We hope that this post comes to bring some clarity over some recent changes, as well as apologise to some people who have been affected by this over the last couple of weeks.
We recently started implementing some moderation changes around proper sourcing when submitting art. It has always been in the subreddiquette that people should try to use the primary source (Tumblr, Deviantart, etc.) when submitting posts to the subreddit. At times, people would rehost images before submitting them, or use a secondary source in place of the original.
After speaking to people about this in the meta thread, we eventually decided to try a stricter approach to sourcing and to start removing posts that are not sourced correctly. This was not made abundantly clear outside of the meta threads and has generated some understandable confusion when people have had their posts removed.
It can be hard to work with original sources like Tumblr and dA, since they are not the most user-friendly of websites and especially do not work well with RES.
After some time trying it out and finding out what does/doesn't work, we've settled on this as a new policy as part of Rule 1.
Primary sources should be used unless the primary source breaks one of our other rules (mostly Rule 2).
Derpibooru is discouraged as a source, but is not outright banned. We will not remove derpi links that contain a valid source, but we do ask people not to rely on derpi more than places such as Deviantart and Tumblr. The click-through rate is still very low compared to linking the original sources.
i.redd.it and imgur are not allowed to be used for art unless you are posting something you made yourself or something that does not have an alternate source. We will remove these posts and ask you to repost with the primary source if it is available.
This does mean we have to apologise to some people who have recently had their derpi links removed while we were testing out this new policy. It has become unrealistic to try and ban derpi outright, and we do consider it to be established enough between artists and users that it can continue to be used to share artwork.
We will leave a note in Rule 1 highlighting this new change.
Hope that helps clear things up.
