 And welcome to the first of a WordPress multi-site 201 series with joined today by Pilot Irwin and our kind of regular returning host, I imagine, will be Tom Woodward. And we will be talking today about terms of use, DMC takedowns, and other things that go bump in the night. I can't make these titles up. I leave that to our professionals in the writing room and back. That's beautiful. So today we are going to talk about terms of use, DMC takedowns, and other things. And Tom, I think you're going to get us started, am I right? You are. And I will, just for fun, share a little bit of slides, right? And I thought it'd be fun, since Jim and I have both started a WordPress multi-site, and been a little nervous about it, perhaps. Maybe Jim wasn't. I was a little nervous, because you're starting this big thing with all these people. And you're like, it's a bit like throwing a party. You're going to try and invite people. You're nervous. No one will come. If they do come, you want them to have fun. And you're also a little bit worried they might trash your house and the police might come. So maybe that's a really good analogy. The more I think about it, it just came to me right now. But this was the stuff I came to the party worried about. I was worried that people would say rude things or give themselves names like, I don't know, something inappropriate. I won't give some examples. Just let your imagination run wild. And then one of the high pressures was making sure a bunch of people came to this thing and did stuff. And that really was a fair amount of pressure. And it drove the next thing is wanting to have enough plugins and themes to make this a good thing. And I kind of see these three elements as the main humane things that I was worried about kind of right off the bat. So with you, Jim, was it similar or? It was similar. I think it was a little earlier than the VCU one. And then we had done something similar though at Richmond and we ran up against kind of different obstacles. But I remember speaking to the idea of wrong or inappropriate names. We were pretty gung-ho and I think it was young enough of a project that we hadn't dreamt up all the problems, but we were getting a lot of pushback. Someone's going to say something inappropriate. Someone's going to pose something inappropriate. And our provost at the time, who was new and we had Mary watched one of the things that was happening at the time is there's so much higher, there was like higher management turnover for all sorts of weird reasons. So she comes in and she's like, so you want to do this thing, right? And you're like, yeah, but you know, there have been some concerns about whether people say she's like sooner or later, someone's going to say deal, though. You just got to go ahead with it was like, that is awesome. She basically like was like, that's the worst thing that could happen. It's not going to be the end of the world and run with it. And it was liberating because so many people were so concerned about all the things that could happen that it prevented them from actually doing it and realizing that the things you think could happen won't. It's the other things you never thought of that will really start to get you. But I had a very similar situation and luckily we had someone who had some clout who was like, that's not the end of the world. Things are going to happen and she had a great way of communicating it. That was very funny and it kind of like everybody kind of relaxed a bit. And then we went forward and back. No one ever did say that. That was going to be my next question. Yeah, did it happen? Not that I know of. Because I think that was like part of it is we had seen, you know, because it was when we did this, Gardner Campbell was involved, who was also involved with y'all at Mary Washington. So we had seen that and had at least a little bit of an inkling of what the possibilities were, which is easier than starting from scratch. But in the entire time we were doing this, I mean, I think like, you know, out of thousands and thousands of users, we had like one person do, you know, like one oddly named site, which turned out to be kind of OK in the end. And we had like a little bit of comment problems from an external person. But that's that's all we ever had in terms of drama. As a matter of fact, we had one instance where somebody did this kind of crazy post around corseting. I don't know if you've ever seen that. It was new to me. But like when they do piercings and then thread them up with like ribbon. I haven't seen that. Yeah, it's super crazy. That's new to me. Yeah, it was new to me. But this person posted, you know, their back was done like that. And I was super nervous like that. A lot of weird things were going to happen. But it was the probably the most supportive comments from all these people in our class that I could imagine. It still made me nervous. But it was just one of those examples where I was like, wow, that did not did not go as a surprise. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's just just kind of strange in that way. I think I mean, I absolutely my experience aligns completely with yours in that in the how many years, 10 years we were doing UNW blogs because you excuse me. We had one site that was flagged as an issue. And the site was a legitimate student site that was writing a satirical essay about pedophilia. And obviously that can go wrong if the satire isn't very good, right? A rough one. And so so we were like, yeah, this probably like, but it was almost more of a concern about like, who's your audience? What are you saying? Like, is this satire working? Like it was actually very much the work of higher ed and thinking through voice and what you're doing and how you're doing it. And they did take it down. It's not like we even had to come in in strong arm. But it was an interesting conversation that was like the one time where we were like it was brought to our attention and we're like, we probably should reach out to the student and find out like, what's going on here? So for your first foray into comedy, satire about pedophilia, should we rethink this? Well, and I think that that's been the beautiful and interesting thing is is having people surprise you in positive ways with this. Like one of my favorite things was I did I did subscribe to the alerts every time a new user or site was created. And for a while there, I would post the most interesting username chosen, you know, that that week on on Twitter or something like that. And I got a kick out of it anyway. But it was it was kind of fun to see the creativity there and what people did. And also the focus, I'm sorry, I won't stop. But the focus and I think Gardner Campbell, who was a part of both, like a good example of I think a positive frame is you could always focus on here's all the things that could go wrong and some of them do, but never as much. But I think he was for us a very good kind of anchor. Here are all the things this is going to provide students in terms of a voice and in terms of the space to learn. And I think highlighting that and focusing on that because I do think it was true in that it provided some very powerful experiences early on for these students and faculty with a platform that they would become familiar with WordPress. So I think like how you decide to focus on it and how you can kind of try and contain some of the thought or fear uncertainty and doubt around what could happen with well, here's what we're going for. And it's very manageable and doable within the context is probably a good antidote for some of that. Yeah, and I think coming up with a plan as well for OK, in the absolute one, what is the absolute worst case scenario? How likely is that to happen? What's the likeliest thing that will happen? And in that worst case scenario, how would we deal with it? Is going to, I think, just help a lot of people go, oh, actually, that's way more reasonable than I thought it would be. Yeah, I think naming naming your fears and preparing for them and also just coming to terms with the idea that if you're going to do this or try and do this in a way that covers all risk and all scenarios, you just won't do it. So go ahead and stop and save yourself a lot of hassle. You know, there you can't be innovative. You can't push boundaries and have no risk. You can lessen risk. You