Lazy / Invalid Flagging Reasons

I'm not a big fan of mass flagging in general, and although I know there is no longer a grandfather clause, it feels like sometimes things are getting thrown back into the mod-queue simply because they are old and often with lazy or invalid flag reasons. For instance, "low res" when the posted resolution was likely the largest and only resolution produced 14 years ago when the image was uploaded, or "unsourced" when things previously commonly came from image boards or scans. Images with rough or sketchy lines also often get flagged even though rough artwork is still perfectly acceptable.

Often times these flags are also just nasty for no good reason without giving much commentary on the image itself. I don't think this sort of behavior should be normalized.

I'm not quite sure what should be done about this. I don't think it reaches the level of user feedback, but I thought I'd bring it up so it could be discussed.

Also, has policy changed with regards to duplicates that precede their higher quality parents? I generally won't, and don't want to (re)approve lower quality duplicates, but forever ago we had a rule not to flag them since it penalizes the original poster in terms of deletion ratio and the like, when they very well may have posted the best quality version of the image available at the time.

The policy hasn't changed, it just so happens that the recent Twitter update since December 2019 have caused a lot of mishaps to take place due to how close to pure duplicate some images are (nowadays, a Twitter image with less than 20 kb difference than its Pixiv image gets uploaded). Nonetheless, if this is also concerned with the mass flagging of old images then I don't have any further discussion to go through with it. Even so, I agree with your points and that this mass flagging of old posts should be toned down a bit.

As far as I know the duplicate keeping policy only applies to first party sources. I've been flagging third party and sourceless lower res/upscaled dupes when I see them (from zerochan etc) since they have no merit, but for example for twitter posts being 1upped by pixiv posts, we keep both because as you said otherwise it'd penalize people who uploaded them and had them approved when they were the only versions available.

As for flag reasons, they were recently limited in length in this commit on the line of thought that if a post is flagged for its quality it should be immediately evident from the picture why it was flagged.

I've flagged a few posts like post #35000 for "trash quality" in the past because to me it looks very bad, but typically as I said I only flag third party dupes, and rarely I flag for quality check. But I personally don't see the issue with pruning old bad posts, as there was next to no quality standard back then (I wouldn't personally spend time going through old posts to flag them for poor quality though, as there's way too many of those and I'd just burn out).

Also sorry for double post, but we had quite a long discussion last time in topic #15531, since albert was the one who brought the argument up.

nonamethanks said:

I've been flagging third party and sourceless lower res/upscaled dupes when I see them (from zerochan etc) since they have no merit...

I understand the reasoning here, but if an old post was from zerochan and that wasn't against the rules when the post was uploaded is it fair to penalize that user? I think the same logic applies here still. An old deletion looks the same in the deletion ratio as a new one. I mean if it's some heavily artifacted watermarked garbage, then sure, it should be delted for quality reasons anyhow, but if it's close enough in quality that it could be a modern Twitter clone, I don't see that that should be valid. Again I don't think they're worth reapproving, since they are sort of clutter, but the prior deletion rule exists for a reason, so they shouldn't get flagged in the first place.

nonamethanks said:

As for flag reasons, they were recently limited in length in this commit on the line of thought that if a post is flagged for its quality it should be immediately evident from the picture why it was flagged.

I've flagged a few posts like post #35000 for "trash quality" in the past because to me it looks very bad,

Be that as it may, 140 characters is plenty to point out a specific reason for a flag, and if it's an obvious quality issue a neutral "quality check" says the same thing as "trash quality" without the overt animosity towards the artist or uploader. We really ought to be civil towards each other.

nonamethanks said:

But I personally don't see the issue with pruning old bad posts, as there was next to no quality standard back then

I'm fine with it too within reason. There is lots of old stuff that is way outside our current quality guidelines or way off topic. For instance I have a slight urge to save post #29999 on account preserving an old original meme character that will probably never get drawn again, but there's just no way to justify the quality.

