I’ve been a member and guest here for a long, long time. Sometimes good and sometimes bad. Seen a lot and been through a lot. Had good times with people. Had a few fights with people. When Grams died several members/guests stepped up and were kind enough to offer masses on her behalf, sent PMs and a couple even emblazoned a hatchment on very short notice. The good has always outnumbered the bad here. For this reason, and because I’m proud to be an American and an armiger, I always thought of AHS as my heraldic home and the only place I actually paid to be a member of for that reason.

That is why I have shared my art with people here as well as some personal info, like my health issues, where I have not done that elsewhere, as my friend Ton can attest to. That and the previous admins/IT people had promised that AHS would always work to help combat un-authorized use of works especially in light of a previous president of this society having stolen a piece he had commissioned me to do and then never paid me for but then put the image up on some websites he was affiliated with and used it as if he had paid for it. In the past I was allowed to put up a thread with basically the same warning about un-authorized use of my art. Of course this was before people like Kimon got here, so people like him may not have been aware of it. But, I did post it and was told I could, which is why I did so again since I was painting again as part of my physical therapy and had decided on sharing those works with everyone here—I didn’t want any of it being copied and used without my permission and sometimes people could do that without thinking/knowing I wouldn’t want them to or could do so maliciously.

However, as the post I put up regarding this serious issue of protecting my works (serious to me anyway) was mocked by Kimon the IT guy in his ‘there’s nothing you or we can do about this kind of thing so it’s pointless posting it’ themed post in his initial post on the matter and as it was part and parcel with all of the side-tracked issues and was seen as "useless" by Joe and asked for it all to be removed and as I asked if just the first part about no un-authorized use of my images when Joe had called for it all to be deleted by Mods could be left up, well, then, I am left with the sad reality of knowing that the AHS, or her powers that be, no longer does care about the safety of my images, or for a member, such as myself, who is asking that this notice be put up to help combat such activity as I was always allowed to do in the past without mockery from any board member.

Add to this nothing being said to me, or asked of me, regarding the one board member who sent a harassing email to my private email and who has power to remove entire threads and hide while he’s on here—something not quite right about hiding here while you’re here, but hey, what do I know—and then post seconds after you do then it is clear that either the powers that be do not care, or do not want to be involved, or think it not a big deal just as the attempt to protect my art is no big deal.

None of those is a good thing and makes me pause long and hard about what I am doing here.

So, after thinking on this a bit yesterday and again today while at neurology again I decided that it is clear that I no longer have a home here, or am not wanted here or whatever, which is fine. So be it. I will move on. Frankly, I do not care to go in circles with anyone especially with someone who is allowed to bully people on and off the board and nothing is done about it or on the merits of trying to protect one’s art. Life’s too short and, frankly, those few people who act like that are not worth wasting one more second of my life on.

Before I leave, however, I want to thank those people who I’ve met here over the years who have been people of good will and honest in their endeavors both on the board and off and as part of AHS and outside it when we’ve communicated. I appreciate the good times we had and am sorry for any of the bad ones we may have had. I wish we could continue on here, but it ain’t gonna work not with actions and inactions going on as they recently have and most especially without being willing to cooperate in the protection of my works which were shared here.

I wish most people here a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. If any of you want to reach me outside of AHS and since we’ve lost the other means of heraldic forum/friendship due to certain peoples continued actions and there’s no other heraldic vehicles left you can do so through Facebook where I am friends with many here and send me a friend request by checking their friend list if they allow that. At least I believe that’s how that’s done.

Take care and may God bless those men and women of good will and intent here at AHS.

Sorry to do this, but I have to just in case—I hereby withdraw all permission(s) for the use of my work on this forum or by the corporate body known as American Heraldry Society as I can not get guarantees that it will be protected or that measures will be put into place to help protect against mis-use of my works by outside parties or that I will continue to be allowed to post public notice in that regard. Sorry.

Mr. IT director please remove my member’s armorial section immediately. Thank you.

Coach I would follow you but I need to keep a watchful eye on this forum because some pretty damaging threads have been posted about me here in the past which Kimon kindly removed for me. Catch you elsewhere.

I’m sorry to see you leave under such circumstances.  You will be missed Coach.

I’m sorry to see you leave Coach.  You will be missed on here.  Best of luck with your PT.  I hope it at least reignites your passion for making personal art (even if no one else sees it).

The easiest thing to do is say, "sorry to hear it, Denny."  Which I am.  But since I’d lay odds this thread will be taken down because it should be - I’ll throw this out there.

I think the heraldic business has quite enough emotional reactionaries and it takes more than one person to have such problems.  Solid differences of opinion or perceptions quickly appear to become or be taken as personal.