can have reasonable risk, but there there's always going to be risk in these things and you need to come to terms with that. And hopefully you have somebody like the provost at Mary Washington or, you know, in my case, Gardner Campbell kind of backing up the choices that you're making and understanding what's going on. Yeah. Can I can I ask you a question, Tom, on this slide? I mean, if we kind of cover it, but I'm just interested, how did you ultimately get people on rampages? Well, the the scale stuff we dealt with because we were able to kind of hook in with the freshman writing experience focused inquiry courses and so they were supposed to work on, I think, multimodal arguments and digital literacy and multimedia kind of fluency. So this was the tool they were going to use to do all that. And so we ended up having the opposite problem. I had too many people, which is a bit like having too many people at a high school party at your house. All of a sudden, things go very, very badly and your house starts to get trashed. And that's, you know, that's that's what we ended up dealing with. So I think, you know, in terms of getting people having a firm hook into something that's happening institutionally already, but also maybe doing that not at the scale of several thousand people at once is is a better path, you know, kind of work your way upwards. But that that got us people, too many people. I don't know, at Mary Washington, it seemed like it was more organic. Was that the case? There was a yeah, it was a lot of like class visits. There was a lot of like working with faculty to say you should do this as part of their class. And like there was a program that came in post facto. But I think a lot of early wrong. There was like, you know, this was a course driven thing. And this was kind of trying to get people excited about that. And like a lot of like early payment pounding to get like people to even think about why would I do this? So and we framed it as an alternative publishing space so students could do things they couldn't do in the LMS like embed videos, make links that go to the web, be accessible to other people at other schools, etc. So yeah, it was a kind of still that early kind of wide eyed. Wow, this is open. This is the web and it's yours, right? Yeah, there's I think there's some real advantage to that because in our case, the scale went up so quickly. I think a lot of faculty ended up using it but not really knowing why they were using it or ever having that conversation. And I just don't know if you can scale, you know, like it's one thing to have examples. It's one thing to have documentation. It's one thing to do a presentation to, you know, 50, 100 people. But it's it's very different to kind of. Be able to use it with them or get them started with it. And maybe even only doing that with people who are willing rather than almost by fiat having this thing thrust upon them. Totally. And technically, these were the two things I was mostly worried about. And maybe some people are being tense. Don't worry, I just add it 928 to the to the to the. Put that in that you edited that to be scary. Yes, yes. So but that's kind of what I felt like at times, you know, all of a sudden I'd look one day and it'd be like 56 updates. And I'd be like, oh, dear, there's no way I'm going to be able to test any of this. And I would often just click the button for update and be like, well, it'll probably be all right. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, I'm sure there's a backup someplace. Reclaim exactly. But in all the times I did it, I mean, the only the only plug-in I ever had lots of problems. So it's honestly was Beaver Builder. And I think that was more with its relationship to multi-site rather than anything else. You know, not saying you shouldn't test things and, you know, but also realizing, like, depending on the complexity of your system, a lot of times you can't. And I was more concerned with not updating and having like some sort of security issue than I was about the plug-in breaking something or the theme update, breaking something, you know, in some sort of interrelationship. So do you have an estimate of how many plug-ins or themes you guys thought would be like useful at the beginning and whether that number scaled at all? Well, I'd say we really made some horrible mistakes there in that we would often in our desperation to get more people on there would pretty much just be like, OK. By request. Yeah. And we would just throw things in there and a number of people could throw things in there who maybe shouldn't have been able to, you know, so we didn't really have a formal approval process to get plug-ins in there. We certainly. Said yes to people when they were like, but I don't like Twitterrific. I like Twitterrific e and we'd be like, OK, what? Is it going to get you? Can we get you in a car today if we're willing to do this? And so at certain points, like that's the way it was, we would do basically anything to get you in a car today. And as a result, we ended up with like way more than we should have, you know, like I said, really duplicative things. You know, and they ended up almost with I was worried, you know, back here, did we have enough cool things to get people to come in? And then we know what we ended up with was we had so many things. People got a little bit of choice, fatigue and kind of like. There's too much stuff. Yeah, I was I was going to say that the thing you mentioned earlier about particularly faculty who are using it without knowing sort of why, how to make best use of it. Particularly, I think I've had experiences with faculty going. Yeah, I don't really know why this plug-in is is it useful? Should I be using it? How should I be using it? Like, what does it do for me? And the answer is, I don't know what you want. I can't say that. Well, having lots of plugins feels like it would. Cause that conversation to scale, I don't know. Yeah. And you would come into certain sites and you'd be like, Oh, dear Lord, you have sixty seven plugins activated. Why is it slow? Are you using them all? And you would ask that. And they'd just be like, why just want to see what they would do? But they never turned them off. You know, they just turn them on to like, is anything different? And a lot of times they couldn't tell because like, who knows? What the hell that thing's supposed to do? And I think it was for a reason. Right, right. And I just, you know, no harm in a foul. That's when I started to figure out a little bit of like, must use plugins and the plugins that like, we wanted like, say, for a syndication and certain things that we wanted to happen. But you're right. That choice fatigue became a real issue where the what we thought was this great supermarket of options just became a list that no one really looked at. And the potential harm it was doing, although like you said, we we just updated, we took the faith and the seed that everything was going to work. And a lot of times to WordPress's credit, it did. But like, yeah, I think if I were going to be doing it now, I would be super intentional about the plugins and the themes. And I would, you know, build them and add only if I really felt it added something like, but you like, I would throw anything in there. It wouldn't matter. Oh, yeah, this gallery, that gallery, this, you know, edit PHP on the front end for anyone like, yeah, sure, why not? I think also it may be useful. I don't imagine that most users had an idea of it, but the difference between a network active plugin, which is the admin saying, no, this is essential. This is something that you need versus, yeah, it's available. It's off by default. You don't need it, but it's here if you want it would be useful for people to just sort of again, that's maybe a conversation that's just not feasible at scale, but for people to sort of understand what the platform offers inherently versus, you know, what's an option if you want it, if it's useful. It's a good point, Pila. And a lot of those early conversations with the faculty or the students like when we were going to classes would center around. This is what you're expected to do for this class. Here's the plugins and themes that are recommended. So like there would be some direction, whereas if someone was just getting it together site, they may not have that same, you