Self-uploading artist policy discussion

I'm sure most of the people reading the forum know about the text on the Upload page that says "Before uploading, please read the how to upload guide." Also, I'm sure the same people know the section under howto:upload that says "Uploading One's Own Art is Sacrilege".

Unfortunately, there's a common problem with this: A lot of people just don't (or won't) read that page, which leads to people uploading their own artwork. I feel there needs to be a change of the policy instead of keeping this bandaid on a user issue that could have some more direct attention.

So because this continues to crop up (particularly recently), my proposal is to update that policy. One into a harder stance of "Don't Upload Your Own Artwork", with another line on the Upload page that says this verbatim to further cut down on any excuses for not reading this.

Reasons being: The majority of the artwork from self-uploading artists isn't all good, so it's not as if this would put a hit on potentially good uploads. If their artwork is good enough, it will be found and uploaded by other uploaders here. And while there's only SOME worth looking over, very few of it from the self-uploading artists I've had to warn or have seen being warned are actually worth keeping on the site.

Discuss.

How would this be enforced?

I still don't see why we can't just let anyone upload whatever.

As long as it isn't a contributor uploading his own stuff, everything has to go through the modqueue anyway.

Gollgagh said:

I still don't see why we can't just let anyone upload whatever.

As long as it isn't a contributor uploading his own stuff, everything has to go through the modqueue anyway.

Just because we have a moderation queue doesn't mean we upload bad art to begin with.

So make the rule "Don't Upload Crap".

I don't think that'll help.
Artists tend to say that their art is good or average. So this rule will most likely be circumvented.
It's pretty simple: Either we allow it completely or not. Since the purpose of Danbooru is that third-parties uploads art, I'm clearly for the latter, because everything beneath these two extremes turn to be...relative. Not tangible. And that would also save pains regarding moderation work, because if the art is good enough, it will most likely be uploaded from a third-party here.

The problem with it being a hard rule is that users will target good images for deletion. I've seen good images (although rare in occurrence) get flagged or straight out deleted in the past simply because the uploader was also the artist, and I just can't personally agree with deleting good images because of who uploaded it.

I believe I re-approved the ones I thought shouldn't be deleted, particularly because of the fact that such images would get deleted and not expunged. By only getting deleted they stay in the database and prevent any other user from re-uploading them, so it simply makes no sense to only just delete those images if you're arguing they should be uploaded by someone else.

A system where other users could vouch (taking up one of their upload slots) for an artist's self-uploaded work before even registering in the mod queue imo would be a better idea (as well as separate very low upload limits for self-made art), but such a system would probably be too much of a hassle to make.

The main problem that I see with users uploading their own artwork is that they would probably be a lot more emotionally invested in their upload. For users uploading artwork from another artist, I've seen some that have gotten upset when a particular post wasn't approved, even though it wasn't even their own artwork. The response can be even worse if a post gets flagged. Now imagine the response from someone uploading their own artwork. Do we really want to invite that kind of aggravation?

kuuderes_shadow said:

How would this be enforced?

The same way the current policy is now. If people won't take notice of something that directly tells them not to do something, they get a record, with further action taken if needed.

Rastamepas said:

Just because we have a moderation queue doesn't mean we upload bad art to begin with.

This is correct, but then it falls on anyone with Approval abilities to not approve bad art, bad self-uploaded art, or duplicates in the queue/approved then flagged later.

Gollgagh said:

So make the rule "Don't Upload Crap".

It's not that simple, because of subjectivity, and that applies to the above with approvers.

Just an idea possibly related to the subject, but what if we had a forum post "Should I Upload This?" as a preliminary quality check. I've had several occasions where I find decent pictures of what I found to be borderline quality and was unsure of whether or not to upload it (only to find that they were uploaded and approved later). An "approved" picture on the thread wouldn't be a guarantee that it would pass the mod queue but it could at least give some confidence in the upload.

As an extension, users can submit their own works on this thread for a pre-mod review of sorts (they'd have to host the image elsewhere first).

This thread would probably be a damage control for those sensitive about their upload/deletion score but at the same time it could potentially filter out some of the obviously bad images from the mod queue so approvers can look through actual good posts rather than just ignore a picture only to have it come up in the deletion appeal thread with the reason "Only reviewed by 3 mods."

