Thanks for the reply. I do recognize that there is more than one (or two) issues that make the frontpage just poorly suited to being a frontpage.
I think other people have also noticed variou "metas" going on, like just searching md5_mismatch to mass 1up things. It's usually only one or a small number of people doing it, but by the nature of what's happening it's very noticable.
I do genuinely think the incessant notagging is just another symptom of this, just usually one that gets automatically resolved after a few minutes. Actually important tags like loli regularly get missed on initial upload, but even not-as-important-but-arguably-still-important tags like genitals and sex acts rarely if ever are present upon upload. While I'm personally not that bothered, I've heard of quite a few builders and the likes who blacklist these things and regularly struggle to use the frontpage normally because of that. I think there will be less complaints if such tags were consistently added (not counting people who complain because they got sniped themselves, but those are more rare nowadays). Again though, I recognize this is only a part of the problem.
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."
Not every fuzzy concept is clearly definable, but most people exercising common sense know when something is a problem. Just like uploading "good art" is subjective, but most people here have a consensus on what meets minimum standards.
"Exactly" wasn't the right word for me to use. I'm not asking for hard numbers. We just need something more than "thousands of posts of the same character is too much."
Also, telling someone to use "common sense" isn't going to help, especially since there's a clear disconnect between what Contributors and average users think is an acceptable amount. It's also not clear whether spacing out the uploads is enough, since some users seem to prefer they don't get uploaded at all.
If I had to answer the question myself, I would think 3 outfits x 3 faces per character would be fine to upload. Maybe 3 characters a day or so. And 3 outfits x 10 faces might be doable if it's kept to 1 character a day. Again, these aren't hard numbers, just intuitive guesses. The problem is that I don't actually know if these numbers are reasonable. Are they too strict? Too lenient?
We've mostly been talking about the really large sets, but when exactly would uploading a set reach the point of spamming? How many expression variations would be too much? How many expression/costume combinations? And when would it get to the point that not even uploading a few at a time would help?
Someone earlier in the thread raised a salient point about redundancy and how these sprite variations are utilized in the game itself vs. mining out thousands of them as individual pngs and posting them. You have a set of characters, a set of outfits, a set of poses, and a set of expressions that all work and are purposeful for the game format itself. If you extract them and attempt to mix and match every possible combination you end up with thousands of posts that just functionally redundant, not unique art, and don't really have a purpose. This is actually not unique to sprites, games like Gothic Delusion have hundreds of variants of a single event CG.
People bring up archival, but extracting data is inherently not an optimal way of archival for anything that's not a defunct online game. If you want to archive this game you would archive the DVD ISO or DL archive. We should be thinking in terms of what is functionally purposeful for an image board, i.e. event CGs that have an aesthetic quality outside of the game itself and a logical amount of sprites that show something unique like an outfit or pose, not a set of no blush/light blush/mid blush/nose blush/ear blush/full face blush/full body blush intermixed with 5 different pose and outfit variations, and all of that multiplied by 5 because of eyebrow position variations.
...If people keep this up, it's going to require more radical solutions, such as:
Limiting the number of uploads per day for everybody so Contributors can't spam more than 100 or so posts per day.
And why should 99% of uploaders again endure this ridiculous collective responsibility when we genuinely don't have that many who could start doing what CommentaryRequest did? At a minimum (for someone to start doing it), it would require a contributor+ rank. Is it really easier to restrict the multitude of fast and prolific uploaders with truly diverse content just to save ~5 minutes warning one person (new large set uploader) who appears roughly once a year? In all this time, I can only remember maybe 2-3 people who did this, even though it’s a fairly new trend. I think this is not very good that people have already started choosing which restriction is more optimal for them, because they have never been part of a problem whose solution is suddenly supposed to have such a big impact on them.
I think people are a bit too hung up on that line. I agree it sounds like a bad solution, but just because it was said doesn't mean we are days away from it being implemented. It'd just be one of many tools that would make limiting spam easier, and nothing points to it being the currently preferred option.
I understand and agree with all points except this one:
People bring up archival, but extracting data is inherently not an optimal way of archival for anything that's not a defunct online game. If you want to archive this game you would archive the DVD ISO or DL archive.
The point is not to archive the game itself, but to make the assets accessible to the average person that doesn't know how to unpack/decrypt them. But The Spriters Resource would be a better place for that as long as the assets aren't outright pornographic.
I understand and agree with all points except this one:
The point is not to archive the game itself, but to make the assets accessible to the average person that doesn't know how to unpack/decrypt them. But The Spriters Resource would be a better place for that as long as the assets aren't outright pornographic.
And if they are outright pornographic, e-hentai is a better place.
And if they are outright pornographic, e-hentai is a better place.
I was under the impression the images had to be complete to be posted there. I don't think they'd want a bunch of faces over transparent backgrounds. Each combination would have to be merged first if they have multiple layers. That's the opposite of The Spriters Resource, which prioritizes asset preservation over presentation.
At least here, we have the option of storing the raw assets without posting them. As long as they're properly linked, we can keep the pool sizes small while giving other users the means to create any combination they want.
