Brooke51

it's so subjective that it depends who you ask. in terms of flickr's standards, they are reasonably clear (just don't discuss them with flickr staff, i did once, and i still regret it). moderate - partial nudity like bare breasts or butt (in practice, this also includes a sheer top through which you can see nipples) restricted - full frontal nudity (including glimpses of pubic hair) and/or sexual activity the best advice i can offer is, if in doubt, bump your photo up a rating. for example, you make a "safe" photo of a pretty outfit that happens to show a hint of areola peeking out of a low cut top, bra or dress. if you think it might be a little risqué, bump it up from safe to moderate. the bot is often wrong and just meant to fix the worst aspects of the problem flickr has with people ignoring ratings and posting explicit pics. follow their guidelines studiously and you should be fine, or as fine as you can be.

agree with this. and the free users on flickr are PART OF ***** MY AUDIENCE **** and the audience of every other PRO flickr user. so, free flickr users contribute to my reason to pay for flickr. i do agree there is a difference between SL free users and flickr free users (and i hope LL sees the value of their free users, too), but flickr free users are certainly not worthless to flickr. run off enough of my audience, and i will stop seeing the value of being a PRO member. for some reason, flickr doesn't seem to care about that, which seems odd. surely, it MUST have occurred to them that a general reduction of site traffic and use will affect their paying customers negatively. maybe they think we won't notice when suddenly hundreds or thousands of our followers are "missing" from the "community" they claim to be trying to protect. it's probably like someone was saying earlier (i'm sorry, i forget who or i'd quote it, it was right on target): SmugMug is positioning flickr to be sold.

no, no difference. creepy corporate doublespeak

Yes, they said "we haven't actually deleted a single photo in the past" in spite of their 1000 photo limit for free accounts. they want credit for that (as if they're really good guys), but the threat is there. this new thing might be LIKE that, but it sounds to me like they will be deleting, either immediately when they start really rolling this out, or at some point after. its hard to decipher the doubletalk. i find it creepy.

the flickrbot is clumsy in its ratings, at best, although it has improved noticeably in the last few months. i was told by flickr staff that "virtual photos are harder for the bot to rate properly" as they do not look the same as RL photos. i stopped minding the flickrbot rating mistakes when i started seeing improvement in its accuracy. it's just a piece of software that needs more tuning/feedback to understand what is actual nudity vs what is just some skin. you don't have to accept the flickrbot's mis-rating of your safe photos. just change it back if it is wrong. i don't think reporting a photo can change its rating, so i think your photo's rating must have been changed (inaccurately) by the flickrbot. thanks for reading

OK, that's how i understood it, too. if there was some new way to see what was happening, i was going to be happy. but no. these smugmug corporate suits have done NOTHING to improve flickr's feature set. maybe losing half their users will help them focus on fixing their often crappy software. unbelievable. feeling grumpy. thanks for reading

how did you find that out? i know of no way to check and see if a particular photo has been reported. or maybe it was just that your rating was changed to moderate or restricted: was it the work of the flickr modbot?

well, it looks like most of what can be said has been said. i've been pro for years and this is yet another betrayal by the platform of my years of loyal patronage. i'd love to leave flickr, but i see no good alternative at this time. these changes are going to decimate my audience, many of whom are free users. the ones left will be the bloggers and the pro creators of art, who will also suffer from the general loss of traffic. well, i'm not storing pictures. i have hard drives for that, LOL. (i guess i do count on flickr for storage to a point, actually, but it's secondary purpose). i use flickr as a means of creative expression. the fact i want others to experience my creative expression and enjoy it (and hopefully, yes, like it) i guess means i'm in it for the "validation." the need for validation can easily become unbalanced and negative, its true (it sounds like that's what you mean). i've worked (not always successfully) to keep a healthier balance from my earliest flickr days, when i wrote as the first lines of my profile: "the paradox of flickr: if you're making photos for faves and views, you're missing the point of the art. but if nobody sees and appreciates your artistry, what is the point of posting it at all?" no, i don't post photos on flickr simply so **** i **** can go and look at them whenever i want to. it's supposed to be a community, and it has been, at least for me. until now. we'll see how this goes, but i'd imagine roughly a 50% drop in views as people leave.