Remember this warning in the begast page telling hosts to not create lazy bitpacks?

I think it works because it's announced where it crucially matters the most.

Similarly, if we have warnings such as:

"don't troll vote", displayed above the XHB save vote button and;

"don't reveal your artist name", shown above the XHB upload system...

then maybe newcomers will be aware of those rules in advance and won't break them.

Nice idea, but I'd say "make distinctions between your votes" instead of "don't troll vote", because people that are trolling and doing it on purpose wouldn't listen to the warning anyway, and newcomers will probably dismiss the warning because they're not actively malicious without actually knowing what troll voting is.

Good points, I'm down for whichever is the best way to word the message. Meant to propose that it could briefly explain what troll voting means, since the explanation is only given in chat posts and in admin notifications from what I can tell.

I have a long-standing FAQ work-in-progress that it'd be nice to link to for these sorts of things.

I can't really promise when that'll be done, it hasn't been touched in a while, but this is a good reminder to finish it, and I do think there's a lot of little rules and site quirks that come up a lot and deserve clearer answers.

I have a request but no clear suggestion about it
It's about HXB battles where botbrs must not reveal the artist name. That leaves an unsigned drawing, which is easily stealable - i know what you think, but not everyone has moral codes on internet and i already got stolen and now i'm pretty panaro.
I know this might be hard to develop, but i would suggest we submit an unsigned drawing for the time of voting which would be destroyed after the tally period, and a signed drawing which will be online afterwards (of course, unsigned and signed will have to be exactly the same)
Also, that's just a suggestion regarding visual / pixel XHB and I am aware this might be hard to do!

Well the same can be said about music, unless you put some sort of "producer tag" in it (which I don't like because it takes away from the song imo)

I would rather just live with it, because the only thing people can't steal from you is your motivation to make stuff.

i don't believe it's worth the effort to implement any "countermeasures" like that. if someone wanted to steal your drawing they could open photoshop and trivially remove the signature in mere minutes, if not seconds. even very intrusive watermarks can be removed with a bit of reconstruction work (speaking from experience)

plus, i don't believe plagiarism is a real concern with xhbs, where most works sit around maybe tens of total views/plays, primarily coming from active members of the community. those works got practically no exposure to potential bad actors, especially now that you can't access majority of the website without logging in

This is sorta off topic from the OP at this point, but re: signing art entries, there's definitely a missing piece here -- after the battle has concluded, there's no option to add visible author attribution to the entry itself afterward. In contrast, music entries allow you to upload a tagged mp3 render, filling in the attribution.

The real boon of artist signatures like this isn't to prevent abuse (bad actors can indeed crop it, edit it, strip tags off mp3s, and whatnot), but to make it so the attribution doesn't vanish into the ether when well-intentioned people excitedly share your work elsewhere by reuploading it as-is. If I see an art repost and it has a sig, and I really dig it, then I know what to search for to find more from the artist.

Within BotB itself, I wonder if it'd be possible to repurpose the system used for renders to allow for uploading a signed version? In practice, it's the same concept -- uploading a second "view" of the contest entry that's geared toward casual viewing/listening/etc.

my main issue is the rules are placed under the submit button, instead of vice versa

this means visually, you see the submit button before the rules on submitting

@02FD THIS