A problem that is not new in any way with area owners.
Related to the above… What about areas that have images that would be forbidden under the rules? Eg. Lamplight has multiple areas with pretty much straight on cub porn in the room images. Many of these area owners won’t be around any time soon to fix the issues, but unlike characters who only are a problem for other players when they are actually online, rooms and their images are and remain there regardless of the owner’s activity.
I mean, if we want to get super-technical the proposed rule says you may not upload it; it doesn’t say anything about what’s already there. 
But I imagine builders have the ability to directly remove an image if called to do so. Albeit that the sort to visit a seedy cub venue might not be so inclined to report it . . .
And if you want to get even more super technical “sex” means male/female biology, which means that all characters need to be asexual neuters once the rule goes through. Any suggestion of what sex the character may be is sexually suggestive. Breasts, penises, vulva.
I don’t mean this just facetiously. I’m making a point. Nudism is not compatible with this new rule. Western civilization desexuales itself. We as humans are sexual by nature, from conception to death. It’s facing that fact which western civ has an issue dealing with, apparently. Again, back to the Church. Judeo-Christianity. The Virgin Mary. She gets raped by the Holy Spirit™ but at least she’s a virgin, yay!
They’re not alone. Plenty of other religious doctrines that do this.
It’s created pain and confusion and misery throughout all of the world.
Furry, for the most part, is based on a different philosophy. It’s a much more realistic one, in tune with nature. Call it Pagan, call it Humanism. Mark Merlino came out of that mold, and luckily that’s the direction he and Rodney took The Fandom, instead of the hypocritical repressive self-hating, fear-and-loathing route the labcoat guy took it. Like Rodney said, the fandom is sexual because as humans we’re living, and breathing, and feeling.
That’s why I fear so much the direction things are heading. We’re losing the pervasive philosophy which made Furry Furry the more we cater to these external political forces that make hosts “uncomfortable.” By saying cubs cannot be sexually suggestive, you’re turning cubs into little neuter dolls the way Americana would have us do.
So with this new change in policy, what what age can a typical human-adjacent anthro character on Wolfery be before they hit puberty? 18? Puberty is when secondary sexual characteristics develop, so anything thereafter would be sexually suggestive, and that will be prohibited. Must they remain neuter until then? Won’t make much sense to show something cute and innocent and adorable if they’ve already welped cubs a few times and have breasts.
I would just change my character’s traits to say their species doesn’t hit puberty until 18, but according to this rule it would not matter. Even if they were 100 and barely hit puberty, I still cannot depict it. They could be rulers of the universe with omnipotent powers over the 3rd dimension, but still they can’t have small titties. Gotta go from nothing to big knockers all at once.
It would seem that beings of alien nature would be more free than anthros. If I make myself an alien blob, and say that until their blobnarts are filled with zeezsnarf they are children. So if I draw a blobnart without zeezsnart, is that prohibited? It’s child-like, is it not?
Remember, from an existential standpoint, you’re not just banning it from public places on the grid. You’re banning it from the server entirely, which means it cannot exist in the minds of the beings living in Wolfery. Not having an accurate visual depiction is the equivalent of placing burqas on all the children until they come of age.
I don’t mean to be adversarial. I’m just pointing out the factors that you should really consider before going through with this “release.”
(I would highly advise to separate technical updates from behavior guideline changes, btw. This is not a code release or hardware upgrade. This is an orgware governance matter. The machines don’t care about such things unless we train them to… which… incidentally I should point out the more neurotic we feed them this contradictory sort of bullcrap the more fated I believe humanity is dooming itself to a fate worse than death once general AI awakens.)
I just made a reply, but it says it was marked by “the community” as spam?
Who thought my commentary was spam? That’s not very nice.
My first thought of your predicament goes back to the idea of creating a fediverse scheme. Tapestries split off from FurryMUCK early in the game for this very reason. Every community needs a red-light district. If the server code can be expanded to do this I think it would be game-changing. (No pun intended.)
