Bapabooiee said: Hmmm, I like what I'm seeing. Good quality content is being approved a lot faster than before, while the approval or disapproval of crappy content pretty much seems the same.
So far, it looks like Albert's experiment is going relatively well. Nothing terrible has happened... yet.
There's an "approve all" button at the very top of the queue. I'm very, very afraid that someone is going to click this, either by accident or with malicious intent. Because, oh my god, it's horrifying how bad some of the posts in there are.
It's been giving me a bad feeling all night. Too much power in the hands of too many people, with no accountability.
Edit: Okay, the svn says the undelete for contribs has been removed now.
Aurelia said: There's an "approve all" button at the very top of the queue.
Now that. That changes everything.
It's been giving me a bad feeling all night. Too much power in the hands of too many people, with no accountability.
I've been having that exact same feeling, too.
But like I said... nothing bad has happened yet.
Edit: And it looks like Albert is out-and-about, but he just isn't posting on the forums. I just saw a post that was uploaded by him an hour ago, and as you pointed out, there's been changes to Danbooru's codebase, too.
I've removed the ability to undelete and have fixed the vulnerability evazion mentioned.
Let me try and make my case.
Janitors are trusted. They're expected to differentiate good art from bad. They're a finite group; if you remove one, he won't be immediately replaced. Despite this trust they aren't always perfect. Sometimes they approve bad art.
Contributors (at least those promoted for their uploads, I'll get into this later) are trusted. They're expected to differentiate good art from bad. They're a finite group. Sometimes they upload bad art.
In my opinion, these two groups share a lot of overlap. A lot of people have made the argument that some contributors might approve a bunch of bad art. There's a hard limit to how much they can approve however: up to the last three days. And surely they're not going to approve every single piece of shitty artifacted artwork. If a dozen bad images end up getting approved a day (out of the hundreds that are uploaded and approved), I consider this acceptable. Especially since the larger team can deal with unapprovals quicker.
And if they do consistently approve bad art, this (should) be easy enough to find. I may add an approver: metatag search. Two or three bad apples are dealt with in return for 30+ semi-active approvers.
There is the issue that there are some contributors who were promoted for their notes/wiki work/tag edits. I'll have to wait to see if this turns out to be a problem.
I apologize for springing this without any discussion, but I felt that the potential for damage would be limited to 2-3 days of mass approvals. Most people seem to be telling me to revert it but I want to try it for at least a week. I don't think we're giving contributors enough credit here. If it turns out I'm horribly wrong, I will revert.
Contributors: you don't have to use the moderate interface. In fact, I may make that janitor-only again. But if you click on an unapproved post and you think it's good, go ahead and click Approve. You're lessening the burden for other approvers.
So, in short, if I'm getting this right, contributors can approve posts/hide from queue from the post page, and can effectively view the queue with a status:pending search, but unlike janitors+, don't have the helpful color system or the ability to see how many others have hidden the posts, making it even more likely that they'll approve lower quality posts/dupes?
This has me a little iffy, but I do understand your reasoning, albert. It is a decent experiment and hopefully if there is damage the offenders will be caught quickly and demoted. I'll definitely help keep an eye out for such people and wrongfully approved posts.
This is an improvement (though I still have intense reservations), but if we limit contributors to ONLY being able to approve from the post page, and make approvals by contributors easily trackable by Janitors and above AND make sure they have no access to other moderation functions (especially deletion, undeletion and double-deletion) AND perhaps institute (at first) a cap/cooldown period for approvals...I can see this being feasible.
Getting a real look at the post moderation queue has showed me one thing: it is ponderous. I used it briefly and didn't see a single post that I would approve. There's so much mediocre to outright bad material present that it's understandable to me how one or two quality posts can be overlooked in a torrent of crap. I'm not sure most Contributors would want to use it.
As far as approvals go, there's only a handful of currently active Contributors that I would trust with actually keeping quality in mind if they used this ability. But I haven't seen any extreme cases of bad judgment yet from the time the changes were enabled.
Overall, this is definitely experimental. Methods to ensure accountability are basically required with a system like this in place. Something like the tag/note/wiki/pool edits pages that are easily trackable.
