Hi Harry,

Many thanks for your kind words. It's been a while since I was here and from what I have read in the past few days things have changed for the better in some ways, for the worse in others. I've been through my own personal hell since I was last here and hope the worst is over and I am starting a period of relative peace and calm.

I've had a look around my User CP to see what's new, what's old and what's gone. I would be happy to post any images that people feel are helpful on the condition that I, as the copyright holder, retain control of those images. The rules state clearly on this page that All rights are retained by the original creator or copyright holder.

However, in all practicality, this is not the case. How so, you might ask? Well, if you go to your Attachments panel, you will see that you are not able to select an individual or multiple attachments to delete them. This means that if you choose to remove an image to which you hold the copyright, you have no option but to ask a moderator to remove it for you. What if the moderator disagrees and refuses where necessary to maintain forum continuity (quoted from the rules)?

Even worse, if you have the misfortune to be banned, you no longer have any access to your User CP / Attachments page. This means that you will have no way of even listing the images that are owned by you but which are no longer under your control.

I have written to Xara about this issue (as an artist and designer it is important to me) because when I raised it on these forums the matter was brushed off by certain moderators who decided I was being belligerent instead of understanding that I was raising an important intellectual copyright issue. Xara replied to me telling me that any image will be removed at a user's request. Well, as you can see from the above, if you are a prolific poster with hundreds of attachments, this is virtually impossible.

I don't know who took the decision to remove our right to delete our own Attachments, but until the ability for any user to delete any of his Attachments is restored I will be very wary of posting anything of value.

The alternative is for me to restore those mini-tutorials and copyrighted images onto my own server for public access (which I am very happy to do). However, as it states here, Images should be uploaded to the TalkGraphics server [...]. This is to ensure that such images are always available. Images hosted by third party hosts are susceptible to host closures/crashes etc and often render threads unintelligible. The XaraXone is hosted on a different server and IP to talkgraphics.com. There are god knows how many posts on this forum pointing to pages on the XaraXone, posts which will be rendered unintelligible if the site goes down. It is perhaps an unfair comparison because the same people look after the XaraXone and Talkgraphics servers, but the fact remains that an issue with one will not affect the other and vice versa (unless 1&1 Internet go down!).

In a world full of different graphic apps, I have a lot of time for Xara ones. I've always liked posting. Moreover, I like helping people. But whoever has fiddled with the users' control panel permissions has created this issue.

Sorry guys.