Danbooru

Uploader and Approver Complaints on Low Quality Images

Posted under General

Type-kun said:

I think it would actually help a great deal to know that your upload was rejected by several approvers rather than wonder if it was simply overlooked...

Do we have topic #7934 for that?
And I think people should use topic #8984 to discuss why a certain post should be deleted.

I do wonder whether there's some kind of grandfather clause type deal here. Kikimaru got booted from contributor incredibly quickly when he got promoted last year, yet Not_one_of_us is approving images of the same quality than Kikimaru's worst and has been for a long time now.

Are we just accepting him as Janitor because he's been here from the start?

OOZ662 said:

Since you seem to like making arbitrary striking real-life comparisons, the average malignant tumor makes up roughly what percentage of body mass and cell count again? Tha'd be about as relevant.

A malignant tumor kills the whole body by using up nutrients, producing toxins and crushing/replacing healthy tissue. That's a physical fact. Are the 7% of posts brought here by The Dark One somehow physically corrupting and blotting out all the good posts? Or is it a matter of perception?

Lunatic6 said:

Do we have topic #7934 for that?

It says "post here if your uploads keep getting deleted". Additionally, there's rarely any actual response from approvers, because even the OP says it's voluntary.

Lunatic6 said:

And I think people should use topic #8984 to discuss why a certain post should be deleted.

Well, ideally, flag system should take care of that. Maybe it's due some improvement as well.

The gist of my reaction to all this is that I'm fine if the overall quality of the site goes down. Instead of trying to control what comes in it's easier to control what to find.

This is the direction the site has been going in as more people join. Deleted posts are visible. Upload limits haven't changed in months. Trying to figure out who to ban and who to throttle just causes a bunch of drama as this thread shows. We just don't have the administrative resources to figure this stuff out.

And from my daily usage of Danbooru, it's still nowhere near as bad as going on Pixiv and trying to find the lone 50+ favorited drawing in a popular tag. Once you start using score filters obviously it's much better.

Requiring more mods to approve a post just makes it that much less likely that a post will get approved. Don't get fixated on deletion being the lone arbiter of whether or not you see a post. You could rely on score instead.

I can change the upload limit formula, but my past attempts at changing this have all faced vehement opposition. If you want to suggest alternative formulas I'm all ears.

I'd appreciate it if this topic stops being about specific users and focuses instead on solutions.

albert said:

The gist of my reaction to all this is that I'm fine if the overall quality of the site goes down.

I really hope no one's going to use this statement to justify awful quality uploads in the nearest future. To be frank, I'd rather not see the quality drop further, current threshold seems just fine.

Type-kun said:

What I'm trying to say here is that approval system perhaps lacks some kind of feedback from approvers to uploader, and means to exchange opinions between approvers. I think it would actually help a great deal to know that your upload was rejected by several approvers rather than wonder if it was simply overlooked. Additionally, if an approver thinks the post is bad and rejects it (ideally, commenting what's wrong with it), it could serve as a signal for others to double-check it before approving or rejecting as well, which could in turn resolve most shitstorms before they even start. That doesn't really solve contributor problem, but at least it's something.

Thoughts? Approval system is pretty trivial and old compared to the rest of the site, maybe it's due some improvements?

I think the mod queue has some kind of 'disapprovals' system where each individual janitor can disapprove a post in order to hide it from their own view on the mod queue. Maybe we can just make these disapprovals visible in the pending notification or something? That would let uploaders know how many janitors saw their upload and thought "not good enough". (It seems fellow janitors can already see this when they're on the mod queue, it shows the number of disapprovals each post has. Not visible on the post's show page though.)

However, the disapprovals system doesn't currently have comments where the janitor can say why they rejected it. Perhaps we can add a comment field to the table for this.

Toks said:

It seems fellow janitors can already see this when they're on the mod queue, it shows the number of disapprovals each post has.

