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When we launched the dakka gallery in December 08, there were thousands and thousands of images suddenly pulled in from across the site. We spent a lot of time approving each image and are still categorising them to this day. Now we need the help of dakka's readership. Each image in the gallery needs 5 votes before it will get score attributed to it, but the moderation team can only accomplish so much, and we still need about 35000 votes. Here is an automatically updating graphic of the number of votes that we have so far:



The gallery is still under heavy development as we continue to tweak it into the best miniature gallery anywhere on earth. For now however, we are hitting a bit of a roadblock in that we still have many thousands of images with no scores. Once we get scores on the vast majority of images we will be able to do great things to help you waste your workday away, but until then we are a bit limited in our choices.

We need you to vote on as many images as you can tolerate. If you could handle just 10 votes per day then that would make a massive, massive dent in what is left to do. To vote, simply go to an image and then click on the paintjob and coolness ratings on the left hand side to vote. If you are a user who has more than 100 posts, or are a DCM user, then you are free to use the turbovoter application, which I'll post about in this thread in a second. You can see if you are allowed to use it by going to the Gallery Home Page and scrolling to the bottom - there should be a turbovoter link there if you are allowed to use it.

As you will notice when voting, there will be a lot of WIP images, battle report images and general vague/boring images that are often displayed in annoyingly large batches. While this is something that we are working on removing, it will be helped automatically as more people vote. I've tweaked the site to enable more random display which should also cut down on the batching quite a bit too.

So please, try to get 10 votes in each time you visit Dakka, and we'll be able to make the gallery into something truly amazing. 10 votes will show as 0.01 on the graph above, so you'll be able to see the difference you make add up quickly. You dont even need to be registered to vote, just hope on over to the gallery and get started

To use the turbovoter (if you are allowed), go to the gallery home page (click gallery in the top right of any page), then scroll to the very bottom. There are two options - the first link will load it in a new window, the second link will open it in your current browser window, optimised for use on a phone if you are so inclined.

The turbovoter allows very rapid voting from a tiny window with an innocent label, the intention being you can have it open in the background then when you are bored waiting for things to compile or render or have a boring phone call, you can click through and entertain yourself. It is tested in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Be warned though, it does seem to be quite horribly addictive.

Here is the hint text from the bottom of the the turbovoter window so that you can read it more clearly as it is very small in the window:

Keyboard Voting: Type a number from 0 to 9 to rate the paintjob, or press A to give it a 10. Do the same again for the coolness rating and then the next image will load. Enter the wrong number? Press C to reset the votes. If you dont want to vote on this image, type X to skip to the next image, or click on the image. Keyboard voting will not work if you have autosearch-on-typing enabled in firefox. If keyboard voting does not work for you then click on the question marks to vote.

As you can see, so long as you dont have automatic search enabled in firefox, you should be able to just key in two numbers to vote for an image and have the next one automatically load. Tagging is disabled in the turbovoter as the main purpose, as implied by the name, is to get as many votes on as many images as possible.

In terms of how entertaining the voting might be, at the moment things are still not as great as they will be once we have more votes, but it is slightly better and more random than it used to be. We really need as many people as possible voting as much as possible to get the initial 45,000 votes in place. At the moment we are at about 13,000 votes with a load of duplicates (images with more than 5 votes). The voting has been changed for registered users to only show images that have 5 votes or less, so we can rack up the votes much faster. By the end of february we should hopefully be there, and then I'll update the gallery again so that the images shown when voting will be extremely entertaining, cutting out all the barely related crap, and endless duplicates that make it much less fun to use.

Thanks and enjoy!

What "great things to help you waste your workday away" are you planning? And do you really need 45,000 votes? That's going to take forever!

InyokaMadoda wrote:What "great things to help you waste your workday away" are you planning? And do you really need 45,000 votes? That's going to take forever!

Primarily, the gallery will become significantly more interesting and fun than it is now, but there are also dozens of ideas on the drawing board that are being worked on for multiple months down the line. 45000 votes will probably take until the end of February at current rates, but it will be done sooner if more people vote more often. If every person who visited dakka each day voted 10 times then we would hit the total within hours, but that wont happen so the best we can do is get everyone who cares voting!

