AUP Updates; August 15, 2011 - "Fetish Costumes" now prohibited

[Jim Demintia]

The Acceptable Upload Policy has been updated. And it looks like Princess Piche might have been waiting for Symantec to finish scanning something, because he was clearly bored when he set this up.

The link in the admin-notice goes FAF. In the past, it went to the wiki, but that's gone. When you click on a link marked "details", you are inexplicably taken to an entire sub-forum of FAF that has been created to discuss, specifically, the August 15, 2011 update of the AUP.

Most sentient mammals deal with changes to policy documents by providing the delta towards the top, followed by the complete lawyer-approved text (hah). That does not appear to be the case, as the new AUP is posted in a sticky thread. Dragoneer talks about the changes in another sticky, but the usual practice is to do something along the lines of: "line 3, paragraph 2 is changed to read: blah blah".

The good news: almost all of the changes are for clarity, grammar and general readability improvements! Hurrah! We've updated almost everything to make it easier to understand and digest.

while Sean's inability to write coherent English like an educated adult human is well-known, he's also not a lawyer and changing words often means changing meanings.

This was addressed, perhaps unsurprisingly.  Other stated policy changes are: Image rating for maturity level is now required (it wasn't before?), and there is a policy on 3D models. Since FA cannot accept let alone display, say, Blender models, I fail to understand why there's a need for a specific policy addressing rasterized renderings of models that are no different from a policy standpoint than any other PNG/JPEG art file. Regarding that policy, "Fender" says:

It's both stricter and looser

Hmm. Okay.

The photography policy was also updated. And that's where the madness lies, complete with ad-hoc capitalization:

Photography involving people wearing real-life Fetish Costumes (BDSM, skin-tight latex/leather, Pony Play and other severe fetish costuming, etc).

"severe"?

[Conan]

The more they try to "improve" this, the more it needs to be thrown out and rewritten. Every bit is contradicted by another part, there are huge loopholes, there are things that just make no sense. Like this:

Food - Photos of food may only be uploaded if: A) all elements of the culinary piece are created by the user, B) the submission abides by the quality and photo dump/similar content rules, and C) both the culinary creation and photograph exhibit artistic merit. Photos of purchased or common food (candy, sandwiches, drinks, etc) are not permitted. Only dishes that showcase the uploader's culinary skill will be allowed.

It basically forbids you from uploading pictures of food altogether if you actually follow it completely. You can't "create" seeds, you can't "create" a chicken.

Also, I absolutely HATE the way they go about doing AUP changes. "Let's change the AUP, post it on the forums, then tell everyone what it actually means and make a whole bunch of unwritten exceptions that will be forgotten about because they're not actually part of the fucking rules!" If you write it one way, and then decide to make exceptions to it, REWRITE THE RULE. If Dragoneer posts "Durr Durr Fart You can't post anything anymore." then no one can post anymore. If you say "Well, you can actually post!" in a forum thread, change the rule to reflect that. I thought that's why there was public review of these things in the first place.

[Freehaven]

If I ran the TOS/AUP into one of those "dialect translator" things online then ran it back through to output it to English, the end result would still probably end up sounding better than anything 'Neer wrote.

[ColonThree]

...there is a policy on 3D models. Since FA cannot accept let alone display, say, Blender models, I fail to understand why there's a need for a specific policy addressing rasterized renderings of models that are no different from a policy standpoint than any other PNG/JPEG art file

I think they're trying to cut down on the amount of people that download Poser and the pre-made Krystal model (or whatever), spend 5 minutes moving a few body parts into some vaguely sexual position, then call it a day and upload it. There's a few default models that make up a large proportion of the 3D work on FA, and most are entirely unmodified from stock.

Edit: Why does this captcha only accept Lincoln instead of Abraham Lincoln? I was very confused and had to check Wikipedia a few times to try and figure out what I was doing wrong, like it was some kind of trick question.

[ProvincialTwit]

Don't forget the gigs upon gigs of SL screencaps!

Also the captcha does whatever I told it to last time I was drunk so, w/e.  Guess I could turn it off for post-registration though.