Poorly written detailed rejections

This has been bugging me for some time now but I feel like there's no moderation when it comes to detailed rejection messages.
Rejection messages like on post #8407672 are NOT helpful in the slightest and what's worse, they are written by approvers, i.e. users that should be trusted to some extent.

It'd be nice if the flood of detailed rejection messages is reduced significantly. That's also an appeal not only to mods but also approvers to be more mindful when writing these messages.

Provence said:

This has been bugging me for some time now but I feel like there's no moderation when it comes to detailed rejection messages.
Rejection messages like on post #8407672 are NOT helpful in the slightest and what's worse, they are written by approvers, i.e. users that should be trusted to some extent.

It'd be nice if the flood of detailed rejection messages is reduced significantly. That's also an appeal not only to mods but also approvers to be more mindful when writing these messages.

Yeah that isn't really helpful, even if their opinion is straight up just that they don't like, it doesn't explain why with just "it's shit".

It's already a bit crap to have to hope the post you have uploaded is liked by others, but then to get responses like this, that are the worst kind of subjective feedback bar offensive responses, is quite honestly a shame.

I'm not sure if an immediate punishment of approvers such as this one is necessary, but at least a talking to, because frankly when everyone from regular members to approvers sees this as shitty, then maybe stuff needs to change on that person's end.

"Poor quality" is already a built-in reason to not approve a post, so writing out that a post is terrible (esp in terms as vague as "it's shit") separately is just kind of insult to injury and really unnecessary imo.

Provence said:

It'd be nice if the flood of detailed rejection messages is reduced significantly. That's also an appeal not only to mods but also approvers to be more mindful when writing these messages.

I'm not an approver, but wouldn't a flood of rejection messages be helpful given they are actually a reason and not an insult?

I always wished they were more common when I was putting stuff through the queue and even something like "bad leg" or "ugly coloring" would have felt way better that a 20 disinterest rejection.

But of course I agree blanket insults on images that aren't obviously low quality aren't helpful, I just disagree with discouraging detailed rejections in general.

zetsubousensei said:

I always wished they were more common when I was putting stuff through the queue and even something like "bad leg" or "ugly coloring" would have felt way better that a 20 disinterest rejection.

And while we're at it, let this also apply to flag reasons, because I'm getting pretty sick of

Quality Check

without any more substance of even a glimmer of a hint what the reason was to motivate someone to go through the effort of a flag.
Flags are an indicator that a Contributor (or a User + Approver) has made a possible wrong judgement call, so some more feedback about that would be great.

Not asking for an entire thesis, but surely a single noun should be doable:

Quality Check: Lineart

Or do I even dare to be greedy enough to ask for a noun with an adjective:

Quality Check: Crooked arm

And please don't use topic #7934 as a reason to not include that feedback, because we all know what a slog that topic is.

zetsubousensei said:

I'm not an approver, but wouldn't a flood of rejection messages be helpful given they are actually a reason and not an insult?

I always wished they were more common when I was putting stuff through the queue and even something like "bad leg" or "ugly coloring" would have felt way better that a 20 disinterest rejection.

But of course I agree blanket insults on images that aren't obviously low quality aren't helpful, I just disagree with discouraging detailed rejections in general.

Absolutely agreed with everything said above... I often have no idea what the specific issues with my deleted uploads are and it drives me crazy because if I did that'd be something I can pay more attention to in the future.

And yeah, topic #7934 is pretty useless when it comes to actually getting feedback. At best you'll get a vague reply from someone who isn't an approver or the post will be quietly deleted. Most times you'll get no feedback whatsoever.

Trouble_Windows said:

Absolutely agreed with everything said above... I often have no idea what the specific issues with my deleted uploads are and it drives me crazy because if I did that'd be something I can pay more attention to in the future.

And yeah, topic #7934 is pretty useless when it comes to actually getting feedback. At best you'll get a vague reply from someone who isn't an approver or the post will be quietly deleted. Most times you'll get no feedback whatsoever.

The simple fact is that it's inviable to give detailed feedback to even a fraction of all disapproved posts with how many posts there are, especially when quite often the real reason for disapproval is that "it's just a bit meh". Completely worthless disapproval messages like the one that prompted this do not help this issue at all, and they usually just give people bad preconceptions as to what's approvable and what isn't (especially in cases like this, where it's not even generally agreed to be true).