Now how many people would actually use this thread I don't know.

NWF_Renim said:

The problem with it being a hard rule is that users will target good images for deletion. I've seen good images (although rare in occurrence) get flagged or straight out deleted in the past simply because the uploader was also the artist, and I just can't personally agree with deleting good images because of who uploaded it.

I believe I re-approved the ones I thought shouldn't be deleted, particularly because of the fact that such images would get deleted and not expunged. By only getting deleted they stay in the database and prevent any other user from re-uploading them, so it simply makes no sense to only just delete those images if you're arguing they should be uploaded by someone else.

A system where other users could vouch (taking up one of their upload slots) for an artist's self-uploaded work before even registering in the mod queue imo would be a better idea (as well as separate very low upload limits for self-made art), but such a system would probably be too much of a hassle to make.

The hard rule says: Self-uploading is prohibited
Not: Self-uploaded images are going to be deleted.
Because: This should be a catch all rule for all kind of self-uploading. When there is this further condition "good-average" then this would create some problems. Because where is the line? Then the moderators have to evaluate every single post and writing a record to the ones who they think upload bad art. I don't think this is wished. To say though that we prohibit it to every self-uploader this issue won't be raised.
That you re-approved those images is good and exact what this rule would say: Prohibit it to every user (-> record) but don't delete images that are worthy to stay here^^.
Well, I don't really see a problem at least.

NWF_Renim said:

The problem with it being a hard rule is that users will target good images for deletion. I've seen good images (although rare in occurrence) get flagged or straight out deleted in the past simply because the uploader was also the artist, and I just can't personally agree with deleting good images because of who uploaded it.

If I implied that this rule will be enforced retroactively, that's not what I meant. I didn't say to start deleting any currently known or found self-uploaded images up to the point of the policy change. Maybe an extra note needs to be added stating this, though I don't see this problem cropping up as much as the condition with Duplicates (to not flag duplicates for deletion).

EDIT: In the cases of both post #2303288 and post #2353706, I didn't consider either of these to be any good and stated that they're self-uploads from the artist in my flagging reasons. Neither of the two Approvers noticed that this was the artist uploading their own artwork, but that seems to only be due to the lack of an artist tag before Nitrogen09 identified them months later (you can see these in the tagging history for each). So I don't place any blame on those two approvers.

Any good self-uploaded work from artists can stay, but it has to actually be good. Not "gets picked up at the very end of its 4 day moderation period by one Janitor" good, it needs to very good and worth keeping on the site.

Apollyon said:

Any good self-uploaded work from artists can stay, but it has to actually be good. Not "gets picked up at the very end of its 4 day moderation period by one Janitor" good, it needs to very good and worth keeping on the site.

So what do you want to do about these posts then? For example if, don't know....zigzag isn't active for three days and approves this post then, then this would also fall under this scenario. I don't think that this could be considered a good line to distinct "average-good" and "good" uploads. Also, this way, the approver who approved this on the last day gets more or less "demoted" as a "valid" janitor if they do this.

Apollyon said:

Any good self-uploaded work from artists can stay, but it has to actually be good. Not "gets picked up at the very end of its 4 day moderation period by one Janitor" good, it needs to very good and worth keeping on the site.

That's how I interpreted the currently existing version; self uploading is frowned upon and will be held to higher scrutiny than other uploads.

OOZ662 said:

That's how I interpreted the currently existing version; self uploading is frowned upon and will be held to higher scrutiny than other uploads.

I think the way that was stated at the time was in response to how blatantly artists would just toss up their own posts, and their following reaction to them. Worst case scenario is a bluedemon13, a user that uploaded bad, plagiarized artwork, and kept doing this under multiple sockpuppet accounts even after being warned and banned. It got to the point where all of his artwork was finally banned with a "Delete all uploads on sight" order under his wiki entry by jxh2154.

As pointed out in forum #114756, that's been in place since April 4th, 2009 and hasn't changed, so I do think an update to that rule is needed.

Provence said:

So what do you want to do about these posts then? For example if, don't know....zigzag isn't active for three days and approves this post then, then this would also fall under this scenario. I don't think that this could be considered a good line to distinct "average-good" and "good" uploads. Also, this way, the approver who approved this on the last day gets more or less "demoted" as a "valid" janitor if they do this.

