Posted under General
Unofficial black lists and inconsistent approvals are big problem. Ive seen really really dedicated janitors though, some of which approve things everyday so its not like someone of the ones we have here are lacking. I suggest getting a more diverse and varied set of janitors.
スラッシュ said:
We've always had falloff and those people need to be replaced. We could even cull ones that have been inactive for a long time. People will "end up lazy" if they have other stuff to do or just become disinterested (it's quite a lot of work actually, I think a lot of eager janitors underestimate it and become overwhelmed).Anyway, I don't see a very significant change in the mod queue, in terms of how many hides an image gets (since the Dashboard was introduced, which I think doesn't make use of the "hide in mod queue" function?). If Touhou-approvals really are an issue, we can recruit based on that, but I don't know if it's actually true.
There's definitely some falloff occurring lately. Several of the more influential janitors have been significantly less present, but not to the point you could call them inactive.
The actual impact is hard to tell though, as other janitors apparently manage to compensate for them to some degree.
Since the last demotions for inactivity last summer, only a couple people have disappeared actually.
Some janitors did drop a lot in activity, falling down to a handful approvals per week, yet a few others were reckoned full-fledged janitors with such numbers and never went higher, so go figure.
I suppose albert sometimes struggles to find janitors willing to approve in meaningful volumes.
スラッシュ said:
Maybe we need deletion appeal thread special OPS? :D
I wish we had.
While I'm not entirely sure it's necessary, adding some new Janitors might not be a bad idea. Before it is done though, I must agree that culling the old, inactive ones should be priority. Otherwise the overinflated number of people who can approve posts is just going to get higher and higher and these types of threads are going to continue to show up on a monthly basis. The number 50 might sound good to keep the masses at bay, but anyone who browses the site with any sort of frequency knows that there's no way in hell that number is accurate.
Looking at the images set to expire tonight, most of them have about 10 hides, and at most 13 hides. That's a pretty far cry from 50. Even if you include the few Janitors and Mods that have made it clear they don't use the queue/hide system like Fencedude and Hazuki, you'd still be lucky if there was even half that many active. I wouldn't be surprised if on most days the number doesn't exceed 20.
With all that said though, I'm still not convinced adding more Janitors is going to solve anything. While obviously not perfect, I really feel the current staff does about as good a job can be expected with keeping images approved in both a timely manner and keeping quality control high. Comics seem to be the biggest concern here, so hopefully the new thread at forum #63240 helps alleviate that.
スラッシュ is also right that people severely underestimate how much work being a Janitor really is. It's mostly a thankless job, we don't gain anything for it, and we certainly aren't paid for it. It's done purely out of love for the site. Once people come aboard and realize just how much time and energy has to be spent on it, they quickly tire out because it starts to feel more like work than anything else, and this leads to the incredibly high burn-out rate the position has.
ultima said:
スラッシュ is also right that people severely underestimate how much work being a Janitor really is. It's mostly a thankless job, we don't gain anything for it, and we certainly aren't paid for it. It's done purely out of love for the site. Once people come aboard and realize just how much time and energy has to be spent on it, they quickly tire out because it starts to feel more like work than anything else
Wouldn't you be happy to have more teammates helping to make the job less time consuming then?
I don't see why complaints would be related to the number of janitor level users.
ultima said:
and this leads to the incredibly high burn-out rate the position has.
Actually when I look at the overall activity only a few janitors did burn-out, while most of them are still hanging on.
It gets worse for the older janitors, maybe because they never agreed to handle the volume of uploads we have now.
if handling the staff is the issue right now, simply ask all janitors their thoughts.
Ask if they wish to continue to be janitors or not. If they decide they don't want to be a janitor anymore, they can become contributors unless they wish to leave the site all together.
If they want to continue, cool. Just make it obvious that theres no pressure involved but if they do want to leave or are going to be away for a while, just give a heads up.
assuming this stuff isn't already happen. i have no idea how the inner working of this site goes.
I remember back when I started as a janitor that there was a warning that janitors were expected to be active (approve posts) at least once every two weeks, and if they didn't they would be contacted.
I'm not sure if that ever was enforced though, since I try to keep relatively active.
Katajanmarja said:
Assuming that the page counts are correct (no bugs), the deletion rate for Touhou pics is around 5,5% (548 / 9862). Your point is still valid, you just mistakenly replaced the number of Touhou pages total with the number of Touhou posts deleted total.
