Explain to me what is ignorant about not knowing if a piece of art is traced or not? With the evidence in front of us, we came to the conclusion that the artist did not intend to copy art, and therefore that they did not deserve punishment for it. However, with all of the evidence you gave, we had to take them out of the running because even if they didn’t intend to trace or copy, the similarities were too great to allow them to win the contest. We always view every single flag on a case-by-case basis and we try our best to be fair to our members, especially when they say that they didn’t mean to copy.
Not particularly. We’ve done everything we need to do. I had a feeling people would want more, though
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It doesn’t matter if it was ignorant or not. That’s how outsiders will probably see it, and they might be hesitant to join these forums, and that’s not what anyone wants.
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No. I’m saying that if you had a problem with it, it is absolutely ridiculous to get angry and upset with us about a piece of art winning when we had no clue there were copyright issues. If you didn’t tell us before, then don’t spread sh!t and make it seem like we don’t care about copyright. As I said, we are human beings and we can’t always be aware of what is traced and what isn’t. When the accusations came out this morning for me, Caliope even tried to reverse-search the art and couldn’t find what it could have been traced from. So, unless we already knew that it was similar to a piece of art, what do you expect us to do exactly except respond to things as and when they come up? We never intentionally allowed any piece of copied or traced art to win and we actually made an effort to avoid that as and when we became aware of tracing. It is not our job to scour the internet to see if art is traced or not. If we discover it, we will deal with it accordingly. However, don’t act like we are condoning it just because we weren’t aware.
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Also, @phnx, considering I told you all of this in DM? It’s becoming very clear that all you want is just to start a fire out of what? Spite?
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It really, seriously depends on what art you have seen and how much of the artist in question’s art you have seen. For example, you had told us about other alleged copying beforehand and we completely agreed that it needed to come out of the running as the two pieces from the same artist were in completely different art styles. However, if we cannot find the art after a simple reverse search, what do you expect us to do? There are actually millions upon millions of pieces of art on the internet and while you may be aware of the sources of some of these art pieces, that doesn’t mean that we all are. Nor does it make us stupid or ignorant to not know. I would love to have some help with art contests. In fact as you know, we need as much help as we can get.
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In fact, @phnx, you were a staff member during this competition. It would have been a nice contribution
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The ones we were aware of were disqualified. We just didn’t want to make a big deal out of it for mental health reasons. As I said in the first post, anyone we had suspicions of was not able to win the contest.
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Noooo
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The fact is: if you suspect anyone of plagiarism, come to us.
If you don’t come to us until the last min, don’t get angry with us for not knowing and allowing someone to win when we didn’t know.
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What if (this is just a suggestion) instead of canceling the Art Competition, we would run another competition just for the section, which drawing/icon was disqualified? It could be fair to the winners and other participants.
I’m not saying to do it now, I think it’s still too early and we all need to cool off, but it can be a future possibility.
I’m not sure if this is a good idea and I hope it’s not disrespectful toward your decision.
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What I don’t f*cking understand about running this forum is how spiteful teenage girls can be. You make a freaking honest mistake not knowing something was plagiarised and suddenly you get a bunch of people acting like you allow plagiarism on purpose, you’re having to take responsibility for the actions of other staff members and you’ve got people in the anonymous questions saying this is exactly like Episode? So yeah people are bloody trying to invalidate all the hard work that goes into the Forums because of what? Not knowing that art was plagiarised? Well it DoEsNt TaKe ShErLoCk so I guess we’re just as bad as Episode and I should just give up trying.
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I’m a teenage girl, and even I think we can be as*holes
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Don’t give up cause of this Shannii, I totally get how everything is overwhelming for you tho. So shutting down the competition was the best decision…
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And no, I’ve only been on the forums for a couple days, and I love it.
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Hey, not all teenage girls, please, let’s not generalize. People, despite gender or age, can be spiteful. And I understand why you are angry, I would be too. But as @Jass stated - don’t give up, Shannii.
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It’s not even about giving up. I just can’t do it anymore. Like, if anyone else wants to take this place off my hands, be my guest.
It only costs $178 a month to run
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Clearly we’re just like Episode if we make mistakes I guess.
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I know this might be hard to do but how about you just ignore them? Like you don’t need to validate yourself to a bunch of people who haven’t sunk thousands of dollars into this. You addressed the issue and did what you could do. Ignore them and allow them to continue humiliating themselves.
As the famous saying goes: 
Silence is the best answer for a fool
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Is there anything we can do to help out with that?
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