Recent neg record and posts issues

LaC said:
I can't read all the thread, but salarta's level has been changed to privileged, so the problem is solved.

The "problem" of me being "unable or unwilling to distinguish good art from bad," right? Because five posts out of 200 is such a sin?

I didn't say anything about this earlier because I was in a rush to do something else, but this is the gist of the issue. The statement implying that I'm either ignorant or purposely negligent when I've tried time and again to adapt to the style desired by the danbooru moderation and administration. This is what makes me feel insulted by the drop down to privileged. Without that, I'd probably still wish I was at Contributor status so good ones didn't get auto-deleted solely because a mod/admin didn't approve them, BUT I'd have accepted it without complaint because it would mean that I wouldn't have to worry as much about if it "isn't danbooru quality" as I was when I had Contributor status.

homeless_homo said:
Even the ugliest image imaginable will have favorites if there is so much as a boob showing or an exposed vagina. That is how retarded half of this community is.

This makes me sad, but at least it tells me why most of my uploads stay low single digit scores... I don't upload anything explicit, but it's sometimes surprising how some of the ones I really like stay at 0-2. Ah, well.

As for the topic at hand, shrug. Some of the stuff he uploaded, I've probably downvoted if it showed up on the comments page with a bunch of negative comments and it was ugly. I don't vote for anything that's not on the comments page because I'm lazy, haha.

salarta said:
Maybe I'm putting too much stock in the idea of people putting in votes...

There was one a bit ago I deleted that had a favorite and a -1 score. I'm watching 3 others still, though I think two of them only have -1 because it's not to one person's taste (or as mentioned with the down-voted Rosa one, someone might be going out of their way to down-vote some things of mine).

Another thing you should do with favorites, is click the user who favorites it, and look at all the other stuff he/she (usually he) has added. Most often you'll find that his favorites list is full of horrifyingly ugly pictures of women having sex etc.

Just because one of your images has a favorite, doesn't mean the user who added it knows the difference between good and bad.

Been a day, thought I'd post to state I'm watching the thread regularly.

Many of you are right about that approach with down-votes and favorites, which is why I reiterate that it's the ones that are grey area to me that I post; I do have a heck of a lot I did NOT post, even of my favorite characters, because I realize they wouldn't be accepted. Yes, some of those ARE grey area material too.

My main issue here has been the way I got framed in my neg record, as if five posts and constantly trying to get better clarification to provide as much as I can without withholding something that would have been accepted makes me a stupid or mean-spirited person (implied in the line about me being "unable or unwilling to distinguish good art from bad" and so on). There are ways to phrase something in a constructive and forewarning way that don't involve insulting the person in question on some level.

You're taking it too personally.

Akari said:
This makes me sad, but at least it tells me why most of my uploads stay low single digit scores... I don't upload anything explicit, but it's sometimes surprising how some of the ones I really like stay at 0-2. Ah, well.

Sadly, the humanity as a whole is hopeless. I've long since stopped caring about scores on my posts. Although I do have uploaded the lowest-scored post in the history of danbooru, which so far proves to be a fascinating sociologic experiment :)

I don't understand why you guys should be surprised. Porn is the focus of this site, like it or not.

Even if porn is a focus on the site you would still hope to have the voting system (which is meant to gauge quality) have the same standards for porn and non-porn. Unfortunately in practice a malproportioned, impossibly large breasted futanari image is likely to do better than artbook quality non-nudes. I find this fact unfortunate.

葉月 said:
I do have uploaded the lowest-scored post in the history of danbooru

Somehow you were the victim of people piling on the bandwagon. I'm not sure that "Misteru Bean" should be ranked all that highly, but it definitely doesn't warrant -170 when the next highest score is less than a third that.

Does anyone search by popularity, anyway?

memegui said:
You're taking it too personally.

It's the principle. I'm tossing my philosophy toward art completely out the window because I understand that danbooru has its own philosophy, I'm trying to do what I can to comply with danbooru's philosophy, and I got insulted for it. Why should I really bother uploading if I'm going to be treated as a black sheep and partially insulted for wanting to help bring the most to danbooru that fits its standards?

We could split votes to separate negative votes and positive votes. I think it would be nice to be able to compare.

I think post #161053 (seven months ago danbooru's second lowest-rated post at -43 according to a comment, and now -17) is also an illustrative example of the changing tastes of the danbooru proletariat.