There was discussion (I use that term loosely) in forum #104709 about Janitors and the approval process that only led to more approvers being added. Maybe it is time to start actually pruning approvers, but that can be saved for another thread.

Apollyon said:

I think the way that was stated at the time was in response to how blatantly artists would just toss up their own posts, and their following reaction to them. Worst case scenario is a bluedemon13, a user that uploaded bad, plagiarized artwork, and kept doing this under multiple sockpuppet accounts even after being warned and banned. It got to the point where all of his artwork was finally banned with a "Delete all uploads on sight" order under his wiki entry by jxh2154.

As pointed out in forum #114756, that's been in place since April 4th, 2009 and hasn't changed, so I do think an update to that rule is needed.

It was actually last touched back in 2010-08-20 by lady garegga, but otherwise not substantially changed beyond pointing out how the artist may not be the best judge of their own art.

Still, it might be good to make it more prominent in the upload guide, and have a reminder in the Terms of Service page with the Restricted Content warning.

So looks like here's all the points made in this thread:

• All artists are prohibited from uploading their own arts, and doing so will result in them being penalized (i.e neutral record) and their uploads will be held to higher scrutiny. It doesn't necessary mean that their works will be overlooked though, if it's good enough, then it can stay here. Any self-uploader persistent enough and the mods will resort to a ban.
• Old, approved uploads from self-uploading artists will be left untouched, unless there are quality problems with the art itself (in this case flagging it with a valid reason would be enough).

What amuses me about self-uploading rules is how easily any prohibition can be circumvented - it's enough to not use the artist alias as danbooru nickname, and we'll never know. Moreover, nothing stops them from creating both their "own" account and another sockpuppet account for uploading.

I can't say I agree with flat-out prohibition - if the art is actually good, why should we stop anyone from uploading it? Ideally, I think it would be better to keep current rules, but in addition, explicitly apply the same rules to self-uploads as we currently apply to restricted content, like OOZ662 mentioned:

...will be put to a higher level of artistic and qualitative scrutiny than normal...

and make it absolutely clear that uploading own work to Danbooru means that:

• you are absolutely sure that every picture meets all the quality standards and doesn't break any other rules
• you still have to upload it somewhere else first
• you are putting it up for our approvers to evaluate, and they will judge harsher than they would a regular upload
• if you happen to have unrestricted uploads user privilege, you still need to put it up for approval
• you get absolutely no say if it gets rejected
• if you fail to get your works approved then you must stop throwing trash into our database.

Not much different from our current stance, but hopefully more clear.

All that said, I'm aware that it's an overly optimistic approach and perhaps a complete ban would be more effective. If that happens, it must be made clear that self-upload is not a valid flag reason.

What we should address, though, is the initial problem:

Apollyon said:

Unfortunately, there's a common problem with this: A lot of people just don't (or won't) read that page, which leads to people uploading their own artwork. I feel there needs to be a change of the policy instead of keeping this bandaid on a user issue that could have some more direct attention.

We can make rules however strict, but it doesn't matter if people don't see them. I think that a notice about uploading own art should be put in TOS and, more importantly, at the upload page itself. Something like "Think twice before uploading your own artwork" as a hyperlink leading, ideally, to a section of howto:upload dealing with self-uploads (currently impossible technically, but that could and should be fixed). If people still manage to miss the rules after that, they will be penalized for breaking them.

Type-kun said:

We can make rules however strict, but it doesn't matter if people don't see them. I think that a notice about uploading own art should be put in TOS and, more importantly, at the upload page itself. Something like "Think twice before uploading your own artwork" as a hyperlink leading, ideally, to a section of howto:upload dealing with self-uploads (currently impossible technically, but that could and should be fixed). If people still manage to miss the rules after that, they will be penalized for breaking them.

Yes, I did suggest putting a very clear, concise message on the Upload page advising against uploading your own artwork. Not the hyperlink part, but that was only because there isn't currently any functionality for that. I thought it did exist at one point, but it would be useful to get a feature like that.

https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/2364595?tags=widowmaker_%28overwatch%29
+9

https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/2371637?tags=user%3AD_Krauzer
-6

So much Danbooru ...