That being said, I think even without a grandfather clause people need to keep in mind what is and isn't a valid reason to flag something. Things that get flagged ought to be far from the borderline of what's considered acceptable, for instance post #2224921 is rough, but perfectly acceptable.

I guess it mostly irks me to see a bunch of stuff dumped in the queue that falls in that fuzzy gap between "I wouldn't approve it" and "I'd have no problem with it should a builder post it" laced with insults rather than critical commentary. Often times the quality of the flag seems worse than that of the content.

nonamethanks said:

Also sorry for double post, but we had quite a long discussion last time in topic #15531, since albert was the one who brought the argument up.

Reading through that, maybe it's an old guard thing, but I find myself almost entirely agreeing with Albert. It's not that I don't see the merit in flagging or think that the tool itself is broken. I just think the people that use it need to be more thoughtful and civil. I see violating a rule with regards to flagging (e.g. using an invalid reason) as being just as bad as posting something that doesn't meet quality standards. Throwing around insults isn't acceptable behavior in the forum or comments, why should it be tolerated in flags?

Shinjidude said:

I understand, phrasing might be perceived as an attack on the uploader though it's not meant that way. I'll try to phrase my quality flags better in the future. Though it might be better to just contact the users who are extensively flagging on the basis of "shit quality", since AFAIK it's just one or two users.

As for the third party thing, deletion ratio is not really an issue imo, as I expect evazion and whoever else is looking for promotions (and demotions) will judge based on recent uploads rather than what's shown on the profile page.
The main difference between twitter and third-party reposting sites like various imageboards though is that often the pictures are recompressed like hell. We only kept twitter because it was considered first party, but I remember people were flagging them and warring over them even 3 years ago (the replacement function was even taken away from approvers because people kept replacing them with pixiv versions).
To be fair, there are very few users that are still active after 14 years, so I doubt they'd mind having lots of their old posts deleted, and deletion ratio doesn't affect anything on site other than e-peen.

I agree though that some flaggers are overzealous on flagging sketches and chibi posts (some other examples: post #310498, post #965929).

Shinjidude said:

Things that get flagged ought to be far from the borderline of what's considered acceptable

Firstly, why? I've generally only flagged stuff that falls into that category, but I see no reason why others shouldn't flag something that they feel falls firmly on the wrong side of borderline. If it's one user doing it for hundreds of posts they should probably tone it down, or at least slow it down. But that doesn't mean they should stop entirely.

Also, bear in mind that what feels to be far from borderline for one person does not necessarily for others. As you should know from previous conversations we've had.

Shinjidude said:

...it feels like sometimes things are getting thrown back into the mod-queue simply because they are old and often with lazy or invalid flag reasons.

Another lazy one that pops up all the time is "single page of a comic". Has that ever been a valid flag reason? I'm not saying these posts shouldn't be flagged — most of them are crap, to be honest — but the flag reason is just bad. AFAIK individual comic pages have always been allowed here as long as they stand on their own merits (e.g. quality artwork, good jokes or dialogue within the span of a single page).

Also, as an aside, I noticed that the flag dialog was recently changed to include a declaration that non-anime-related content is not a valid flag reason. Is this official? I ask because it represents a major shift in policy from the community deciding via flags and approvals what is and what isn't appropriate for Danbooru, which is how the question was historically resolved.

iridescent_slime said:
Also, as an aside, I noticed that the flag dialog was recently changed to include a declaration that non-anime-related content is not a valid flag reason. Is this official? I ask because it represents a major shift in policy from the community deciding via flags and approvals what is and what isn't appropriate for Danbooru, which is how the question was historically resolved.

I reworded that after several discussions with other approvers in the past few months and issue #4415, because we kept getting flags for things like post #2976183, post #3234654 and post #3847312, which are perfectly acceptable for site rules. Basically a good 90% of all "Off-topic"/"Not anime" flags we get are wrong. See also the end of topic #16692. There's more examples in the issue.