Well, I'm trying to do my bit when I remember....

legoburner wrote: or have a boring phone call, you can click through and entertain yourself.

That's exactly what I've just done ! My phone rang as I clicked on the turbovoter link and I managed to get a few votes in before I even needed to speak ! ( it was the ex)
Gotta say, turbovoter works nicely IMO. thanks guys.

I have discovered that I can paint, turbovote, and be on hold to my phone company at the same time.

Total with images with votes seems to be climbing a bit today. I wonder if we can bump the red line up another pixel by the end of the day...

Ok I just spent the last couple hours, rating, and labelling. I am taking a break

You guys have done a fantastic job so far today, thanks ever so much!

The algorithm works like this:
For registered users, show images that need votes, sorted by number of votes ascending (so images with 0 votes will be shown first, then images with 1 vote, etc)
For guest users, show any random image, including those with 5+ votes, but weight it towards images with 0 or 1 votes.

As you can see, this means that the red line will not increase much for a while. Once the blue (1 votes) hits the green, the orange line should shoot up, then pink, teal and finally red. As each line reaches the top (the green line), the gallery will marginally improve in functionality and more options will be available to me for future work. As and when the red line hits the green line, I'll flick the switch to make gallery browsing totally addictive, cutting out almost all of the crappy images from casual voting.

Thanks again everyone. If you've not voted today then please spare a moment to vote on 10 images (or more )

Does it make it so that I don't vote on the same image more than once?

Your latest vote replaces the original, should you ever vote on the same image twice.
I've been suspicious of the turbovoter repeating an image every now and then, but I have been using it a lot, and there are also at least a few duplicate uploads.

So, for battle report photos, WIPs and non-miniatures, should we just vote 1-1?

Or skip them?

Or vote as we see fit?

Duh... I just noticed there is an N/A

Use that, yeah?

InyokaMadoda wrote:Does it make it so that I don't vote on the same image more than once?

So long as you are logged in, it will never show you the same image twice. You might see different versions of the same image (different angles, different WIP images, etc), but never the actual image you have voted on before.

Arctik_Firangi wrote:Your latest vote replaces the original, should you ever vote on the same image twice.
I've been suspicious of the turbovoter repeating an image every now and then, but I have been using it a lot, and there are also at least a few duplicate uploads.

Correct, your latest vote replaces any previous votes you made on the image. There are quite a few similar uploads out there which would give you that effect, but you should never see an exact duplicate as the gallery software will warn you if you upload something that already exists (it checksums every file uploaded, then when you upload, it compares the checksum with all the stored checksums, and if any match it will point you at the matching file with a note on how to dispute ownership instead of processing your own upload).

Fifty wrote:So, for battle report photos, WIPs and non-miniatures, should we just vote 1-1?
Or skip them?
Or vote as we see fit?
Duh... I just noticed there is an N/A
Use that, yeah?

I usually vote N/A for paintjob on battle reports unless there is a very clear and interesting paintjob to see. Coolness sometimes gets 1-3, maybe a bit more if the picture looks very cool, but most of the time it is just a low score. N/A for coolness goes to anything that is pointless to look at (bits of materials, blurry bits of plastic glued together, etc). Ultimately just vote as you see fit - if you want to give N/A / N/A to every battle report photo then that is fine. Some WIPs are pretty cool so deserve a coolness rating but obviously ones that are just unpainted standard figures dont really deserve a score. Ultimately vote however you feel is appropriate - if everybody does that then the average should represent the pooled opinions of dakka which is what we are trying to achieve anyway.

Making post 101 so I can get the turborater...

edit: Yay, it appeared!

N/A does not seem to be available in turborater?

in the turbovoter 0 = N/A

Arctik_Firangi wrote:I have discovered that I can paint, turbovote, and be on hold to my phone company at the same time.

I can top that !

I'm painting, posting on here, chatting with a mate on f-book AND watching top-gear re-runs. ALL whilst going through turbovoter.

Good times

Well, I usually have MSN open, and I had whatever I was watching on pause while I was on the phone...