Furs would be able to make their own spaces to the tune of whatever type content they feel comfortable with, and it would alleviate the headache it feels like this situation is headed. It would leave you free to keep coding, which is what you seem to enjoy above all else.
I can’t say if that’s even possible, because I know that it was impossible for MUCKs to connect up to each other, and Mucklets are based on Mucks. But, if there’s any time to begin thinking about it, my guess is it would be better to start sooner rather than later into the source code, before things get even more complex and harder to do?
Wasn’t me. But to be honest - and you know I have a keen interest in freedom of speech - I don’t think you’re helping your cause bringing up religion or thought-crimes. (Also, if you really think text isn’t enough to imagine, a text-based roleplaying environment may not be right for you.)
As Accipiter said, this isn’t an ideological discussion. It’s also not about America - this service is hosted in Europe. It’s an issue with hosting images that he may be held personally liable for, the result of which is that a decision has been made to remove them from the platform.
The separation of concerns is valid as it goes, but as a practical matter I believe the documents in question are technically embedded in the app and therefore part of an application release.
Regarding alternative realms, there is this, but it is meant to be less focused on ERP, not more. Perhaps there will be the opportunity to host it yourself in your own space at some point, though? (Oracle’s free ARM64 VMs may be suitable.)
This isn’t a purely text-based environment, otherwise such a rule-change would not be required. It’s text-focused. I think it was wise for Accipiter to call it “textual” rather than “text-based.” It’s an apt description.
And c’mon, Green, you know me. I’ve been on MUCKs since 97. This isn’t my first rodeo. Even in text, people get squicked and say “eww, I don’t want that around me.” Look how Whitefire banned human children running around from public spaces. At least he didn’t ban them universally, and he lamented about how conservative the young furs were compared to him in his newspost.
Conversely, THIS policy change is a universal ban! It is above mere behavior and goes outside the realm of the simulation, and into the physical server hosting the creatures within that child-dimension. The reality of those inhabiting that dimension are adversely reacted by a change made from “God.” That’s a big deal!
I fully respect the rights of the property owner of a server to dictate what they do or do not want hosted on their machines; and I completely understand Accipiter’s situation; so this isn’t an attack on him.
What I AM driving at, is that I am creating a passionate appeal, pointing out the underlying philosophical principles, as any good critical mind would, to speak on the various facets such a change makes for the community. This platform is in its infancy, and if you don’t have people active enough to speak out about it, how can the one who governs and dictates what happens to so many others make informed decisions about how these policy changes affect them?
In regards to alternative realms, I’m new here. I have given less than 4 days time to the game, and I don’t know off-hand if I can commit to such a venture, but I definitely have interest. Pioneering this sort of thing is of extreme interest to me.
Glancing over the post, however, it still seems like we would be in the same boat as before. It’s all hosted on wolfery.com. So the same server restrictions would apply. Hence the node idea I was throwing out there.
Tbh I thought, when I saw you replying, you were going to say it was you that censored the post. I’m glad it wasn’t. That calmed me down. I have a feeling it was an automatic reaction to my edits. I have that issue where I write something, then I realize there’s more to say, and I revise constantly.
I remember when rules were added. Lots of people were slapped, herded off to an empty room or otherwise got a mod warning. Lot of people don’t read forums and aren’t there when Accipiter toasts the server to go read the forums about an update.
When big changes like this are made on other mucks you get a login and immediately presented with modmail. Might I suggest mailing everyone when the new ToS comes? Something that the typical user sees when first logging in to wolfery.com. Even a couple weeks advanced notice to all users would be nice. So that when new ToS rolls out it isn’t immediately met with a bunch of shock and warnings.
The posts were marked by the system automatically because you are a new user and they had multiple links (‘to the same domain’, which I didn’t know it checked but makes sense), which to be fair are usual spammer behavior. Your posts were of course not spam, and I’m unhiding them.
