Hi, I was wondering what the policy is on uploading art by artists who have deleted their FA accounts/other online presence with no warning. I'm assuming the guideline is to just not upload the art in the first place, but just wanted to make sure it's not like a "it's cool unless the artist personally sends a DNP request" thing.

The artist in question was Theresliterallysoapeverywhere, I didn't find a previous discussion about them on the forums.

If an artist has deleted all of their presence online, that means there's no "source" link for the images you're posting, and uploading without any source link(s) is generally frowned upon unless you ARE the source/artist.

It's not technically against the rules to upload art without an artist's permission, but if they've tried to scrub their content from the internet, chances are they don't want you uploading it here, so it'd be best not to upload it to avoid any hassle.

Per the Code of Conduct:

2.2 Tagging, Rating, and Sourcing Abuse

• Do not add any sources that are invalid, and do not remove any sources that are valid.
• Valid sources are defined as web pages where the artwork can be found.
• At least one source page should be publicly available, unless you are the artist, commissioner, or copyright owner of the artwork.

If they don't already have art up on here, always best to just contact them and ask, if possible. They might be fine with it, or might not

Fair, that makes sense. It was art I commissioned from them but I truly don't know how I'd contact them without the FA link. I'll just leave it on my hard drive then, thanks all

If an artist deletes their presence from a site, it is probably because they no longer want to be on said site anymore (and may have alternative galleries).

If an artist completely nukes their presence from the internet, it is probably because they do not want to be associated with their alias and/or artwork anymore.
Chances are that they would never respond to your inquiries or are unable to be reached anywhere online, or that they would clamp down on any reposts made and request for them to be taken down.

roprope2 said:
Fair, that makes sense. It was art I commissioned from them but I truly don't know how I'd contact them without the FA link. I'll just leave it on my hard drive then, thanks all

As the commissioner, you may repost whatever you have commissioned without fear. Ideally, with the source being from one of your galleries instead of the artist's.
Commissioners generally retain some publication rights to repost the artworks they had received, depending on artist's terms of service when they had commissioned from them.

However, if the artist were to request for their artworks to be purged from the site, then you are out of luck.

wandering_spaniel said:
If they don't already have art up on here, always best to just contact them and ask, if possible. They might be fine with it, or might not

This does bring up an interesting thing to note. Some art I've found had source links, but overtime the account was removed or the original post deleted leading to a broken link in the sources, but the art on E621 remained.
Should someone go about updating the links in that case or keep it as is? It's not entirely a common thing, but I've seen it happen a couple of times.

avatheavali said:
This does bring up an interesting thing to note. Some art I've found had source links, but overtime the account was removed or the original post deleted leading to a broken link in the sources, but the art on E621 remained.
Should someone go about updating the links in that case or keep it as is? It's not entirely a common thing, but I've seen it happen a couple of times.

Please don't go removing dead links from sources. However, you can show that the links are dead by putting a minus at the front of the link. Eg. -https://inkbunny.net/s/386516.

clawstripe said:
Please don't go removing dead links from sources. However, you can show that the links are dead by putting a minus at the front of the link. Eg. -https://inkbunny.net/s/386516.

Didn't say I was don't worry, better to ask then find out the hard way.
Thanks for clarifying!