It's the Australia Day long weekend, so yesterday I was mostly boozing, drybrushing, voting, watching Monkey Dust and occasionally tapping into MSN. What I really need is a voice recognition soft that I can rout to my browser while it's in the background, flipping up images on my second monitor while I've got another window active. That would be awesome.

My roommates would just hear me blurting an endless stream of single numbers.

It looks like this chart is constantly updated but the red, 5 votes line isn`t budging.

Any ideas what else can be be done?

Kid_Kyoto wrote:It looks like this chart is constantly updated but the red, 5 votes line isn`t budging.

We are getting there slowly but surely. See my previous comment:

As you can see, this means that the red line will not increase much for a while. Once the blue (1 votes) hits the green, the orange line should shoot up, then pink, teal and finally red. As each line reaches the top (the green line), the gallery will marginally improve in functionality and more options will be available to me for future work. As and when the red line hits the green line, I'll flick the switch to make gallery browsing totally addictive, cutting out almost all of the crappy images from casual voting.

People have been doing an amazing job so far and we are at about 25000 total votes now. Keep up the great effort everyone

Any chance of an updated chart? Please?

That chart is only 30 minutes old. The higher total vote count comes from images with more than 5 votes which are not shown on the chart as they have no bearing on the goal that is being achieved.

Got it so we basically need all 5 lines to hit the green line, that`s a long slog, any projections?

I was saying the end of February, but people are adding so many new images each day it is looking more like mid march. One line should reach the top every 9-10 days or so.

Only about 4000 to go!

I'd uploading my WIP photos to photobucket instead of Dakka for the sake of saving people those tiresome series of low ranking photos... but then it occurred to me that my intention of later making articles out of them is going to be made quite a bit more difficult.

When you get around to revisiting the article system, got any plans for external image linking?

Dont worry about uploading images to the gallery, in time they will sort themselves out, it is only now that it is a little annoying. I am afraid the articles will never have external image linking as we want to have full control over the content of an article, not have randomly broken images or suddenly find the images on our most popular articles getting replaced.

You might consider removing the vote on painting option if enough people vote N/A on an image.

While that is a logical idea, the amount of time to implement it vs the benefit from implementing it is not enough, so development time would be better spent elsewhere for now. I'll consider it for the distant future though.

Just a thought... how hard would it be to create a tag for images in forum posts that basically does the following:
[imgvote] [/imgvote] // Creates link for a miniature turbovoting dialog on click if image URL is within Dakka

Rather than taking the user to the Gallery, it opens a window where you can just knock in a vote (obviously the picture is right there on the thread) for simple voting within the forums?

There's probably a far more elegant way to do this, it just doesn't spring to mind. Perhaps if you could just mouse over and type in your vote (Painting:? and Coolness:? pops up below the image within/extending its link border). That way clicking would still take you to the zoomable image if you wanted.

If voting could be performed within the forums, however, people would probably be much more willing to vote as it does not distract from the actual reading of the thread... not to mention a series of images can be voted on simply, as opposed to entering your vote, getting immediately flown off to a random image, clicking previous image, selecting another image from that gallery...

There's my brainstorn.

I've been trying to think of a way to implement just that, but have not come up with anything I am happy with yet, so now my attention is focused on the other issue you mention - going to a random image after viewing something specific. I am working on it now so that the next image will be from the same gallery or possibly even the same search results when you view a specific image.

p.s. anybody wondering about the gap in the stats - that is just where the stats server was offline as I was doing stuff on it.

Yeah, it's fine for random voting sprees, but just kind of annoying when you want to see different shots. Since the turbovoter is only giving me images with at least 1-2 votes, I've been trying to pick through individual galleries and vote on everything that desn't have a score yet...

I gave up on that pretty quickly though.

Perhaps the 'View a Random Image' should launch a turbovoter with Medium thumbnails, with of course the usual link should zoom/comment be desired. I don't see why the fully featured gallery page needs to jump around at all once the voting average is up to a level you're comfortable with... after the turbovoter I find it incredibly tedious to have to click on my votes .