know, orientation early on to what they're using and why. So in some ways, it was legitimate while some of those plugins started to add up because different classes had different ways in which they wanted to use the platform. So it wasn't just completely willy nilly, but it's quickly once it gets a little bit of momentum, how quickly that stuff starts to add up because everyone has a different idea of how you want to build the site. And that was the whole advantage of it is like, you could do it. So why would we say no? Right. And it's it's trying to walk that line between. Providing the avenues so that they don't just abandon the thing because like, what's the point? And creating like something that doesn't just feel like it's spinning out of control. And it's a difficult line to walk at times, but I think doable. I just didn't do it. And I think the other thing I was concerned about was was storage, which didn't end up being quite the problem that I thought it was going to be. Although I would say these days it probably is, you know, just because images and things like that have become so much larger. And so when people take pictures with their phones now or something like that and use that in a site, like those things are giant. So I think this would be more of a concern these days. But in the at that time, you know, it's kind of interesting on most student portfolio sites. A lot of times, and this may be a failure of of the system itself, our whole attempt was like, a lot of times it might be the default theme. No plugins have been activated and very little media has been used. At least that was uploaded to the media library. So, you know, it's an interesting thing to look at. It's like, what do you set the storage defaults to? And when do you set exceptions to them? It becomes kind of an interesting conversation. You know, these days, I think I would go ahead and like, I'd prevent video uploads and I would probably default turn on for the network something like insanity to limit the picture sizes on upload to something reasonable, you know, like 1200 pixels or something like that. Yeah, I know that we, I think without that for a lot of users, they're like, yeah, why not? Biggest size, it'll look nicest. When we had that for students who did photography and art, we're like, yeah, this is the size that I want everyone to see it at. So I'll upload it that way, not really realizing that there's very diminishing returns and it's going to just eat up so much storage space. It's not going to be worth it. And also, they can't really see those numbers on a WordPress multi-site. They don't have a sense of how much space they're using. Right. And unsplash in a number of those kind of free stock image sites now, like they give you that file at a giant size. That's what I've seen lately on our Domaino in its own instances. Like people tossing those things up. It's trying to load like a eight or 10 megabyte image file for no reason, you know, to be seen at 400 pixels. WordPress also does a particular thing where if you upload an image, it goes neat. Well, I'm going to need this as a thumbnail here and also here and also here. So I'm just going to save this six times in a couple of different sizes, just in case. Which is, I guess, effective. Which is compounding. Because you have so many copies of your image. You don't know which one to use. I hate that, actually. But insanity is kind of, that's a whole idea of trying to make this. Like if I was doing a WordPress multi-site, it would be about making it more efficient and effective and streamlined and like giving, getting a sense of how people are using it and trying to make sure like it's elegant. And there's a couple of plugins and a couple of nice themes and they can trust that when they go. You know, it will be fast and it will be effective. And I would go away from the bloat that I had kind of promoted for decades. Going for minimalism this time around. Exactly. As my hairline goes increasingly back, I could feel the minimalism. Live and learn, right? Right. Yeah. I think there's something to be said for that. And I think like the, the environment. All right. So that was the stuff I was worried about. And let's, let's take a look at maybe what I should have been worried about. And this is going to sound a bit elitist, but rather than getting like as many people as possible, probably getting the right people. You know, and, and thinking about it a little more, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, and, and thinking about it a little more organically rather than trying to, what's it like, eat the cow in one bite or something like that, you know, like we, we could have approached this along the same route, but maybe gotten up to speed a little more carefully and thus been able to show better examples and have better people in the discipline to spread the message and thus scale that better. You know, when you're, you know, talking to fellow colleagues sometimes like they're able to have communication and conversations in ways that, that external people can't. I think I imagine it's also to some degree, rather than just getting as many people to log in and make a site, getting people who really will make effective use of what's going on, who understand what's being offered and how they can use it well, which I don't know. There's maybe also something to be said for sign up and learn on the, on the fly, but it's that I know that at Carlton's WordPress multi site, there was a lot of, when we did cleanup, a lot of logs that were very clearly someone had logged in and had a site auto generated for them. And then they just didn't have any use for it. I do have to say one of the things that I think because it was early on and there wasn't the kind of expectation of WordPress, it was still new. A lot of those faculty who went into it and like became believers in some ways, like it did create a pretty good culture of like faculty who were into it. You know, there was always some who weren't, but like for us early on at Mayor Washington, I can only speak from that experience, it did, it did felt like early on and for most of that, the right people were in there. They were kind of leading their students. They had a clear idea of how they want to use it. It wasn't a mandate, which is a big difference because at the point is a mandate they'll people who go in there like even faculty and staff and who will resent it and it will show. So like in that regard, it was lucky, although, you know, at a certain point, you know, people move on. And so like the detritus sets in, but I do think that is a good point. And I wonder, depending upon how you're framing out, is it a mandate? If it's a mandate, it better be very streamlined and simple and not a lot of choices. And like it be highly effective in getting people to where they need to be simply without being pissed off. So they come back to you and hate the mandate versus, you know, a playground. Yeah, I think also what I was talking about was maybe more along the lines of students, less so than faculty because again, this is pretty anecdotal, but I remember looking through this and going, okay, the most actively used stuff, the people who very clearly got the most into it were faculty members who wanted to build out project sites, like personal resume professional sites, people who wanted to use it for course blogging with their students. And then a lot of the blank sites looks like students who had logged in because they were asked to do it as part of a class project. And then they did the class project and went, no, I'm not going to use this anymore. Like they never really got into it. And so I hunted those people down and they lived up to their contract. Okay. Well, it's tricky because I mean, if you get, you know, 50 fat or let's say 20 faculty who aren't really bought into it, but they feel like they have to use it and they have 30 students each. Now you've got like 600 people on the site who are maybe not getting the best directions, you know, like there's a lot of load that can come with that, that can eat up your time, which kind of gets into this idea of like, if you're doing stuff that's really non-standard in this space, then the kind of work it requires in terms of support and being able to work with those people who tend to be awesome, but also tend to be using WordPress in ways