "general wiki pages" in a new topic (or exist). Then it would be possible to discuss updating other man pages, a template for finding them in help:toc.

Bump.

evazion said:
...

• You can't search the wiki for "no-post artist" to find banned artists, most banned artist wikis don't contain that phrase (and it's not necessary anyway, there's already a banned artists index).

...

This was thanks to the "untouched" artist template here.

Travley_ZeroFaithedHypocrite said:

Bump.

This was thanks to the "untouched" artist template here.

That whole page should be nuked, all of the information is wrong or outdated.
The "database" entry is already reachable from the wiki page itself. Also, creating wiki pages for artists is now discouraged, especially if the reason is to leave a critique about their art, which we certainly don't want.