Maybe the line "do not flag drawings just because they depict non-anime content" should be reworded to make it clear that such posts can be flagged for quality? It's not been true for many years that non-anime stuff is "off-topic", in any case, since we have hundreds of thousands of posts that have nothing to do with anime copyrights, and the majority of flags for "off-topic" that are not old screencaps are immediately reapproved by various approvers, as can be seen in the flag search page.

skylightcrystal said:

Firstly, why? I've generally only flagged stuff that falls into that category, but I see no reason why others shouldn't flag something that they feel falls firmly on the wrong side of borderline. If it's one user doing it for hundreds of posts they should probably tone it down, or at least slow it down. But that doesn't mean they should stop entirely.

Also, bear in mind that what feels to be far from borderline for one person does not necessarily for others.

I think we're in agreement here. When I say "far from the borderline of what's considered acceptable", that's synonymous with "falls firmly on the wrong side of borderline". Quality is subjective, and "far from borderline" may vary, but you really need to be using the borderline of what gets through the mod queue. The way the queue works is that if it's acceptable to anyone with approval powers, it's acceptable to the site (barring blatant abuse of course). If you know that something is just over the line for you, but it wouldn't be for the site, it shouldn't get thrown back to the queue. That's the area where as Albert said in the linked thread that you should downvote rather than flag.

iridescent_slime said:

Another lazy one that pops up all the time is "single page of a comic". Has that ever been a valid flag reason? I'm not saying these posts shouldn't be flagged — most of them are crap, to be honest — but the flag reason is just bad. AFAIK individual comic pages have always been allowed here as long as they stand on their own merits (e.g. quality artwork, good jokes or dialogue within the span of a single page).

I agree with you here too, comic posts in general are something I never approve unless I find real interest in them for art reasons (which is rare), but comics in themselves are acceptable, and if approved, they don't need to be posted in their entirety. I'd say that this flag is also invalid (though one I'm probably unlikely to overrule).

Also, as an aside, I noticed that the flag dialog was recently changed to include a declaration that non-anime-related content is not a valid flag reason. Is this official? I ask because it represents a major shift in policy from the community deciding via flags and approvals what is and what isn't appropriate for Danbooru, which is how the question was historically resolved.

Not sure, but I think this was in response to people flagging very high quality work by Pixiv artists that may be either non-human, or of a Western character (often in an anime style, though really the two have blurred a lot lately in a lot of cases), or anime characters drawn in a western style. Those sorts of things were always acceptable within reason. It's sort of a fuzzy barrier again. If someone posted Matt Groening's Bart Simpson as he draws it, I'd still consider it off-topic enough to flag. If a well-established Pixiv artist drew Bart in their style, or anyone drew Bart in an anime style, I'd have to think more about it, but I'd say it probably doesn't warrant a flag. Things like pictures of birds, or landscapes, etc (of high quality, and again usually by established artists) historically have also been well accepted in practice throughout Danbooru's history.

I too agree for single pages if they stand out, and I've approved a lot of those myself, though it seems that flag message has been almost exclusively used to flag old rating:e bad quality comics. I think in this case it's an issue with the flagger using incorrect flag messages, rather than actual good content getting flagged.

nonamethanks said:

I too agree for single pages if they stand out, and I've approved a lot of those myself, though it seems that flag message has been almost exclusively used to flag old rating:e bad quality comics. I think in this case it's an issue with the flagger using incorrect flag messages, rather than actual good content getting flagged.

Almost everything there falls into that gap of "I wouldn't approve it, but I wouldn't see it as a valid flag either". "Comic" isn't a valid flag reason, "old" isn't a valid flag reason, "rating:e" isn't a valid flag reason, in that description only "bad quality" is valid. If the flagger sees the post as something that needs to be removed for that reason, then that should be the sole argument in the flag, and approvers should judge based on that complaint.

To me too, most of the art quality in that link is perfectly fine. It's monochrome, but that's not a problem. The only reason I wouldn't overrule those is because I personally don't usually approve comics.