that are non-standard and thus require conversation and custom work and conversation and more custom work. Like realizing how that work plays out is really, I think, important because you're dealing with not just your workload as an individual, but faculty workloads, it's a balancing act. Yeah. And sometimes I think maybe running into faculty members who have gotten really into it and learned a whole lot and they come to you with a question that's like, so here's something that I don't understand and you go, uh-oh, if you don't understand it, let me get back to you on that one. Let me go do some Googling. And so yeah, like I almost expand the idea here with like you're not going to have everybody in that crazy innovation amazing work zone. So it's like, what's the balance? What's the balance you can support? What's the balance you have at your institution? You know, like trying to figure out there in terms of users, you know, what level of crazy stuff can you support? Like I still look back regretfully on a couple of things. We didn't get to kind of complete a VCU with like some really wild art professor or, you know, if only I'd have had more time or energy in this particular project, but I was spending lots of time and energy on dealing with scale. And so I had less time to spend on what I feel like was more transformative work. So trying to figure out that balance I think is tricky. I think one of the kind of, how would you say, kind of like the Holy Grail, something that's always elusive that I saw early on and I never saw it completely materialized, but I still think to your point with the right balance of people and with the right kind of contingent of cohort joining, you could have all these distributed people running really cool stuff and then you could find a way through WordPress multi-site in one thing to aggregate it. So it does highlight all of the cool stuff happening across these classes. Like I still believe in my heart of hearts that that was the real sell for higher ed and for a community like this for an institution like, you know, a university or a college or what have you to highlight the cool thinking and work and doing that in a way that was both thoughtful and I think we got close but we never realized that because I think that would have allowed that flow of new people to come in once they saw what was happening to come in and want to kind of do that as well and then it builds its own culture and then you're not having to police that. You're just saying, here's the site. Do great stuff, right? Absolutely. That virtuous cycle of like use, reuse, communication, interrelationship, like having it be like this amazing thing that you can then see the value and worth of all this work. You know, I mean like that is it. That is it. I feel like people have gotten close a couple times but it certainly has a lot more room before you hit the ceiling than anything I've ever seen done. You know, it could just be so incredible. I always want it like, you know, the photography classes, images, being fodder in this other class is consideration for, I don't know, collages or in designing sets in the theater department. You know what I mean? Like just having all this stuff kind of meet together and really get at this true interdisciplinary kind of community of people leveraging the work that these students are doing that usually just goes into a drawer or is great and then disappears like that. That is what I dreamed of. It is a real argument too, I would say, for this idea of balance of people and balance of courses. And I think the mistake I made early on was always being wondered about numbers and then numbers driving how I could report it, you know, whether it's just out of ego or out of sustainability or out of whatever, but it's like maybe it just took four or five classes that were doing exactly that kind of crossover with, you know, 20 students each, that would have been just as powerful and just as kind of compelling a narrative as I have 5,000 people on the site now. Right? Like, like, it's, it's, there's something there and I think we respond to that data because it was new and it was amazing to think you could even do that. But, you know, again, maybe in retrospect, finding that way to just do one really cool crossover of different posts to show the community at large would have been enough. Well, it's easier to say, right? I can say a thousand people and people are like, oh, that's impressive. But if I try and describe it, I end up sounding like a lunatic and they're like, yeah, right. Education, really exciting. Good job there, buddy. And they're like, we're going to take our money elsewhere. So it's, it's trying to figure out like what's a, what's a sellable product, whoever you're trying to sell it to so much like, you know, it's, it's tough. But, you know, it's possible. There's cool stuff we can do. The stuff I should have been worried about what ended up being a little bit of a hassle or at least is becoming more of a hassle is probably these three things. Privacy with GDPR as well as we're, you know, I was in the state of Virginia. They had a bunch of weird changes around like what could be seen by whom regarding just student emails in strange ways caused us a lot of complexity and worry. Copyright stuff, which will address more explicitly with the DMCA things as soon as we get moving. But came a bigger deal. You got Pixie and other sites like that that are doing these automated searches. And now like VCU has been hit a couple of times with takedown notices and I think really sketchy kind of threatened lawsuits for stuff that's like nine, 10 years old. And then general just the complexity overall can get really big because in rampages we didn't have a, well we had explicit methodology of saying we're not going to take any of these sites down unless somebody requests it. That was our desired thing. But when leadership changed that became a problem and now reclaim and poor Matt Roberts at VCU now are trying to figure out like what do we do now at this degree of scale to deal with all this complexity and all these old accounts and you know, thousands of sites. What do we do? All right. We were talking complexity. Complexity? Yeah. Yeah. As I was saying, poor Matt Roberts is stuck there with a change of leadership. He's got you know, 36,000 sites or something ridiculous like that and now he has to try and figure out like what to do now that things have changed substantially in terms of what they're supposed to save and keep and you know, I went by rampages today just to see what the registration process looked like and they're only doing registrations for faculty sites right now. So no student sites whatsoever. So you know, this is difficult stuff to navigate in the short term but it's really hard to figure out how to keep these sites running when you're talking about the long term when you're talking about 10 years or 15 or 20 years. I mean that's crazy timelines with technology and institutions. So in general, Jim, if you could have saved Shannon from certain problems at UMW, what would you have done differently? Yeah. I think you learn it even while you're an admin is you know, themes and plugins don't have the life you thought they would when you first installed them or fairly new to WordPress. Like they expire quickly, right? It's like the milk in your fridge. They're not going to last that long so I think you know, calling some of that and being a little bit more forward thinking but you only knew what you knew when you were doing it and I think that was fair. There's a fair balance but to your earlier point and I was going to make this is it's amazing despite the complexity of these systems like tens of thousands of sites, right? Tens of thousands of users and you're still like having sites that run pretty effectively, pretty efficiently and can be managed by one or two people. That's the case with you and Ray Boggs. It's still the case with rampages and case with many other WordPress. I think in that regard, despite the complexity, these systems are pretty resilient at staying up and I like that balance because they are the things you worry about as an admin. No two ways about it. Like these are the things that keep you up at night but at the same time, I probably would be more concerned about privacy and copyright than like themes and plugins given