Oh, it is already? Testbooru was wiped out, and it'd be too much work to test. Well, that makes things a bit worse than I thought.

Maybe we can just make these disapprovals visible in the pending notification or something?

Only to uploader and janitors+, if possible? Though I'm not sure if it's wrong or not to show this info to others.

Apollyon said:

I'm sure a lot of you think Hillside Moose is being harsh here.

I, for one, believe that post of his was one of the sanest things said in this topic.

Toks said:

I think the mod queue has some kind of 'disapprovals' system where each individual janitor can disapprove a post in order to hide it from their own view on the mod queue. Maybe we can just make these disapprovals visible in the pending notification or something? That would let uploaders know how many janitors saw their upload and thought "not good enough". (It seems fellow janitors can already see this when they're on the mod queue, it shows the number of disapprovals each post has. Not visible on the post's show page though.)

However, the disapprovals system doesn't currently have comments where the janitor can say why they rejected it. Perhaps we can add a comment field to the table for this.

Sounds like a plan.

Updated

On comments on why I didn't do anything, one, I started this thread on behalf of another, and two, I honestly wasn't really aware I could promote/demote up to the rank below me. When I was promoted to mod, the reason behind it was to help fill a specific role, and while I've done other roles as well, policing other moderation members was not within the scope of things I considered to be within my role or my authority unless it was extreme (to the degree of like mass uploading or approving pornographic photos or the like). I don't play a role in selecting moderation members, and so it seemed obvious that I didn't have a role in policing them unless emergency circumstance required it.

Toks said:

However, the disapprovals system doesn't currently have comments where the janitor can say why they rejected it. Perhaps we can add a comment field to the table for this.

An ability to comment on why something wasn't approved imo would be nice, but that also does add a lot of additional time per upload that moderators may simply not have. If something like this was to be viable, the load of images would need to be reduced in some manner to give them more time to be able to make use of a feature like that or else the feature would predominately either go unused or it would reduce the number of images a mod may go over.

I'm starting to think an automated approval system to aid moderators based on score would be a good thing, if even to reduce a small amount of images (that would surely get approved anyway). Set the approval to a high enough score (say something around a score of 40 and over) and you'll weed out really any problems (last image deleted with a score of 40 or over was from 12 months ago and after that it from 5 years). Can also have the image linger in the mod queue to to be contested before the 3 days are up if you want by moderators.

An auto-flagging system based on score would probably also be good, in general you don't see something get a lot of negatives scoring unless the image quality is bad in someway.

NWF_Renim said:

An auto-flagging system based on score would probably also be good, in general you don't see something get a lot of negatives scoring unless the image quality is bad in someway.

If a post score can get low enough to trigger some arbitrary threshold, surely one of those voters would have flagged it by then...

Toks said:

I think the mod queue has some kind of 'disapprovals' system where each individual janitor can disapprove a post in order to hide it from their own view on the mod queue. Maybe we can just make these disapprovals visible in the pending notification or something? That would let uploaders know how many janitors saw their upload and thought "not good enough". (It seems fellow janitors can already see this when they're on the mod queue, it shows the number of disapprovals each post has. Not visible on the post's show page though.)

However, the disapprovals system doesn't currently have comments where the janitor can say why they rejected it. Perhaps we can add a comment field to the table for this.

Just because a post doesn't fall under my tastes doesn't mean it's a bad post. Also, not everyone uses the mod queue, some moderate by searching status:pending and finding images they want to approve. Currently it looks like 4-6 moderators use the queue (or at least the hide feature) and I can't say how actively they do so.

The notes thing I've considered before but if it's not restricted to mod team until a post is deleted and hidden which person said what after deletion it'll lead to petty appeals left and right.

NWF_Renim said:

An auto-flagging system based on score would probably also be good, in general you don't see something get a lot of negatives scoring unless the image quality is bad in someway.

