Change log

Regarding other voices in this thread:

• Very much no for a general forum. There are other places for general talk, we don't need to be yet another. I don't frequent general anime fora, for good reasons, and I'm not particularly eager to see them frequent me. Doubly so for having to put up with generic idiocy like PHPBB or whatever. I hate these things with passion. As buggy as the internal forum might be, it's minimalistic and tailored to the needs of the site, both of which are good things. We don't have avatars, sigs and personal talk pages, and we shouldn't have them.
• Re: promotions. As I've stated previously, and will repeat now: it's always a good idea to nominate people you think deserve recognition to a mod, myself for example. This is in fact the primary source of promotions I've handed out in recent times, because I simply can't keep up with everything everyone is doing and notice the outstanding users. Bapabooiee and gladwort (amongst others) have submitted such requests to me before, and I'm very thankful for that. I really do like promoting people; it's spotting them that's hard.

葉月 said:
Very much no for a general forum.

I don't see how the existence of a general forum would impact you in any way; you wouldn't be required to participate in it. Regardless of what happens, the "no fun zone" needs to continue to exist, but I don't see how supplementing it, or partitioning it (perhaps a forum for translators to better do their work) would be such a terrible thing.

葉月 said:
As buggy as the internal forum might be, it's minimalistic and tailored to the needs of the site, both of which are good things.

I have nothing against the minimalism, and don't get me wrong, I really appreciate all the effort Albert has put into this site, forum included, but the fact is that there are a number of important features our current forum lacks. Search for example, is decidedly sub-par. I'm not sure what causes your anathema towards general stock PHP based fora, but at least in the case that we used one, we wouldn't need to re-invent the wheel.

I'd much rather see Albert spend his development and debugging time and energy on the aspects of Danbooru that make it unique, and not on replicating features that have been well established elsewhere.

葉月 said:
We don't have avatars, sigs and personal talk pages, and we shouldn't have them.

I'm truly ambivalent about these things, though if they somehow strengthened Danbooru as a site and made it run smoother, I wouldn't have a problem with them. In any case, these are typically all options that can be disabled with stock forum software.

葉月 said:
It's always a good idea to nominate people you think deserve recognition to a mod, myself for example.

Agreed.

葉月 said:
I simply can't keep up with everything...it's spotting them that's hard

Hence the need for a better way to automatically detect and perhaps publicly acknowledge those that deserve promotion.

Also in reference to your general attitude with regards to reform: It's ok to be conservative and want to preserve the status quo. Nine times out of ten, that's the stance I take when it comes to changing site policy. Being completely rigid and unwilling to strike any sort of compromise though seems to be exactly the sort of thing that is causing general users to give Albert grief.

I wonder if it would be viable to allow users to request promotion?

Like, have a form they can fill out, explaining why they should be granted Priv/Contributor.

Restrictiosn would be...oh, say been a member for at least 6 months, non-negative record, meeting some threshold of Uploads, deletion ratio and tag edits. If their request is turned down, they can't try again for another 6 months.

Just a thought.

Just to bring a correction:

葉月 said:
The current posting rate is several comments per second

When have you seen that? Whenever I look at the comments, the rate seems to be one every few minutes.
Which is still pretty fast but nowhere near as crazy as your numbers.

Shinjidude said:
I'm truly ambivalent about these things, though if they somehow strengthened Danbooru as a site and made it run smoother, I wouldn't have a problem with them. In any case these are typically all options that can be disabled with stock forum software.

What I like with the forum in its current form is that it goes straight to the point. There's nothing fancy around because nothing else than the purpose of this place matters. At least for me, this is the kind of things that positively impressed me when arriving and made me want to help.

I can't tell if a more regular forum would actually have prevented me from joining, but it'd have weakened the dedication feeling this place gives.
Other people may react differently, but then I'd tend to think that people getting scared that easily mustn't be very motivated or suited to contribute, for the reasons Fencedude stated in forum #58900.