As for salarta, the only advice I can offer is to become as picky as I am. Don't rely on danbooru to determine the quality of images, and don't upload an image unless you'd be willing to set it as your desktop background / print it up and put it on your wall as a poster / wear it on a t-shirt / whatever other more elitist metric then you're using currently pleases you. In contrast to most judicial systems, the philosophy around here seems to be "better that ten good images remain un-uploaded than one horrible one slip through the cracks."

Can't say much about the negative record, it's LaC's decision whether he wants to rescind his harsh words, now that his concern is solved by your demotion from contributor to privileged. But if you just want to get rid of that nasty -1 on your profile page, I'd be happy to give you a positive record, since you are genuinely interested in contributing to the site; it's more than I can say for most of my ancient invites, or 90% of the users here.

It's pretty banal glancing at the profiles of people who have favorited my images and seeing a countless number of 0-post 2000-favorite users...

Hmm, since it popped up in the comments I have to cite it here: post #64006 has 10 votes at the moment while post #174116 has 5 votes. This is after I cast my votes for each. Not only would I think the votes should be swapped, I'd nominate the former for swapping with 葉月's -170 vote post.

(note, I'm aware I'm bringing up a 2 year old post, but you still see the same trend for newer posts before they get autodeleted)

Shinjidude said:
Hmm, since it popped up in the comments I have to cite it here: post #64006 has 10 votes at the moment while post #174116 has 5 votes. This is after I cast my votes for each. Not only would I think the votes should be swapped, I'd nominate the former for swapping with 葉月's -170 vote post.

(note, I'm aware I'm bringing up a 2 year old post, but you still see the same trend for newer posts before they get autodeleted)

Well, I personally don't really like that style much (talking about the second one), but just for you cause you post good stuff, I up voted it, lol.

Sorry that was a bit off-topic =P Slightly more on topic though, I'm well aware that there are tons of votes for porn just because, but that's expected. I mean, when I compare the votes, I look at a non-porn good image vs another existing non-porn good image. Same with a porn image vs another porn image.

Why would you compare apples to oranges?

At the same time though, it really says something when a non-porn image gets up to the 30-40s. I have one that's a 60, though it's not porn I guess it IS two girls kissing...so I dunno if that really counts...

I admittedly have only uploaded a handful porn-y images, but my highest scoring image by far is post #280703.

As for salarta, the only advice I can offer is to become as picky as I am. Don't rely on danbooru to determine the quality of images, and don't upload an image unless you'd be willing to set it as your desktop background / print it up and put it on your wall as a poster / wear it on a t-shirt / whatever other more elitist metric then you're using currently pleases you. In contrast to most judicial systems, the philosophy around here seems to be "better that ten good images remain un-uploaded than one horrible one slip through the cracks."

Can't say much about the negative record, it's LaC's decision whether he wants to rescind his harsh words, now that his concern is solved by your demotion from contributor to privileged. But if you just want to get rid of that nasty -1 on your profile page, I'd be happy to give you a positive record, since you are genuinely interested in contributing to the site; it's more than I can say for most of my ancient invites, or 90% of the users here.

None of those ways of judging quality would really work for me because I'd do any of those for most of the ones I save unless they're hentai (since I wouldn't want to wear a shirt of a girl getting screwed). My natural philosophy is to appreciate art from different perspectives unless it's absolutely amazingly terrible, undeniably so. So I'm doing what I can to shirk that and go by the danbooru mentality. toward "good" and "bad" art. Because to me, most art is good if it can inspire.

My issue was more about principle about what LaC's comments suggest about me than the negative mark itself, if he had said it in a constructive way then I would have just thought "well that's true, I do still have some trouble distinguishing it, being down to Privileged isn't too bad" and such.

But with the situation, I'd appreciate the positive record to even it out. LaC seems like one of those types who would feel like rescinding harsh comments makes him look less of an authority and like someone who cares a lot about that under the impression that you have to be heartless to be effective in getting people to do what you want.

Salarta, I'd like to hear ideas from you on ways to improve the moderation process. Here are the alternatives as I see them:

- Accept everything by default and moderators just remove bad posts. The problem: moderators are pretty lazy and it's easy to miss bad posts. Users will also be encouraged to upload more crap, since it has a higher chance of getting through.
- No moderation at all. History has shown this leads to a bunch of furry and shota manga getting uploaded.
- Automate moderation based on scores or favorite count. Problem: easy to game (just find some proxies and write a few scripts), and score isn't necessarily indicative of quality.

