On Approval

Scarlet200% said: It was mentioned that some people go over just the thumbnails and only expand the image if they deem it worth looking at closer. While it obviously doesn't apply to everyone going by this discussion, is it potentially not a problem in itself?

Yes and no. If I see five tentacles raping the hell out of a girl in the thumbnail, I don't need to view the full image to know I would absolutely never approve it under any circumstances. Also, if I check out a couple pages of a doujin and decide not to approve it, I don't need to then open up every other page of it to know I'd hide it.

When I was going through the entire queue, I would very quickly skim rating:e and hide almost all of them based on thumbnails.
rating:q would get a much closer look after I weeded out the obviously excessively sized breasts and such.
rating:s would get a full image view for virtually everything.

Basically, the thumbnail tends to be adequate for determining the broad subject matter of the image. Judging the finer details of stuff that isn't an automatic pass should require checking the full size, yes.

I say demote inactive janitors and set a number of how many images should be approved in a set amount of days (like 90 or something). That way we can get less posts that meet danbooru standards sent to the graveyard.

You need to contribute and post images, but you apparently CAN'T upload anything, and can comment only once or twice.

All it's missing is a "Donate to us or screw off!" or more accurately, "Bend over and touch your toes, heh, heh, heh....!!!!" instruction

You really joined just to say dumb shit? Leave, but do it slowly, as so the door can bust your ass during exit.

In response to cattz and other users like him:
There have always been plenty of ways to contribute to danbooru. Uploading images is just the main route, but it has never been the only route. I'd imagine that if a person participated only in forum discussions and contributed heavily through it, they would receive a privileged account for that just as if they had posted lots of approved images.

If you honestly want to contribute there have always been plenty of ways to do it, you're not limited to just uploading images. There has always been a need for tagging images, working on tag lists and tag groups, doing translations, discussing and defining tag definitions, and writing up wikis. This whining over not getting images approved or there being a monetary route to privileged status has always in the end been nothing more than someone bitching over how they were too lazy to learn what kind of images we approve on danbooru (ie discerning some minimum level of quality), or learning how the site functions (not uploading duplicates, knowing what certain tags are for), or simply just being too lazy to type and hold a constructive discussion with others. We ask people to lurk around for awhile in the simple hopes that one might familiarize themselves with how the site operates, but sadly it seems for many that is simply too hard.

Repeating this suggestion:

There's actually a potential solution I came up with a while ago but forgot to actually discuss, that would allow each moderator to look at the images in more detail and (probably) make the queue move faster.

That would be to split the queue into several bits (like say, 5 queues, randomly assigned), and then randomly assigning janitors into each queue-part (so we'd have Janitors-A through Janitors-E, each group consisting of several people). This would spread the workload around more effectively, but it would also mean that janitors never see some pictures (at least not in the moderation queue). I don't exactly know if that's a bad thing or not, but it's worth thinking about, in my opinion. The moderation queue is a daunting place.

My suggestion would be that the moderation queue would be split for the janitors, but that moderators and admins see the entire queue.

That might be an idea if it somehow boosts janitors' going through the queue, but from the sounds of things, every image is already being seen by many people, just not approved.

If we did something like this, it might be nice to make optional as well. I for one don't mind going through the whole queue.

Perhaps if people are detecting systematic gaps of images that "should" be approved but aren't, we could address that rather than changing the system, or perhaps even adding more people. It's probably harder to define the false negatives that it is even to define what makes a "good image" in the first place (something that has been debated endlessly).

If it's something as simple as Pokemon images, Mecha images, 4koma, or something like that (all things I tend to pass on more often than not), perhaps we could discuss that and have a directive for the existing moderators & janitors to pay more attention to the neglected genres.

sorry but I don't really understand what the queue is, is it just all the pending approval posts?

if it is and we go with スラッシュ's suggestion, then they'd be able to see all of them by looking at the most recents posts right?

also, maybe instead of assigning things randomly we should assign by areas of interest. for example: FeKa approves pokemon posts, but Evangeline A.K. McDowell never does (hasn't approved a single one), so it'd be a bad idea if we sent some great pokemon posts in Evangeline's way since we'd still have the problem of great posts not being approved because they do not meet certain people's areas of interest

EDIT:

actually if we go with this instead of giving janitors posts in their area of interest, let's just keep from sending janitors posts in their area of neglect. So we don't have so much of the touhou problem

so don't send pokemon posts to Evangeline, but also don't send all of them to FeKa (just using you guys as an example ok?)

