[ADMIN] Official statement on grouping and resubmitting art

[ADMIN] Official statement on grouping and resubmitting art

bart's picture

This is a post about the bit of drama that's come up recently.  To the people involved, I apologize in advance for addressing this publicly, but I need to make sure people are aware that OGA has an official stand on this issue so that it doesn't come up again like this.  Please note that this is not intended to be punishment or a lecture.  The people involved have both apologized for the situation in separate comments, and I don't feel that any sort of penalty is needed at this point.  Rather, I'm putting my foot down right here and declaring this drama to be over so that it doesn't escalate further, because it clearlty doesn't need to.

As I see it, there are two issues at work here, which I will address in the order that they appeared:

Large numbers of small submissions

Occasionally, we'll get artists who, with the best of intentions, submit a large number of small items.  I did this myself when the site was new, because I thought it would make things easier to find.  Ultimately, it had the precise opposite effect, and the archive is cluttered with a bunch of old entries that should have been bundled into single submissions.

Another adverse effect of this is that it messes with the front page.  Unfortunately, there's never going to be a 100% fair way to make sure that all the art submitted here gets an even amount of exposure on the front page.  There just isn't room.  However, it's frustrating for an artist who might have spent many hours working on a large piece of work to have it immediately knocked off the front page by a bunch of small submissions that could have been grouped together.

Finally, we need to be aware of the fact that the purpose of OGA is for artists and game developers to collaborate.  Showing off your work is fine, but it's courteous to people who are looking for art is you group your similar items together in a way that's easy for them to find and download.  Your work will ultimately get more exposure this way.

Resubmitting and attributing CC0 art

First off, I'm sure most people are aware of this, but I'm going to repeat it here for clarity:  The CC0 license is equivalent to the public domain.  Legally speaking, anyone can do anything with CC0 art, and there are no requirements for credit.

However, as a general rule, even with CC0 art, we need to remember that if someone releases their own work on OGA (which they took time and effort to do), the respectful thing to do is credit them for it when it's reasonably possible.

Also, OGA understands that there are many purposes for art, and one of those purposes is to make statements.  That being said, if you are making a statement with a piece of art, and you ask people to link to OGA in your credits, please be mindful of the fact that you're implying that OGA is endorsing the statement that you're making.  I don't want to scare people away from asking to link back to OGA in their credits.  Just be careful. :)

What to do about it

First off, a quick note on how to change the author of a submission.  If a submission is credited to you and you want to edit the submission and change the author to someone else, look immediately below the license selection.  Where it says, "Is this your own work?", click the "no" option.  When you do that, a box will appear underneath it that will allow you to enter an author.  Also, if you request it, I or one of the other admins can actually change ownership of the submission to the actual author, but that's up to you.

Secondly, there are some coding things I've had on the back burner that might alleviate this situation, so I'm going to just bump them up and deal with them today.  One, if it's reasonably possible, I'm going to make it so that only one work per submitter shows up in the "Latest Art" section of the front page at any given time.  That way, if someone submits a large number of small items, it won't knock a bunch of people off of the front page.  Please note that this will not affect the "Popular This Week" section in any way.  Although I'm going to be working on this today, please give me your feedback on this idea.  If the response is mostly negative, I won't do it.

I also am going to try to make a way for people to join existing submissions together into a single one.  This will require that the submissions all have exactly the same author and exctly the same set of licenses.  This will create a new submission that contains all of the descriptions, files, and preview images from the original submissions, and remove the originals from the archive.  The links to the originals will be set to redirect to the newly grouped submission, to prevent link rot in case someone is linking to one of the submissions you're grouping together.

Admins will be able to do this with art by anyone, although the restriction that the author and licenses have to be the same will still apply.  While we don't plan on doing this willy-nilly, OGA reserves the right to group submissions together if we feel that it will be helpful to people browsing the archives.  The original submitter will retain ownership of the new submission, and be able to add to it and edit it, like always.

Finally, a reminder to everyone:  If you're not directly involved in this situation, please do not escalate it or comment on it further.  I realize that a small amount of drama is inevitable on a site OGA's size, but I'd prefer to keep it to a minimum, and I'd like to avoid ruling with an iron fist.  Feel free to comment and add thoughts on this post, but leave specific individuals out of it.

Thanks,

Bart