Shinjidude said:

Almost everything there falls into that gap of "I wouldn't approve it, but I wouldn't see it as a valid flag either". "Comic" isn't a valid flag reason, "old" isn't a valid flag reason, "rating:e" isn't a valid flag reason, in that description only "bad quality" is valid. If the flagger sees the post as something that needs to be removed for that reason, then that should be the sole argument in the flag, and approvers should judge based on that complaint.

I think that's another issue with the wording of the flag form. There's a line there that says:

Manga: Multiple pages of a manga, doujinshi, or comic that don't stand up to individual scrutiny

So people might take that as an invitation to flag individual pages.

I actually had an user contact me in the past because they flagged an alternate language post with the reason that it was hard translated, and got confused when I reapproved it (which is why I added a note to the flag form about that). I think it was post #3268924. In general there seems to be some fair amount of confusion on this kind of things.

nonamethanks said:

I actually had an user contact me in the past because they flagged an alternate language post with the reason that it was hard translated, and got confused when I reapproved it (which is why I added a note to the flag form about that). I think it was post #3268924. In general there seems to be some fair amount of confusion on this kind of things.

Yeah, that one is sort of tricky. If not for the fact that the artist posted it, I'd have agreed with the flagger here. "Hard translated" typically is a valid flag reason, and for that post, I probably wouldn't have approved it for quality standards anyway, personally. That's another annoyance, when you want to overrule because the flag rationale is faulty, but you can't because it really isn't a good post. Please flag those sorts of things for quality reasons instead. Though again, if this was actually hard translated (and it really looks like one), that would have been valid.

I don't see what the issue with (correctly) flagging old posts is, I know we've had some users in the past uploading Pixiv versions of old Twitter posts (not deleted ones but wouldn't be up to today's quality standards) and then getting confused when they weren't approved since the old ones were approved.

Unbreakable said:

I don't see what the issue with (correctly) flagging old posts is, I know we've had some users in the past uploading Pixiv versions of old Twitter posts (not deleted ones but wouldn't be up to today's quality standards) and then getting confused when they weren't approved since the old ones were approved.

If it breaks a rule, or the quality is sub-par enough there's no way it would pass the queue, then I have no problem at all with flagging old posts. I also agree that just because something got through in the past doesn't mean it gets a free pass to be approved today. The approval guideline is "you should only approve of posts that you personally like". If no one actively moderating likes it, there is no reason it should get through.

I stand by what I say above though, flagging for invalid reasons, or flagging things you suspect someone else would have approved are misusing the tool and defeating the spirit of Danbooru's moderation system. Being nasty towards other people technically breaks the "be polite" rule in the wiki. I'm only asking that people keep those things in mind before dumping things through the flag system.

Im the second most prolific flagger on the site and Im the "single page of a comic" guy.

I find a lot of old posts during my tag gardening (I usually add order:id to my searches) and I started posting them in the deletion request thread after the grandfather clause was overturned and later flagging them when that became an option.
One of the how to/help pages (cant remember which one at the moment) states that the only reason we havent removed the old inferior quality art is a lack of interest and man hours. I figured I could at least make a dent in that population.
I flagged 130 posts between 2020-04-17 and 2020-05-17 and only four where reapproved, so I assumed I was using the system as intended.

Regarding comics I think a page or two that used to be a part of a larger comic loses quality by being shown without context. Still I would not flag something like post #13078 as she has an unique and interesting design compared to how shes usually drawn. But I cant for the life of me understand why someone would like to see post #12001 on its own. We have literally millions of better images on this site.

I do offer my genuine apologies for the language in some of my flags. I used a thesaurus to find synonyms for bad and I see now that it got nastier than intended. Im open to changing my behavior if it disturbs others on the site. I rarely use all my ten daily flaggs because I dont want to burden the approvers.

This became a very ME centric reply but NNT has already made most points I would otherwise bring up :)

I don't think burdening the approvers is an issue, as now "disapproved:disinterest" etc can be used in tag scripts to mass disapprove posts.