• The site has now migrated to Xenforo 2. If you see any issues with the forum operation, please post them in the feedback thread.
  • An addendum to Rule 3 regarding fan-translated works of things such as Web Novels has been made. Please see here for details.
  • Due to issues with external spam filters, QQ is currently unable to send any mail to Microsoft E-mail addresses. This includes any account at live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com. Signing up to the forum with one of these addresses will result in your verification E-mail never arriving. For best results, please use a different E-mail provider for your QQ address.
  • For prospective new members, a word of warning: don't use common names like Dennis, Simon, or Kenny if you decide to create an account. Spammers have used them all before you and gotten those names flagged in the anti-spam databases. Your account registration will be rejected because of it.
  • Since it has happened MULTIPLE times now, I want to be very clear about this. You do not get to abandon an account and create a new one. You do not get to pass an account to someone else and create a new one. If you do so anyway, you will be banned for creating sockpuppets.
  • Due to the actions of particularly persistent spammers and trolls, we will be banning disposable email addresses from today onward.
  • The rules regarding NSFW links have been updated. See here for details.

Rule 3 Addendum - Translations of Others' Works

seeing_octarine said:
Suggesting people should go learn a whole different language just to read some shitty badly written fanfics is, uh, it's certainly something, that's for sure.
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trashtaker said:
You underestimates humanity's dumbass will to find itself to ruin.

We're gonna learn a new language just to find new waves of brainrots
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I was just about to respond basically this. Remember that Flag Hunt Shia LaBeouf thing the internet did? The power of weaponized autism is extreme.

On a separate note, I personally am a cautiously optimistic towards the new rule. It was always a potential legal risk to allow potentially monetizable content to be posted from another location, but at the same time the restriction on thread topic IS a restriction and that infringes on the thing about this site I find the best- the freedom to post what you want with a few practical limits to reduce pointless friction (like 'no calling other users slurs' and 'no current politics').

It's not so much a 'I love those threads' thing so much as it is me worrying about the slight erosion of the ideals of 'unrestricted discourse/writing'. It probably won't be an issue considering the main focus of many of the users is the NSFW section, but I can't help but worry after watching a number of other forum sites slide down a slippery slope of censorship.
 
I can see why, tho I'd miss those that get hit by this change. Nobody wants the site to get DMCA slapped for something hard to police, especially when the infamous copyright holders just have bots crawl and auto report.
 
Thatonesungod said:
Reposting/translating is the same material.
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Any retelling that isn't verbatim copying is new material by definition. And a translator that tries to do word-for-word translation will generally end-up with unreadable slop that requires at least some familiarity with both of the languages to vaguely parse (unless they're very closely related languages).

I also think reposting and archiving (with proper crediting) should be lauded rather than reviled, but then that's our idiotic system at work.
 
What is the practical or legal reason to ban translations of fanfics? Fanfictions can't even be copyrighted.

If you think it's a dick move to translate a fanfic because the author didn't give permission, then I'd like to point out that I don't know of a single fanfic author that actually got direct permission for themselves in the first place.

Edit: Bonus points if you write a fanfic of the fanfic and then give yourself permission to translate it.
 
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da3monh0st3d said:
Any retelling that isn't verbatim copying is new material by definition. And a translator that tries to do word-for-word translation will generally end-up with unreadable slop that requires at least some familiarity with both of the languages to vaguely parse.

I also think reposting and archiving (with proper crediting) should be lauded rather than reviled, but then that's our idiotic system at work.
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I can sorta understand the logic. Whether you play Pokemon in English, Japanese or German its still the same game
 
Overall I get the change, but like, I still feel fanfics should be okay/exempt. I get and support the original work one even if it's a bit annoying since it means losing stories I like, but the fanfics should be fine.

I just dislike that it's basically putting up language walls on fiction, tbh.

veekie said:
I can see why, tho I'd miss those that get hit by this change. Nobody wants the site to get DMCA slapped for something hard to police, especially when the infamous copyright holders just have bots crawl and auto report.
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This is why i say fanfics should be exempt. Original work, sure, I 100% understand, but fanfics are already something that shouldn't be monetiseable in the same way.

[template] said:
Oh, that's something they did later on. If you want to have a link to the chapter on NU, you need to be logged in...or at least it was that way last I checked, no idea if they now removed links completely
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mizerie said:
I forgot to mention that you can see the links if you made an account but then its probably another layer of annoyance that you might dislike.
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Eeeeeuuuuuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhhhh

That might be it, I don't like making accounts for sites. But seriously? Eugh. That's a dogshit change.

