JohnMH here. I normally don’t try to do something like this, especially when it comes to breaching what a certain topic should be about, but I want to make this very public, as it’s absolutely needed, in my opinion.
Get protection for your artwork!
Private Servers are at an all time high when it comes to stealing sprites. Not just from Prod or other Private Servers, but from the Ideas Section itself. This has been verified in the past by people like Santeripe, pepus, myself and CrystalPX. It is now affecting people like Aurusenth, Aurum and possibly others that are around here. It’s becoming more and more of an issue, and I don’t want to have you guys deal with having the sprites you worked hard on being stolen by someone too lazy or lacking responsibility to make their own artwork.
I’ll try and look for something to make it easy to have protections for your artwork, but to start off, I highly suggest trying watermarks for your work. It goes a long way, trust me. I hope you guys don’t lose your creativity or your drive to make sprites. That’s the entire reason I’m being so forward about everything.
Sincerely,
JohnMH / DreamIess
Update:
I’ve looked through a lot of stuff in the one particular Private Server that I made this post because of, and what myself and many others saw was a huge collection of stolen sprites ranging from that of Private Servers, to countless items from DECA and the UG(I.E. a LOT of the ST Sets from @Aurum as well as all alien items and even some things from Bella and other very recent things), to even things that were posted exclusively to here(I.E. @Pepus’ Pirate set, or things from @Santeripe’s Occultist). It’s despicable.
I would especially work on getting protection for your sprite work if not before. Some Private Servers hold no shame for their actions and you need to be prepared to act accordingly, unfortunately.
Update #2:
Their staff is just as bad. At least one of them (name censored) is trying to help solve the issue. Also, normally I would have an issue with making names like these public, but if you have the audacity to condone theft, then…