Gonna bump this conversation, as I'm still seeing a lot of these tachi-e spams, so we need to figure out a way to clamp down on them, or at the very least redirect their uploaders somewhere where they'd be more appreciated, as I don't like seeing tags or the front page being full of nothing but the same character in the same pose making different expressions.
Gonna bump this conversation, as I'm still seeing a lot of these tachi-e spams, so we need to figure out a way to clamp down on them, or at the very least redirect their uploaders somewhere where they'd be more appreciated, as I don't like seeing tags or the front page being full of nothing but the same character in the same pose making different expressions.
Post count for user:AngryZapdos tachi-e age:<4d: 258 Post count for blue_archive age:<4d: 1743 Post count for tachi-e age:<4d: 663 Post count for age:<4d: 26319
Since you decided to mention AngryZapdos in particular, I've looked up some post counts for the period you specified, and I want to ask, is 258 posts spread out across four days also considered too much now, when it doesn't even make up 1% of total posts in that period, and there are a lot of other Blue Archive posts in between of those tachi-e too. There are also only 8 different expressions for a single sprite. Is this really supposed to be the same thing as posting 2k variations under a day?
Since you decided to mention AngryZapdos in particular, I've looked up some post counts for the period you specified, and I want to ask, is 258 posts spread out across four days also considered too much now, when it doesn't even make up 1% of total posts in that period, and there are a lot of other Blue Archive posts in between of those tachi-e too. There are also only 8 different expressions for a single sprite. Is this really supposed to be the same thing as posting 2k variations under a day?
I don't think either Zapdos or Magirl are contributing to the problem. Both of them are spreading out their uploads, varying what they upload, etc., while the dbz socks are just dumping hundreds of the same tachi-e but slightly different into the queue with inflammatory usernames. The sets those two are uploading are also significantly smaller.
To be clear, I only pinged AngryZapdos so they could be aware there was ongoing conversation about some of the art they were posting; it certainly wasn't meant to be a callout or anything and I wasn't sure if a ping or DM would be better. If the ping was improper, I apologize for using it.
I'm not trying to start anything for the record. It just caused me to think about this thread and how we were still stuck on figuring out how to deal with these. Terribly sorry for any trouble I caused.
Since you decided to mention AngryZapdos in particular, I've looked up some post counts for the period you specified, and I want to ask, is 258 posts spread out across four days also considered too much now, when it doesn't even make up 1% of total posts in that period, and there are a lot of other Blue Archive posts in between of those tachi-e too. There are also only 8 different expressions for a single sprite. Is this really supposed to be the same thing as posting 2k variations under a day?
Hundreds of the same image is going to rub people the wrong way regardless of whether it's all at once or split up, unless some site changes happen to make it less spammy. I agree with this comment in particular:
In my opinion, I think it's best to just leave today at only asking to interval your uploads if you're planning to mass dump hundreds or thousands of similar images like this, if you even somehow manage to find a case where that can happen besides very dynamic VNs.
That sounds even worse. At least when they're uploaded all at once I can scroll past them all at once in searches. If they're intervaled in upload it means there's actual posts I want to see hidden between them.
Uploaders feeling like they have to upload complete sets for archival purposes makes it worse as a site for browsing images.
I'm mostly familiar with our variant set uploaders only doing a few, sometimes even only just one, set in a day, and usually it's either less than a page (assuming default page size of 20) or a bit over that. Hundreds, let alone thousands, all at one go is definitely something that I haven't really seen before on this site. In my time since joining the site, I've seen about four major complaints about unusable pages due to this, the first time being in 2024-ish with Touhou (?) and that too was about 110-150 pages.
In some ways I still stand by asking uploaders to interval their uploads if they're going to have a lot of variants to upload like this but I realise that we can't have anything nice on this site because if I say it like this then someone will just take it to mean "do the same thing but stretched out over time"; I see where Spatula comes from by calling it worse. My thought was either that or only doing a few per day instead of ending up amounting to hundreds or thousands per day just split by longer periods of time.
On a broader scale, variant sets usually get tolerated because they don't obliterate huge amounts of pages of usability, though you can clearly tell how people, through various factors like how fast they get downvoted, dislike even small variant sets. I will admit that in spite of my opinion that these are really newly-emerged outlier scenarios and I'm fine with having the smaller sets here, I probably have a minority opinion, and I don't really know what the best course of action here is. The post index isn't really designed to handle flood like this from a browsing perspective, especially when Members are still limited to 2 tag searches. Sometimes it's not just variant sets either (pool #23785 haunts me in my dreams).
This has already been brought up a few times, but I think if you're going to upload very large variant sets of game assets, the best way to do it would be to make a set representing all of the assets (or at least the ones with significant differences), but not necessarily having every combination.
For example, I'm thinking of uploading one in the future with three bodies and three faces per character. I could upload every combination for nine images per character, or I could upload just three combinations with a both a different face and body for each one (haven't decided which one yet, since nine isn't really a lot). I would also link the original assets in the comments under each post.
If it were a single character with a lot of combinations instead, I would add a full list of assets in the pool description. That way, I would be effectively making all combinations available. The viewer would just need to do a bit of extra work on their end to see it.