I am known to be direct - and somewhat passionate - and often, well, disagreeable -

Since the thread in question is gone, it cannot be re evaluated with a calm mind or digested, but I believe the initial tone ocould be percieved as a bit of a bellicose stance, technical realities were pointed out which led to a veiled accusation of aiding a stalker (a felony) and heated responses - during which there was a request to take it off the forum and to PMs which was ignored.

There was enough to go around on this one.

Issues elsewhere appear to be bleeding into this forum.  That is unfortunate.

Wish I didn’t like heraldry so much sometimes.

Coach, I wish you fair winds and following seas.

Dennis,

Aquilo is a strong wind that this time won’t blow in your sails to help you sail away !I hate to see good and passionate people leave, specially when you said ‘the good has always outnumbered the bad here’.So, please reconsider your decision.

I don’t believe that AHS doesn’t care about you or issue of un-authorised use of your artwork.It was quite an unfortunate combination of topics in one thread, along with site-tracking and not to mention your suspicion about the link to the blog I posted.At this point,I’m grateful to the moderator who made an effort to scan it all and bring back some trust in technology used around.Being not very savvy myself I appreciate Kimon and other the IT guys here .I take their opinions seriously and since they see placing warning notices as useless ,I believe they have a reason to say so. I’m just following and witnessing a case of the whole website being cloned ,with the whole content and graphics.Fake pages adorned with stolen from Facebook private profiles pictures and a private data collected from Google -all of this is a work of skilled thieves who disregard all written and unwritten rules of ethical behavior.

I don’t ignore the issue brought by you ,Dennis .I want everybody to acknowledge that it is much broader than we think and in this case the logic thing is to unite and combat the evil instead of politely withdrawing.

You said ,it’s your home ...then ...fight for it !:shootout:

If Denny is actually gone from the forum, isn’t it rather superfluous to keep sending him messages on it?

Good friends will pass the good messages along .  Others will simply be ignored.

Perhaps Anna the ‘cloning’ you are referring to is simply a matter of someone buying an additional domain name and pointing it to their existing website such as the ‘heraldry.us’ link I have purchased and pointed at the Jamieson Gallery.  This is a very common practice.  You used this address, heraldry.us, to visit my site just this week.  Make sure you aren’t creating drama where there is none.

I hesitated to take parting shots when Denny was no longer here to shoot back, but if people are going to imply that Denny is the wronged party here, we need to set the record straight.

Denny was unhappy that his work had been lifted from the AHS site without his permission and demanded the IT team take steps to prevent that from happening in the future. Kimon and others explained politely why all the solutions usually proposed for this issue are ineffective. The one workaround he didn’t mention, which even I know about, is a simple screen shot of the image you want to copy.

So then Denny escalated matters by accusing one of our members of putting a virus on "her" blog (a blog that turned out to be clean and wasn’t actually "her" blog at all) and charged the AHS as an organization with basically aiding and abetting criminal activity.

Frankly, at this point it may have been better to launch Hugh Brady, our resident lawyer on the board, to issue a warning about making unfounded accusations, but Kimon responded advising Denny to discuss the matter via PM. Did he say that sometimes Denny has no clue what he’s talking about? Yes, he did. But how could Denny take exception to that when only a few days before he had admitted:

Quote:

I am tired of being ignorant of IT stuff and, frankly, tired of feeling stupid because I can’t figure a lot of these things out!

And so here we are. My comment that the thread was useless did not refer to Denny’s complaint about his artwork being misused. I’ve had the same thing happen to me, most notably one AHS member’s thinking he could put my images of the U.S. presidents’ arms on Wikipedia. So I understand and sympathize with the problem. Whatever people can do to obstruct such behavior I’m all for, but I take the experts’ word for it that right now there isn’t much that can be done.

But the unacceptability of intellectual property theft quickly ceased to be the issue. Instead, it turned into a person who by his own admission is "ignorant of IT stuff" arguing about HTML code and malware and such in the public forum with someone who does IT for a living. This was, as I said, useless and unedifying. Furthermore, the idea that Kimon’s repeated attempts to take this discussion offline were an invasion of Denny’s privacy—I believe he used the term "stalking"—is unedifying bordering on ludicrous.

So while everyone is free to regret the loss of Denny’s participation, no one should be under any illusions about what just happened.

Joseph McMillan;91036 wrote:

And so here we are.

I think you mean, "And so here we are…again."

Andrew Stewart Jamieson;91035 wrote:

Perhaps Anna the ‘cloning’ you are referring to is simply a matter of someone buying an additional domain name and pointing it to their existing website such as the ‘heraldry.us’ link I have purchased and pointed at the Jamieson Gallery.

My guess is she is literally talking about cloning a site, line for line.  There is a simple command that will download every single thing from a domain to your computer.  All of it.  Every image, every line of HTML.  You can then change a few things to brand it as your own work, and serve it up.  Unethical, but simple to do.

Please don’t feed her.