As far as the content goes, I agree with Acci and Maximus.
Who’s Maximus? Don’t see any comments they made on the thread.
Haha, whoops. Maximus is another moderator and I thought they’d replied to this already.
To your fediverse posts however, it is intended for Mucklet to be a service allowing additional realms, though those would likely all have similar rules to this due to the location of hosting.
There are a few important points here that I think are being overlooked.
First and foremost, this policy change is not about what you actually play on Wolfery, be it character concept or scenes. This is a policy change with regards to what images you are allowed to upload as profile pictures, which are stored on Mucklet AB’s servers.
The service owner does not wish to take on the legal burden of hosting images that may be in a legal gray zone, especially as the content is hosted in a country with specific legislation that affects drawn art. This is a matter of following law. Whereas I can understand it makes it more difficult for certain character concepts to present the art they want, it is: 1) Not a prohibition from linking said art, just a ‘No thank you’ to hosting it on Mucklet’s servers. and 2) Not a policy change that affects the ability to play those characters, or play in scenes involving those characters.
Claiming this is a ban on the existence of young-looking characters is disingenuous. It isn’t. You may have art of your clothed young-looking character. You just can’t have suggestive or sexualized images of them on Wolfery’s servers.
If it’s a fediverse, it would be hosted in multiple locations on servers owned by furs other than Accipiter. Different domains, different machines, different countries.
Nodes, like IRC, Usenet, Mastadon, Telegram. Same concept.
I didn’t miss that at all. And I don’t think it’s disingenuous, what I said. What I play influences how I look. How I look will no longer be allowed, therefore it affects how I play.
Just host the images on Inkbunny like Green offered to do. That’ll take care of the issue.
Better for scalability, too, if you ask me. A server geared toward an image library will help the server load.
Allowing externally hosted content to be presented natively in the Mucklet client was discussed. But there are significant security concerns to this, and as I understand it, there’s no core security design in place to handle external content in the system.
It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but as far as I know, there aren’t any plans for this at present. So don’t rule it out. But in the meantime, looking into alternative hosting for images that do not fit the policy change is the wisest option.
It’s entirely possible to code the Mucklet to where when it asks you the profile pic you want to use, it can point to another domain. They do that all the time in other places.
As for the security aspects, could you describe the issue?
The more likely issue will be when those domains no longer host the image, and the link breaks, but that’s hardly as bad. People just need to update their links. Heck, I’ll imagine most people will just link to existing f-list profile pics.
This reminds me of that one time else-MU I got suspended in an empty room over something entirely off-MUCK, only I was never actually told that, the server administration was so whimsical that their suspension room wasn’t clear it was for administrative suspensions, and one of the standard global exits worked in it, so I thought it was a soft form of idle-purge to move sleepers - since I’d been away for a year and a day - and carried on as usual. Cue a permaban for jailbreaking.
I know this is a bit tangential to the situation described, but it’s a good example of how direct messaging is usually the best policy vs. assumption.
This is kind of a privacy issue and also IB’s content delivery nodes wouldn’t allow it, my suggestion was more a manual “invite people to use some named alternatives and link to them”.
I guess I’m trying to understand the security issue that arises, in the difference between displaying a picture in Mucklet, versus creating a text link whose URL opens up a new window and does the same thing.
I’m not the right person to go in depth about Mucklet specifically, that’s Accipiter’s domain. But off the top of the bat - IP logging, XSS attacks, MITM attacks, content spoofing, image library exploits…
Any data you do not have the ability to sanitize yourself before running through more code is a risk. Heck, given that we don’t even have the ability to control content size on external links, it could serve as a DDOS attack.
So yes, any changes that allow externally hosted content is not a matter of ‘just doing it’. It will first and foremost be a decision Accipiter needs to make, and then assess on how to do. In the meantime, what we need to do is comply with that policy, when it goes active.