Should first-time uploaders really be able to upload many images at once?

There has been a large dump of horrible uploads lately and while browsing the comment list, one of these comments happened to be under post #3723438 (Awful quality and nsfw) by the user @iridescent_slime .
I don'T know how seriously this statement is meant, but I assume it's 100% serious.

The comment is the following:
``` Maybe it's time to rethink the default upload limit of 50 posts per day. It shouldn't be this easy for first-time uploaders to dump 30+ garbage posts all at once like this.```

I'm wondering because that's actually a good idea.
Maybe to "unlock" the full amount of uploads, there should be an approval of their images first. So, if one gets approved, the user gets access to all 50 upload slots but is limited to 10 when there are no approved uploads.

And yes, it happens rarely that there is such an user but it happens from time to time and it'S honestly annoying and takes away the "high-quality" imageboard standard when there are over 10 of these images on the front-page.

Original thread, for reference: topic #11878

The only problem I see is the way the base limit is determined. Presently, it's based entirely on account age, so an account four months old with no contributions to date has a higher limit than a younger account with hundreds of approved posts. Rather than rewarding users for their good uploads and raising their limit as a sign of trust that they'll continue to make good use of their privileges, it's a perk that gets automatically handed out to everyone whether they deserve it or not. I'm not an approver so it doesn't affect me too much when someone fills the the queue with poorly-drawn trash, but I still see room for improvement in the system.

Lacrimosa said:

Maybe to "unlock" the full amount of uploads, there should be an approval of their images first. So, if one gets approved, the user gets access to all 50 upload slots but is limited to 10 when there are no approved uploads.

Bumping the limit up to 50 with a single approval would make it too easy to game the system by uploading one half-decent image. Even the user who uploaded post #3723438 has already had a handful of approvals to date.

I was thinking of some kind of tier system. Maybe something like, 20 approved uploads raises the base limit to 20, 50 approved uploads raises it to 30, and so on. The exact numbers would be up for debate, but they'd need to be enough to stymie users who only want to flood while still being within reach of new contributors who maintain a low deletion rate and want to reach the 50 upload limit within a reasonable amount of time.

I actually never created an account on here and was just an anonymous passsing by, so just now i created an account here, mostly to fav things out, i never planned to upload things or even to get to this forum, but now, I kinda feel a need to help this grow and start uploading things, helping with tags or even participating on the community like on this forum.
But i don't know how to upload things, like, not what is right to upload and what's not, and i don't want to be like this one guy, I also agree with this idea of the system not being too easy, and this idea from iridescent slime is amazing.
I should actually be right now researching how to upload and etc, not going here and talking all this shEEt but i just saw this topic, wanted to agree with it and also share my opinion.
And my opinion is mostly like I don't know why this guy is posting crazy shEEt, but i think that the most great solution is if persons have good sense to not just grab anything on the web and post here but actually research, see the wiki, guides, forum, etc, wanting to help the site itself grow, not just putting their database of poor quality pics here.
The problem overall, it's partially from the system, the major problem is with people.
Even with those kinds of tier system and making it more hard to post, it would affect good people with lots of great pictures wanting to help the website, so ofc it would be great against the bad guys but it would be against the "good guys" as well, this wouldn't stop the bad guys nor the good guys (I think), the problem is with people themself.

What about a "cooldown" between uploads if they're not approved/still pending?

For example, if a user has a limit of 20 a day, they can only post 10 then wait until they've been resolved before being able to slowly upload the other 10.

The biggest problem I see with that is longer comics. If you're not posting in a common tag (like kancolle or fate or something), it can take quite a while for your posts to be approved. If you were trying to upload a longish comic, you would have to split it up potentially across multiple days, and of course an incomplete comic is less likely to be approved and be noticed by somebody willing to translate.

Yeah, the current situation is akin to a master craftsman giving their precious tools to someone that just walked in the door for them to try their hand at the craft. Maybe we need something like an achievements system or something that can better track how a user is learning the craft of how to upload quality posts, or at least not garbage posts that waste everybody's time.

How about 10 slots as a base upload limit (the current start and minimum) and approved uploads during the last n days can give up to 40 additional slots (to match the current maximum of 50). Uploading crap or few/nothing at all during the n days will reduce the extra slots, possibly down to the 10 base slots.

Maybe something like this:

MinLimit = 10
MaxLimit = 50
ApprovalWeight = 0.1
BaseLimit = Min(MinLimit + ApprovedPostsOver60Days * ApprovalWeight, MaxLimit)
DeletionConfidence = WilsonScoreInterval(UploadsOver60Days, DeletionsOver60Days, 95%) 
EffectiveLimit = Max(BaseLimit * (1 - (DeletionConfidence / 15)), MinLimit)

 ApprovedPostsOver60Days should not include pending/flagged posts. I assume the DeletionConfidence we currently have doesn’t go above 15.

