Change log

• I've adjusted the way the spoiler tag works. It should work across multiple lines now. Unfortunately it won't always inline spoilers seamlessly, but being ugly is better than being wrong I guess. The trigger is when the tags are on new lines, like so:

• Lately I've gotten a little worried that the forum is becoming increasingly detached from the rest of the site. It can feel a little like an echo chamber here. So I'd like to gather some feedback. Hopefully I'll hear from a broad range of people to see what they think of the site as it is currently.

Haha that didn't work.

Ok so you have to surround them with empty newlines. Which isn't worse than what it is before but I'll look into it.

What worries me about the forum is that I noticed people asking the same questions over and over when it has been already clarified in another topic.

If we could have one large topic for people asking questions about danbooru and so on, it could save some space as well as time.

hidetheunforgiven said:
If we could have one large topic for people asking questions about danbooru and so on, it could save some space as well as time.

An FAQ certainly wouldn't hurt.

albert said:

• Lately I've gotten a little worried that the forum is becoming increasingly detached from the rest of the site.

Could you elaborate a little bit more on this point? Some examples of what you are seeing would be helpful.

For me, there should be more awareness that you can rank up, so to speak, for working in the forum.

I was gifted a privileged account for helping out on the forum, and a couple of other things, and while rewards are offered for helping out danbooru, I think things like tag gardening, translating, being productive in providing feedback should have some reward as well. Not saying there should be ABSOLUTELY AWESOME PRIVILEGES, since it cheapens the reward for buying such a status,

1.) There isn't a way to easily access threads. We tried sticking everything, but there was too many threads, and I came up with the idea for a single thread with all the important threads, but that doesn't work. I was thinking that subforums, if it is possible, will help greatly.

2.) A way to request translations outside of comments and the forum, like an option on the post to click "request translation." and this can be done at the post or pool level.

3.) Member level users should be able to flag images or request images to be flagged without going on the forum. There should be several factors, however:

A two week period between when an account is made, and when it can flag an image

A user with a negative record cannot flag images. Maybe a user who has a negative record for flagging, or is associated with banned accounts, should not be allowed to flag images

A member level user can only have so many flagged images at a time, with a minimum of one or three, with some way of allowing more, perhaps, for not abusing the system?

4.) An option to allow users to request bans formally but anon, basically there is a "request ban" on a user's profile, and someone has to give a reason. It doesn't show up on the user's record that he has been requested to be banned, and the user doesn't even know he has been flagged or who flagged him. I generally send out a PM to an admin or moderator if I see a user with a lot of negative records, but perhaps a way to directly request a user to be banned.

5.) I think the biggest problem is that there is no easy way to figure out how danbooru works. The common answer is to "lurk more" but it takes a lot of time to figure out how things work, so perhaps an easy way to collect common questions and to answer them, a comprehensive FAQ would be nice that doesn't suffer from "TL;DR"

6.) What honestly bugs me is the 2 tag limit for member level users. For me, when I was a user, I always thought that 3 tags, maximum, would be a lot more versatile. Perhaps it should work like this, maybe

1 copyright

1 character

1 or 2 general

1 how many characters (solo, multiple girls, multiple boys)

7.) A way for users to directly appeal images. Since reasons are not required in the forum, a user can appeal images and perhaps this can count towards his approved posts if it succeeds, as a reward. I'm hesitant to allow the latter, however.

8.) The thing that bugs me, is that I spoke to a janitor who flagged an image for TOS who told me that there wasn't TOS violations, but that he was told or believed to flag it as such. I personally think an image should be able to be flagged once, but there should be a section in the forum for those images that have been reapproved but are still lacking.

9.) A better system for dealing with images that violate the TOS, or a better TOS. Currently, images that violate the TOS can be allowed in some cases, such as guro, but things such as fake_translation are banned regardless of their quality. There needs to be a more uniform standard, IMO.

10.) I noticed that member level users can't see who favorites posts, I don't see why this should be done.

11.) How about making negative records, especially for bans, dissipate over time? they can still appear for a user to see, but this relates to my suggestion on flagging.

12.) There should be a way to report comments directly, rather than downvote, for being spam or for spoilers.

