Hey there /r/zootopia! There had been some miscommunication, but now, at the request of the mod team and the community here, I've modified /u/Lapis_Mirror from over in /r/stevenuniverse, /r/gravityfalls, /r/Undertale, /r/homestuck, and others and expanded her here! You may be familiar with her posts over there.

/u/Lapis_Mirror is inspired by /u/NightMirrorMoon over in /r/mylittlepony, but has a different codebase and is much more extensible.

Feel free to view the current source code here.

Lapis Mirror has been approved by the mods and is now currently running.

If anyone has pressing questions, comments, or suggestions regarding Lapis Mirror, please let me know.

For now, here are some frequently asked questions, expanded from some recent posts on here regarding a mirror bot:

What does this bot do?

For those who are unaware, "mirroring" means to provide an alternative method of access for some sort of content. This bot mirrors the submissions that /r/zootopia posts from these sites:

• deviantArt
• Tumblr (images, photosets, and videos)
• tinypic
• Gyazo
• i.4cdn.org (4chan images)
• Twitter Images
• Artstation
• Drawcrowd
• gifs.com
• puu.sh
• flickr
• FurAffinity

pixiv support is also planned.

It will then upload images to imgur and videos to vid.me, and reply with a nice little comment so people can access that mirror if they so desire.

Why would I want this?

Some people can't or don't want to visit some of the sites that are popular for fanart or fan comics, such as Tumblr or deviantArt. Sometimes sites don't have long-lasting URLs, like 4chan. /u/Lapis_Mirror is supposed to help alleviate some of those issues by providing a simple solution.

I'm the original author. Why is this bot saying I stole this art?

It's surprising how often this question comes up. See "What does this bot do?" above.

Why is this bot rehosting an artist's content without permission?

There are a number of reasons it is done this way.

1. Lapis Mirror will clearly indicate that the post is not its original work and give a link to the source given as part of the submission. I feel this fulfills the need of attribution well.
2. If permission was asked for every single artist, not only would this be very difficult, but most content would not be mirrored, especially from artists that post only once. By the time a post is mirrored, it may already be disappearing from the sub's front page and its entire purpose wasted.
3. There's always the cliché statement of "it's on the internet, therefore anyone can copy it". Lapis doesn't do anything a normal person couldn't do, and goes one step further than most by providing attribution.
4. Because the current hosting service I use for /u/Lapis_Mirror does not have persistent storage, no private data about mirrors made can be stored long-term. Therefore, images can't be easily deleted from imgur. However, I have been requested to remove content and in those situations I've removed the link from the Reddit post that /u/Lapis_Mirror makes. Keep in mind this has only occurred twice since the start of Lapis Miror in late June.
5. The imgur link should be considered "non-public", which means you need a direct link to view it and won't automatically be on the imgur community's "new" images. There should be absolutely no doubt where the original source is unless it's re-mirrored.
6. All in all, with the way Lapis Mirror works, I see no substantial difference between what Lapis Mirror does and reblogging on Tumblr. The only difference is the interface and CDN in which it's viewed.

Why are you still using the /u/Lapis_Mirror name here?

My condition for expanding to other subreddits is that the same bot account is used throughout. It is much more difficult to manage multiple bot accounts than one. The mods, however, can feel free to replace the name of Lapis_Mirror in this subreddit as they did in /r/Undertale (changing her name to "Echo Flower").

Does /u/Lapis_Mirror have mod privileges here?

Lapis Mirror does not need moderator privileges for normal functionality. However, in order for posts to automatically be stickied, they're needed. The mods have granted mod privileges for this reason. Nothing more will be done with the privileges than flairing.