Examples:
400 approved posts over the last 60 days, no deletions = 50 slots
100 approved posts over the last 60 days, no deletions = 20 slots
10 approved posts over the last 60 days, no deletions = 11 slots
400 approved posts plus ~60 deletions over 60 days = 10 slots (15% deletion confidence, the current maximum)
Not uploading anything for 60 days = 10 slots

This looks harsh, but if you uploaded only 100 posts during 60 days, you don’t really need a limit above 20 unless you plan on uploading a whole doujinshi in one day or something, which is discouraged anyway. Upload lots of good stuff, get rewarded. Upload nothing or crap, get no reward.

Edit: If you upload exactly your limit every day and have no deletions, you can reach 50 slots in 18 days. To sustain 50 slots, 50 uploads per week with no deletions is enough, so it’s possible to take care of your upload duty in just one day per week.

Edit 2: It currently takes five months to reach 50 upload slots, so this alternative would reward good uploaders about eight times as fast while not rewarding idle/garbage uploaders at all.

Edit 3: Fixed the calculation and deletion example to properly take deletions into account.

kittey said:

Maybe something like this:
BaseLimit = 10
ApprovedPosts = UploadsOver60Days - DeletionsOver60Days
ExtraSlots = min(ApprovedPosts/10, 40)
DeletionConfidence = WilsonScoreInterval(UploadsOver60Days, DeletionsOver60Days, 95%) ← This is already in use; I guess it doesn’t go above 15.
EffectiveLimit = BaseLimit + (ExtraSlots * (1 - (DeletionConfidence / 15)))

That looks good, although UploadOver60Days should be clarified to mean approved uploads, i.e. it wouldn't include pending uploads.

This looks harsh, but if you uploaded only 100 posts during 60 days, you don’t really need a limit above 20 unless you plan on uploading a whole doujinshi in one day or something, which is discouraged anyway. Upload lots of good stuff, get rewarded. Upload nothing or crap, get no reward.

+1 Yeah, I vote to try it out. Your proposed solution is definitely an improvement to the current system. It may need some fine-tuning, but that's something we'll discover as it gets used.

BrokenEagle98 said:

That looks good, although UploadOver60Days should be clarified to mean approved uploads, i.e. it wouldn't include pending uploads.

Does it mean that in the current algorithm? Then the calculation for ApprovedPosts in my suggestion is bogus and UploadOver60Days should be used for that instead.

kittey's proposal sounds like an improvement.

It's a waste of everyone's time when an account that simply waited for a weeks gets to dump 50 low effort uploads, clogging the front page and the moderation queue.

Hopefully, this will address that without crippling new users who are putting in effort to find and upload good art.

ygm_1 said:

The biggest problem I see with that is longer comics. If you're not posting in a common tag (like kancolle or fate or something), it can take quite a while for your posts to be approved. If you were trying to upload a longish comic, you would have to split it up potentially across multiple days, and of course an incomplete comic is less likely to be approved and be noticed by somebody willing to translate.

Currently, comic posts take up 2/3 of an upload slot. Perhaps this number may need to be revisited in tandem with the proposed changes to the upload limit.

Image sets and pieces with multiple variations are out of luck.

issue #4234, though I guess evazion checks the forum pretty often anyway.

Calculating the upload limit based on approved uploads instead of waiting time has the additional benefit that good uploaders are rewarded much faster. Currently, reaching 50 uploads takes five months, no matter how good a user’s uploads are. With the proposed alternative, it can be done in 18 days (with a perfect upload record), so about eight times as fast.

Currently, comic posts take up 2/3 of an upload slot.

I didn't realize this. If this is the case, should comic posts only count 2/3 as much for determining upload limits, as with kittey's proposed formula? Otherwise it seems a bit unfair that new uploaders will be able to get 50% more approvals a day by posting comics as opposed to non-comic art, thereby reaching the 50/day cap that much faster.

Just want to note that I am reading this and I do have some changes in mind, but I won't have time to address this until after Christmas.

iridescent_slime said:

I didn't realize this. If this is the case, should comic posts only count 2/3 as much for determining upload limits, as with kittey's proposed formula? Otherwise it seems a bit unfair that new uploaders will be able to get 50% more approvals a day by posting comics as opposed to non-comic art, thereby reaching the 50/day cap that much faster.

