To begin, I’m fairly sure I made a mistake on a model I uploaded that was recently taken down abruptly, with little extra info from MakerWorld. Needless to say this is really disappointing and discouraging, but I have some suggestions for the MW folks to maybe try and improve this experience for amateur creators in the future.
Background: I uploaded a remix from an old Printables model that was released under the Creative Commons 4.0 license. This model is actually a remix itself of an OpenSCAD-based project from GitHub that was released under the MIT license (fully open-source). My model did not modify any STL’s, since there were none to modify. It required generating a number of different STL’s myself, creating the print profiles, putting in variable modifiers in the model, tuning wall strength and variable infills, custom support generation, etc. This was my first remix from an external site, and I might have mistakenly chosen the standard license when creating the project. I choose that for all my original models, so I think this was muscle memory. I did cover all the Creative Commons 4.0 requirements for original attribution, but the license may have been wrong. I say may have been, because when MW abruptly took my project down after it being up for half a year, I have no way of seeing the project to see what was wrong.
I’ve appealed once and then a second time with a ticket, and throughout the process I asked what exactly was wrong. I kept getting the copy-paste of the guidelines. I pointed out I couldn’t see my project to see what I didn’t do correctly, and still the same responses. I even said I likely put the wrong license on it, and would be happy to correct it if that was the case, because it was purely a mistake and oversight if that was really what happened. But it was still met with the copy-paste of the guidelines.
MW made it clear there was no recourse or ability to see what I actually screwed up, just “here’s the guidelines, better luck next time.” This is really discouraging for an amateur creator. I’m not a commercial creator by any stretch, I do this in my spare time and because I enjoy it. I really enjoy sharing my projects with others that find them useful. I don’t know what triggered the issue, and I don’t know 100% what the issue actually was. It’s not the missing 900+ points, it’s really the issue of I don’t know what I did incorrectly, and my project that took a few days off and on to create all the profiles and upload, annotate and upload all my STL’s to share, respond to questions for additional configurations and create/upload them, etc., is now gone.
I’d like to suggest to the MW overlords to find a middle ground here. There was no warning, no notification of any issue, just the hammer. Would it be too much to send a stern warning to a creator if there’s an issue they need to look at ASAP to correct it? If the warning is ignored, then swing the hammer? This could also give an opportunity for a creator to talk with the MW admins to collaborate on making better compliant models, instead of after-the-fact trying to plead a case when they’re not even sure what the original issue was.