So if you follow my personal twitter, or happened to catch it in recent comments, you may know that The Cheezburger Network has launched their own video game caption site Bob’s House of Video Games. Now I don’t know who Bob is, I don’t know if he’s renting or has a mortgage, and I don’t know what the property values are in his neighborhood, but I do know that he deals in the business of video game screen captions, and this is relevant to my interests.
Despite my ramblings on Twitter where I sound like a sleep deprived lunatic (which I was) this is not some horrible, end of the world thing. Honestly I knew they’d step into the realm of video game captions sooner or later (they’ve got pretty much EVERYTHING else covered at this point) and it’s not like there aren’t other sites that dabble in the genre.
However there are certain things that bother me about how ICHC runs the “blogs” on their network. Essentially the sites are designed as dumping grounds for content instead of being moderated and run by editors. The only reason this bothers me is that original content, created by Halolz readers, submitted to this site, will be copied on to their site with no credit, permission or watermark.
Now in a sense this isn’t ICHB’s fault, but it’s how their system is designed and it becomes our problem not theirs. People will pull your submissions from here and submit it there and as of right now the only thing we can do is submit a form on their site asking them to remove your work (and maybe it will happen). Now I mean if you want your submission up there, go ahead and send it in! But 99% of the time, if an original submission from our readers appears on their site, it’s going to be because some random person grabbed it off here and sent it in and no one (including you, the person who captured the screenshot, or Halolz) will receive any credit.
Of course there is plenty of stuff posted here that has just been “floatin’ around the nets” and hardly counts as original Halolz content, but in the three or so years we’ve been doing the site I have always made providing source links a very high priority on every post. And by design this is not something that will happen at Bob’s.
Anyway this is pretty much the only real problem I have with the site, and I’m going to try to meet with the guys who run the site this week while I’m in Seattle to talk about it.
But for those of you who feel like taking some action, well there are two specific things you can do. And trolling their site is NOT one of them.
1. If you see a submission on there that you know is an original Halolz submission, submit a request to have it removed or for them to add the source. Especially if is something YOU made.
2. Continue to do the one thing I’ve always said is the biggest way you can help support the site; share your favorite submissions on forums, by email, share them on facebook, retweet, etc (and always try to provide a link to the site).
And now I have to run, as my friend Heather who is helping me at Sakura-Con needs to see some Seattle sights before I make her work for the next four days!
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Posted by Shawn Handyside on March 31, 2010 · 4:56 PM
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Submissions are now closed, be sure to check out our new site!
Did you know the site has over 4,000 video game themed lolz?
"But for those of you who feel like taking some action, well there are two specific things you can do"
*Prepares to troll with well thought out and meaningful dialogue*
"And trolling their site is NOT one of them."
Awww…
People stealing content? On the internet?
What has this world come to!
HMMMMMMM…
http://bobshouseofvideogames.com/2010/03/12/funny… or http://www.halolz.com/2010/01/06/extreme-thumbwre…
http://bobshouseofvideogames.com/2010/03/25/video… or http://www.halolz.com/2009/04/11/meat-shields/#id…
http://bobshouseofvideogames.com/2010/03/27/video… or http://www.halolz.com/2009/04/06/teamwork-it-does…
http://bobshouseofvideogames.com/2010/03/17/video… or http://www.halolz.com/2009/03/28/if-you-want-your…
… and that was just a few I noticed.
Ive made comments linking to the original halolz post of all the ones on the site, very politely, I doubt they will post them (What kind of a lolz site moderates comments?) but lets hope they take the high road on this (doubt it)
"with no credit, permission or watermark."
Correction: they do have watermarks. Fucking huge ones at that. They use them to cover up the halolz watermark.
Well, I sent the owners of the Cheezeburger Network a complaint about the site. They said they will deal with it and will contact you Shawn. Maybe you can stop it.
Lets see if they notice with some submissions, and yes I'm being civilized about this.
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/090/5/3/Ca…
Too long. Did not read.
And I didnt comment on this.
And I certainly did NOT divide by zero.
We can certainly fix that.
Personally, I pity them, they can't be a good lolz site if they have to steal from places without giving proper credit
If anything this fires me up to make a WHOLE HUGE BUTTLOAD OF NEW HALOLZ PICTURES! Let's get that photoshop cranking people! Let's flood Shawn with Halolz submissions like he's never seen before!
Yeah they do seem to have quite a few Halolz originating posts
Personally, I don't mind if my submissions end up there. I just want them on the internet.
Apparently though, they cover dental for their submitters.
O_O"
A lot of those submisions look awfuly familiar…
We need to be delicate with this. It could potentially bring a flood of trolls to Halolz, which would suck seeing as this place has been relatively devoid of trolls for quite some time.
That would make sense. That's why I'm not doing it. I, however, will troll the hell out of the site.
Did my thread on the forums start a troll war? *goes off to check*
I'm not usually pissed off by things on the internet, but this is actually somewhat annoying. Posting with proper credits is fine by me, but blantantly stealing content certainly isn't. Hopefully, someone will eventually get through to the site's owner(s) and get this resolved.
Also, I noticed a lot of stolen submissions weren't Halolz's best or most popular. That's bizarre in itself, unless they thought those pictures were ignored already and they'd get some free content that way.
All of their original stuff sucks.
Most of the stuff they stole from Halolz is among our worst submissions.
Long story short, they suck so bad at everything, they even suck at letting other people do the work. Worst thieves ever. Kay will be very angry at them.
I'm one of the code monkeys here at Cheezburger (srsly) and I stumbled upon this and I thought I would try to clear up a few small misconceptions.
1. We have an explicit policy never to post images that have anyone else's watermarks on them. We like to think that people who submit content to us made it themselves, but unfortunately that's not always the case. A handful of submissions came through with the Halolz watermark and a few slipped by without us noticing them, as our software (that I made) automatically put our watermark over most of it. I'm working on changing the auto-watermark algorithm to *append* to user submissions instead of overwriting the bottom-most 12 pixels so we can more clearly see exactly what was submitted and bounce out things that were stolen.
If you ever see something on *any* of our sites that you feel was stolen or lacks the proper attribution, let us know (in the comments, or click "contact us") and we'll give the attribution or take it down right away.
2. We don't need to steal content from anywhere. Our content is user-submitted, and we have a bunch of submissions. We have had a "video games" category in our online "Lol Builder" for the last several months and have received a large batch of submissions from there.
3. None of our sites are just "a dumping ground". We have a system where submissions are moderated by our editorial team, promoted to a "voting" stage where the community gives feedback into what they consider funny. Our editorial team takes the best things from voting and puts those on the front page of the site, usually with some extra commentary or context.
Also, the guy who is doing editorial for BHOVG is one of the funniest and video-game obsessed guys I've ever known. He's really working hard at making it a site worthy of your attention.
4. We're not out to destroy anyone. There doesn't need to be any angry rivalry. Halolz is a great site with funny content and an awesome community. You have nothing to worry about. Abraham Lincoln once said "The path to success is wide enough that more than one funny video game web site can walk it at the same time". Or something like that, whatever.
If you pay attention, below the Halolz originating submissions there are credits (or at least it says "Via Halolz.com")