My team has been working on a plugin to steganographically encode jpegs with username data in order to cut down on piracy. Basically it hides the login info of the logged-in patron who downloads it, within the pixels of the image, in a fashion that stands up to image cropping and manipulation. So you can plug it in a “reader” utility and find out who is reposting your work. We will have an oauth version running in the next few days, and I am putting this out in the hopes I can get a few people to help me test it out. Please PM me if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready to test.
Great idea – in addition to the hidden watermark, maybe also add “do not share - 's copy” visibly but in a small, non-obtrusive font (like 10px?) in the corner so as to remind the user that they shouldn’t share it. That’d help A) users remember not to repost, as many users lose track of what is public and what is private, and B) help those images get removed by automatically moderators of responsible sites.
EDIT: Actually, going to argue against my own suggestion since I just realized some patrons might be miffed that they’re paying for the high quality version only to get a visibly watermarked copy. So, maybe just do the invisible watermark and include that text in the filename as a reminder.
Contact the mods here… if you shoot them a rough draft of this, maybe they can polish it up and make it a default feature of patreon … (WITH credit /reimbursement where due)
If this were built into patreon, it would save so many creators so much headache!!
We have it working nicely as a “link” so a thumb displays on your Patreon main page and when you click on it, it will (a) prompt them to accept a new plugin cookie if they do not have one, and (b) download the encoded image if they have the cookie.
Unfortunately, because of the wonkiness of Patreon’s Oauth API, we are unable to make this seamless. Presently. Hopefully they will see the merit of our project and change this.
I will be contacting some of you via PM with info on how to implement this system and help me test it out.
Also new on the development front: We are experimenting with QR code formatting (presently we use barcode-style), and the first test to destroy the data ends up with us still being able to read the data when the image has been reduced to 15% of its original size, using a smartphone photo of the monitor. This feature is the next one to be rolled out.
D: Not sure how heavy the spam prevention is but does it help adding in a top line that is personalized? Like a “thank you ____ for contacting us.” And then change the name each time? (some sites will let you get away with this. Some wont. But it’s a thought.)
@carla - The people who come here are usually personally invited. Is there some way to not have the system prevent these kinds of things?