Oops! Well, by random chance it seems that the numbers are close enough that it doesn't change my result significantly.
The job doesn't become less time consuming with more Janitors, UNLESS we start doing a segmented moderation queue (like policemen walking a beat, basically).
Since we all have to go through the entire queue, and the policy is to leave bad images for others to judge, and the vast majority of the images are bad, it will always be approximately the same amount of work regardless of how many people do it.
In the end, about a dozen people looking at a picture before it gets timed out is, in my opinion, enough. I don't remember there ever being a time where 20+ hides on the moderation queue was normal. So whether we have 50 people who could potential moderate images or not, the truth is we have always had at most about a dozen active moderators as far back as it was possible to see the numbers. Based on that (and based on the few good images in the "old" part of the mod queue), I say we've got enough Janitors.
スラッシュ said:
the vast majority of the images are bad
You're being pretty pessimistic here I believe. 3/4 of the posts submitted to moderation end up approved, so you'd have to be either late or very selective to really think this.
In the end, about a dozen people looking at a picture before it gets timed out is, in my opinion, enough.
You're probably going to disagree with what I'll say next, but I think the large discrepancies between each janitor's quality standards make this unreliable.
Danbooru's staff approves 8,000 posts per month, i.e. 13 pages of uploads on a daily basis. That's freaking huge, and I'm aware it has to make the time window to review each upload pretty small.
As I said earlier, most of the staff has little to no impact on this number, either because they're barely active, or because they're active but rarely approve anything they review.
Thus plenty of posts can end up with a lot of hides until one of the core approvers enters and goes katamari over everything.
When several fastidious approvers happen to be away at the same time, the core approvers, having lower standards, will mostly catch up.
When the same happens with core approvers, you end up with a thread like this.
Whether you see this as an issue depends where your standards are.
Some fastidious approvers probably think the core team approves way too much crap, and in the end whether anyone is right is all up to albert.
I think the current situation is fragile and the core team needs more backup, and the easiest solution to this would be to have other janitors trying to lower their standards a little.
Bluntly, NWF_Renim is currently owning 30% of this month's approvals all by himself (1360 posts) because darkship, rantuyetmai and Evangeline A.K. McDowell have all been mostly away during the last weeks.
Situations like this don't look fine at all to me.
Updated
3/4th?! Are you sure you're not adding the contributor uploads? Last time I checked we approved about 10%. (Where do we get statistics like that? I can't find anything on Danbooru anymore)
I don't actually personally browse Danbooru much, so it's hard for me to judge whether standards are too low. Too high would be noticeable immediately, since it would mean having a lot of good images in the top of the moderation queue, which isn't happening.
But like you point out, you only need one person breaking the pattern to solve that. We could have 50 active Janitors that all have super-high standards, and one NWF_Renim, and the end result would be the exact same as it is now.
I'm only judging it from the side that I can, which is observing the moderation queue, which looks healthy and not significantly different from months/years past (note that when the number of moderators was dropping and we introduced the Janitor system, the number of hides on the mod queue was a lot lower, and I also had to improve a great deal more images per pass).
Also, if NWF "scoops up" all the good images quickly, he'll of course have the vast majority of approves--that's the nature of the system. That's not a bad thing (or a good thing), that's just the nature of our moderation system. If you assume that stuff that NWF leaves behind is of fairly low quality on average, the chances are good that nobody else will approve that either. I only do the queue once per 3 days, and sometimes there's almost nothing for me to approve (lots to ignore though).
EDIT: All this is not to say that more Janitors are a bad idea. New Janitors, provided they're good, are always welcome in my opinion. I just wouldn't expect a huge change.
スラッシュ said:
3/4th?! Are you sure you're not adding the contributor uploads? Last time I checked we approved about 10%. (Where do we get statistics like that? I can't find anything on Danbooru anymore)
Did that all manually from approver:X date:Y..Z tag searches. I don't know if there's an easier way (available to a non-mod at least).
I stack up counts from every users with approval powers at a given time and compare the total with the number of posts uploaded and deleted during that frame.
Tbh I've been surprised as well that the ratio was this high, but I don't see what I could have done wrong.
For example, last month's approvals add up to 344 pages (a few more now with stuff getting undeleted afterwards).
% pages approved / pages reviewed = 344 / 437 = 79% (ranges 70-88% over the past months)
Overall, approvers review 50% of danbooru's uploads, the other 50% being auto-approved.
