NicolaiB

Yes, we are going to take action, not jut against "thieves", but also against those that come here to start fights, advertise or otherwise behave in ways that are counter-productive to the community, including mod theft. We knew about the issue, the "modders" knew that we knew about the issue and they knew that we were working on a solution, yet they ignored our polite requests to stop public accusations and start fights several times. I asked input from everyone in October about the site and what improvments we could be,noboody chimed in, nobody wanted to discuss theft or other issues on LCPDFR, nothing. I received one PM from a user that wanted to share his appreciation for LCPDFR, but that was all. Many people don't release mods unlocked because they willl get comments like "This will be overused by the community" or "Average modders doesn't deserve this, you should remove it" by other modders. You mention Dodgeboy's Ford PI being used without permission by "thieves", yet at least one of the "accusers" showed the same model despite "not having permission to release it": >Here, and> here's a statement form him regarding the hubcaps. Remarkably few of the modders that are "fighting" against mod theft made any accusations or remarks then despite the fact that the problem has been present for a long time. The attitude some of the modders seem to be that they're above the rest, that they deserve things their way, that they deserve to "control" the modding scene. The only changes they have been willing to accept would give them more control over the modding community.

You could also argue that a minority of users feel as if they "need" to "rip" the car models if they want to be on the "forefront" of modding in our community, the only unlocked new-gen cop car is a Charger, both the PIU and PIS from Ford as well as the Caprice is kept under lock-and-key by those few that have them. "Their"(the "rippers"/"thieves") resoning could be that all they want the means to make nice police cars for other people, but they're "limited" to Crown Vics, Impalas and Tahoes and a "hand-full of lights" when "everyone else" are releasing Caprices, PIS's/PIU's and Chargers with "the latest" or "best" lights on them, why should they work on "sub-par" mods knowing that they'll "never" get access to the "hot" models? I'm not justifying ripping or theft, nor am I saying they're right or that we're allowing,encouraging or endorsing it. Sure, there's a lot more dev resources out there now, but you are still very limited as a modder unless you can acquire "good" car and equipment models via the ethically correct way if you don't want to model, say a "correct" Whelen Liberty oredSig Valor. The new-gen cop cars are tightly guarded by those who has access to them, as it lighting equipment. Modders has actively discouraged other modders from uploading development resources and told the same if they do upload some. That's assuming that you don't accidentally cross paths with another modder, you're on our own if someone brands you as a thief. One of the modders we contacted ran into trouble with a model with a skin given to him by another user, unfortunately that skin used parts of third skin without permission, the rumours soon started to flow along with snarky comments about theft. This user was lucky to have been a part of the modding community for a while and had several released mods before that incident, but it still shows how quickly attitudes change if someone sees something they thing are odd. Again, we're no justifying theft, ripping or any kind of unauthorized used of content. It's not my opinion or any of the CT members opinion, however we do try and look at things from every angle.

I did not intend to attack you, but there are certain inaccuracies in your statement and I don't agree with the tone. It looks to us like there's more to the departure of certain modders, the complaints we got, some public, from the modders concerned lack of exposure of their mods on the site as the site grew and more modders joined the site. The other side to this is that we haven't been approached by anyone about the issue, the only times we heard about theft was when the public accusations went around, we weren't PM'ed or contacted on Steam/Skype etc, about the issues. One modder mentioned in a PM conversation I had with him that theft accusations are used as a weapon: We all agree that mod theft is bad, I don't think that it is right to talk about us as people who who don't, however we are not going to remove content and apply sanctions based on claims that cannot be verified. We also want everyone to abide by the same rules, which, with some people (you aren't one of them) are not interested in doing. We can debate the rules, which we have done with a selection of modders and we can do it again. However it's not acceptable to disregard the rules because you disagree with them.

It's a round-about way of dealing with the issue if I'm honest. We can address theft, gallery issues and other issues by making the rules and sanctions less ambiguous. By the numbers, theft isn't a problem, we've had 263 reports in over three years that contains the words "credits", "stolen" and "theft" (keep in mind that theft is used in some sections and are counted). The problem concerns the gallery, specifically what is allowed and what is not allowed in the gallery. One fairly straight-forward option would be to prohibit car mods that aren't released or shown in a Work In Progress thread on LCPDFR. I personally don't think that it is a fair thing for us to do, why should we prohibit you because you're not using mods that are hosted on our site? We could do that, it's a feasible way for us to enforce anti-theft policies in the gallery. It's restrictive, cumbersome and will undoubtedly give us a lot more work.

We'll have new rules that are leave much less room for interpretation that are also updated to reflect the emphasis on modding in general on the site. They'll be implemented along with the new forum and download section structures this Weekend, we still need to plan the final details so we'll update once we can.

At least I don't have to do much to show the stupidity that some people have 'round here.

>We aren't doing anything? Regarding rules and guidelines, it's clearly defined exactly what a "guideline" is here: Your behaviour illustrates the problems we face, there's absolutely no respect for us as staff, our rules or other members. We reached out some of the modders last month, just over 30 days ago (the staff section post was created "4 weeks ago", we hardly had much time to do antyhing back then, LCPDFR 1.0 was just around the corner and we had several flame wars started by modders. The suggestions we got varied, however the scope was everything from "banning mods from the gallery" to "setting up a theft investigation team", some openly advocated for public accusations. The accusations carried on, it escalated to some making derogatory remarks at us. One user responded to a final PM warning with a post where we were called "faggots" for enforcing the rules, another sent me a private message with the title "you fail" with several abusive remarks about my person in it. There has been similar public posts on other sites. We started all this just over a month ago, how do you expect us to work on finding a way to deal with the issue in a resonable and sane manner in the same month that LCPDFR 1.0 came out, with Christmas and with several arguments happening every day. You modders aren't the victims here, we haven't ignored you, we haven't taken harsh action at you guys, one one of you received a 12 month suspension for repeatedly calling people out, he received several PM's, a number of warnings, was put on mod queue, given temporary bans and even had his posting rights removed (which prompted the "faggots" PM I mentioned) We're not going to implement anything that severely restricts all but the few modders that so readily jump to the guns when they see an image they don't like in the gallery. I think we've been more than fair with the modders.

So it's okay to break the rules whenever you feel like we aren't doing "enough" because we're not going to take severe sanctions against some gallery images? We've always taken action when we had evidence that content was used without permission. We have asked for input from the people that kept making accusations, but nothing changed, the accusations kept flying and fights kept occuring even though we made it clear that it's not acceptable and that we are working on finding a solution.

Regarding the issue pertaining to the image Sam posted: JokerMods was caught evading his ban by our multi account reporting system. This is where we are, we all expect our tasks here to be thankless every now and then. We do however have a line that mustn't be crossed, we're five time zones over the line right now.

Sorry, I had 49 notifications when I logged on the site so I didn't see your reply here. Can you upload a couple of images of the model in zmod?