Victor Wynne :tooters:
Hey @miaq why the change in Flipboard’s website which strips all author attribution, titling/alt text, and zero links to the source material? Those photos are mine, but how would anyone know? Same behavior on the website/iOS app.
Boosting 🚀 on here retains the original author. The only “flipping” happening here is the middle finger at photographers.
Mike McCue
@victor @miaq Hi Victor, I think there's a bug happening here. Your attribution should never be be removed from these posts. I believe this worked fine earlier but something changed with a recent backend release. We are looking into it now and will get back to you by tomorrow with when we will ship a fix. Thanks for calling it out and apologies for doing anything to upset you or other photographers. We will make this right.
Mike McCue
@richard_merren @victor @miaq Yes we've confirmed this is a bug introduced in a recent backend release. We've always displayed full attribution with links back to original URL since we launched Flipboard in 2010 with the goal of enabling more people to discover, engage with and follow more creators and publishers. Our team is working this as we speak and I will send an update later today.
Richard
@victor @miaq This is nuts. Flip has many years experience providing links to websites and they know better than to do this.
Mike McCue
@victor @squeevening Hi Victor, I have an update for you on this.
It turns out that the reason why you're seeing two different treatments for posts shared to Flipboard from Mastodon is that it depends on how that sharing happened. Our web bookmarklet properly preserves the Mastodon link along with author attribution, etc. But this is broken in our beta iOS and Android integrations.
We just shipped a server side hack to fix this immediately. A more elegant fix to the clients will ship soon.
Victor Wynne :tooters:
@squeevening 💯…look at the first screenshot of two in the initial toot of this thread. That was done correctly. Providing all of the info in the original post, and a link back so that alt text was retained. This is ridiculous.
Calamity Caitlin
@victor Wow. Assholes.
Victor Wynne :tooters:
There are countless fedi photographers who have CC/Copyright protections on their photos which have been “flipped” into this same curated list of photos with zero attribution. They should be a lot more upset by this than me.
I am more upset that no linking back is occurring so my location, and alt text details have been removed. I put a lot of information in my alt text both for people who use assistive technology, but also Easter eggs for people with no vision impairments.
Victor Wynne :tooters:
You’ve “flipped” (🖕🏻) dozens of my photos @miaq and at no point, anywhere, do you give author attribution, or reference where the images were sourced from.
You also strip out the location details I provide in my toots, and the alt text which are an important (and essential to screen readers) aspect of each photo I publish.
Watermarking be damned, that still wouldn’t help link people back to tooters.org.
Mike McCue
@victor @squeevening Apologies for creating any alarm here. Our intent has always been to preserve the Mastodon link, attribution, and engagement when that post is seen on Flipboard. We strongly believe this is a) critical for the author of the post and b) a fundamentally better user experience for anyone using Flipboard to discover posts on the Fediverse.
Thanks for calling this out and please let me know if I can help with any other questions or concerns you have here.
Mike McCue
@victor My pleasure. Really appreciate your reply and understanding. Thanks for keeping us on the straight and narrow!
Victor Wynne :tooters:
@mike thank you so much for the quick response, and action. It was shortsighted of me not to assume good faith, and the potential for a bug when earlier this year I saw my photos ending up on Flipboard with everything preserved. I updated my thread with your initial response last night when I saw it this morning. The entire history of Flipboard has basically been link posting which pulls in certain info from the source, and when it was radically changed it threw me off. Thank you, Mike. 💙
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