heroart opened this issue on Mar 16, 2005 ยท 112 posts
Thorne posted Thu, 17 March 2005 at 12:35 PM
I usually avoid these discussions like the black plague, but I have to point out that Renderosity is not making a moral judgment here, it is a commercial one. In the beginning Renderosity did not have a marketplace at all, it was merely some forums and galleries. When the store was added, it was added on the same existing site, and therein lies the problem. With over 1600 merchants here and I am sure quite a HUGE PayPal account, they are not going to risk having that account confiscated (yes, PayPal DOES THAT) and so for the most part they are forced from a business standpoint to tone it down or have quite a large sum of money tied up in limbo for literally months. If the store site and forum/galleries occupied different URLs, they would not have to be so strict. They were not in the past so strict when most of the images in question were originally posted. What happened? Some self-righteous smarmy asswipe complained about Renderosity to PayPal, so Renderosity came to be in the unenviable position of having to crack down on nudity of any sort, especially young looking characters.
I can assure those would-be witch-hunters that they have scored no victory here as far as getting images pulled: it is mainly a business decision where Renderosity is looking out for their own commercial interests (as any business owner would do), nothing more, though admittedly a moderator or two may have gotten a bit overzealous in his/her interpretation of the TOS. My store at faerie-dreams.com does not allow any more nudity than is allowed in the store here, and that is because it is a BUSINESS, not primarily an ART SITE. Check out the PayPal terms of service (only a few hundred pages, hyperlinked) or ask around here for PayPal horror stories of accounts being frozen for the slip of a naked tit and you will perhaps get the idea. Renderosity is a BUSINESS with forums and galleries attached, NOT the other way around.
In closing, since my site name was carelessly associated with this distasteful business, a clarification. FaerieWylde allows more nudity because the store and the forum are on 2 different URLs, 2 different domains, 2 different servers, even 2 different countries, but even so, sexual images of any kind or any age have been and will be deleted at FaerieWylde as well. I can heartily assure you that it has nothing to do with local ordinances, as we are in the same city as Renderosity (about 2 miles down the road, in fact). However, any creeps thinking they can come over to FaerieWylde and post any nasty nekkid kids-with-wings pictures they like will quickly find out otherwise. The images that were pulled here do NOT violate our TOS as there was merely nudity and no sexuality involved.