To albert:

I'm kind of flattered that you'd want to hear from me on ideas to improve the process. I saw your post pretty soon after you posted it and spent a couple hours tossing around possibilities in my head (not JUST thinking about danbooru during those two hours; I was resting as I thought about these).

Without knowing the capabilities of the moderation utilities, both in actions you can already take and ways you can modify the process:

Out of your options and based on the way the community is (as I've seen it), your current setup is the best option, but could be tweaked to make things a bit better. Here's my ideas:
-You can extend the period before something gets auto-deleted to something like 5 or 7 days, which gives more time for moderation to view the image and would make the uploader feel that it's more likely the moderation DID get to see it before it got auto-deleted.
-Unless I have it wrong, it looks like Privileged users have nothing that auto-deletes their entry after a certain number of days. If this is the case, then emphasis on checking the ones that will get auto-deleted without mods looking over them is ideal.
-Whatever your moderation utility looks like, perhaps you can create a way to break down things in the moderation queue where you can search for ones that will get auto-deleted and things that won't get auto-deleted.
-These are wrapped into the above. There are some things that might be important or more likely to be meaningful to danbooru than others; perhaps they can have categories as well. Some ideas for categories would be posts that are part of a set/series and official art.

Sometimes it's not the utilities that can be improved, but the rules, guidelines, options, etc. So, here's some for that.

-My auto-deletion appeal thread was all about how there are some images I feel would be perfectly good for danbooru but which got auto-deleted, and asking the mods to give them another look. There could be a thread in the forum devoted to it. This COULD be too grandiose and taxing for the moderators of danbooru to do on a widespread scale, I don't know the composition of the moderation team and time they can invest in it.
-Naturally, the mods have a lot of demands on their time. If a thread for people to appeal auto-deleted entries is made, there needs to be explicit and possibly strict guidelines on what people could and should appeal. I did not consider this until when I tried to appeal a huge number and was asked to go back and narrow it down to a more reasonable number.
-Perhaps there could be examples of "danbooru-quality" gray area images that would be accepted? I don't know if this one would make sense or actually work, it's an idea to help people decide if their images are good enough for danbooru. Everyone knows a stellar, spectacular image when they see it, ones they can be sure would be added to danbooru; the ones that aren't in the top 5% of art are the ones that are debatable.

That's all I can think of for now, though there may be others. I hope that's not TOO long of a post, and that it's helpful.

salarta said:
-Perhaps there could be examples of "danbooru-quality" gray area images that would be accepted?

I like this idea. If albert agrees, I can select a couple images from the archive that I would barely approve, so to speak.

-My auto-deletion appeal thread was all about how there are some images I feel would be perfectly good for danbooru but which got auto-deleted, and asking the mods to give them another look.

I think this idea is valid also. Maybe this should be somehow integrated into the mod queue. Like (in my head) you would get a limited number of "appeal slots"--something like 3 to 5--and you can click on "Appeal" for one of your deleted images and the image is sent back into a separate queue for re-checking, similar to the current "Mark for deletion" queue.

Perhaps one thing that could be done to allay people's fears that their pics aren't being looked at prior to auto-deletion could be a simple "ignore" counter. Such that when a janitor, mod, or admin sees a post in the mod-queue, they can process it in one of three ways: "accept" as they do now, "delete" if it's a blatant rule violation or stupendously awful, or a new option "ignore", which would increment this counter. When the pic eventually gets autodeleted, in the message up top include: "# janitors, mods, or admins reviewed this pic and didn't find it approval-worthy".

The result of this is that the user knows that if their pic is accepted, at least one mod saw fit to do so, if it's deleted before its time that one mod saw that was necessary as well. If it gets to be autodeleted, then at least they know that a certain number of mods looked at it and said "meh".

You could take this one step further, and say that if a pic gets to the end of it's moderation lifespan and still has an ignore count of 0, instead of getting deleted it is brought to the mods' attentions so they can give it a sudden death approval or disapproval.

The end result of this would be that the poster knows for a fact that it was considered by a certain number of people and not just let slip.

The down-side of this is that it would require more active participation on the part of the mods. I don't know what the interface looks like either, but if they are using the quick vote feature, it shouldn't be too onerous to ignore-vote the ones they wouldn't approve.