I have been searching for a few hours on ways to prevent stolen avatars from being entered into the MD Universe. With a few trial and errors, I have found a few sites that offer reverse image recognition searches.

While not perfect, these sites do offer a way to protect MD against things of this nature. I have done a few searches with these sites, and have found about a 50% success rate of finding these images. It's not perfect, but it does sort of work.

I suggest the council or who ever deals with the avatars look into these sites. I have a list if needed.

Actually reverse image searches such as tineye work really well for large images. However if you try with the small avatars, finding the results has a much lower, if close to none likelyhood of finding them. This is due to the fact that the images are made transparent and turned into gif, a frankly horrible format for preserving quality.

Back when there was a lot of avatar stealing, in Fenrirs case when he stole a bunch of images and claimed they were his own, i used some of these reverse images tools to check any other "suspicious" avatars, however using them i think i found one only due to the amount that the image had been changed from the original. These sites work well for many images larger than 300*300 but the smaller you get its harder to make a match due to the general algorithm used.

In asking for the avatar to be converted to transparent, and MD added, you actually change a large amount of the pixels, since the background is the majority of any image, i did find more sucess by removing the MD and adding a slightly off white color to similate the "paper" it would have been drawn on. However even then it only produced a match on this one avatar, which was one we had already known about, which didnt help anyway since that was one that someone else had identified and i was checking if the tool actually worked.

I think you will find, that using such a tool on the avatars, wont produce any results, even if the image is well known. But it is a good idea, if it doesnt work practically.

Edited August 18, 201114 yr by Chewett