For spoilers, perhaps giving the user a grace period between being reported for spoiling and giving them time to correct it, so they don't have to be banned.

For giving a negative record, there could be an option to tick boxes such as:

• Spamming

• Rude behaviour

• Spoilers

• Posting his or her own art

• Consistently failing to tag

• Abuse of power

And so on.

13.) I think there should be two system of pools, one for public use and one for private use. The private pool would be used if a user has a lot of favorites and wants a way to better categorize them.

14.) A way for users to start "initiatives" and to reward users who help. The idea is that I can say, "Okay a lot of posts that only have one character do not have "solo" in them, lets start an initiative to tag images that only have one character." or "Okay, a pool needs to be cleaned up, lets work together to fix it."

15.) An easier way to request aliases and implications without going to the forum.

These are just some grievances.

reese said:

Could you elaborate a little bit more on this point? Some examples of what you are seeing would be helpful.

Sure. I think there's this general perception that the forum is filled with people with Asperger's Syndrome who are hard to approach and needlessly argue the details. Kind of like Wikipedia editors. Which is kind of true, to a degree. I will sometimes get a private message asking why a tag is the way it is. And when I tell them to post a topic in the forum, they will respond back, "I don't want to spend a week arguing with those idiots."

I don't know how common this opinion is, but it's something I want to combat. This is kind of what drove my Forum Civility topic. I want us to be polite to a fault. If you're going to tell me you're not going to post on the forum, I don't want your excuse to be, "Because they act like jerks."

The forum, ideally, should be representative of Danbooru users in general. If there's a large furry community that resents the furry ban, I want to hear from them. I want to take whatever steps are needed to lower the barrier to entry.

Anelaid said:

These are just some grievances.

That's a lot, and this isn't really the place to address them, but be sure to email me so I can read everything in context.

Is there any chance we can get neutral user records implemented? There's plenty of times where I need to notify someone to do something some way other than how they're doing it and other people need to know that they have been informed (to watch them to make sure they actually do it or whatever) but it does not need to be a positive nor negative mark on their account.

Current example: I have been tagging original, based on pixiv tagging, one user at a time. One user I had cleared keeps uploading original images tagged オリジナル on pixiv but not tagged original here. I do not find this worthy of a negative record but I believe the user needs to be informed of this error and others be aware that they have been informed so the mistake is not repeated.

albert said:
And when I tell them to post a topic in the forum, they will respond back, "I don't want to spend a week arguing with those idiots."

But here's the thing. The reason we are probably the single best example of a tagging system anywhere is because of those of us here on the forum who are obsessive about this sort of thing.

You can't really have it both ways. We're trying to be a high quality image repository, with the most thorough tagging you will see anywhere on the internet...and thats going to require a large degree of anal-retentiveness on the back end. We aren't an easy community for people to break into, and for some people, it simply won't work. We aren't what they want.

Fencedude said:
But here's the thing. The reason we are probably the single best example of a tagging system anywhere is because of those of us here on the forum who are obsessive about this sort of thing.

You can't really have it both ways. We're trying to be a high quality image repository, with the most thorough tagging you will see anywhere on the internet...and thats going to require a large degree of anal-retentiveness on the back end. We aren't an easy community for people to break into, and for some people, it simply won't work. We aren't what they want.

I think the idea is that improving communication between the forum and those who use danbooru will greatly help danbooru's ability to help both.

albert said:
That's a lot, and this isn't really the place to address them, but be sure to email me so I can read everything in context.

I PM'd you.

Anelaid said:
I think the idea is that improving communication between the forum and those who use danbooru will greatly help danbooru's ability to help both.

And we do that better...how?

What are we supposed to do? Loosen our standards?

Is it fine to send you a dmail albert or are emails really preferable?

e: and I side with Fencedude on that one.

Hmm, a few thoughts on civility & community on Danbooru.

1. We are sort of elitist, that's intentional, and for some good reasons, but it somewhat seems to me that things are becoming more and more frozen with regard to status. I could be wrong, since I have nothing to do with promotion anymore, but it seems like it is harder and harder for people to get rewarded for good behavior. The bigger and more voluminous Danbooru gets the harder and harder it is to notice peoples' good work with tag gardening and the like. Perhaps somehow developing an interface to automatically pick out people doing good work (lots of notes, tag edits, highly rated posts in a certain time period) could help alleviate this. These people could be pointed out to the mods with invitation rights, and/or perhaps given some sort of public recognition.