After queued posts have been moderated, they make up 44% of the active posts.
I don't know where your 10% would come from.
(Outright posting of a table would be kind of uncalled for I guess, so pardon me for throwing numbers.)
スラッシュ said:
[rest of the post]
I hear you very well on everything.
Approvers who scan the mod queue more frequently naturally find more interesting stuff, which in turn can make others' activity look lower than it actually is.
So you have people with around the same standards than the top approvers who tend to get overshadowed, and you also have people with definitely higher standards for which top approvers make little difference.
You can tell the latter ones apart because they have overall higher quality approvals, usually approve posts very quickly after they were uploaded (or not at all), and consistently appear in the very first names when favoriting new posts.
The first category of these people could somewhat support top approvers going missing (like it's currently happening), but the second couldn't at all.
With a system where people with lower standards hold more power, when your stardards are higher what's your contribution as a janitor at the end of the day?
As I said in my previous post, where the bar should be set is necessarily subjective.
My personal stance is that it's rather the bottom approvers being too strict than the top approvers being too lax, which therefore makes me wish the bottom approvers would lower the bar to cover for casual activy drops from the top approvers.
I want to award a rec to NWF_Renim for consistently handling 10-20% of danbooru's approvals alone over the past year, but other approvers would surely find this to be utterly wrong.
I can't really say myself who does the best job, I just know he does a lot, and I believe separating the wheat from the chaff is a harder task than simply picking top class material like several do.
(And welcome to kyoh_.)
Updated
I don't think the current moderation system is scalable.
The more popular this site gets, the more janitors it will need. And vetting janitors is hard. All you need is one bad apple and they completely invalidate the point of the moderation system by letting bad art in. Danbooru's moderation system is somewhat uncommon, but I'm starting to feel that it's uncommon for a reason.
I find myself increasingly relying on order:rank and the popular pages and ignoring the main listing completely. I personally would have no qualms with abandoning moderation completely and just using per-user limits to prevent dumping.
Otherwise the only option I see is finding someone who can dedicate the time to aggressively find, promote, and filter janitors. Unfortunately I am not this person. If someone wants to provide me a list of candidate janitors I'd be happy to give them a trial.
albert said:
All you need is one bad apple and they completely invalidate the point of the moderation system by letting bad art in.
also applies to contributors. (~300)
albert said:
If someone wants to provide me a list of candidate janitors I'd be happy to give them a trial.
the contributors have already passed a selection.
if a contributor upload quality images, then it should be able to approve quality posts.
albert said: I find myself increasingly relying on order:rank and the popular pages and ignoring the main listing completely. I personally would have no qualms with abandoning moderation completely and just using per-user limits to prevent dumping.
Moderation isn't as scalable as we'd like but it's much better than no moderation. Missing some good art is better than letting in a huge amount of bad art. You'd just shift the moderation burden to deleting the crappy images, which is going to be a lot more contentious and panty-bunching than handling appeals.
albert said:
I personally would have no qualms with abandoning moderation completely and just using per-user limits to prevent dumping.
I certainly hope you don't ever seriously make a move in this direction. The fact that there is moderation, that there are standards to be upheld, is what makes this site worthwhile. I could spend hours wading through crap art with half-assed tags on Pixiv or Deviantart, but I don't, because I'd rather come to Danbooru for good art, with relatively well-considered and consistent tagging practice. Ditch moderation, and we lose that.
I think of it this way. You already see unapproved posts for the past three days, so the moderation really only matters for posts uploaded before then. At this point what you want is art that was good enough to pass the binary decision of approval/rejection. I think order:rank is good enough to give you the same thing. Maybe we need to tweak the algorithm (normalizing for rating for example).
Well, I'm not seriously thinking of changing it. But I admit that I'm lazy and constantly updating the janitor list gets tiresome. I would love to hear ideas for improving this process and automating as much of it as possible.
Alright, only because you asked will I suggest this queue tweak I've been wanting to see for a while.
Editable filters under the search field, 5 would be a reasonable number I think. These won't actually be filters but shortcuts to queries on the queue but if I was able to one-click search things would help. Being able to skim through posts that we are less likely to approve or draw attention to posts we are more likely to approve, that appear on a regular basis. This would help make the whole process of moderation less daunting to a newcomer as well, I would imagine.
