Artists uploading their own art

I've noticed a few artists uploading their own art over the past couple of weeks. Should I just send them private messages mentioning the relevant passage (below) in howto:upload along with a link to it? I don't want to be confrontational, but people are obviously ignoring the line at the very beginning of the Upload screen that says "Before uploading, please read the how to upload guide.".

Uploading One's Own Art is Sacrilege

Posting one's own art is severely looked down upon, and there are two reasons behind this:

Firstly, artists tend to be biased when it comes to judging the quality of their own work. What looks good to you may be regarded as mediocre to Danbooru moderators.
Secondly, allowing posting of own work (self-posting) will cause a sudden spike of sub-par uploads as users mistake us for another Pixiv or Deviantart, far beyond the scope and capacity of Danbooru.

More suitable sites to upload your own art to include Deviantart and Pixiv.

Admins and moderators are especially harsh on self-posting artists, lashing out penalties without remorse. The one and only way to feature your art on Danbooru is to show immense talent and skill elsewhere, and with that, captivate some fans on the other side of the Internet into uploading your art.

As long as you don't instigate a problem by being too curt with people, private messaging should not be a problem. If anything happens and they send a nasty PM, don't respond and get into an argument with them, just contact a moderator and let them decide what is the appropriate action. Sometimes people need to be reminded by a live person if they're ignoring a system and the ToS/upload guide.

If the art is good there's no harm done, usually in such cases it's not, though.

IIRC, this is a really old policy, dating from before the janitor system when there was no real quality control on uploads other than mods deleting blatant TOS violations (pretty sure upload limits didn't exist at the time, either.) It's probably less of a concern now that posts from normal members require approval. If the art isn't any good, it won't be approved.

I see nothing wrong with artists uploading their own work as long as it is good and gets high scores and high favs (btw i never understood the difference between the 2).

Now if it is bad artwork or not in the theme of this site, then yeah they probably should be reprimanded then.

Honestly at this point we might as well ban it, there's so many people who are determined to keep the site pure and downvote + flag anything that's self-uploaded regardless of quality it doesn't really benefit either side to have the policy in the middle.

Log said:

Honestly at this point we might as well ban it, there's so many people who are determined to keep the site pure and downvote + flag anything that's self-uploaded regardless of quality it doesn't really benefit either side to have the policy in the middle.

What are you basing that on? From what I've seen most self-uploads that are good don't get flagged or a negative score. Example

And then you have stuff like post #2115958.

If we're gonna do this because we're worried about the artists raising a stink about their art, we already have uploaders who get upset about deleted uploads which they didn't even draw; I'm not seeing a huge difference here.

basically this:

Schrobby said:

If the art is good there's no harm done,

I guess it's been a couple years since anyone's flagged for self upload for the most part but shoujo_donburi was banned for uploading his own work despite there being no indication that anyone actually bothered to reach out to them in japanese and the uploads as tagged don't actually violate any rules (we'd discussed a minimum tagging requirement but it was pointed out that it isolates foreigners as in this exact case so character, copyright, artist, source is the actual minimum.)

Can we get rid of the part about not uploading one's own work? I think it's sad that dedicated members like arantheus (user #102116) and maullarmaullar (user #14892) are unable to upload their own art despite being able to pass the queue. We have processes in place to handle bad judgement, and who uploads a post doesn't factor into it.

Dbx said:

Can we get rid of the part about not uploading one's own work?

No, it has a valid purpose that you can see on the uploading guide. Who's uploading the posts does matter for the reason stated there. Danbooru is a filter site that tries to collect the best art. Bypassing that filter by letting artists upload directly to it undermines the site's purpose.

If the art is high enough quality it'll get noticed and uploaded eventually. There's no point in rushing it. This is simply another layer of quality control for the site.

I regard danbooru as some sort of art vault. If the art is good I don't care who uploads it, artist or not. That's my personal opinion.

K, now I present a bunch of coulds.
We could allow artists uploading their own art as long as they have to be approved to weed out the bad stuff. That could attract lots of sub-par art and so create a heavy workload for the approvers, though. We could have a test period to check if that happens. Depending on the result we could or could not get rid of the rule preventing self uploads.

Hoobajoob said:

Bypassing that filter by letting artists upload directly to it undermines the site's purpose.

Art still gets filtered through the moderation queue and can be sent back to the queue by flagging. I think it's rather unlikely that a contributor or above would continue uploading his own bad art despite flagging; but if such a person exists, is it really a problem that can't be managed?

Dbx said:

We have processes in place to handle bad judgement, and who uploads a post doesn't factor into it.

...processes which don't work correctly because that who uploads a post matters a LOT - as many mediocre if not to say bad postings stays only because they were posted by privileged contribs+, while posts by normal users are being subjected to random yet very tight and recently even more strict (after last albert's change of posting quota) procedure.

Anyway, ban for upload of own art was one of the best ideas danbooru implemented ever. Not only because it's the very first line of defense from bad art flood, but also because it prevents some bad blood situations possible with artists posting their own works massively.

I think it's rather unlikely that a contributor or above would continue uploading his own bad art despite flagging; but if such a person exists, is it really a problem that can't be managed?

Seeing today how some contribs+ being flagged and deleted responses with just posting more of similar stuff (well, why shouldn't they? - it's not that they are subjected to some kind of rational and/or periodic evaluation after all) I can see such scenario with some privileged (and yet unmovable) artists as a very high possibility. Especially considering the fact that they are the ones who can easily retaliate with removal all of their previous works from danbooru.

I think any system of uploading which doesn't address the contrib+ issue could lead to potential abuse. As others have pointed out, contrib+ users have posted mediocre and/or bad artwork, a lot of which would never had made its way through the moderation queue.

I suppose contrib+ users could flag their own posts, so that their artwork has to go through the moderation queue, but that would rely heavily on the honor system. Therefore, if we are going to allow artists to post their own artwork, I propose that there be a ban policy for any artists with contrib+ accounts that blatantly skip the moderation queue.

BrokenEagle98 said:

I suppose contrib+ users could flag their own posts, so that their artwork has to go through the moderation queue, but that would rely heavily on the honor system.

That feature already exists. Contributors have a checkbox on the upload page that allows them to upload their post as pending so it has to be approved, no need to flag it.

Toks said:

That feature already exists. Contributors have a checkbox on the upload page that allows them to upload their post as pending so it has to be approved, no need to flag it.

That's what I thought. I was just suggesting that those that don't when uploading their own art be up for a potential ban, if we're going to go this route.

With the mod queue in place I think we should relax the rules a bit. Maybe something like the following:

1) Uploading one's own art is severely frowned upon, but may pass muster if it's of sufficiently high quality.
2) Consistent uploading of low quality own's art is grounds for a warning. Flooding the mod queue with low quality own's art warrants a ban,
3) Attempting to bypass the mod queue with one own's art is grounds for a ban (even if the art is of high quality), but some leeway is allowed for accidents (such as in the case where a group of images in a comic is uploaded as pending, except one in the middle. Obvious mistake.)

This should let artists upload their own art while discouraging flooding of the mod queue with low quality art.

So basically "Yes, you are allowed to do that, but people may not like it. And you'll face heavy sanctions if you abuse the system. So make sure you're a damn good artist first before you try it."

Why are we making this so complicated? Just make a note that artists who upload their own art are ineligible for an upgrade to contributor and call it a day.