"I've been shown the yellow card by flickr and may well be banned from the site. What heinous crime have I committed to cause this? I put a copyright notice in the description of all my images. For a number of years now I have been using the following as my copyright notice: “(c) Ian M Butterfield / www.imb.biz”. Initially this was used just as a watermark but that has not stopped people from stealing my images. So some time back I decided to spell it out in detail in the description field. Here is the wording I have used: PLEASE NOTE: This photograph is (c) Ian M Butterfield / www.imb.biz. All rights are reserved. No use is permitted (including non-commercial use) without prior permission. The inclusion of the link to my website is what flickr are objecting to. They consider this to be in breach of the rules concerning commercial use. How this is in breach of the flickr rules I am not sure. I have been informed by flickr that having the link in my profile page is ok but not under each image. Where does it say that in the terms and conditions?" - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet

WTF? - Tyson Key

Flickr is completely out of control. NIPSAing somebody for their copyright logo? So many people that I know include a link to their blog or site on their photos. So many great photographers do this. Why shouldn't you be allowed to link back to your site? Totally unreasonable on Flickr's part. Ian's also posted a thread on this in the help forum (where I'm still banned and have been for months). - Thomas Hawk

Zack Shepherd from Flickr: "Having a link to contact you 'If you wish to use any of my photographs' is still promoting and seems at least like a way to get around the no links rule and still put some contact info under the photo." http://www.flickr.com/help... - Thomas Hawk

I'm still annoyed that they decided to NIPSA my account, over a year ago, and haven't reversed it, despite putting in 3 review requests. Still, I'm glad that they didn't purge my account, given that I rarely visit Flickr, these days... - Tyson Key

Oh geez... seriously? Adding a link to flickrmail you is now "promotion"? Give me a break. - Stephanie Keating

Did they NIPSA your account Tyson? Did they tell you why? - Thomas Hawk

"Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr." http://www.flickr.com/guideli... - tabbr

I think that it was NIPSA'd since I created it back in 2006, although they've never told me why, Thomas. :( - Tyson Key

"If your account is also "NIPSA", you may be one of the people caught up in the transition between the old system of moderation (public, pending, private accounts etc) and the new way (safety level/content type filters). It's fairly likely that if your account is NIPSA, it's because your account was NIPSA pre-transition, and that it may require a review by staff. You can request a review if you wish. It's fairly unlikely that staff would flag an entire account in the new system, given that you have more fine-grained control over the images in your account." http://www.flickr.com/help... - tabbr

Your account hardly seems offensive Tyson. I'm surprised that they NIPSAd you. My own account was entirely NIPSA'd, thousands of photos for many months. - Thomas Hawk

Indeed, and I never enabled the NIPSA flag on my account. (After all, why would I want to hide my content in a ghetto, from the rest of the Flickr content base? I'm sure that you'll agree with that sentiment, too)... - Tyson Key

I've pretty much given up on Flickr though, thanks to the 200 visible images for a free account limitation, so other than putting in several review requests (all of which yielded the same result - "safe with NIPSA"), I haven't spent time on the issue. - Tyson Key

Sorry to hear about your account, though. If I was a professional photographer, I'd be insulted that they decided to pull such a trick. - Tyson Key

I can only sympathise with the owner of the other account, although I know that Flickr aren't the only service to have a "silent ban" policy (Reddit also comes to mind, from what I've heard)... - Tyson Key

Yeah my pro account is due tomorrow and I have decided not to renew, as well I won't be renewing my wife's account either. I have started testing the waters with SmugMug and will like start a membership with them next week. I think flickr's day has come and they are now doing their best to kill their user base and I am getting out before they kill my account for some stupid reason. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Still, I'm happy with Picasa Web Albums as of late, even though they're not perfect, and have limitations of their own. I was thinking of Flickr Pro at one time, just to remove the 200 images limit, although I don't think they're worthy of the money... - Tyson Key

(After all, I didn't use Flickr that often, and wouldn't morally want to pay for a service that penalised users for unexplained reasons, and was more than happy to do so). - Tyson Key

My flickr pro account expires in 6 days, and I will not be renewing because of their evil ways. - tabbr