Reapproving your own uploads

RaisingK said:
If a mod or two is dead set on keeping, say, penis Reimu, downvoting it is the only thing left to us.

What the shit!?

Granola said:
approver:Seem order:score_asc

All of this should be flagged and put through the queue.

What Granola said, please. Especially penis Reimu.

Positive scores mean nothing when it comes to approving/deleting posts, but extreme negative score is another case. It's not double standard, just how it should be.

I don't think that Janitors/Mods should be completely banned from reapproving something they were previously involved with, though I do believe that it should be a major taboo.

I would hope that the original approver would at least try to be a little more critical of the work before reapproving it.

I see one of the images I uploaded on that list of low scoring posts Seem reapproved, and you know what? I probably wouldn't have reapproved it myself. Its very mediocre.

The uploader cannot reapprove their uploads. It must be reapproved by someone else. No matter what status their account is. If it's admin, mod, Janitor, test janitor, WHATEVER.

Many of the images Seem has reapproved are of low quality and not of danbooru standards.

I didn't really mean for this topic to end up as discussion of any one moderator's approvals. I am not really a fan of several of Seem's approvals myself, but it seems like a PM to the person himself (or to jhx2154 or albert) would be a more appropriate place for those concerns.

Seem said:
It's not an abuse of power or circumventing of the system, it's going through the system as intended. You seem to misunderstand what unapproving and the moderation queue does - it sends posts to the moderation queue for moderators to look at and decide if they think it should stay or not.

Okay, my semantics were off. What I should have said, then, is that we should change the function of unapproval to require multiple approvers' opinions on flagged images. This should mean that, in addition to not allowing approvers to reapprove their own flagged posts, we should not allow approvers to reapprove a flagged Member-level post that they approved on its first trip through the queue, and we should allow two flaggings on Contributor-level posts. A system like this ensures that posts whose quality is contested are backed by two approvers, thus eliminating the possibility of a single person's mistake in judgement forcing bad art onto Danbooru. (Surely we can agree that approvers are not almighty emperor-gods and are capable of mistakes in judgement?)

Seem said:
Log also posted a bunch of pretty obvious reasons for having the ability as well.

Log posted a single reason for having the ability, which was not altogether convincing to me. If a post is flagged for an invalid reason, then any of the dozens of other approvers should be able to handle it well within the 3-day time limit. In the event that it's somehow missed, you can submit it to the deletion appeal thread, where posts that are clearly Danbooru quality will be reinstated.

sgcdonmai said:
2. In addition to removing the ability of Test Janitors and Janitors to reapprove their own uploads, there absolutely MUST be a revision of the "one flagging per post" system. It allows far too much garbage through.

I don't know that I agree with this. If two approvers have decided that an image has merit, there doesn't seem to be much point in forcing it through the queue any further. This does mean that penis Reimu and that goddamn Beedrill are here for good, but hey, at some point you have to allow that there's no accounting for taste.

And at some point you have to recognize that tastes and attitudes shift with time. Several older posts now exist which would certainly not have made it through the mod queue today.

I think my idea is certainly fair. The exact length of the cooldown interval is certainly up for debate (one month was merely a random length of time for example's sake), but surely the idea itself has merit.

It seems fairly arbitrary, to me, that an image can be eternally protected from anything other than impotent user votes (and possible mod action, but that applies to all posts) just because it passed review twice - or, in the case of Contrib+ uploads, only once.

Constraining the frequency of flagging to once per (insert interval here) would adequately do the job of keeping malicious low-level users from flag-spamming posts, while simultaneously ensuring that users can still have a say in the quality of the material on the site past one or two reviews.

It certainly wouldn't negate the usefulness of the flagging system as it currently exists; rather, it would expand its usefulness.

Instead of a fixed interval for your proposal, perhaps one that is based on the number of different approvers might do a bit better. As an example lets say we use that interval of one month for the time interval between flaggings. If one person approved an image, and it's flagged, and the same approver approves it again then the interval before it could be flagged again would be a month. If a different person re-approved the image though, then it'd be two months before it could be flagged again. If someone flagged it again after 2 months and a 3rd person re-approves it, it'd then take 3 months before it could be flagged again, etc. In short the larger the number of people willing to approve it, the longer the interval between when the image can be flagged again. We could do something else with the interval, but I do think the time interval should be extended in some fashion if an image gets approved by several different approvers.

NWF Renim said: stuff

Well, that just blew the KISS principle right out of the water.

I'd say that once a post has been approved after being sent to the queue, that should generally be it. And if there's a quality-control issue with one of the approvers, the problem lies with them, and doesn't need to be wrapped around in an implementation like that.

And in agreement with zatchii, I too find it somewhat surprising that we even need to discuss anything like this. We are, after all, supposed to be trusted to make good decisions.

