Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-16461120-20160502015253

For far too long we have accumulated an increasingly excessive volume of unlicensed fan art, which has been uploaded to this site. This is a problem because the art cannot legally be displayed without explicit permission from the artist, and the majority of it is thus against Wikia's existing terms of use. Therefore, we will be begin to purge the site of all the illegal and unlicensed fan art on  June 1st, 2016 .

Now this presents a pair of minor problems, which I'll describe, with simple solutions, below:


 * First, many of us have previously tagged our personal user galleries as fan art. If that includes you, in order to protect your gallery from the coming deletion, you will need to change the GalleryType to "User Gallery". (You'll find an example of that done here.)
 * Second, even properly licensed images where permission was given, such as those where the uploader is themselves the artist or they commissioned the artwork personally, will be subject to the coming purge if they remain in any of the various fan art categories. If that includes you, in order to protect images which you definitively have legal permission to use from the coming deletion, you will need to change the License to "Public Domain", the Image Type to "User Image", and lastly provide an accurate Description which explicitly details the nature of the permission given. (You'll find an example of that done here for a commissioned image and here for a self-made image.)

Hope this helps, and feel free to ask any questions y'all may have. Thanks. 