Donmai

Upload Feedback Thread - post here if your uploads keep getting deleted

Posted under General

Hello, first time poster here. The only feedback I got on this

post #8313234

from five approvers was disinterest.
I did have to set up a new artist for this artwork, which may have been the cause, but the quality of the artwork is at least good. There are no visual defects, the style is in theme for other related works for this character

post #8269922
post #8034772

I checked the image myself and didn't find any notable JPEG artifacting or other issues mentioned in this thread that have caused some images to be rejected. If anyone can explain what might have caused this, it would be a great help!

Hello got a couple of ones that don't seem to make the cut but id like to start with this one which was rejected twice by disinterest. Hopefully I'm doing this right...

post #8231406
post #8300725 (This one got rejected once but i was recommended to post in this thread).

Both artists seem to be been consistent and these two feel like they aren't an exception. By all means criticism would be appreciated so I can let this pieces go or hopefully it can get a spot in the archives at some point.

Coming back to this, out of curiosity I took a look at the disapproval listings. Approvers have plenty of posts to go through, and naturally people turn to automation, but I did find that there are a large amount of disapprovals being processed in a single minute. For reference, let's look at 2024-10-22 22:50 EST, in which a whopping 82 posts were marked as disapproved per reason "disinterest", give or take a few.

This in itself could be a bulk checking tool, but the types of posts (mine included, post #8313234, which I'll try to be impartial towards) are greatly varied. I can't find any particular pattern at all, so unless someone is checking through > 1 post per second, or multiple approvers are working at the same time, this pattern of post-checking is likely automated. Of course, we do know people do this as per forum #25989 this forum post.

An issue I noticed with this is that because a post may lack certain tags, whether by accident or otherwise, they get automatically marked as "disapproved" by the approver, and this of course adds up in the post's own moderation history. Whether or not a person looked at a post or not, this still counts against the post itself and can influence other approvers or potential appealers to leave the post for dead, which at times can include posts that would be approved if viewed directly. Appeals are meant for this case, but not every approver will be able to check every post. Hence we have a conflict in between the need for efficiently tagging large amounts of posts and the need for closer looks at certain posts. It would be unfair to suggest that approvers take the time out of their own lives to manually check each and every post, but at the same time it can be frustrating to users with upload limits who have to deal with a largely opaque and seemingly arbitrary approval system (evidence: many posts in this forum post).

To resolve or help with this issue, a suggestion I would like to propose is to hide the number of approvers who have disapproved a post until the post is flagged for having spent three days in the modqueue without approval. Alternatively, add a special disapproval reason "automated" so approvers will know that the post in question hasn't been reviewed by a human.

Barring any gaps in what I could read from the modqueue wiki, approvers shouldn't need to know how many approvers have disapproved the post before making their own judgement. Only when appealing and reopening a post that has fallen out of the modqueue is the number of approvers relevant, and knowing how many of these approvals were done via automation adds additional context to appeals that is effectively lost the moment the post is disapproved.

Lastly, I would like to apologize for the wall of text, and more if this breaks any rules or guidelines. Please correct me if I have made any mistaken assumptions, and provide feedback on the suggestion if possible.

Updated

veries said:

I can't find any particular pattern at all, so unless someone is checking through > 1 post per second, or multiple approvers are working at the same time, this pattern of post-checking is likely automated.

Multiple approvers can check the modqueue at the same time. I don't even know how you would automate this because it requires manually looking at and judging each post, and there is no benefit in mass disapproving posts without looking at them.

HyphenSam said:

Multiple approvers can check the modqueue at the same time. I don't even know how you would automate this because it requires manually looking at and judging each post, and there is no benefit in mass disapproving posts without looking at them.

I found this one forum post made about nine months ago. It turns out that I mis-cited it in the original post, due to forum quick links directing to forum posts rather than forum topics.

Usually I use tag scripting to quickly disapprove the bulk of posts I don't like before actually going through the mod queue. That way I can quickly sort out the posts where I can already tell from a small thumbnail that I won't like them without having to use the blacklist on the modqueue (where I use larger thumbnails) and potentially skipping a post I want to approve despite it including something I usually don't like.

It appears that some approvers do this procedure. I checked again and around 2024-10-23 00:06 EST we see a bulk of around 30 posts marked as "Disapproved" per reason "disinterest". Around that time, from the matching approval page, we see one, maybe two distinct approvers approving images. At a generous three users, this leaves an average of six seconds spent reviewing each individual post. At two, or one, this time drops to three or two seconds, which could cause discrepancies in judging each post.