A friendlier forum would start to attract users who have no interest in contributing, which could have positive effects (moving a part of the comment activity to the forums, ease the transition from freeloader to helper).
But what I'm worried about is that our current minimalism is a formidable weapon against drama among helpers, because we practically know nothing about each other, and a friendlier forum might make this shatter.

albert said:
The forum, ideally, should be representative of Danbooru users in general. If there's a large furry community that resents the furry ban, I want to hear from them. I want to take whatever steps are needed to lower the barrier to entry.

Agreed.

This detachment of the general users and forum goers/moderation can be seen with how posts are approved and handled. See post #574960, 322 user favorites and it got deleted. There's a disconnect here between what the population wanted and what the staff allowed them to see, the picture was well received by the general population but the minority decision overruled everything else.

The trend of letting good pictures die because of content is very common. There is a bias against explicit and alternative pictures so you'll see well drawn pictures get overlooked because of their content but mediocre pictures that are let through.

I don't have an idea on how we can solve this problem of one set of tastes and opinions dominating the moderation process and alienating everybody else. If I think of one I'll share it though.

Shinjidude said:
I don't see how the existence of a general forum would impact you in any way; you wouldn't be required to participate in it. Regardless of what happens, the "no fun zone" needs to continue to exist, but I don't see how supplementing it, or partitioning it (perhaps a forum for translators to better do their work) would be such a terrible thing.

Extending the work-related forum functionality I have no problem with. But adding general idle talk section I'm extremely strongly against. Danbooru is not a community-building site, and anything that suggests it could be is harmful. We already have a disproportionately large percentage of users who don't do anything besides attempting to do just that and we don't need any more. If anything, we should make it more painfully obvious that we're not yet another anime forum site.

I have nothing against the minimalism, and don't get me wrong, I really appreciate all the effort Albert has put into this site, forum included, but the fact is that there are a number of important features our current forum lacks. Search for example, is decidedly sub-par. I'm not sure what causes your anathema towards general stock PHP based fora, but at least in the case that we used one, we wouldn't need to re-invent the wheel.

I have a lot against PHP-based fora, since they're without exception horribly crappy software that puts all the effort in the functionality I don't want to have. Not to mention they're themselves re-inventing the wheel, namely usenet and mailing lists. So if we go for special forum software, I'd rather have it do what's needed for danbooru maintenance and only what's needed for danbooru maintenance.

And btw, I like the implication that PHPBB's search is good. It's not, it's a piece of shit.

I'd much rather see Albert spend his development and debugging time and energy on the aspects of Danbooru that make it unique, and not on replicating features that have been well established elsewhere.

Except we don't need 99% of crap all the PHP-based packages implement, so the total implementation time of just the features danbooru needs is comparable with (or less than) what it'd take to hack PHPBB into supporting post #nnnnn and similar.

I'm truly ambivalent about these things, though if they somehow strengthened Danbooru as a site and made it run smoother, I wouldn't have a problem with them. In any case, these are typically all options that can be disabled with stock forum software.

I hate these things with passion, for one thing, and for another, it'd only strengthen misconceptions about the site. Once again, danbooru is not a general anime discussion place. We should actively work against having things that make it easier to attempt turning it into one, because it detracts from what makes it unique and actually worthwhile, and what I invest my energy in.

Also in reference to your general attitude with regards to reform: It's ok to be conservative and want to preserve the status quo. Nine times out of ten, that's the stance I take when it comes to changing site policy. Being completely rigid and unwilling to strike any sort of compromise though seems to be exactly the sort of thing that is causing general users to give Albert grief.

The problem is confusing "some people are complaining" with "there is an actual problem people are complaining about". The former will always be the case for any site big enough, especially if you have one that's not exactly like all the others. But the trick is to know that and be prepared for the flak you will get anyway, and stick to what is your mission.

Danbooru is a digital museum, and that means we'll have the digital equivalent of signs telling you to put on slippers before coming in, and digital boring old people who will get annoyed when you run in the corridors and yell. And that's okay, because it's those boring old people who create worthwile collections in the end. It doesn't mean we don't want to allow any fun whatsoever, but fun on danbooru comes through the content, not through getting drunk and behaving stupid.