the ecosystem around WordPress. I guess the other question with complexity comes themes and plugins two at a date. Do you get hacked? And that's a kind of like where it comes over with security but yeah, I found for Shannon, I don't know, I mean, I think Shannon's doing the smart thing right now and UMW blogs is coming on its 15th year and they are basically sunsetting that. They opened up a new one and they're going to archive it all as static media and that's going to live as a kind of timeline and UMW blogs, the same URL as an archive and all new sites and they're starting fresh and I think there is something probably really relieving about that for them. Like they don't have to have the technical debt that I had kind of pushed on them 10 years earlier. And so I like that solution. Yeah. And you don't have to... Same deal with users sounds so cynical but the idea of if you say, okay, you don't need too many themes and plugins you want to make sure that you're picking ones that you think will be supported for a long time. You want to make sure that you're going back and checking the thing you want to be managing things. You want to make sure that workload is simple and you try and do that on a older site. People will get mad at you if you take things away from them. Right, right. It's like teachers they used to claim like if you don't smile until Christmas not that I think that's a good example but like yeah, you can't go easy and then try and be hard. You know, you have to kind of... Yeah. And so the ability to say for Shannon, well your site looks the same but if we're starting fresh and fresh means newer rules, simpler stuff. It's certainly a new way to deal with that. And I think a point to Tom's idea of the complexity the complexity gets to a point where you can continue to take away stuff and piss people off or you can basically say that was what it was at the time it was. We can now move beyond that and basically have effectively a new space and keep an archive. And I think that's what was smart about what Shannon did. Shannon did think of it archivally so that site still lives. The work they did is still there and preserved by UMW but now they can start fresh and integrate it more directly with their other program. So it makes a lot of sense. It was the most elegant way to do it because no matter how you did it, it was going to be hard. Well, and I think... Yeah, I don't know. There's some fun stuff to think about that like what would you do? You know, could you spin up individual WordPress multi sites with the idea that it's going to last four years or five? You know, like an encapsulated that way? I don't know. There's some crazy stuff that might happen if you started thinking about those sort of batch things. It might be fun. The thing about DMCA takedowns, I mean, and that was the thing, and I remember we didn't get really any. I think we got like one or two but YouTube saved us a ton because they were doing a lot of that work because a lot of the ones that they would come after would be video and it was happening on YouTube. And so those videos would go away. Very rarely did someone look for an article or something like that. Maybe we got one or two where someone was sharing a PDF, but like literally it was never overhead for us and it was never for the time we did it. And I believe that's still the case for Shannon, but I'm not sure. You know, it was really the questions of privacy. Students coming back after the fact and being like, I don't want that stuff up anymore. And like giving them ways to kind of shut down that stuff elegantly post facto because a lot of it is linked to their UMW email or whatever school email and sometimes that goes away. So that's a workflow I would definitely want to kind of factor in right away is that students may want that stuff to go away and you should encourage them to do that while they're still a student, but should they come to you post facto, give them a space where they could still out of form and you can make it easy enough to say what their email was, maybe link it and then that site gets archived and comes offline or give them that ability because that does link back to stuff like GDPR and privacy. I kind of think that's a good thing. People should have the right to take that stuff back off should they want to. If it's a community site though or a group blog, it gets a little more complicated. I was going to say talking to, this was a conversation that I wish I'd had with more faculty at Carleton. There were professors who were like, yeah, this is a project that was done for my class. So the site is technically in my name or like the students were the ones building the site, but I created it and then gave it like, gave them like editing permissions or this is a course blog. So it's in my name and it has some student work on it and the ability to say, okay, so I get that you want an archive of the work that's done in your course. I get that the department wants to be able to point to past student work and say, here's what you can do if you study with us. Where does that intersect with the right to be forgotten? If a student comes back and says, no, I don't want that up. The ability to say look at capstone projects from years past. How are you going to respect those wishes? What is your... I mean, it's always complicated when it's more than one author or something like that, but if it's a capstone, that's the students and you give them a space to say, should you want us to not promote that? Here's the form that would go to the admin so that they would know. I think that kind of solves it. I think a lot of students don't mind having their stuff promoted or faculty or staff, but I think giving people the kind of channels to change their mind. And do you think that? Sorry, I maybe should have clarified. I agree with you that the students are correct. They should be able to say, no, I want this gone and then have it taken down. It was more a question of having that conversation with the faculty would go, but why though? Why? But I need it to be up for one reason or another and say, well, it's not really yours is the thing. Yeah, they were... We've had that conversation and started to put it into some of the like project things. Like if you knew like this was going to be a multi-author thing with student authors, we would be like, all right, because this is their intellectual property, let's go ahead and make it clear to them what they're doing when they contribute here and that they're agreeing to use it in a particular way. You know, and if they're kind of, not quite signing a contract, but they're committing, you know, and then down the line, it's a little bit different if you want to get it removed, if you've already kind of acknowledged your participation in a particular way. So that's one thing we played around with there with those sorts of cycles, but it's not a clean thing. It's kind of messy, you know, proving that you're a person if you don't have the email address that started the site is also kind of ugly, you know, but the amount of people who would fake that they were somebody else know the email, you know, like you get into like probability of stuff I think in those sorts of processes, but I think in the entire time we ran it, I maybe had five or 10 people ask for their sites to be deleted. What I would have done too is make a better, could I get the graduating people's email addresses, match it to the accounts, and then at least prompt them. Like if you want to get rid of this thing now at the time, I would have liked to have done a cycle like that with some better communication, but we didn't have that kind of, we never did it. I do want to hit the DMCA stuff a little bit because the copyright things I think have expanded. Like I said, Pixie, there are a number of other sites that are sending out these crawlers, you know, through sites just looking for things. So what you do as a, like say I was a photographer, you put your work in there and then it spiders the web looking for matches. And if it finds one, it allows, it shows it to you and you can be like, send them a notification, you know, essentially like sue them, sue them, sue them. And I think they'll like pay you a certain percentage of whatever they get, right? And so this is happening at VCU right now, not a huge amount, but they've been hit by a couple