I've downvoted posts because I don't believe it's content belongs here, not because the art is bad. I highly doubt I'm the only one.

albert said:

And from my daily usage of Danbooru, it's still nowhere near as bad as going on Pixiv and trying to find the lone 50+ favorited drawing in a popular tag. Once you start using score filters obviously it's much better.

Requiring more mods to approve a post just makes it that much less likely that a post will get approved. Don't get fixated on deletion being the lone arbiter of whether or not you see a post. You could rely on score instead.

Isn't that largely the same as saying that Danbooru should just be Gelbooru, but with a score filter?

If that's the argument, what's the point in having janitors or deletions at all? This seems more like a capitulation than anything.

Besides which, score filters are a largely awful way to find the stuff worth reading on this site. Most decent long-running doujins or webcomics don't have good scores (many get 0 because nobody bothers to upvote each individual panel of a comic) for any individual post. For that matter, this site has a well-known bias for certain topics (like, say, Touhou,) that would skew scoring of just about anything else based purely upon obscurity. Score also assumes everyone has the same taste, and as everyone in this thread is ready to quickly agree, we clearly don't, and sloppy art with ridiculous Y-cup breasts constantly gets upvotes (and evades flags because "it's supposed to look this awful") from the people who very clearly have that fetish, while there isn't any such automatic upvoting for things not falling into a fetish, even if it is good artwork.

NWF_Renim said:

An ability to comment on why something wasn't approved imo would be nice, but that also does add a lot of additional time per upload that moderators may simply not have. If something like this was to be viable, the load of images would need to be reduced in some manner to give them more time to be able to make use of a feature like that or else the feature would predominately either go unused or it would reduce the number of images a mod may go over.

Are there any typical reasons why the upload would be rejected? Failed anatomy, bad quality, non-anime-related stuff, phases of the moon, etc - some of the reasons could be predefined as links or buttons, with ability to write a custom one. It seems there's already a lot of space taken per post, two more lines can fit in fine.

I'm starting to think an automated approval system to aid moderators based on score would be a good thing, if even to reduce a small amount of images (that would surely get approved anyway). Set the approval to a high enough score (say something around a score of 40) and you'll weed out really any problems (last image deleted with a score of 40 was from 12 months ago and after that it from 5 years). Can also have the image linger in the mod queue to to be contested before the 3 days are up if you want by moderators.

Hm, are there enough posts that get to +40 in three days?

Log said:

Just because a post doesn't fall under my tastes doesn't mean it's a bad post.

Then, perhaps, "I disapprove" and "Hide this from my queue, it's not bad but not my thing either" should be separated? Actually, disapprovals gain much more meaning this way.

Log said:

Also, not everyone uses the mod queue, some moderate by searching status:pending and finding images they want to approve.

Well, for janitors+ some of the queue control elements can be embedded into the post page, if we all come to agreement on their placement and when Toks or Albert will have time. Approve | hide are already inside the pending line, after all.

As for the queue, there's not much feedback from the approvers on the things that could be improved. That's a common problem for any old system with few users - everyone's already ignoring the bad things, found their workarounds or got used to it. It's also hard for builders to suggest something without actually seeing it at work - test base doesn't provide the necessary volume.

The notes thing I've considered before but if it's not restricted to mod team until a post is deleted and hidden which person said what after deletion it'll lead to petty appeals left and right.

Ability to leave "status comments" should be Janitor+ only, that's a given. As for comments, perhaps the disapproval count should be visible to anyone, but the comments and their authors only to uploader and fellow janitors? Sounds like a plan to me.

Log said:

The notes thing I've considered before but if it's not restricted to mod team until a post is deleted and hidden which person said what after deletion it'll lead to petty appeals left and right.

Posts can't be appealed while they're still pending, so the user will need to wait until it's deleted to appeal it anyway.

The names of the disapprovers may as well be hidden since I don't think knowing it would be useful.

RaisingK said:

If a post score can get low enough to trigger some arbitrary threshold, surely one of those voters would have flagged it by then...