Action_Kamen said:
See post #574960, 322 user favorites and it got deleted.

It's a sexually-oriented pic, catering to the basest sensibilities. Of course it's going to get a lot of favorites. This is the case for virtually any pic of less-than-halfway-decent quality that features such material.*

Were I a mod, I wouldn't have approved that pic regardless of the aforementioned reason for deletion, thanks to its shoddy lines and lazy shading. Not Danbooru quality.

• I am intentionally underselling my paranoia of sockpuppet accounts astroturfing its popularity.

Action_Kamen said:
...

The problem with relaxing standards of quality or greatly changing the type of accepted material, is that it will undoubtedly lead to worse material, and material the people most dedicated to the site don't want to see or process.

I am all for giving the general user a voice, and making it easier to interact with and assimilate into the long established set of users that make this site work. Just because we allow people to voice their opinions and let themselves be heard however, doesn't mean we should necessarily fold to their every whim.

Alienating general users is a problem, but if you start alienating the people that keep the site running smoothly and create an environment in which they no longer wish to work, I can see things going south very very quickly.

葉月 said:
Danbooru is not a community-building site, and anything that suggests it could be is harmful. We already have a disproportionately large percentage of users who don't do anything besides attempting to do just that and we don't need any more.

I don't see any obvious reasons why Danbooru shouldn't be and in some ways already is a community dedicated to archiving and curating good anime-style art. Every site is primarily leechers and lurkers; consumers rather than producers. There's absolutely no way to change that short of shutting the site down to the public again, and from Albert's recent posts, it sounds that's not a direction he wants to move in.

I have a lot against PHP-based fora, since they're without exception horribly crappy software that puts all the effort in the functionality I don't want to have.

"They have features I don't like, and I don't like using them" isn't a particularly compelling or convincing argument against something.

And btw, I like the implication that PHPBB's search is good. It's not, it's a piece of shit.

I'm not a general forum user myself (and haven't been for many years) so I wasn't speaking from experience here. That said, there do exist much better pre-established search functions than what we currently have (compare MediaWiki's).

The problem is confusing "some people are complaining" with "there is an actual problem people are complaining about".

This depends on your opinion of whether something is problematic or not. From the sounds of things Albert is saying there exists a problem he'd like fixed, but you don't find it problematic.

Danbooru is a digital museum, and that means we'll have the digital equivalent of signs telling you to put on slippers before coming in, and digital boring old people who will get annoyed when you run in the corridors and yell. And that's okay, because it's those boring old people who create worthwile collections in the end. It doesn't mean we don't want to allow any fun whatsoever, but fun on danbooru comes through the content, not through getting drunk and behaving stupid.

I agree with this, insomuch as I'd like the general users to become acclimated with our way of doing things and become more like us and work with us, rather than we become like them (or get swamped by them). But without any sort of substantive communication, that assimilation process is not going to happen.

Also even museums have food courts and gift shops, and bring in busloads of whiny children in order to culture them. A museum that shuts out the public is no longer a museum.

Fencedude said:
I wonder if it would be viable to allow users to request promotion?

Like, have a form they can fill out, explaining why they should be granted Priv/Contributor.

Restrictiosn would be...oh, say been a member for at least 6 months, non-negative record, meeting some threshold of Uploads, deletion ratio and tag edits. If their request is turned down, they can't try again for another 6 months.

Just a thought.

This is an interesting idea.

Frankly, I’d still prefer the promotion issue be handled from the staff’s side, namely with implementing better ways to spot people doing good work and the staff making a committed effort to use these hypothetical tools to look for them.

On the other hand, Fence’s idea is another “solution”, albeit with a number of foreseeable problems. Namely, lots of people are going to use it, many will abuse it and we’ll likely have a lot of hissy fits regarding rejections. Some of it could be alleviated by having it automatically blocked for users who do not meet a specific criteria of posts/records. I am not opposed in principle to the idea of allowing people to poke at the staff a bit so we are aware of their existence if they have been doing good work, though putting it into practice sounds like opening Pandora’s Box.