of different notices. And so you have a relationship here with your legal department, probably your IT department. Everybody is probably already has a DMCA takedown agent. It's the person for the university that's contacted when a copyright infringement thing is seen. And what that is, and I'm not a lawyer, blah, blah, blah, clearly like look at the sign, look at me. I'm not a lawyer. But like the deal is with the MCA is you have like this safe harbor provision. And one of those is if you're running a network of things with users on it and they violate copyright, you're not responsible for that violation as long as you do the following things. And one of those things is you have somebody to talk to about the takedown, you respond in a reasonable way, blah, blah, blah, blah. So when we talk about not reinventing the wheel, that's a big one. So can you use the institutional DMCA process in person to deal with this stuff? Also having like at least a conversation maybe with legal counsel, assuming you have that kind of access so you see what their position is. Are they like super worried about these kind of things and will like freak out in which case maybe that means certain things for you or if they're just like, yeah, we just tell them we took it down and roll on with life and if they want to try and sue us, best of luck, buddy. So there's different positions people can take on this depending on the lawyer you have, depending on your institution. And you also want to play around with like if you're a public institution or a private institution, there are a couple of things here that get involved, right? So public institutions, you have to worry about constraining free speech. Private institution, you don't have those concerns, but a public institution, there's some stuff that gets more entwined and a little more complicated. So that's a thing to consider. And then also you have to worry about like are you supporting fair use and in what way? We had a great example here where somebody was writing a paper about sexist advertising and they used a number of sexist ads and they were talking about them. Like textbook fair use for academic and editorial purposes and we got a takedown notice and I was able to bop it up the chain, went to the provost, she was just like, we're backing this to the core, don't worry about a thing, just tell them this is fair use and this is why and we are happy to take this to the mat. So I mean, that was like a beautiful thing. But find that out first because you don't want to step into it then have the upper people like cut you off at the knees and you end up looking stupid and perhaps exposing yourself to additional drama. But that's an important one. Yeah, that's interesting. I was wondering if you would ever, come to the fore, but that's interesting that you did and that you got support at the university level. That must have been amazing. Yeah, it really made me happy. I was like, this was an example of the academy kind of like working and doing what was supposed to and not cow-cow-ing to these people. I think what you want to is you want your pattern for when you get a DMCA takedown notice. What do you do? You know, what we did is I essentially would go evaluate it first and be like, all right, is it fair use based on my rough understanding or is it like clearly a violation? Usually it was pretty clear. It was either fair use or it was like, yeah, you shouldn't have done that. So, you know, we didn't have a lot of middle of the road where it was debatable. But if it was a problem, what do you do? What we did is we would contact the individual. We would say, hey, this is what happened. You know, what I've done so far is say this, like I might remove the link from the thing if it's really egregious or I might say, I need you to respond to me by X if it's say a faculty member about whether you're going to contest this being fair use or not. And if so, da-da-da-da-da. So I had like a pattern to email that would allow me to fill in the things. And if I didn't hear from them, I removed the content myself. If I felt super paranoid, I'd keep you a copy of it someplace. So if they lost their mind, I could send it back to them. But like we had a setup like that and I would notify our DMCA agent because we ran kind of a parallel program at that time that what I did, how fast I responded, all that sort of stuff. Those patterns are important and good and you should do it. And if you template it out, it makes it so much easier for you to do it if it's repeatedly done. And it just keeps everyone on the same page with regard to policy and procedure and then you can have someone other than you do it. Because these are not fun. It's just usually dumb work. So if you can get somebody else to do that, I recommend it. Can I ask you? That's awesome actually. We haven't had to deal with that. I guess as time went on it became more and more common like you're saying with the corollas and stuff and sophisticated ways to identify. With the terms of use, I know that's something we mentioned early on in the title. How did you set up your terms of use? I know for us at UMW we basically said here's our network use policy. This applies to UMW blogs as well. Click this button to agree and then sign up. We did something similar for actually we recommend something similar for institutions that ask us your IT department probably has a policy of if the university provides this to you here's what you're not allowed to do and that's the end of the story and those can either be adapted usually. I think that's what we've seen. That's what we've done. What I say is don't reinvent the wheel. You've got tons of policy written at your university already like you just do. Which ones apply? It's interesting in terms of terms like what might apply. When I looked at UMW it was interesting to see the honor code and the aspire statement of community values. So you got a trifecta of things being used right now. Georgetown references their main acceptable use policy for IT and it references reclaims use policy which I thought was interesting. So reclaim is getting powers maybe delegated to it that you may not know about. Thank you for letting us know. I think that's the way to do it. I think SUNY Oneata does some stuff but it also adds some context with just some statements. I think that may be a thing to consider. Can you get some easily readable statements? Maybe that don't become this thing but you reference those things. I think SUNY Oneata does something like that with like what was it? I'll throw the link in there. Improve the society in which you live. Be respectful. Assume good intentions. Report inflammatory stuff. Don't get involved. I think maybe little things like that are good. In addition to linking to the more legalese more specific things. Where you put them is also kind of interesting. So some people just have these like by using this thing you're agreeing to this stuff. Some people put it as part of the sign-in process like Jim was describing. You have to check yes and then it allows you to move into the registration process. There are also some plugins or registration customization options that require that check-off as part of the functional registration. Then you have like a record of it someplace. How much you're worried about those different ways really depends. We can drop this link in the blog post for the week and probably in Discord as well. This is stuff that was volunteered in Discord. So we got these from different people. I think we may end up having a place where you can submit these because it'd be kind of nice to have institution, URL to the policy, maybe private or public, and whether it covers a couple of these cover both say a WordPress multi-site and some of them also cover Domain of One's own installations. Does different universities have different setups like that? It's kind of interesting to see how they've dealt with policy in different ways. It's interesting too because I do see this one from I haven't seen it before if you mentioned it which is why I brought it up. The whole report, don't feed inflammatory points and these kind of points it is a nice addition to terms of use to put it in very talking to someone as if, hey, here's some recommendations where you jump in rather than here's the long policy you'll never read, but this is what I expect. I do like