Treating comic pages differently in calculating the upload limit will probably make it slower and the formula much more complicated. :-/

Comic pages still need to go through the approval process and if they’re good enough to get approved, the user deserves to be rewarded, not to mention that uploading comic pages tends to be risky unless they’re good and/or of a popular copyright. I don’t think this will be much of an issue since reaching the 50 slots upper limit could be much faster with approval rewards compared to now, even with non-comic uploads, and it would be a six days difference at best with a perfect upload record.

Well, let’s see what evazion will implement.

I'd much prefer a system akin to iridescent slime's proposal than one like kittey's. Some people (myself included recently) will prefer to do infrequent trawls through large amounts of images rather than constantly looking through a small amount, or may come across a big set of good images to upload. Kittey's proposal would prevent this even for longstanding, trusted uploaders if they hadn't uploaded recently.

Personally I don't see any reason to do this - surely if someone knows what is upload worthy then they know what is upload worthy, whether they have been uploading in the last couple of months or not.

My only issue with iridescent slime's proposal, on the other hand, is that those figures seem too high.

This is the system I'm considering:

• You start with 15 upload slots.
• You lose a slot after every 3 deletions, down to a minimum of 5 slots.
• You gain a slot after every X approvals, up to a maximum of 40 slots.
• Each pending post takes up 1 upload slot. The slot is freed when the post is approved or deleted.
• That's it.

The number of approvals you need to gain the next slot depends on how many slots you currently have. At first you need 10 approvals per slot, increasing by 2 for every slot after that. So if you have 15 slots, you need 10 approvals for the 16th slot. At 16 slots, you need 12 approvals for the next slot. At 17 slots, you need 14 approvals for the next, and so on. At 39 slots, you need 58 approvals to unlock the 40th slot.

While you'll gain slots for approvals, you'll lose slots for deletions. The math works out so that you need to maintain a ~23% deletion ratio to keep 15 slots, a ~13% ratio for 20 slots, ~9% for 25 slots, ~7% for 30 slots, and <5% for 40 slots.

This system is intended to make it easy for uploaders to predict how many slots they stand to gain or lose when they upload a batch of posts. Currently it's basically impossible for uploaders to predict how approvals or deletions will affect their limit.

The biggest difference from the current system is that now your upload limit is how many pending posts you can have at once, instead of how many posts you can upload per day. In the current system, even the worst uploaders can still upload 10 posts per day no matter what, while good uploaders can run into limits even when all their uploads are being approved.

In the new system, if you upload a batch of posts and none are approved you'll have to wait 3 days before you can upload again. On the other hand, if you upload posts that get approved quickly, your slots will be freed quickly and you'll be able to keep uploading more. Note that about 50% of approvals happen in the first hour and 90% happen in the first day, so in most cases slots will be freed up faster than they are in the current system.

So if a user gets all their uploads approved fairly quickly they could theoretically upload an unlimited amount of posts in one day?

kittey said:

How about 10 slots as a base upload limit (the current start and minimum) and approved uploads during the last n days can give up to 40 additional slots (to match the current maximum of 50). Uploading crap or few/nothing at all during the n days will reduce the extra slots, possibly down to the 10 base slots.

The issue with date cutoffs is that it causes unpredictable fluctuations in your upload limit as posts age out. One day your limit might rise because a bunch of deletions aged out, then the next day it might drop because a bunch of approvals aged out. You can use an exponential decay to avoid this, but that makes the formula more complicated, and I really want to have a system that's easy for uploaders to understand.

ygm_1 said:

The biggest problem I see with that is longer comics. If you're not posting in a common tag (like kancolle or fate or something), it can take quite a while for your posts to be approved. If you were trying to upload a longish comic, you would have to split it up potentially across multiple days, and of course an incomplete comic is less likely to be approved and be noticed by somebody willing to translate.

Comics are slower to approve than other posts, but they're still usually approved in under a day. Comic approvals have gotten slower over the past few months, but that's more from not having enough active approvers.

Unbreakable said:

So if a user gets all their uploads approved fairly quickly they could theoretically upload an unlimited amount of posts in one day?

Yes, which is how I think it should be. As long as you're uploading good posts that are all being approved, I see no reason for you to be limited.

One side benefit to the proposed system is that it will more easily allow moderators to see at a cursory glance who the candidates are for an upgrade to the Unlimited Uploads permission. Under the old system, a user's upload slots regenerated to the maximum no matter what, and now only the good uploaders should have right around 40 upload slots. Other things such as upload total and account age would also need to be considered, but now the moderators won't be required to do a whole lot of calculating to see who has a good upload ratio.