In the end it goes down to how doable is this, how much it’s possible to prevent its abuse, and how much the mods are willing to put up with it.

Shinjidude said:
-

Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for us to relax the standards. Just not to factor in content in the equation (apart from the understandable limits) so we don't have

"This picture isn't all that great but its from touhou, vocaloid, Popular_anime_of_the_month so I'll let it slide."

or

"This picture has alternative and explicit themese so I won't even consider it."

type decisions being made.

Shinjidude said:
I don't see any obvious reasons why Danbooru shouldn't be and in some ways already is a community dedicated to archiving and curating good anime-style art. Every site is primarily leechers and lurkers; consumers rather than producers. There's absolutely no way to change that short of shutting the site down to the public again, and from Albert's recent posts, it sounds that's not a direction he wants to move in.

Ah, but we're already a community in that sense. We're just not a general amorphous "anime community" and shouldn't be one. And having a general area in the forum (ie. section not directly related to running the site) would be moving exactly in that direction.

I'm not saying we should make it impossible for new people to join the rank of contributors (as in people who contribute, not the user level now), quite the opposite. But saying "it's okay not to give a shit about what this site is about, we even have an area just for that for your convenience" is working against it, not for it. We want new users interested in contributing to what danbooru is, not any new users.

"They have features I don't like, and I don't like using them" isn't a particularly compelling or convincing argument against something.

They're also features we don't need, and features which are unusually strongly correlated with all kinds of general forum drama and lack of useful contributions. Username is all we need; animated avatars, smileys and 10-line sigs are noise I absolutely don't want to see here of all places. Besides, you say you don't use the PHP fora yourself. I've used more than I could wish for and they're uniformly fucking horrible.

I'm not a general forum user myself (and haven't been for many years) so I wasn't speaking from experience here. That said, there do exist much better pre-established search functions than what we currently have (compare MediaWiki's).

Then the search needs fixing. There are libraries for that, such as Lucene. Switching to mediawiki is like replacing your mini morris with a tank because the road to your house is kinda bumpy.

This depends on your opinion of whether something is problematic or not. From the sounds of things Albert is saying there exists a problem he'd like fixed, but you don't find it problematic.

But we all know that albert is also easily distracted, and the type of guy who throws things at the wall until something sticks (to use his own words, though I'm unfortunately unable to find the post where he said that). I prefer thinking things through before doing them, and so I want to establish that we actually have a problem before we rush in to fix it.

I agree with this, insomuch as I'd like the general users to become acclimated with our way of doing things and become more like us and work with us, rather than we become like them (or get swamped by them). But without any sort of substantive communication, that assimilation process is not going to happen.

Also even museums have food courts and gift shops, and bring in busloads of whiny children in order to culture them. A museum that shuts out the public is no longer a museum.

Sure, but the communication means better documentation in more obvious places, better intro materials, easier access to feedback. It doesn't mean opening a drink bar smack in the middle of the museum. We want to assimilate newcomers, but that means newcomers who came to a museum, not newcomers looking for a place to get drunk.

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing: I'm not against improving the forum in general (even though I might not share anyone's opinion about what'd be an improvement). I'm against having any part of the forum that's not directly related to running the site in one way or another.

Ephyon said:
This is an interesting idea.

Well, I'm invisioning this as a way for people to put themselves forward. The decisions would still be made on the staff side (Mod+). We could make a clear disclaimer on the form that a rejected petition cannot be appealed, and throwing a public fit over it is a bannable offense.

I think having more reliable and expressive reports would be a good first step here, more than explicit self-nominations. Robust reporting would be useful for more than just promotions, so it'd be good to have it in any case.