GabrielWB said:

And while we're at it, let this also apply to flag reasons, because I'm getting pretty sick of

Quality Check

without any more substance of even a glimmer of a hint what the reason was to motivate someone to go through the effort of a flag.
Flags are an indicator that a Contributor (or a User + Approver) has made a possible wrong judgement call, so some more feedback about that would be great.

Not asking for an entire thesis, but surely a single noun should be doable:

Quality Check: Lineart

Or do I even dare to be greedy enough to ask for a noun with an adjective:

Quality Check: Crooked arm

And please don't use topic #7934 as a reason to not include that feedback, because we all know what a slog that topic is.

I've expressed discontent with this before as well. Often someone comes along and says "well it's true isn't it". But just like I mentioned above, just because 1 person agrees with it doesn't mean it's a universal truth and it also doesn't mean it's particularly helpful in general. With "AI check" flags the flagger is also asked to corroborate, even a little, I don't see how "quality check" should be different.

I don't think we should make it harder for users to write flags or appeals. I don't see any harm in the blank slate flag reason that is "Quality check".

But an approver should know when to write a rejection message. These are two very seperate pair of boots.

Provence said:

I don't think we should make it harder for users to write flags or appeals. I don't see any harm in the blank slate flag reason that is "Quality check".

But an approver should know when to write a rejection message. These are two very seperate pair of boots.

I do agree we should at the very least hold approvers to a higher standard, but if you're flagging something surely there is something that caught your eye to make you do it, even if it's not a single point but instead just a "vibe". Even a single word could alleviate a lot of the "quality check" flags where people are just left guessing what the hell the flagger even meant.

As a user I would be okay with even “leg”, “shadow”, “perspective”, “unfinished”.

ANON_TOKYO said:

I do agree we should at the very least hold approvers to a higher standard, but if you're flagging something surely there is something that caught your eye to make you do it, even if it's not a single point but instead just a "vibe". Even a single word could alleviate a lot of the "quality check" flags where people are just left guessing what the hell the flagger even meant.

I'm sometimes wondering what the flagger meant even when the flag is more descriptive.
It's up to approvers to figure out if the quality we need to check is above or below our own quuality treshold.

Provence said:

It's up to approvers to figure out if the quality we need to check is above or below our own quuality treshold.

That's all great and dandy for the Elite Approver Party (now with complimentary seafood buffet)
But for Contributors and below it's an incredible opaque and black box process.
We fuck up every now and then, absolutely, it's only human, so what IS the treshold that we just went below with post X?

Asking flaggers to be a bit more verbose would be miles better than the brick wall that is "Quality Check" and would coincidentally also lighten the load of topic #7934 with just a bit less people asking about things that could've been included in the disapproval/flag message.

Asking for just one (maybe two) words extra is hardly making things harder in my opinion. You've already written two words "Quality" and "Check".

We don't need an epistle. We don't need a literary work. We don't even need a whole sentence.
Just one (or two) words. A faintly glowing target on the horizon. A small whisper. Just give us a vague cardinal direction to look at and travel towards so we can improve.

Provence said:

I'm sometimes wondering what the flagger meant even when the flag is more descriptive.
It's up to approvers to figure out if the quality we need to check is above or below our own quality threshold.

+1 to this. "Quality Check" has always been a legitimate flag reason for the same reason that approvers have mostly given up on the feedback thread: when a post is just not good enough, sometimes it's impossible to accurately explain why beyond saying "it's just not very good."

And any justification added beyond the simple "Quality Check" is irrelevant. It can help draw an approver's attention to one strikingly bad element of an image but in the end we're going to approve or not approve based on our unique, subjective criteria for what makes an image good or bad. Some artistic error that you think is bad enough to flag for might be perfectly fine to me, and vice versa. Long, detailed flags would help approvers very little, and add little of value beyond providing a basis for certain approvers to nitpick and go off on their usual complaints about how all flaggers are idiots.

CoreMack said:

+1 to this. "Quality Check" has always been a legitimate flag reason for the same reason that approvers have mostly given up on the feedback thread: when a post is just not good enough, sometimes it's impossible to accurately explain why beyond saying "it's just not very good."

And any justification added beyond the simple "Quality Check" is irrelevant. It can help draw an approver's attention to one strikingly bad element of an image but in the end we're going to approve or not approve based on our unique, subjective criteria for what makes an image good or bad. Some artistic error that you think is bad enough to flag for might be perfectly fine to me, and vice versa.

