Post #2361792

2026-04-15 16:13 UTC

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 – 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](https://web.archive.org/web/20260129205541/https://lemmy.world/c/comicstrips) 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](https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/).

Replies (1)

@moakley@lemmy.world 2026-04-15 17:49

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.

Open ##2361793