Something I've been wondering about - are janitors allowed to use tag blacklisting? I thought content doesn't matter as long as pictures are well drawn, but I've noticed a lot of hardcore and fetish posts getting deleted despite their high quality. That's my only problem with the site. I read jxh2154 comment about passing over explicit images, and the though of janitors having long list of blacklisted tags bothers me a bit, to be honest.

AFAIK there is no rule against janitors or mods using blacklists. I don't use one myself, since I'd rather not screen things out. If I remember correctly though blacklists don't work on the queue itself.

Also as per the second half of your post, no one is obligated to approve anything. In fact the instructions are to approve only of things you personally like. So chances are even if things were black-listed from the queue, the janitors or mods who black-listed those images would be very unlikely to approve them anyway.

Bellamy said:
Something I've been wondering about - are janitors allowed to use tag blacklisting? I thought content doesn't matter as long as pictures are well drawn, but I've noticed a lot of hardcore and fetish posts getting deleted despite their high quality. That's my only problem with the site. I read jxh2154 comment about passing over explicit images, and the though of janitors having long list of blacklisted tags bothers me a bit, to be honest.

Which is the core of the problem... Interest.

As was said there needs to be more janitors with varied interest so that the representation of images is more equal. If 10 janitors like touhou and only 2 like explicit there is an intrinsic imbalance.

Obviously it would be impossible to get it to 6 touhou 6 explicit, but a better balance would be productive.

Also I am curious to what percentage of "shit" images are user submitted (and rejected) vs contributors. There has been some pretty aweful stuff getting a free pass, tho that is a different subject I guess.

yeah, some of the series I've noticed kinda suffer from this are One Piece, Yuu-gi-ou, and Sonic the hedgehog

Blacklists are not applied to the mod queue.

Also, I'm not sure splitting up the queue is a good idea. If a member uploads a series of images and it gets divided up among several janitors, it has a higher chance of being partially deleted.

I don't really have a solution to this problem, but maybe breaking up the queue into pages (with an option to view all) might help. It's pretty easy to miss something when you look at 100+ posts at once.

If possible, it might be worthwhile to conduct a survey of the janitors. Something basic to see what major genres/ratings janitors are interested in, what they'd willing to look over, and what they wouldn't be willing to look over. If needed could also inquire on what days of the week and/or times of the day they're normally active to know if there are any gaps or weak spots in coverage.

I like NWF Renim's idea but couldn't you just view their blacklisted tags of the possible janitors to get an idea of what they don't like and possibly pass over in the queue? then again a general survey would cover tastes that they may not have on their accounts. I also love the idea of the day and time of janitors too cause I'm normally active mid-day to late night/early morning and feel that approval does seem a little slower in the middle of the night.

Using blacklists wouldn't really tell you anything there's stuff I won't generally approve but my blacklist only contains one thing (toddlercon.)

Hiding things in the queue and hiding all posts of things are vastly different.

I'm against the queue split too.
If anything, that's only going to make less pics to be approved and more bitching about deleted things than we have now.

eidolon said:
(...) but maybe breaking up the queue into pages (with an option to view all) might help.

This is actually a good idea.

If it's helpful for anyone, I use a combination of greasemonkey scripts and macro keys to help go through the queue more easily. Basically it allows me to open everything in the current query in new tabs, and check for duplicates, approve, hide, or vote with a single keystroke for each action. I could make these available if anyone is interested.

Sounds useful, I'll give it a try!

I receive a nightly report of how much everyone approves. I'll do some work this weekend to prune the list. I would say about a third of the current janitors approve fewer than 5 posts a week.

It would be nice to automate the process of janitor nomination so we don't have to go through this phase every six months. Awhile ago I had suggested automating the janitor test. Maybe when a user hits N favorites after X weeks they'll be prompted with an invitation. Passing the test would put them into a test janitor role. New janitor invitations would be sent out every month based on the number of active janitors, inactive ones would be automatically demoted.