It looks like the community wants to prevent a small handful of users from overtaking a given category. That’s presumably why there is a guideline against bumping posts too frequently:
We allow “bumping” your post once per week.
But there’s currently no guidance on creating new posts. At one point a few minutes ago, five of the six most recent posts in the Art category were all by a single user. It’s probably not desirable for one person’s content to push everyone else’s down like that. Maybe we should limit topic creations to one-per-day per-category, or a similar guideline?
I think that is a very good thing to discuss, Given that art posts aren’t limited to one image per topic (Unlike platforms like FA which I think a lot of people are used to), I think it’s reasonable to ask that there is a delay between posts in specific categories, like art, commissions, animations, 3d renders and the like. The time could be of a few hours maybe to encourage people to post several images at once instead of one per topic created. Though if they’d prefer to stagger posts the option is there as well.
Considering we’re in an early starting phase my current community focus is obtaining more content for people to watch and use the site for. Given this I’m currently a little hesitant to limit how much content people can upload as I’m afraid it will stagger the willingness of for example artists to upload their catalogue or portfolios. However we do have normal ratelimits built into the site that prevent complete spam, but even 1 post per 10 minutes would feel spammy, because at this scale with the forum that would still flood things. It’s definitely a topic worth discussing then, so I will take it up with the team and we’ll come back here at some point.
Yeahhh no shade to artists who have a huge catalogue of stuff to share, but it’s like I just sent my recent commission for February and it’s already pushed way down TwT
Rest assured we definitely want to do something. There’s just a lot of ways to go about it, like:
Using rules to moderate how often people post, or how they can post.
Making subcategories to split off this popular category into smaller, less fast paced ones.
Removing the masonry-like design and taking on a more traditional forum row-based design that shows more posts at once in a better chronological order.
And many other options.
Right now I’m not sure which (or a combination of) is the best solution for the direction we want to take. If you have any other ideas as well I’d love to hear and we’ll mix them in with our considerations.
Hmm. I think the biggest thing would just be establishing clear norms, particularly since lots of folks aren’t used to a forum-style interface. If someone approaches this with the mindset of a gallery site, or a personal timeline on social media, it’s tempting to start out by making a new post for each picture.
Of course, it’s encouraged to make new posts to share exciting new art! But like any forum, it’d probably be frowned upon if you made 10 new threads in an afternoon.
I think having a pinned post in Art explaining the mindset of a forum, with just a couple examples of encouraged behaviour and a couple examples of discouraged behaviour, would head off 99% of problems at the start.
I think some people are still in the art gallery mindset when it comes to uploading things, where you’d want multiple posts for visibility. That not only clogs forums, but kind of defeats the purpose of them as well, as you can’t really have discussions on the many one-note posts.
Since we can upload multiple pictures in one post, I find that usually better overall in art dumping, since either I can go “look at my latest stuff!”, or “check out all these pieces and the themes”.
I’m not sure if this needs a strict ruling as this is an etiquete issue, but yeah, looking at Art as well, there’s a lot of one-note posts where there wouldn’t be able to be a lot of discussion.
I think guidelines on “how to post” would be good. I’m willing to bet a lot of the audience is unfamiliar (or just rusty) with using a forum and may not be familiar with the culture around how the medium works. They may just need to be told that this isn’t discord.
I understand there’s already a guidelines page, but I mean something that isn’t trying to explain the rules of the community and more of like “here’s how you use a forum”
This could be a good avenue for a “beginner’s guide” as well. There’s a lot of buttons and features on the platform that may not be intuitive to new folks. I still don’t know what the raffle leaderboard is all about, and that is in my shortcuts for some reason haha
I, for one, love the masonry like design! It’s very classy looking. I think it would remove something if it moved to a threaded view where you needed to open a thread to see the art. Though, fair go if the threaded design were used for categories with less visual emphasis (maybe for something like casual or events)
Other platforms, like itaku, have mandatory minimum tags on a post before they let it get posted up. Maybe something like that could be useful? That way, people can filter out images they aren’t interested in.
I’m seeing some good points being raised here. I think ultimately we will do a combination of such. Creating a “How to make good posts” sort of thread was already on my to-do list and this adds some good things to include in there.
I also like the idea of minimum tag requirements, I will probably employ that since I think content tagging is extremely important for well searchable forums.