Well I'd consider it kind of a free flagging, since I don't expect everyone to attempt to flag it for deletion.

Also there have been plenty of cases of people jumping on a single initial flag bandwagon, which does waste their chance of flagging the image later if it gets reapproved, doesn't it? If that's still the case, it'd be better to have some form of ability to comment on a flag without having to also flag the image. At minimum I do think it's worthwhile to be able to post a comment stating if a flag reason is bad... even if the image isn't going to get reapproved.

Log said:

I've downvoted posts because I don't believe it's content belongs here, not because the art is bad. I highly doubt I'm the only one.

Well I think it still depends on the score used to kick in an auto-flagging. Even if it isn't simply about quality, I'd say there is a high correlation between negative scores and not getting through the mod queue at all. Also it's just a flag, which could be override by a reapproval.

Type-kun said:

Hm, are there enough posts that get to +40 in three days?

Was in a hurry when I checked that, but yes you're right 40+ would be rather high, as of right now at least only one example of an image within 3 days that has a 40+ rating. 31 posts that have a 25 or more score in with the cut off period. Though I guess it might not be reasonable as the score would need to be high enough to be a filter, but fast enough that a mod wouldn't already have hit the approval button.

NWF_Renim said:

...say something around a score of 40 and over...

Type-kun said:

Hm, are there enough posts that get to +40 in three days?

Perhaps something a bit better and more useful would be a score of 10-20+, or something around that area. An image with a quality that would get a +40 score would most likely be approved within the first couple of hours anyways, saving no time or effort for anybody.

I just did a random sampling from the images on June 1st of this year, with a total of 988 images approved that day:

  • Only 27 or ~2.7% were approved through the moderation queue with a 10+ score
  • Only 9 or ~0.9% were approved through the moderation queue with a 15+ score
  • Only 5 or ~0.5% were approved through the moderation queue with a 20+ score

Please keep in mind, that all of those numbers I gave are after a week. So after 3 days in the moderation queue, perhaps even less would have made the cutoff.

To be fair, on the con side of things, during the entire year of 2014 with a total of 300,000 images posted:

  • There were 207 deleted images with a 10+ score
  • There were 30 deleted images with a 15+ score
  • There were 11 deleted images with a 20+ score

If I were to extend the June 1st numbers I used earlier, than:

  • 9855 images would be automatically approved with a 10+ score
  • 3285 images would be automatically approved with a 15+ score
  • 1825 images would be automatically approved with a 20+ score

Correlating those two sets of numbers together:

  • 207/9855 or 2.1% false acceptance rate with a 10+ score
  • 30/3285 or 0.9% false acceptance rate with a 15+ score
  • 11/1825 or 0.6% false acceptance rate with a 20+ score

Of course, I can't quantify usefulness without more data, but it's pretty apparent that as the score threshold increases, the usefulness of such a feature would decrease.

This is all an engineering tradeoff. The usefulness is directly related to the false acceptance. The question is, how many false hits is acceptable. I'd be fine with the 10+ threshold, as that's only ~200 false hits out of ~300,000 total images per year. Everyone has a different level of acceptance though.

To sum up, I'm all for an automatic approval process, but please make it meaningful and useful, otherwise, you're just wasting the coder's time for whoever would implement such a feature, as it might end up saving no time or effort whatsoever.

albert said:

The gist of my reaction to all this is that I'm fine if the overall quality of the site goes down. Instead of trying to control what comes in it's easier to control what to find.

I think those would be my feelings as well, hence why I'm trying to focus my work on tagging, wikis/Pixiv links & artist creation.

NWSiaCB said:

For that matter, this site has a well-known bias for certain topics (like, say, Touhou,) that would skew scoring of just about anything else based purely upon obscurity.

This. I see plenty of okay to mediocre Touhou images become top-scoring merely on the basis of being Touhou, when compared to original tags or obscure copyrights.