2. The "No Fun" policy is also somewhat problematic, and contributes to general users seeing us forum dwellers as people with sticks up our asses. Yes, it's much easier to get policy hashed out and things worked out without dealing with random cruft. If everything we do is based on debating semantics and purging other people's entertainment (such as pools based on esoteric themes) though people are going to be more and more dissatisfied with the powers that be.

It used to be that the forums were the place for work to be done, and the comments the place to "have fun" (none of this is meant to encourage comment spam BTW). The comments have become so fast-moving though, that they are pretty much worthless to support any sort of community, much like 4chan's /b/, not that it's degraded to that level of idiocy.

It's been a long long time, so I can't remember exactly what the conversation was like back when we used Rasberry Heaven's forum, but I always wondered exactly what the major benefit of keeping our own proprietary forum was? Some of the social pressure that builds up here might get relieved if we had a stock forum set up with sub-forums dedicated to different purposes (like most sites in our domain). For example we could have the "no-fun zone" where all the real work gets done, and then a more relaxed forum for people to interact more socially and get things out of their system.

I'm guessing that the ideal case would be to only have a small number of dedicated users, and unfortunately I missed both chances to experience that since I wasn't here at the absolute beginning, and went inactive for a few months after Danbooru closed to the public at large. Spreading things into separate forums though, might help partition things and give each the feel of a smaller better connected community.

Using a stock wiki (like MediaWiki) could also help with user interaction since it's got richer features and allows for things like discussion pages on specific pages and watch lists so people can keep appraised of changes in topics they are concerned about. (thinking of which having a "watchlist" for tags, though possibly computationally impractical and off topic, might not be a bad idea)

---------------

Well those are a couple of things to think about anyway. I feel like an iconoclast for mentioning things that go so far against our established modus operandi, and I'm sure other established members can ream me out and point out the negative aspects of these ideas (moderation becomes much more difficult; the laxer you get with social rules, the more garbage becomes acceptable and needs to be sifted through; the more places discussion can happen, the more places one has to check to keep up with anything, etc).

I have no doubt that I am one of the aspies referred to when people mention those that frequent the forum, and the work we do is very important for the continued smooth operation of Danbooru as a whole, but in a lot of ways I'm not sure bottling up the rest of the userbase is necessarily a good idea.

Hmm, this is probably getting too long again, forgive my rambling.

[.spoiler]
Looks like internal and external links still show up through spoiler blocks...
[./spoiler]

EDIT: Undid my HAX.

Edit: WTF RaisingK, you broke the forum! Fix that post.

The "No Fun" policy was always at least partially tongue in cheek, but the ultimate point is that functionality trumps fun. The reason we are cracking down on silly pool themes is because as things stand now, pools are very intrusive, and having a post be part of more than one pool starts to seriously clutter the interface. There are certainly ways around this, but they don't exist yet. And we are, in general, trying to avoid making pools of things that are just as easily tagged, because the tag functionality is far more robust than pools.

As for a "community", well...I have other places I go to discuss anime, and I don't see any real reason for us to tack on yet another anime forum. Our Forum is for Danbooru issues, and other than perhaps getting a few subforums set up to help sort things out, I think that adding a large place for free-form discussion just complicates our lives. See my previous comments about comment moderation. I am not going to moderate a forum. Period. Maybe some people will want to do that, but it just strikes me as something completely orthogonal to our mission.

We do need to do a better job of identifying people who are contributing to the site, and rewarding them with priviledged status if warranted, but if someone's reason for not bringing something up on the forum is "they don't want to argue with those idiots for a week", well...great. They can go off to Gelbooru or something. As long as your ideas aren't completely off base, we'll generally at least give a listen.

Raising K, you broke the formatting.

Anelaid said:
Raising K, you broke the formatting.

*cackle cackle* Well, there's your squeaky wheel...

Remove all the spoiler tags from your post and see if that fixes it.