I am still thinking of if the masonry layout is the right way to go. The main thing that bothers me with it is that you can’t see that much content at once, and that it’s not clear what the chronological order of them is. It also feels distinctly not “forum-y”. We were playing with ideas and a mix can be done, like this where it shows images while still being a list. Can potentially address the idea someone had of showing multiple images at once, or a count of how many more there are.
If we wanna go with the “this is a forum” idea and suggest people make art collections instead of individual posts, then I think accompanying it with this more list-based design supports that direction since the masonry idea feels more like an art gallery approach.
Okay, just going to put this out there as someone largely responsible for the inciting incident because I see a lot of people talking about an art gallery mindset and wanting visibility and whatnot.
At least in my case, I did not upload the posts in the way I did to get extra visibility or anything like that. Aside from a few incidents of stuff just not being grouped together when I went back looking for it, the sole motivation I had for not uploading the things I did in one post is that I didn’t want to group together a bunch of images with largely unrelated themes or tags.
I find it makes it difficult to find things both because you will click on a post with a tag you’re interested in only to find one out of many images has what you were looking for, or vice versa that people will end up avoiding posts over tags that in reality applied to maybe one image out of several in that post. I have been personally frustrated by browsing sites where I was on the receiving end of those issues in the past.
That’s also a fear I have, finding specific artpiece things gets harder. But if our goal is not to be an art gallery that might not be the worst sacrifice. It depends, personally I believe if we employ some rules, better tagging, subcategories and have a better chronological list format, all of it together amounts to doing the same thing that demanding people group art would do.
And aside from that, don’t worry @Risk, you’re all good for posting that.
My goal was not to shame anyone, but just to signpost something which could become a sizable (heh) issue if it starts happening regularly.
I think it’s okay if specific art pieces are in threads that make them a bit less findable/searchable. There are already loads of sites which enforce one picture per post (e621, FurAffinity, SoFurry, and many more), and I would always be happy to check out a forum user’s off-site gallery to see a well-organised catalogue of their art. :3
EDIT: And similarly, I think it’s okay if a thread has multiple artworks, only one of which I might be interested in. That happens too, and it’s fine. As long as any contentious content is in the post’s tags, no one should be surprised to see kinks they don’t expect, so long as they look at the tags.
As a space primarily focused on socialising and discussion, a forum doesn’t need to worry about those concerns.
Yeah, I wasn’t feeling shamed by anyone particularly. I just wanted to make sure that view point was understood going forward so that it could be taken into account for whatever solutions are implemented going forward.
Out of curiousity, is there any setting that allows a user to apply tags to a specific post in a thread, rather than a thread at large? If there is, that can mitigate this concern a little bit.
I think when it comes to what we are, the answer is a forum so that’s what we cater to.
But it still bothers me if the general rule is to make big piles of art in posts. It’s gonna be harder to tag them, to find them and to look at them. And even if that is not our main point, it is still a shame.
I think the best is a middle ground, by doing a few things:
We can prevent the spam by implementing a ratelimit, both in software and in our guidelines, that dictates how often you may post in which categories. If artists want to one-by-one upload their entire catalogue they can, it will just take a bit.
A “Posting Best Practises” thread we’re making will include a text that mentions we prefer it if similar art is grouped together. It’s not a rule or an enforcement but just a method we make clear to users so that they are encouraged to post less when it comes to a bunch of art that is similar anyway.
Additionally to clear up the visual clutter and the way posts quickly get lost we’re looking at improving the theme as well, by making a more list-based chronological forum style the default on categories, and making the masonry an optional choice.
I think this will reduce the spam a lot at least for a long while. It may still happen that artists abuse the posting limit to the max causing stuff to shift a bit, but I think those situations will be rare with the above mentioned measures and that punishing that is kind of negative and sad anyway.
I also think the list-based chronological style would also reinforce our forum nature more, and put less emphasis on the “art gallery” feel that you currently get with the masonry. If you want to try out this style, it’s currently available as an experimental theme you can enable in Profile Settings > Interface > Theme. It does not yet contain the option to toggle into the masonry, but it will showcase you the regular list style. Keep in mind it’s experimental and may have some problems elsewhere, we may also still tweak or improve the list style.
