I felt like writing about the constant reposting of icons from livejournal, because I have become a very active lj user in the past months and I know of many lj people who are annoyed as hell to see their icons posted here.
First of all I'd like to say that I did it too. Yes, I took icons that were posted on livejournal and posted them here with credit.
Now you might say: Okay, but if people credit them, why is there a problem? It's not as if the lj people own the original pictures they icon.
This is of course true, but I think it is more about respect and being polite.
Imagine you are someone who loves to make icons and spends a long time creating them. You post them to livejournal and you are happy. Then some day you see that all of them are on fanpop - amongst thousands of other icons.
Or you are someone like me, who posts icons to livejournal and then go to bed because you are tired, and the next day when you want to post your icons to fanpop too, of course they have already been posted by someone else.
It doesn't piss me off very much, because I'm used to it and I obviously don't mind if my icons are on fanpop or I wouldn't have planned to post them there.
But have you ever thought about the lj people? Most of the graphic makers I know say something like:" Why are my icons posted there? If I wanted them there I would have posted them there myself. :S"
And now something to think about.
Why do you post icons made by livejournal users on fanpop?
Is it because you thought they were all so great and you really want to share them or is it more because you want one of these oh-so-great-medals?
If it is because you want a medal, that's really sad. And I've done absolutely the same, medal-obssessed and not thinking about wether the makers of the icons actually wanted me to repost them here.
I'm not proud that I did that.
If you repost icons because you think they are great and want to show them to other fanpop users - why don't you simply ask the maker if you can repost them here?
It takes a minute to ask but it shows great respect and is in my opinion just the right thing to do.
I know, they posted their icons on the internet and once they do that, they have to face the fact that they'll be posted on other places too.
But put yourself in their position. Do you want to see your stuff posted everywhere without a single person asking?
IF they say no but you think their icons are so great that other fanpop users should see them you can still put a link to their icons here, right? ;)
I have also read about Images on the fanpop-about page, because I was interested in what the F4 have in mind.
Image Gallery
We found that it was painful looking for good images for our favorite topics. Whenever we went to a wallpaper site it was always plastered with ads and we were inundated with popup ads. We also noticed that fans loved to make fan art and icons to express themselves but had nowhere to really share them. So we decided to create a safe and simple way for fans to share all their photos, icons, wallpapers and fan art in one place. Now you can show off all of your creations with other fans in our galleries and easily find images of your favorite things in a nice organized way.
I think they wanted us to post promo pictures of TV shows, photoshoots of stars and our own creations, but seriously...with everyone posting so many livejournal icons, our own creations simply get lost amongst them, which is really sad.:/
Posting icons on livejournal is really organised so why would we feel the need to post them here if they aren't even our own creations?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think many people do it because of medals, which I would then call: "The disrespectful reposting of other people's work in order to get a small green,yellow or red dot."