The quoted text does suggest that this particular approver did use tag scripting to mass disapprove posts in bulk, without necessarily looking at them, if that clarifies things.

Anyways, I sincerely hope that this isn't the case, but based on disapproval patterns my post was caught up in mass disapproval waves at least twice that I can see since it was appealed a few hours ago. As it stands, without any further information, it can feel to a non-contributor user that it's entirely up to chance whether their post is chosen to be reviewed, which is greatly discouraging.

veries said:

I found this one forum post made about nine months ago.

...

The quoted text does suggest that this particular approver did use tag scripting to mass disapprove posts in bulk, without necessarily looking at them, if that clarifies things.

That isn't automation. Tag scripting is a tool used for garden tagging because you can add tags by simply clicking on the thumbnail, and this can also be used for approving. You're a Platinum user so you should have the ability to use this too. I use this tool a lot and it is most certainly a manual process.

If you read the post carefully, the approver uses it to "quickly sort out the posts where I can already tell from a small thumbnail that I won't like them". So they do actually look at the posts, hence it is not automation.

Regarding your suggestion, I don't like it because hiding the number of approvers who checked a post will remove transparency, and I don't believe it will fix anything because the number of disinterests on a post discouraging approvals is pure speculation. It can simply mean the post wasn't good in the first place.

True, a large portion of my post was speculative at best. Then again, there are more questions that can be answered by a slightly longer response in the reason for disapproval, such as "The quality of so and so isn't up to standard." Without feedback, good or bad, it's left to the uploader to guess as to what the approvers do want to see in posts, and this, at least to me, feels like a guessing game. Sometimes, posts similar to posts manually approved will fall through without explanation, and sometimes lower-quality posts that I personally wouldn't consider approve-worthy will be approved. Between the large number of approvers on the site, approaching a consistent non-deletion rating even when uploading in entirely good faith feels quite difficult, when what makes a post good is very much a subjective evaluation.

With this in mind, I guess I'll take a break from uploading, not that I did it very frequently anyway, and try to figure out what went wrong.

veries said:

Whether or not a person looked at a post or not, this still counts against the post itself and can influence other approvers or potential appealers to leave the post for dead, which at times can include posts that would be approved if viewed directly.

This is simply not true (see more below)

It appears that some approvers do this procedure. I checked again and around 2024-10-23 00:06 EST we see a bulk of around 30 posts marked as "Disapproved" per reason "disinterest". Around that time, from the matching approval page, we see one, maybe two distinct approvers approving images. At a generous three users, this leaves an average of six seconds spent reviewing each individual post. At two, or one, this time drops to three or two seconds, which could cause discrepancies in judging each post.

The quoted text does suggest that this particular approver did use tag scripting to mass disapprove posts in bulk, without necessarily looking at them, if that clarifies things.

Using larger thumbnails it usually takes less than a second to determine that you don't want to approve a post. When I'm doing the queu I can probably average 3-4 per second just by clicking a bit, it isn't hard.

Anyways, I sincerely hope that this isn't the case, but based on disapproval patterns my post was caught up in mass disapproval waves at least twice that I can see since it was appealed a few hours ago. As it stands, without any further information, it can feel to a non-contributor user that it's entirely up to chance whether their post is chosen to be reviewed, which is greatly discouraging.

Approvers aren't going around disapproving because a post has gotten a lot of disapprovals. Sometimes a post gets a lot of disapprovals because the wrong approvers just happen to be looking at it, but usually there's something wrong.

veries said:

True, a large portion of my post was speculative at best. Then again, there are more questions that can be answered by a slightly longer response in the reason for disapproval, such as "The quality of so and so isn't up to standard." Without feedback, good or bad, it's left to the uploader to guess as to what the approvers do want to see in posts, and this, at least to me, feels like a guessing game.

There's thousands of posts to go through every day, writing feedback on every single one is not only infeasable because of these numbers, because it's also pointless because usually all the feedback that there is to give is "Well it's just a bit shit".

ANON_TOKYO said:

There's thousands of posts to go through every day, writing feedback on every single one is not only infeasable because of these numbers, because it's also pointless because usually all the feedback that there is to give is "Well it's just a bit shit".

Catch-22 of "it be like that". Thanks for the feedback.

I guess while i wait for response on the other 2 posts. Appealed for this one. Its pretty consistent to the artists other works. I don't see a problem on this one. Especially with the other post alongside it getting approved by the same artist.

post #8300770