Eliminating conributors' ability to undelete or "approve all" via the mod queue interface is a definate step in the right direction. With those two changes, the biggest threats are probably eliminated.
I still forsee contributors with niche fetishes approving things that otherwise wouldn't have been (sometimes personal bias overwhelms quality judgment). We'll have to see how this goes.
As far as leaving access to comment moderation goes, if some contributor wants to take that on upon themselves and can somehow keep it clean, power to them.
Regarding the comment moderation queue, it's not even worth glancing at. Aside from it being a massive Vortex of Stupid, there's just an overwhelming amount of flagged comments. I have to agree that the base system is basically busted and in need of some core improvements.
May someone enlighten me with a clarification about what exactly Hiding a pending post does? Does it hide it for yourself only, or for everyone else too? And if hidden, it simply disappears like every other 3-day post (provided it remains unapproved), correct?
Hiding is basically your way of saying "no I'm not going to approve this, so don't show it to me anymore", it only disappears for you, and it doesn't delete it or otherwise affect the post's status in the system.
It's probably of little use to you now though, since it only works in the mod queue. I sort of wish there was a metatag that allowed us to use it in the general post pages.
EDIT: Oh yeah, as Log mentions below, it also updates a counter of the number of people who have hidden a post previously. This can help someone decide what to do with something you're truly undecided on, if a large number of mods hid it, it's probably not something that should be uploaded. Of course that usefulness is sort of moot right now, since the number of mods (hence the number of acceptable hides) just skyrocketed.
Hide post hides it in the queue so you can just ignore it if you're not a proper janitor. I suppose you could use it to help the queue staff gauge what's been seen but it won't affect anyone but them.
Shinjidude said: As far as leaving access to comment moderation goes, if some contributor wants to take that on upon themselves and can somehow keep it clean, power to them.
I think that deletion of evidence is a legitimate concern here, though.
I was tempted to dive in and moderate away, but when I thought it through, I realized might be doing more damage than good.
Shinjidude said: As far as leaving access to comment moderation goes, if some contributor wants to take that on upon themselves and can somehow keep it clean, power to them.
I'm not of Contributor status so I haven't actually seen the queue myself (thus I may not be seeing the bigger picture here), but I recall past incidences of mods using the presence of the offending comments for justification/examples/etc regarding blocks or straight up perma-bans.
From page 2 of this thread:
่ๆ said: Don't bother with the comments. Not only is it impossible, you actually remove evidence of stupid by the worst offenders, which is counter-productive.
Don't want to have others create new examples of stupid if there's already a precedent for what not to do, right?
albert said: I apologize for springing this without any discussion, but I felt that the potential for damage would be limited to 2-3 days of mass approvals. Most people seem to be telling me to revert it but I want to try it for at least a week. I don't think we're giving contributors enough credit here. If it turns out I'm horribly wrong, I will revert.
As you saw here, a lot of very legitimate concerns were raised - that approve all button, contribs being able to undelete, contribs being able to approve their own unapproved uploads, contribs being given access to new responsibilities without a primer on what tools they're being given and how to use them, the fact that we hadn't taken a hard look before doing this at who actually deserves to be a contributor, etc. We practically converted 200+ people to near-mods in a flash, though I see a good deal of that has been fixed.
But this is really why we wanted to know ahead of time. Perhaps all the issues could have been straightened out (especially the last one, which will take time) before anything was implemented. Get the framework in place first and then put the new policy on top of it. Smoother transition, less backlash, and probably a lot of good suggestions that any one person alone may have missed.
And a fresh take on who should be a contributor was needed in general anyway, I feel. If we do expand the base of approvers, then knocking some more questionable people to privileged is more feasible, as the increase in queue traffic would be matched by the increased number of eyeballs.
On the other hand there is something to be said for WP:BB, perhaps. At least something was done, and now we have a chance to see what will come of it. So it's not all bad. Anyway, we can always revert to backups if horrible shit occurs.
EDIT: Oops, you edited your post quite a bit after I composed this.
