Change log

So I've implemented a moderator dashboard that aggregates some data. I will continue adding to it and would like to hear feedback. I hope this will eventually become a central location to promote/demote members.

Regarding the topics mentioned in this thread, I think everything that needed to be said has been said. At this point I'm not going to make any major changes and will just adopt a sit-and-watch approach. I do think the forum needs to be split up into groups like a newbie area/tag maintenance/site maintenance.

So many words here. I read most of it but might have missed a few posts.

Representation
Hazuki is right that we need to define what "representative" is.

If you want "representative" of the "average" user, then just shut the site down right now and redirect users to 4chan or gelbooru. I'm not even being sarcastic. There is no reason for danbooru to exist as a standalone site if the goal is "the internet standard". Let's be honest - the typical user on danbooru is no more sophisticated or interested in the management of the site than the average user anywhere else, which is entirely normal.

The only difference is that danbooru doesn't let those people influence policy. So if you want a site representative of the people who actually contribute and structure things, you're really not too far off right now. And that's danbooru's identity: incredibly precise and well-thought out and complete tagging and good functionality for accessing those images, maintained by a fairly sizable group of people who are explicitly interested in such things.

The second we dumb down our romanization or naming or tag structuring policies, that starts to degrade. And you probably lose your primary contributors in the process.

Promotions
Giving us a way to pick users out more easily is certainly a fine idea.

Barring that, make it more widely known that suggestions are always welcome. But people should realize that the answer will sometimes be "no".

General forum
Adds nothing other communities don't do much better and more relevantly. And it's just an extra moderation burden. You'd have to set some rules (like avoiding political/religious debates, ban huge sigs and massive avatars and other nonense) and then enforce them, unless we just want to have a big cesspool full of bickering and spoilers (i.e. most internet forums).

Stuff for member-levels
If you can increase the allowed tags cap at all, do it. Two is pretty tight.

But it all comes down to what you think the site should be, albert. Are you unhappy with it, or are you primarily reacting to unhappy people who contact you? For every one of those I'm sure there's far more who use the site just fine and never think of it one way or the other.

So, just try to avoid making any decisions based purely on those who complain, because they're always the loudest, and don't always guide you in the right direction.

albert said: Regarding the topics mentioned in this thread, I think everything that needed to be said has been said. At this point I'm not going to make any major changes and will just adopt a sit-and-watch approach.

Figures you replied while I was typing, heh.

I do think the forum needs to be split up into groups like a newbie area/tag maintenance/site maintenance.

Can't hurt. As long as the various sections are easy to navigate. Above all, I'd want to make sure threads don't get marked read before I've actually seen them. Particularly when I can't get back in for 3, 5, even 7 days at a time it can be hard to know where I left off.

Also, as long as the forums stay relevant to site issues, which it sounds like they will, that's fine.

I'd be cool with stricter standards of behavior in a newbie forum. No name calling, no "you should have searched, jackass", etc. Only the most patient users should be allowed to answer questions there.

jxh2154 said:
Stuff for member-levels
If you can increase the allowed tags cap at all, do it. Two is pretty tight.

This is something I was thinking of mentioning. While encouraging contribution is always good, people who post for the sole reason of getting promoted so they'll have access to more functionality instead of simply being interested in the site rarely make good long-term (or even short-term) contributors.

Whenever I'm looking for something in particular, I find myself using at least three or four tags on average. I can't help but feel Member level users are pretty severely constrained on their ability to search. While I definitely think that the contributing/working userbase should be the one to dictate the form of the site, I don’t think it’s okay for us to also be the only ones who can comfortably USE the site for what it’s meant to be used.

I imagine there’s a technical reason for limiting the tag usage, but raising the cap to four or so for Members would really make a difference.

S1eth said:
Naturally, many users notice more good users than a few mods do.

Ephyon said:
I don't exactly see why this would be so.

Because mods only are a tiny part of the site active users? With our current tools it's obvious the only way to find more people is to have more eyes.

jxh2154 said:
If you can increase the allowed tags cap at all, do it. Two is pretty tight.

Like Anelaid said, I too think 3 would be a good start.
I don't know if it actually makes a difference but I was considering 2 tags + 1 metatag, in case it's cheaper than 3 tags.

The huge majority of my searches are "character + random feature + filter", where filter is either rating:X / chartags:X / order:score.
When I'm trying to find a particular picture of Reimu I just can't afford browsing through 200 pages of results.
(I'll reckon however that to this day, it only gets this bad with Touhou.)

I'm writing tutorials for people around me to help them with searches (using metatags and a bit of cheating with blacklists) because I figured out they had no idea it was possible and just stuck with "character + solo" whenever they tried to find something or bookmarked fucking everything when they wanted to find it later.
I don't think such people enjoy enough comfort at this point to make them want to dig into the site, be it contributing, browsing wikis, or even commenting. Over time their main use of the site boils down to a daily touhou rating:s tour, because they don't suspect the site has actually more to offer.
Upgrading to priv doesn't even seem that hot given they're aware of the 6 tags limit but clueless about how much they can actually benefit from it (yay searching more characters).

The 2 tag + 1 metatag idea is a good comprimise to opening accessibilty while still encouraging the less patient to pay for access.

