Topic: Imgur is removing all explicit content

Posted under General

abadbird

Janitor

It might be worse than just porn

We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform...

Unclear how far that goes, but that sounds like a lot of anonymously uploaded content is getting purged too. Would like clarification on that. I'd expect nearly all furry art on imgur was anonymously uploaded, but perhaps content uploaded many years ago still is not "inactive" by some definitions because it's linked by other sites like a FurAffinity submission page or e621 source that occasionally gets a click. For example, is one click every six months "inactive"?

And why upload to imgur anonymously, even SFW content? One less account. Reduce de-anonymization vectors.

I expect imgur can reclaim huge amounts of capacity from purging all those one-and-done anonymous uploads and removing itself as horny Reddit's porn CDN.

Wolfmanfur

Blocked

leomole said:
https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029
https://imgurinc.com/rules

You should rehost any content you want to save before May 15. Some alternatives are ImgBB (32 MB), Postimage (24 MB) and ImageBam/imgbox (10 MB).

If you have any advice or warnings please make them known!

I hope they are reposted too.I remember that several imagesI liked had a higher res variant on imgur.MCM21 has many alts posted on imgur, thankfully I have most if not all of them on my hdd.

alphamule

Privileged

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/hosting-site-imgur-will-remove-explicit-and-anonymous-content-next-month/ Welp, beat me to it, but here's an article I was going to link to about it. Tumblring down with that "removing unassociated-with-account content" :facepalm: This is exactly how Photobucket and Imageshack imploded. They're about to get banned as an image source on a lot of forums, I suspect. :(

kora_viridian said:
Maybe don't use imgbox. They are a spam-friendly host, and host a lot of images used in phish and scam emails. The only takedown method they claim to support is a full DMCA request, also known as "give us all your personal info so we can doxx you to our spammer customers".

DMCA has nothing to do with spam, unless it's selling fake/pirated/stolen goods? This is part of why it was soooooo tempting to just blackhole Yahoo servers if running email servers. They basically do not handle abuse. I seem to remember a lot of services just making you check your spam folders or manually adding incoming source addresses to a 'known senders' whitelist if from them.

Updated

alphamule

Privileged

kora_viridian said:
Most of the images I linked were put on Imgbox by the same spamming software. The spam email loads the image from Imgbox, and then uses an image map overlay to direct clicks to the spammer's site (via many redirects). The spamming software, or its operator, seems to rotate through image hosts for some reason.

A few months ago, they'd sometimes use Imgur as a host. When that happened, I could go to https://imgur.com/removalrequest , give just the image link and a short explanation (no Imgur login needed), and the image would actually disappear from Imgur a day or two later. (Or at least they blocked my IP from accessing it. adjusts tinfoil hat) Imgur was apparently smart enough to realize that all of those "you have definitely won a $100 Walmart gift card" or "your FedEx package is here, plz pay $5 to get it" images on their site were fake.

The only removal option Imgbox apparently supports is a full DMCA from the copyright owner, per https://imgbox.com/dmca . They go to some effort to claim that they will go after you for fake DMCA claims. In my experience, this is equivalent to a giant flashing neon sign that says "We're the perfect image host for spammers!"

Some of the images above actually do illegally use the copyrights or trademarks of the companies they are impersonating, including Kohl's, CVS, and DHL. In theory, if you could attract the information of that corporation's legal department, they could DMCA Imgbox and get the image taken down. In practice, I don't think the corporate legal departments care all that much.

Some of the images have been cleverly edited; the FedEx one just uses "Express" in FedEx's old logo typeface, and almost the FedEx colors. I am not a lawyer, but I feel this would make it harder for FedEx to make a successful DMCA claim.

I am painfully aware of this fact. :D The email address that most of those links came from is handled by Yahoo!. I do have the built-in spam filter turned on, and it kind of works, but at least one or two spams a day slip through.

The other kind of spam I get a lot of on that account are phish attempts. A lot of those are sent using already-stolen yahoo.com or other Yahoo!-hosted email domains. For those, all I can do is report the target site (usually Square or Weebly, lately); there is apparently no way to contact Yahoo!'s abuse desk about it.

There's another tiny little mail server that almost nobody has ever heard of, that sends me a lot of spam. Unfortunately, many mail admins are reluctant to blacklist outhook.com for some reason. >_>

Yahoo(no ! because they don't do almost any of the old services, Lulz) mail being spammers, shock! Oh, and the stolen addresses because reasons. Yeah. Outhook.com is even funnier. OutIook, Out1ook, etc. On some fonts, those look the same or close to it. :derp:

Trademarks don't actually have to be copied exactly, to be infringed, apparently. They use some "reasonable person expects" type of standard that is vague-sounding but functionally makes sense (the entire point of trademarks is trade). But yeah, not worth arguing unless it's something blatant and likely to lead to illegal competition. iPhony <-- Joke ;)

This actually begs the question on images that themselves are illegal. As in, nasty stuff that gets you in prison for creating, yet alone publishing.

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