I'm not sure how this came about, but I just received a warning against posting paysite content of a particular artist (floofnfluff). I'm unsure of how this is possible, since the images were sourced from an archived public discord, not Patreon or any other paid service, and the images are the same as other publicly available twitter pics, just as pngs.

What exactly have I done wrong? Is discord considered a paysite? Or is there some misunderstanding I'm missing?

That's a good question. I've seen posts replaced with higher res or lossless versions from Discord, but it seems DubsTheFox went and removed the Discord PNG sources and replaced the images with Twitter JPG versions. Has there been a change in policy regarding Discord sources I'm not aware of? Or is there something about that artist's Discord channel that makes it not public while others are?

That's what I'm wondering. Nothing in the feedback notice I received in any way related to what I had posted. I guess it was a mistake or some change has been made to posting guidelines I'm not aware of.

Either way, I'd definitely like to have this figured out, as I was planning on adding more images from discord in the future and this really makes me hesitant to do so.

Looking into this, it looks like that artist's discord is for patreon membership only. So if it's part of their patreon membership access and rewards, then it's behind a paywall and anything released there but not for free elsewhere would still be considered paywalled content. So that's what happened here.

Some artists have open discords where anyone can join it and they freely share some of their work that way. Which is fine.

But in this case, their discord is not listed anywhere as available to the public, that I can see. It's also not listed in their twitter profile as inviting the public to join it that way either. But more importantly, access to their discord is explicitly listed here https://www.patreon.com/floofnfluff as one of the pay benefits for all of their tier rewards. So that frames their discord as a patreon reward and as being behind a paywall. Which means anything released on their discord... is also paywall content.

So that is definitely something to check for and to be careful about in the future. Some discords are for subscribers, so it wouldn't be considered a free official source for that artist in that case.

bitWolfy is the one who gave you the record - so I'd assume any appeal would have to be DMailed to them, there's a good chance they'll never see or read this forum post.

When uploading content from Discord it's usually a good idea to include an invite link in the sources or description so janitors can verify that it is in fact a public source, the image link alone doesn't really tell them anything about where it came from, and could actually be from a server that only Patreons are supposed to have access to.

edit: Didn't see furrypickle's response before replying, but I think everything I said is still valid enough.

furrypickle said:
Looking into this, it looks like that artist's discord is for patreon membership only. So if it's part of their patreon membership access and rewards, then it's behind a paywall and anything released there but not for free elsewhere would still be considered paywalled content. So that's what happened here.

Some artists have open discords where anyone can join it and they freely share some of their work that way. Which is fine.

But in this case, their discord is not listed anywhere as available to the public, that I can see. It's also not listed in their twitter profile as inviting the public to join it that way either. But more importantly, access to their discord is explicitly listed here https://www.patreon.com/floofnfluff as one of the pay benefits for all of their tier rewards. So that frames their discord as a patreon reward and as being behind a paywall. Which means anything released on their discord... is also paywall content.

So that is definitely something to check for and to be careful about in the future. Some discords are for subscribers, so it wouldn't be considered a free official source for that artist in that case.

The discord in question is not part of floofnfluffs official Patreon but a previous discord where they shared their art, along with numerous other ABDL themed artists. The channel in question is called ABDL Galleria and it is free to join by anyone. The art was shared freely by the artist and was archived in a separate channel after floofnfluff made their own for Patreon members.

I figured since they had knowingly left the art with their permission that there wouldn't be any issues with uploading them. I suppose it looks suspect to anyone who isn't part of the discord itself.

Just add it to the pile of even more problems with artists using Discord to post art. Makes it practically impossible to trace and verify an actual source.

sallynator said:
The discord in question is not part of floofnfluffs official Patreon but a previous discord where they shared their art, along with numerous other ABDL themed artists. The channel in question is called ABDL Galleria and it is free to join by anyone. The art was shared freely by the artist and was archived in a separate channel after floofnfluff made their own for Patreon members.

I figured since they had knowingly left the art with their permission that there wouldn't be any issues with uploading them. I suppose it looks suspect to anyone who isn't part of the discord itself.

Well, since I'm here already...

I investigated the server, and yeah, the archived artwork is there, posted by what appears to be the artist.
I'll remove the record. The posts themselves have been replaced with publicly available version from the artist's Twitter – I will have to discuss them with the janitor responsible for that if we want to revert those.

I reversed everything, and toggled the penalty. I am sorry for the inconvenience.
^{_{(but "artist has a paid Discord", and "user uploads from a Discord source", is very sus)}}

bitwolfy said:
Well, since I'm here already...

I investigated the server, and yeah, the archived artwork is there, posted by what appears to be the artist.
I'll remove the record. The posts themselves have been replaced with publicly available version from the artist's Twitter – I will have to discuss them with the janitor responsible for that if we want to revert those.

dubsthefox said:
I reversed everything, and toggled the penalty. I am sorry for the inconvenience.
^{_{(but "artist has a paid Discord", and "user uploads from a Discord source", is very sus)}}

Appreciate it. I guess for next time I'll try to make it more clear where it was sourced from, but as you said, Discord doesn't make it very easy.