[Meta] New Rules, and New Future
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Comic Strips
23708 readers
1884 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
Rules
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๐ Be Nice!
- Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
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๐๏ธ Community Standards
- Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
- Posts should be safe and enjoyable by the majority of community members, both here on lemmy.world and other instances.
- Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.
- Moderators have final say on what and what does not qualify as appropriate. Use common sense, and if need be, err on the side of caution.
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๐งฌ Keep it Real
- Comics should be made and posted by real human beans, not by automated means like bots or AI. This is not the community for that sort of thing.
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๐ฝ๏ธ Credit Where Credit is Due
- Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
- Attributions include, but are not limited to, watermarks, links, or other text or imagery that artists add to their comics to use for identification purposes. If you find a comic without any such markings, it would be a good idea to see if you can find an original version. If one cannot be found, say so and ask the community for help!
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๐ Post Formatting
- Post an image, gallery, or link to a specific comic hosted on another site; e.g., the author's website.
- Meta posts about the community should be tagged with [Meta] either at the beginning or the end of the post title.
- When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
โ Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
โ Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
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๐ฌ Post Frequency/SPAM
- Each user (regardless of instance) may post up to five (5 ๐) comics a day. This can be any combination of personal comics you have written yourself, or other author's comics. Any comics exceeding five (5 ๐) will be removed.
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๐ดโโ ๏ธ Internationalization (i18n)
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
Sรญ, por favor [Spanish/Espaรฑol]
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
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๐ฟ Moderation
- We are human, just like most everybody else on Lemmy. If you feel a moderation decision was made in error, you are welcome to reach out to anybody on the moderation team for clarification. Keep in mind that moderation decisions may be final.
- When reporting posts and/or comments, quote which rule is being broken, and why you feel it broke the rules.
Banned Artists
The following artists are banned from the community.
- Jago
- Stonetoss
It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Web Accessibility
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
Web of Links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I don't trust them either given they explicitly disobeyed rules before (which I'm sure hundreds of people pointed out to them, e.g. about post limits), but I can promise you I'll be keeping an eye on what they post here. They won't get the same leeway again, and I think it's a reasonable olive branch by jerkface given that they are able to post good material here when they stick within the rules โ and, in my mind, so that the catalyst of the mod transition doesn't steal the spotlight as a singular reason for the transition. This isn't just "/c/comicstrips but beep isn't here", and I think that conveys that message while giving beep plenty of rope, so to speak.
We'll keep them in check, and it won't be a problem again. Rehabilitation where it's possible, and I think it's possible here.
i understand.
I was pretty anti-post limits, but after seeing lemmyshitpost todayโฆ well. I can understand why theyโre in place.
Yeah, several factors converge to make a bunch of daily posts (even well-meaning) a bad idea to allow; among them:
Did you end up removing his posts with the altered comics? Or are they still out there to disseminate his inferior versions across the internet?
And just to be clear, I think not banning beep is an idea with no upside.
The only rule Beep was breaking at the time was the per-day post limit. While cleaning that up would be tedious, it'd still be doable; the main reason we haven't (that I know of) is that those posts are long-since submitted and have hundreds of existing discussions which other users contributed to. The per-day post limit is mainly relevant for new posts, so enforcing that rule as it should've been when they were posted wouldn't really accomplish anything except make a lot of user comments inaccessible. It'd be functionally random, too โ starting at the first posts, leaving post n and post n + 1, then removing everything until the next 24 hours after post n, loop until we get to the last post they made before it was upped to 5 and Beep was forced to stop breaking it. (That wasn't your question; just addressing it since it has the more complicated answer.)
As for the altered comics, there was no rule in place at the time that comics need to be unaltered and have attribution. We (at least I) don't do ex post facto rule enforcement. Of the existing reports for posts/comments made before dohpaz42's rule changes, none (that I saw) were for violations of the rules that existed at the time, so the only reports I ended up acting on were the ones that violated Lemmy.World's terms of service.