that a lot. That's quite nice. Yeah. I think this is more again something for the chat but I would be curious to hear similarly to Tom you're talking about the fair use and the DMCA takedowns and Jim just the idea of has anyone ever posted something truly inappropriate I would be interested to hear people's experiences in the chat as well and how they dealt with it Yeah. Agreed. Sort of what we've been talking about today what their big concerns were going in and then what sort of just popped up along the way and we want all the details What happened to students right to privacy Jim Exactly Well, and this gets into to like it starts to blend like technical things and community things and like what you have to do because one of the things that's technical that makes all this easier is having the privacy statement and the DMCA stuff in the footers of all the all the themes and you don't want to like manually edit those right so with WordPress multi site you can network activate a plugin and you can use the underscore footer to append things to the footers of all sites and that's what we did with our privacy it's what we should do with our DMCA statement for rampages but that is another advantage to the WordPress multi site is it lets you act across the sites in that way and that's great actually I had no idea about that Yeah, so I will throw another thing this is it's getting a little technical but this is level two and we've gone a lot of human policy stuff but it's just what is it it's like eight lines of code to staple a thing, yeah yeah so what that page is let me see if I can share it with you easy I'm working on that right now Tom oh okay there we go it's nothing fancy it's just that highlighted part lines 113 to 123 and two of those lines are saying what in the hell it is but you can see what I did is one I set a way to avoid writing the privacy thing so that's what those IDs are it's like don't put the privacy thing on these I think that was because they went with custom URLs or custom domains and they thought I wanted so I go alright but otherwise it would stamp this stuff out at the bottom in the footer that's all and this is I was just going to say is this whole document including the privacy footer but also the bit below remove emails for non-super admins and stuff this is all one plug-in or these are just PHP snippets that you've pulled into different they are the way we treated them was one plug-in that was network activated that did all the stuff that we wanted that was like strange so we didn't end up with like 50 plug-ins but this was all stuff we developed as we went through this that would do things like this and so you could run just that one little snippet as a plug-in you can make it into its own plug-in but we found it efficacious to just have a plug-in that's kind of our custom rampages stuff and this is just one piece of it so it's a bunch of other stuff too that's great yeah I highly recommend it you will write your own stuff eventually if you have anything of any sophistication and you have the ability if you don't have the ability you know I didn't either when I started but however many years later you can develop it I assure you so yeah it's that's where you start to cross the line between technically what can I do to support this stuff there are other things like that I'd really encourage you so DMCA is a big thing accessibility became a big thing for us too you know VCU got an Office of Civil Rights investigation about website accessibility and so rampages ended up being brought into that as part of like this big big deal that people are you know rightfully losing their minds about so it got down into like how are we helping make sure that rampages is accessible and this is a policy and technical thing so one we had a site telling you functionally how do you write better accessible posts in WordPress using headings old text for your pictures things like that right yeah and we did you know just a little site on it that was somewhat useful you know and that kind of talked people through it and gave them a quick guide within WordPress you know about how do you choose a theme and see if it's accessible that was another thing we started to do and that I wish I would have done from the beginning is that make sure any themes we brought from the WordPress repository met the accessibility checklist and that is an actual evaluation that is done by a team of people that doesn't say that this is going to meet every aspect of WCAG 2.0 but it's a hell of a lot better than not being evaluated so yeah that's that's kind of the path and pattern there we also include it like a couple of accessibility plugins that would you know that people could activate to kind of just show good faith effort to try and make this better but and this is yeah I see the GDPR plugin too or is that a home grown one this one idea of the got it I think I think it was yeah I think we started that early enough that it wasn't like a thing yet so I think this is a slap together mishmash of some stuff and yeah that's another thing like as this stuff evolves like how do you deal with it like is this what's hard is like if you don't have a good relationship with IT is making sure like you're doing the stuff in a way that's acceptable to the institution and so that can be that can be tricky but at the very least I think showing good faith and doing stuff like this is a lot better than doing nothing and being just like well we didn't know or something like that so I really like this accessibility web page I'll be honest with you I mean you all built so many beautiful resources like as part of that and that's the other thing the ability to push out these resources as you're doing this work obviously a lot of it's under the gun and we're being investigated for civil services but at the same time that's a really compelling and it's a site we've linked to again and again when talking about web accessibility it is well done as a resource well it's a good thing to keep in mind I know Dan Silverman worked on that he was a lawyer who happened to be working in our office but not as a lawyer at all which was kind of weird so that was always good to have those people around and it's part of this deal right like copyright and DMCA stuff and then the technical stuff to support it accessibility and the stuff to support it and it it entwines in lots of different ways and you got to kind of keep building these resources you got to keep on top of the technology that's going to let you do it better but it's part and parcel to thinking this through and then just what level of oversight you have overall is important as well like are you checking all the sites are you running like automated scans like what is that going to cost you in terms of time and energy is it even possible if not how do you know anything or what sort of position are you are you putting are you making it clear to people who need to understand that you're taking which is you know again like relationships with the right people in the institution who talk about and deal with this stuff just so everyone's informed and like we didn't have great relationships with IT and that hurt us in terms of doing anything cooperative you know because we are kind of a pain in the ass you're out in your own little own private Idaho but interesting did you find when you did the accessibility stuff and when you kind of went through that like your whole notion of what plugins, what themes what designs like like is that something where you had a moment where you were like oh if I could have only known this and what we were up against earlier when I started you would have done everything differently absolutely I had no clue about web accessibility much beyond like headers at that time and then you know like it's a whole whole world and I don't feel like I know all of it now by any means but I've at least dipped my toe more deeply in it and I've looked at like how hard it is to fix broken things like you know you're just like you're spending hours trying to figure out like why did this jackass use four of the same IDs in this construction like there can only be one ID of that type on a page why did you do this now I have to go through with like JavaScript and try and fix it which maybe isn't even a way that's a legal fix but it passes the scanner I don't know but it led to