I also suppose this is a matter of policy too. The current system, as Seem said, is working as-intended, and being democratic (eg, not re-approving your own posts after they get flagged) is entirely voluntary.

Here's how the approval model works:

• Albert promotes someone; their decisions are trusted.
• If he thinks they make crappy decisions; he demotes them.
• There are only two levels of power: Albert, and everyone else.

That's basically it, not a lick of democracy. We should be discussing policy here, not implementation details (just yet).

I just voiced my opinion on that system, keeping it too simple wouldn't make it very useful in my mind. In it's current form it would not take into account the rather important aspect that more than one person would be willing to approve it. Keeping it simple would only mean more work in the long run, as we could end up constantly having to reapprove the same image every time the limit runs out, as no matter who approves it, it'll only get extended a fix interval. If over a dozen of the approvers would approve it, that shouldn't mean that only 12 fixed intervals should go by, it should mean that it shouldn't be tampered with until a very long time after that point.

On the other hand, while it might be considered the fault with the current system, on the flip-side the fact that we only have to deal with an image at most twice in the moderation queue can also be seen as a good thing. With any system that would open up the chance of allowing a post to continually be put into the queue, even with a cooldown period, it is simply going to result in greater and greater loads in the long run on those who have to go through the queue. For example if 1 in 500 images would be flagged for whatever reason but is going to be reapproved, you're going to end up with an great increase of these approved-but-going to-be-flagged images as more images get added and only a cooldown to delay an image getting flagged again. If an image honestly warrants needing multiple flaggings, it would be best to resolve it by taking it to the forum where a ruling could be made for the longer term acceptance of the image in which case complaints in the short term can always be directed back to the thread to see what the decision on the image was.

glasnost said:
in addition to not allowing approvers to reapprove their own flagged posts, we should not allow approvers to reapprove a flagged Member-level post that they approved on its first trip through the queue, and we should allow two flaggings on Contributor-level posts. A system like this ensures that posts whose quality is contested are backed by two approvers, thus eliminating the possibility of a single person's mistake in judgement forcing bad art onto Danbooru.

Agreed 100%.

I think this wouldn't be hard to implement too.

Bapabooiee said:
Well, that just blew the KISS principle right out of the water.

I'd say that once a post has been approved after being sent to the queue, that should generally be it. And if there's a quality-control issue with one of the approvers, the problem lies with them, and doesn't need to be wrapped around in an implementation like that.

And in agreement with zatchii, I too find it somewhat surprising that we even need to discuss anything like this. We are, after all, supposed to be trusted to make good decisions.

This. Exactly this. If we must keep the unapproval feature, it should be made clear that unapproving a post doesn't send the message "Your taste sucks, I bet nobody else agrees with you, let's send this back to the queue to see whether I'm right", but instead the message "Uh, did you really mean to approve this? If not, please unapprove it".

If you really have a problem with one of the mods/janitors, bring that up as a separate issue, not on individual posts.

glasnost said: Also, is it possible to return post #744989 to its flagged state? It is seriously not good.

It's gone. And this sure as hell isn't the first time concerns have been raised involving Seem (whether in public or private), but unfortunately I don't call the shots on who is a mod or janitor. That's Albert's territory.

At any rate people should not reapprove their own uploads. If something was hit with an unapproval for a completely inappropriate reason, bring it up with another mod or janitor or me, and if you do choose to reapprove it yourself, let someone know. It doesn't happen often enough that it should be a burden on the mod staff to oversee that kind of thing.

Necro-bump since I want to ask something along the line.

I post pool #1746 quite sometime ago but it wasn't approved. This is not the case where posts were flagged because of unacceptable quality, but because at that time none of the staffs like them. Now being a janitor I still like every post in that pool.

What am I to do now? Appeal for it? Approve it myself?

It seems fine to me, so I approved it for you. In such cases, the best thing to do is probably just appeal or otherwise bring attention to it so you can get a second opinion (as you did here).

Thanks Shinji.

The entirety of the pool was already given its second chance in the appeal thread.

Edit: Not that it matters anyway, since Shinjidude just reapproved them.

Hmm.. you're right. I'm not aware of that because I was not the one appealed for it :P.

Checking the mod_action page, I saw z905844 undeleting some of his own uploads. They aren't bad, so I'm not going to flag them, but there is no way to check the original reason for a posts deletion if the post isn't currently flagged/deleted.

I thought I read somewhere on the forum that albert removed the ability for janitors and moderators to undelete/approve their own uploads at one time, but I guess that's not the case.
In this case, I think this should be done because abuse is bound to happen.
Also, as I mentioned above, being able to view the flag/delete/appeal history of active posts would be nice.

edit: Found it:

albert said in forum #68342:
A post can no longer be approved by the original uploader. This means if a post that was uploaded by a mod gets flagged, they can't approve it.

So, a janitor cannot approve his own flagged uploads, but he can undelete them once they are deleted after 3 days?