I'd prefer to let users (even member level) have an easy way to nominate other users since not many know about or want to use the "dmail to mod" option. (Of course, both ideas are not mutually exclusive)

Something like a form through which you can create a list of usernames, suggested ranks (priv. or contrib.) and reasons (required) for promotion. Also possible on the user page, a "suggest promotion" link.

Possible restrictions:
users (requesting and nominated) must have been on danbooru for x months
users must have a record of >=0

S1eth said:
I'd prefer to let users (even member level) have an easy way to nominate other users since not many know about or want to use the "dmail to mod" option. (Of course, both ideas are not mutually exclusive)

Something like a form through which you can create a list of usernames, suggested ranks (priv. or contrib.) and reasons (required) for promotion. Also possible on the user page, a "suggest promotion" link.

Possible restrictions:
users (requesting and nominated) must have been on danbooru for x months
users must have a record of >=0

I like this idea. Maybe the functionality could be added by expanding the record system to include recommendations for promotion along with better reports (e.g. a page with a listing of unpromoted users with three or more recommendations).

S1eth said:
I'd prefer to let users (even member level) have an easy way to nominate other users since not many know about or want to use the "dmail to mod" option. (Of course, both ideas are not mutually exclusive)

Don’t really agree here. Allowing member-level users into it sounds like it’s asking for circle-jerking groups of users recommending each other just to get a promotion. This wouldn’t immediately break the system per se (they could be rejected), but continuous abuse in such a fashion would render the whole thing too unreliable. We know the number of favourites in a post does not directly correlate to its quality, and what you are proposing could easily lead to the same result.

Also, sockpuppets.

Also, this isn’t really the issue. The problem isn’t not being able to nominate them easily, but rather not being able to NOTICE them easily. The staff needs a way to more readily spot these people, or at worst allowing them a way to make themselves noticeable that would hopefully not degenerate in hordes of NOTIS ME AIM WORKING HAR WY WONT U PROMOT MEEEEEEEE shitstorms. THEN we can deal with better ways for us lesser drones to bring them to the Mods’ attention.

Ephyon said:
circle-jerking
sockpuppets.

If they want to be banned... (it's not like they can't already spam the mods' mailboxes with unjust recommendations)
Anyway, yes, recommendations could also be records (or work in combination with them), which would then be limited to at least privileged members.

Edit:

Ephyon said:
The problem isn’t not being able to nominate them easily, but rather not being able to NOTICE them easily.

Naturally, many users notice more good users than a few mods do.

Edit:
The dmail recommendations proof that already.

S1eth said:
If they want to be banned...

Like I said, the issue is that if this becomes the primary example of how the system is used, the system becomes too unreliable. What would the moderation staff spend more time doing with this sytem, getting useful information, or banning abusers? If it becomes the later, the thing is more trouble than it's worth.

S1eth said:
Naturally, many users notice more good users than a few mods do.

I don't exactly see why this would be so.

Action_Kamen said:
"This picture isn't all that great but its from touhou, vocaloid, Popular_anime_of_the_month so I'll let it slide."

If anyone's doing that, they should not be in a position of Janitorial authority.

"This picture has alternative and explicit themese so I won't even consider it."

This, however, is a horse of a different color.

The reason we have the mod queue around, posts being given a 3-day grace period for approval, and lots of Janitors, is specifically to give a post as many chances as it deserves.
To add on to that, we have the Deletion Appeals thread, just for those users who are a little more insistent, and for those posts that might be worthy but went unnoticed.

If a post goes through its 3-day mod queue wait and doesn't get approved, then still doesn't get approved when appealed, all the while being seen by dozens of Janitors as it goes, it pretty clearly wasn't a worthy post.
The fact that it essentially requires all the Janitor+ users on Danbooru to either abstain from approving (or to silently veto) a post for the aforementioned gauntlet of approval chances in order for a post to fail to stay around is evidence enough.

I'm of the opinion that if we have a Janitor+ who thinks certain "alternative and explicit themes" are not Danbooru-worthy, then that is in itself a valid passing of judgment. Said Janitor doesn't speak for any opinion but his own.