just hours and hours of work around some of these sites to try and make them into something even semi able to pass the test we were running so absolutely that absolutely part of in a perfect world everybody who starts to write on the internet getting at least a little bit of knowledge about how this stuff works and what they should keep in mind even if it's something as simple as like keep your headers in order like it's an outline those aren't just for decoration you know that's pretty simple yeah it'd be interesting I mean accessibility is something we've tried I mean again and again we built it into our conference in 2019 like but it's so hard unless you work for an accessibility like shop within a university to get folks to engage that conversation in the same way and I don't know if there's big questions of reality obviously questions of overhead or like that still seems like a gap between what's happening and what needs to happen and I wonder what's going to be the thing that maybe ties those two together maybe just good design or like I don't know where that's going to fit but it still feels like you know two worlds and I think if I were starting a WordPress multi-site like it would be kind of like professional suicide not to take that into consideration out the gate and then like kind of gear your project towards that you know it just you couldn't do it now it's too much to risk yeah absolutely I mean you want to talk something that's going to sink you pretty quickly like and like there's just a moral idea that like hey I'd like this to work for all the people if I can and so what do you do and there are tricky spots though like if you know digital astrology maybe is a good example you know what level of description is sufficient for a cell microscope slide image right you get into ideas around how much work is going to go into it you get into ideas in the histology thing if it's meant for doctors and this resource is meant for people who are able to see because it's a physical requirement of the degree like what impact does that have on the level of alt text like there are some complicating factors hopefully you know I mean that would be one advantage too better and better AI right is that descriptive text can be generated in ways that are more sophisticated but doesn't take an individual human necessarily writing it but trying to describe that slide for instance in a way that makes it functional for someone who cannot see it I don't know how you would do it right so you'd be like there are two rows of four items like the first I just don't know it would be really interesting to get somebody with deeper knowledge and skills to kind of walk through like what would this look like what would be sufficient how would we make it because I mean one aspect of accessibility is kind of reasonable effort I believe maybe that's not the actual term but like that's part of it is like where is the balance there I don't know and if you're doing just to describe something to see like that's the other thing I've always struggled with is like the intent and the purpose and the audience like I don't know it's stuff that puzzles me yeah I am thinking about this is going back to bringing people in getting them to participate which is it feels like such a cynical thing to say that I heard it a long time ago and it never really left my mind which is that in some ways accessibility is maybe not a marketing tool exactly but the idea of if your site is inaccessible you are cutting out potential users if you want more people to use your site and participate and work using the WordPress multi-site your site is overall inaccessible you're literally just lowering the number of people who could be a part of the project and join in the fun and that doesn't really hold quite the same for someone who's making their own personal page and then just doesn't adhere to best practices but from an administrative point of view keeping that in mind as a moral priority and a legal priority and in some ways a practical engagement priority accessibility is really important I wonder about that practical engagement piece too because the way in which it's a very simple and subtle I love the way you talked about AI as a possible use for describing that and that kind of I want to hear like cool uses of that rather than like I spoke into a chat and it did my homework but like the other idea being like so should you have that accessibility I think the design let's take for example Twitter versus Mastodon as a tool the way in which Twitter treated all text was very kind of like written and whatever and the way in which it's done the Mastodon it's very like here it is and this is something you should do and like it's like really easy to do and it's not like it's not yelling at you to do it but yet it almost is like I feel like I'm going to do it because it's part of the post right and it's such an interesting subtle design that gets to that practical point you made pilot that I think will change the way accessibility works on the web if it's done right design wise well and you can you can force some things in WordPress that might be advantageous like you can say like you can't save the image without putting all text when you do the media upload that's a thing that you can kind of rig in you know you could say if they don't put in all text do this and I think there are some AI ones that will throw in some sort of descriptive text I think it will be done on you know a couple different platforms anyway and there might be a WordPress plugin or two that will do it it gets down to two though like if it's a decorative image you shouldn't have all text in it because it's just going to waste the person's time right and so it takes an element of choice and discretion out of it and you know it's tricky right and one of the things I've always tried to describe people when they're kind of like getting tense about different aspects of this is like I can say like the themes accessible I can say WordPress the content it creates in this aspect is accessible right yeah the interface is accessible in these ways but I can't tell you what the individual is going to choose to do is going to be accessible because they have choice and in any content management system they're going to have some degree of choice to do things the only way you can prevent them from creating any inaccessible stuff would be to restrict that choice down to virtually nothing and like then you're just taking away agency so like to have power you have to have choice and that comes with risk and maybe that's my motto with all this stuff what's the right balance of those things for this particular goal project people I can't think of a better place and a better kind of like series of superhero tag lines to wrap yeah I was going to say what a note to end on are we missing anything because I know we kind of how can we have missed anything it's impossible I know but I can't think of anything anything Tom really wanted to cover that me and pilot might have driven down a dirt road somewhere in the deserts of Arizona to talk about something else like the of the water well what we can try and do is like if we have a place for people to submit their example terms of services that's a cool thing people want to comment on one another's and hypothesis I thought that might be a fun way to have kind of a community discussion based on the things that are submitted and then I don't know if reclaim like wants a thing where you go like alright here's DMCA stuff you might think about there's accessibility stuff you might think about here's terms of use stuff you might think about you know what I mean so you could almost clump them I love the idea of there being examples for like you laid out terms of use from different schools how did I do it here's the DMCA templates exactly like I think that would be a great link of resources for folks to see how other people are doing it and a little context for it and then rather than us giving people a boil point like they can choose and that agency is back and hence they'll feel the power and that's the whole idea of digital identity and agency fighting against the robots that are taking our jobs will seem real even though it's not all right shall we all say goodbye yes yes I was going to say it's been really fun and great but yes also works yes bye everybody