It does need to be made more obvious that contribution can and will get you noticed, but it also needs to be made obvious that there is a real amount of work to be done to get it. This gives people that want to contribute a goal, and those that don't a reason to pay.

I'm curious, do we have any statistics on how sophisticated the average search is? The data would be a bit skewed since the vast majority of users can't go above two, but it would be interesting to see what percentage of the time they use both those tags, and what the average is for priv+. Oh, and how many times a search is kicked back for being over the limit, though it'd probably only happen a handful of times per user.

jxh2154 said:
I'm curious, do we have any statistics on how sophisticated the average search is?

Interesting idea. Especially interesting would be how it changes with someone's level of activity. For example, I wouldn't expect a fresh Priv and myself to use the six available tags the same way.

It might also be useful to do statistics on only the users that don't have a hard limit attached (though that's also likely to be skewed, since those happen to be the power users).

Although I would be very unhappy to be limited to two tags, the majority of the searches I do happen to be two tags or less, perhaps with an additional metatag. I would be very surprised to see anything other than an exponential decay shaped graph for search size vs search frequency. If this is true, it would also hold that the limitation doesn't actually save us that much in terms of resources (since you are allowing the common case, and banning the infrequent one). It does remain an effective motivation to upgrade to Priv though.

Shinjidude said:
It might also be useful to do statistics on only the users that don't have a hard limit attached (though that's also likely to be skewed, since those happen to be the power users).

I don't think anyone can do above six - I know I can't. I'm sure albert could potentially do so for testing reasons but six seems to be the limit regardless of status. I know I've run into it a bunch of times.

Hmm, I think you're right. It used to be unlimited for everyone, but I think the six tag limit for everyone was introduced the same time as the two tag limit for general members. To be fair I don't often (if ever) run against the six tag limit.

EDIT: I can't find where the limits were first introduced, but I myself actually confirmed the 2 tag / 6 tag for Priv+ limit at least as far back as two years ago in forum #15078.

Personally I've never had any problems using just two tags. Especially considering if you use your blacklist you basically have 5000 characters, I believe, worth of negative searches. Most of the time the only reasons I ever use more is for tag gardening, searching for a particular image from memory, or just because I can (that's not a joke).

To be fair though to get the most out of two tags you need to be willing to actually work at it a little and have more knowledge of Danbooru than the average user.

I find that I generally use 3-4 tags, its usually things where I want to find specific things. It could be like:

ibuki_suika solo rating:s

Its useful to have more than two, if you want an image with multiple characters performing a specific action. One example that came to mind is looking for an image with Kaguya and Mokou from the Touhou series with fire, I couldn't do this as a member, but even with just 3 possible tags, that would greatly help. Having 6 is a nice perk to have, it has use, but if the limit could be made higher that would be better.

Its also nice to have more than 2 if you want negative tagging as well.

Shinjidude said: To be fair I don't often (if ever) run against the six tag limit.

There are two situations in which I tend to hit the limit:

1) Can't remember the name of a minor character, so I search "copy -char1 -char2 -char3 -char4 -char5" going down the list of most common characters if I can't easily verify the name through other sources first. Usually after 4 or 5

2) Trying to negate lots of icky things I don't want to see (I don't keep a blacklist for moderation reasons), so I might search "char -tag1 -tag2 -tag3 -tag4 -tag5" etc, and depending on how much ick there is for that char, or copy, or gentag, I can run out of tags before I've filtered it as much as I'd like.

But more often than not I realize I'm approaching six and stop before trying to add another. Even if I want to.

I rarely use more than three, metatags and negated searches included. The only difference if you're a member and can only use up to two is that you may need to go through a couple of pages to find what you're looking for, which isn't that terrible.

Typically I use 1-3 tags for normal searches, 4-6 if I'm looking for something really specific or if I'm doing tag gardening. I used the same "copy -char1-5" tag search as jxh2154 when I tried to tag posts in the gundam tag that didn't have a specific copyright tag like Zeta Gundam or Gundam 00.

It might help that a lot of the series I'm interested in are relatively speaking rare (and hence need less filtering to drill down into), and I don't get into Touhou that much except incidentally. Also, I tend to put up with crap I don't like in search results provided it's not overwhelmingly pervasive. I'm sure everyone uses the system somewhat differently.

jxh2154 said:

Trying to negate lots of icky things I don't want to see (I don't keep a blacklist for moderation reasons)

Sounds like what you really need is a quick and easy way to toggle the blacklist on and off. I also stopped using the blacklist back when I was moderating, although I've never bothered with it again since either (thankfully semen on figure is no longer an issue).

What we had in the old blacklist implementation was that it'd highlight the temporarily unhidden thumbs with red background. I keep meaning to mention it, since it was *really* useful.

Here's a thought I had. Since the most common Metatag search is almost certainly rating:X, what if we made that a freebie?

Instead of typing that in, put three checkboxes below the search bar, one for each rating, and then have the metatag applied in the search? That would probably also help a lot for just user-interface issues, since metatags are a somewhat higher level concept than a normal tag.

So regular users would be able to search two tags, plus a rating, while Priv+ would have six plus the rating.