Really, I took a few years off from reading xianxia, came back, and everything was complete shit. Novelupdates shit itself, wuxiaworld shit itself, stories were harder to find, everything was awful.

da3monh0st3d said:
QQ is pretty much already (in?)famous as part of the Xenforo forum trinity. That ship has sailed a while ago, I think.
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I doubt we're that popular outside the anglosphere, which is where the fics that get translations come from.

It's something that'll likely lead to QQ being more known in non-english locations, which could be bad.
 
I don't really care about this one way or another, since I haven't read any such translated works here, but I'm also kinda curious if this rule covers fanfics. As far as I know, you cannot get DMCA'd because of a fanfic. And I'd be really surprised if some chinese dude decided to make a fuss about a QQ repost, considering they write almost exclusively for chinese audience.
 
Jason Wu said:
How do you interpret that
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I just asked the author in Korean if I could have permission translating their work into English. They said the copyright owners have the ownership, and when I asked about how could I get permission from the copyright owners, the author was the COPYRIGHT owner. And simply, it felt like they weren't comfortable with their works being translated.
 
Thatonesungod said:
translating is the same material
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Eh, not always, really depends on your country's law.
Generally any translation counts as separate work. But if it is original work then you will need permission from author to create it or you will not have any rights to your translation. But non-profit fanfiction author doesn't have any rights to original work so you generally in the clear if you not profiting from it too.
 
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Damn, I called this shit a month ago. Interesting that the mods didn't know about this getting cooked up in the background
 
Jason Wu said:
Whether you play Pokemon in English, Japanese or German its still the same game
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Not sure about Pokemon, but old Nintendo games are pretty infamous for acquiring wild shifts in tones over translation, with missing or new details depending on the version one plays.

Some of that was censorship, some of it was flaky translation and some of it was the translators just doing it for some reason.
 
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Thatonesungod said:
Should that be the case, it would be Patreon's problem. Nothing on QQ even can be locked behind a paywall.
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Well, here they are advertised, including links.

Honestly, I don't even read these translations, so no personal interest. It's just a really weird approach. I would just allocate a separate section for translations and make it a rule to indicate that it is a translation and leave a link to the original work, and of course exclude any way of monetizing such things.
 
da3monh0st3d said:
Yeah, what happens if the author's plain dead? You dig up & ask the corpse?
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The same argument could be made for crossposting someone else's English-language story without permission. We don't allow that either most of the time. Just because you name the other person as the author, doesn't mean you're not still breaking the spirit of the plagiarism rule if you're doing it without asking them first. I think there's been a few cases we allowed leeway in where it was explicitly preserving a work from an author who'd been gone from the internet for years, and their fic was at risk of disappearing forever, but typically this stuff is... not that. If it was, then a translated version wouldn't be the appropriate way to do it anyways.
Justheguy said:
I just asked the author in Korean if I could have permission translating their work into English. They said the copyright owners have the ownership, and when I asked about how could I get permission from the copyright owners, the author was the COPYRIGHT owner. And simply, it felt like they weren't comfortable with their works being translated.
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That really does sound like a "No. My culture makes me uncomfortable saying it to you directly, but no."
riotous living said:
Damn, I called this shit a month ago. Interesting that the mods didn't know about this getting cooked up in the background
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It's been a slow burn debate. Some of us have been regularly saying that it's an issue, some of us have been meh on it. Some probably haven't really noticed when it got brought up. It was sitting in a limbo of "we'll revisit it if it becomes a problem" for a long time, and it's taken a few of us being very persistent in saying that "hey, it's a problem now, we need to do that revisiting thing" for this to happen.
 
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JadeKaiser said:
I think there's been a few cases we allowed leeway in where it was explicitly preserving a work from an author who'd been gone from the internet for years, and their fic was at risk of disappearing forever, but typically this stuff is... not that.
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Understandable, though I feel that at any point hosts can just up & disappear without warning.

Anything not republished redundantly ad nauseam is at risk of disappearing. I've certainly been faced with such issues often enough, when trying to find back things I remembered reading or watching in the past.

Mind, I'm aware of the liability argument for QQ, I know quite well there aren't really other options with the current setup.
 
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Also, the work around for translation without consent (probably) is open/public domain works
 
Seeing the admins cook up a rule change that effectively oneshots Zaztra Vandesh's slop spam harder than a western liberal dipping into Ayahuasca getting an audience with the 6D Lizard King and his demonic cohort is not how I expected my Monday morning to go but it's nice to see something nice happen for a change.
 
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