That makes sense for allowing beep to stay. I still don't think it's the right move given the extreme level of bad faith in which he operated, but ok, you guys are making a point about objectivity. Rules shouldn't apply ex post facto to members of the community.
However. Rules should and typically do apply ex post facto to content. If I dig up an old comic with the word "fuck" in it that was never removed, would you remove it now that curse words are allowed? Or would you say there's no current rule against it, so it stays?
I'm sure it would stay. Common sense wins out in that case, just as it should in the other case.
The point of having rules around content isn't to punish users who break the rules. It's to shape this place into the community we want it to be. If we want it to be a community that respects artists, then we need to remove the content that's so blatantly and aggressively disrespectful to artists.
Posts that broke the per-day rule or the old NSFW rule aren't harming anyone. But these posts that are an intentional perversion of a creator's art, removing their name and in some cases surreptitiously modifying the content of the picture, are passively harming those artists every day that they exist in this community. You're leaving them out there to be found and disseminated, to supercede the artist's original work.
I seriously doubt the community values artist integrity less than "hundreds of existing discussions" about what an asshole the poster is, so I think this should be a pretty easy stance to take.
No, it does not, which is why I applied it only as justification not to enforce the per-day rule as it should've been before; violations of those rules are no longer harming anyone in the way the rule was designed to prevent.
As I said, I don't enforce rules ex post facto. There was no such rule before, but let's say it existed. I would not, and you have to know that's meaningfully different. Punishing someone ex post facto is very different from granting leniency ex post facto. "I've decided this is bad, so I'm going to actively punish it retroactively" is extremely different from "I've decided this is fine, so I'm no longer going to prosecute it." You definitely understand that "I'm criminalizing weed, so you who smoked it a year ago are off to jail" and "I'm decriminalizing weed, so I'm going to drop existing charges" are completely different regardless of your stance on weed (although I know roughly what both of ours are).
And, of course, that's not even the case here; no actual rule (unlike the "fuck" one) was broken at the time it was posted, so I'm not setting a precedent that we can change the rules at any time and apply them retroactively.
Actually, the rules are around to protect the users and what they contribute here โ so they can safely post and comment knowing what's in-bounds and have grounds to object if they think they were unfairly punished. If I wanted to "shape this place into the community we want it to be", I could just go around removing whatever because I think it beautifies the community. I don't apply ex post facto punishments, and I'm likely to grant leniency ex post facto; these two are entirely consistent with each other.
I can probably link at least one thread where I went off on Beep if you think any of this is meant to stick up for them specifically. I requested to moderate expressly because Beep was ruining the community, and I was even surprised to see them granted amnesty and tried to see a silver lining.
You're welcome to think I'm a misguided idealist, but my hobbies are creating copyleft software, copyleft prose, copyleft media, and copyleft data requiring attribution, so if you think any of this is because I'd wish to wipe every one of Beep's de-attributed posts any less than you, you're understandably but sorely mistaken. I feel Beep spat in my face personally along with the rest of my community's. I just don't have a proper justification within the rules โ and that includes the per-day limit applied as a backdoor in a way that's not in the spirit of that rule.
That said, I will show no leniency to intentionally de-attributed posts in the future, and I'll be making sure all have proper credit.
Ok, those are all great things to hear from a mod.
But it doesn't solve the problem at hand. These vandalized images are still right there, doing harm, making things worse for comic artists. How do we get them removed?
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world On the grounds that no moderator was here to listen to the will of the users and therefore (exceedingly likely, due to overwhelming backlash) make a rule against intentionally de-attributed comics, I would like to ask your permission to go back and remove Beep's posts of de-attributed comics.
I make a point not to apply rules ex post facto, but this is an extenuating circumstance where 1) there's almost a 100% chance such a rule would've existed if the community had been moderated, 2) Beep was obviously, intentionally, and maliciously taking advantage of that fact, and 3) the posts are still intentionally harmful to artists as they stay up. I emphasize points 1 and 2 for why ex post facto removal is entirely fair in this case and point 3 for why it should be used. This isn't an ad populum argument; I wouldn't be doing this if I just thought it was the popular option. (See above.)