[Brad]

Originally Posted by punchbowl

First time I'd ever seen the pre-defined avatars on here. Are we allowed use them as predefined avatars on our sites or did the copyright owners just waive their copyright for vb.org?

It would be a nice gesture to maybe use some original ones in there. Build bridges not barricades.

Uhhh as far as I know no they did not waive the copyright. To understand why those avatars are there you have to understand a little bit about the history of this site. Long story short there used to be a site by the name of vBulletintemplates.com that was owned by Saintdog, and I assume he added those avatars when he launched it because they match the old vBt style. This site became an official Jelsoft site at some point and later on the user accounts from that site were imported in to vBulletin.org. To avoid breaking all the accounts that use the pre-defined avatars we added them here during the merger (well they wouldn't be broken but they would have a red X under their usernames).

As far as adding new avatars submitted by the user base; I'm not against the idea but I can see how it can create a problem for the people that run this site. Sure if you just have a hand full of users submitting avatars it's no big deal..but what about 10, 20, 30, 40? Will these designers have requests like having their name in the footer of this site? Are the willing to hand the copyright of the images over to Jelsoft?

It opens a can of worms that someone is going to have to take the time to manage. So it's easier to just not accept any work rather than managing all the submissions that may or may not come in.

Would I run my own ship with such a mindset? Probably not...but then again I don't have a million+ users to support.