Somtimes you just don't see it, which may be why it was approved in the first place. If one of the purposes of flagging is to fix such mistakes, then indicating what those are is useful.

Long, detailed flags would help approvers very little, and add little of value beyond providing a basis for certain approvers to nitpick and go off on their usual complaints about how all flaggers are idiots.

The point is that a single word can make all the difference, nobody is asking for a thesis on why something is bad. GabrielWB mentioned this too, and asking for overly detailed explanations isn't the point trying to be made here.

ANON_TOKYO said:

Somtimes you just don't see it, which may be why it was approved in the first place. If one of the purposes of flagging is to fix such mistakes, then indicating what those are is useful.

Precisely.

Note that I'm speaking from the point of view of an uploader.
How Approvers decide among themselves how to divide their attention, or how they want to nitpick, what subjective criteria to use, or whatever, that is not my business because I'm not part of that group. It's also not particular relevant to this because all users are able to flag, not just Approvers.

If I get a flag, then I as an uploader want feedback. And putting that burden of a whole single word (or maybe two) by the flagger, the person that initiates the entire process, would only be logical.
I don't care how little feedback it is, just as long it isn't zero.

To take an example out of my own uploads: post #8359681/events
Because I like their works I overlooked a minor anatomy/perspective thing related to her foot.
Post got flagged with an excellent flag reason and the post was deleted.
Danbooru got a tiny bit better, and I got a pointer to keep an eye on anatomy. 10/10 would read again.

Another point is that Flag (and Appeal) messages persist unlike rejection messages, so if someone looks at this post again in a few years they can easily look up why a post got flagged and deleted. It leaves a papertrail and something that can be used as a reference.
So if anything Flag messages should have a higher standard than the regular "disinterest" / "poor quality" disapproval messages.

ANON_TOKYO said:

especially when quite often the real reason for disapproval is that "it's just a bit meh".

A "kinda just meh" button could be great in this regard. It kinda sucks to have something sit in queue and the only thing you see after the 3 days is 7 "disinterest"s, it leaves you wondering if just nobody cares enough about the subject matter. We here know that's probably not the case and it's being used as a "its meh" button, but it could be a lot more direct.

FubukiKai said:

A "kinda just meh" button could be great in this regard. It kinda sucks to have something sit in queue and the only thing you see after the 3 days is 7 "disinterest"s, it leaves you wondering if just nobody cares enough about the subject matter. We here know that's probably not the case and it's being used as a "its meh" button, but it could be a lot more direct.

That's basically already what "disinterest" achieves: it's either "not my thing" or "not that good". A problem with adding another option would be that you're complicating the modqueue further.

For some context, the modqueue contains 3 buttons per post now: approve, skip (disinterest), and a "reject" dropdown menu for poor quality, breaks rules or a disapproval with a message. Since a theoretical "meh" option would probably apply quite frequently, having it under the drop-down just makes it annoying to use, but adding even more buttons would clutter the UI. Really, it's probably quite some effort just to basically just appease people misinterpreting "disinterest" and to add granularity where it isn't really needed. As such I don't really see it worthwhile.

A meh button could also end up resulting in less posts being approved. post #8365831 might be well-drawn, but in terms of composition and content, it's not really anything special. Adding a button that approvers can press in these cases instead of approving the post is just asking for trouble.

AngryZapdos said:

A meh button could also end up resulting in less posts being approved. post #8365831 might be well-drawn, but in terms of composition and content, it's not really anything special. Adding a button that approvers can press in these cases instead of approving the post is just asking for trouble.

I don't think a meh button is the answer, as I mean, what would that in reality even end up doing? Do you get the post not deleted but given a notice that is like "yeah we approved it but this really isn't all that". Like, okay, that's just kicking the can down the road really.

If approvers are going to keep their quite overall restrictive standards up, then the best thing they can do is be more open to discussion when a post is initially deleted or, the much more needed part in my opinion, the post is appealed and rejected.

A simple disapproval and flag for deletion at first for an uploader can be disheartening, but that's totally fine so long as an appeal can maybe see what the reason for this was.

But to bring this back around, again this would not really improve things with a "meh" button. How "meh" something is should be determined by the overall userbase of Danbooru when they favourite/upvote something or when they downvote.