bottom line, up front: all faces must be obscured, and any text within screenshots must have at least some of the text which makes the screenshots relevant to WAATGM underlined, circled, or otherwise highlighted.

Some of you may have noticed that @polishknight's recent post, the one titled "Also unlucky in love and life. 44F here and always thought I'd be a mom." is currently missing as of my writing this. [Side note - all comments will be are now restored once now that polishknight reposts has reposted with the newly-censored image. ] After much discussion among the WAATGM mod team and the trp.red/forums.red admin team and lawyers, we decided it was best to remove it as it originally was and make some changes to the website's content policy and WAATGM's rules.

This is in response to a situation that can be briefly described thusly:

1) Dumb bitch shared a bunch of shit publicly on reddit.

2) Polishknight took screenshots and made collages of them for 2-3 posts.

3) dumb bitch doesn't like what she sees and complains to WAATGM modmail and to reddit admins.

4) reddit declared a photo that she shared publicly to the internet and in which she was wearing a sweatshirt to be in violation of a rule against "sharing intimate or sexually-explicit content of someone without their consent" and removed his post and permanently suspended him from reddit, despite his having zero prior warnings or suspensions.

5) it seems that reddit's overreaction emboldened her, because she said:

As the photographer and author of the original content (photos and text), I own the copyright to that material. When I post content on Reddit, I grant Reddit a license to use, copy, and share my content. However, I retain ownership of my copyright.

Since u/polishknightusa has taken screenshots of my posts and shared them outside of Reddit without my permission, this is also a copyright infringement onwww.forums.red

Do you know of any moderators that I can contact at Forums.red to ask them to remove the post with my photo on it?

We're putting Reddit's ridiculous, downright preposterous stance that a photo of a woman in a sweatshirt is somehow "intimate" or "sexually-explicit" aside for now, as that's beyond our control.

My initial thought was to tell her to go fuck herself, because generally once you voluntarily share something to the internet, it's fair game.

However, it turns out she's partly right about copyrights while still being mostly wrong. I was wrong in thinking that one had to register written works to have a copyright. From copyright.gov:

Do I have to register with your office to be protected?

No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.”

However, there is also something called "fair use" which is protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which is concerned with parody, education, and commentary. From a different section of copyright.gov:

How much of someone else's work can I use without getting permission?

Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances. See, Fair Use Index, and Circular 21, Reproductions of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians.

I've also done some reading of the Fair Use Index, but I'm done linking and quoting for the moment. Who knows, I might edit more in later.

To summarize what was several hours of discussion taking place over a few days, here's how we're covering our asses to make sure we don't get shut down and that we can continue our discussions in which we educate and entertain each other:

Works covered under "fair use" have to be transformative in some way; one can't just reproduce the original verbatim.

This leads to our requirement for the underlining, circling, or otherwise highlighting portions of text. Due to WAATGM's requirement that the full story is included in screenshots (to prevent accusations of selective cropping and taking things out of context), without those highlights this would be a reproduction in full.

The comments section on its own isn't good enough to claim commentary; the screenshots in the OPs must be altered somewhat, and in a manner conducive to the sort of commentary we're doing.

As for the faces in photos being censored, this is due to doxing concerns. Yes, the Karen who spurred these changes shared her photo publicly and voluntarily in a subreddit with way more subscribers than ours, and with a much greater likelihood of having creepy stalker types in it than ours. Well, just like my writeup about why we started requiring censoring of children's faces in the OLD profiles of irresponsible single moms: sometimes other people's irresponsibility becomes our problem.

Old posts that don't meet these requirements are grandfathered in. If someone reaches out to us about a photo of theirs in such a post being uncensored, we'll deal with that on a case-by-case basis. edit - site owner/admin @redpillschool was able to go through our back catalog and censor all faces, so this won't be a problem.

From this day forward:

censor all faces

underline, circle, or otherwise highlight any text that makes your post relevant to WAATGM

One last link: the content policy for trp.red and forums.red, also updated to reflect new requirements

The rules on the sidebar (both here and at reddit) will be updated to reflect these changes eventually. Believe it or not, our mod team does have real lives off the internet.