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Hi all.

The original post about this was here http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/301684.page#1705762 so I will put the suggestions in a nutshell here

The issue with the gallery is there are only a small amount of people voting in a pool of thousands and thousands of images, a huge amount are Wip, N/A for paint or coolness (pieces on sprues?) or from blogs or users who do not actually care about rating.

This leaves the small amount of votes we have incoming being spread across thousands of images, a large amount of which will be wasted as the owner does not care for feedback or is completely inactive, and also turns some off voting as they have to go through 10 badly shot wip's before reaching a painted model.

The suggestions to help with this were:

1: A wip/incomplete tick box when uploading pics that will remove them from the random image gallery pool, meaning they won't pop up for people trying to rate.
While I understand people may want ratings on wip's, a stupidly huge amount of the gallery is images of incomplete models, and you cant actually rate something that is incomplete, as the final product could differ entirely. Also, Wips tend to be uploaded for blogs, which means they are actually in threads, so they are easily reachable if someone requests feedback on them.

2: Uploading images comes with a "Please rate me" tick box that is unticked normally. Ticking these means the images go into a seperate gallery which is open for rating, meaning that anyone who wants to rate images can go to this gallery instead were not only are there thousands less images, but each image is from a user who actually wants feedback from it. This means the small amount of incoming votes we have will not be wasted on images that users do not especially care about, and you have a much higher chance of actually getting feedback on the models you want

3: Oh and another from SilverMK2 :

"I like the idea of a "rate me" button and a "WIP" button. This then gives you potentially several levels of filter on the images - you can go through and rate everything that people want you to rate, you can go through and rate "everything but WIP's", rate only WIP's, etc.

Just click on the types of images you want to see in your random search and away you go"

There are quite a lot of complexities with the gallery that make it harder to implement some of that stuff.

First, images are also automatically imported from the painting and modelling forums. People who upload there are unable to set tags, galleries and enable/disable voting due to the automated process.

Second, an annoying number of people do not read anything when they upload and just keep clicking through until it is done.

Unfortunately, in both cases, lazy and tech illiterate does not mean bad at painting and modelling and there are often many amazing images that would otherwise be buried if we changed the defaults which is why they stay as they are.

As for your suggestions, there is already a 'disable voting for this image' option both on upload and as a checkbox within the search page - click on one of your sub-galleries and you will see it. In relation to the above points where people dont provide any info about their images, having voting forced on them (no matter how crappy) goes at least some way to categorising them.

I can only make slow changes to the gallery at a time so that I can get fair evaluations of how effective each change is. The disable voting option was added relatively recently and now 8% of all images, and about 15% of new uploads have disabled voting (so never appear in the random image search, and appear at the end of tag lists with an effective score of 0/0). Those numbers indicate that old images are not getting voting disabled and as such there is still the problem you report of loads of pointless images existing. As I see it (and have been planning) there are a few options for me to play with next:

1. Allow trusted users to disable voting on images with less than 5 votes. This is open to abuse which is why it has not been implemented so far, but voting can easily be re-enabled.
2. Create a gallery moderator position and allow them free reign through the gallery to fully manage it. This is an extremely dull job though and I wouldnt want to burn out our best gallery contributors with it.
3. Continue to get lots of users voting. There is a tipping point in the gallery and as soon as images have had one vote, they are filtered into a complicated ranking system that ensures rated low quality images (bad wip, things on sprues) are hidden from 99% of users. Only about 10% of the images you see will have a score of less than 3 once there have been enough votes.

As for number of votes, we are doing ok. Each image has a mean of 3.5 votes, but great images are real vote hogs and so there are some with hundreds and hundreds of votes whilst others have no votes. About 15K images have no votes right now. Voting and new image adding is roughly equal so it stays stable. Having a weeklong, site wide 'please cast a vote' popup or something like that might clear the backlog and improve the gallery a lot, but it would annoy a lot of people and cheapen dakka a bit so we have not done so yet.

The final plan that is being worked on is to send a PM to every single user who has uploaded images to the gallery to explain how the disable voting options work in detail, so that they can disable voting on their battle report images, boring wip and sprue stuff. This would probably have the largest effect on quality of images in the voting pool and is planned for the near future.

Thanks, I had just gone through and set most of my images so no voting needed. I tend to have images of conversions prior to paint to make it easier to see what was done. It took literally a minute for 25 images at least so this is easy to do. A PM may be a good way to go so if everyone does it and it is minimal effort, that should clean things up well.

It is a valid point in the other forum that we all like to show 3 odd views of the same completed model. So either pick the best picture and disable vote for the rest OR create a single image multiple view by the user OR would Dakka be able to make the collage if the pictures are lumped under one group or gallery?

Will now attempt to go forth and vote...

thanks for all that, Legoburner...

i am, unfortunately, one of the tech-illiterate...
i put my images into their own manufacturer specific galleries, but that's about it...

using me as an example, how can the painters who want their finished work to be seen make that happen, and use the gallery to it's full potential???

it looks like i missed giving titles to some of my images, but it also looks like people have added tags to my images...
do titles matter???

cheers
jah

jah-joshua wrote:thanks for all that, Legoburner...

iit looks like i missed giving titles to some of my images, but it also looks like people have added tags to my images...
do titles matter???

cheers
jah

I like Black Templar so if you label your finished stuff and I do a search for Black Templar I can find your stuff and tell you how it inspired me to do better... you do like them right??

If you choose to implement the ability for trusted users to disable voting on images, please do make it a turbovoter option. The issue of WIP-step and sketch/article files has been lessened in flow, at least, but there are plenty floating around. You know you're never going to get through them, and something needs to be done about the hastily uploaded or for those who didn't know the option was available that might not care to do it, or have strayed away from the site. A lot of fantastic WIP blogs are the only thing a user will leave with Dakka before moving on, leaving us with a great thread... and an increasingly more cluttered gallery.

I'm going to go through my things and mark them now... it is a good idea for people to do this in general and I reckon Ifalna makes some ok points there.

EDIT: Having now done so, it was easily half of what I had... he he. Batreps and WIP stuff, but nice unpainted conversion shots always have a place, I think.

jah, just adding a title to each of your images is good enough and gets them searched more effectively. Your work is good enough that it will tend to float to the top anyway, but editing the image (with the 'edit' link directly under the image when viewing it) and adding a title will help the stuff get seen by a few more people.

On popular images, tagging is generally done by mods and trusted users and is done effectively. On less popular images, tagging and adding titles is the only way to get them into search results.

Forgot about this pet-peeve, but it might help with voting as it's something that greatly discourages me.

When I'm looking for inspiration for a model I'll do a search. When I vote for the image, instead of popping up another image that fits my search parameter, it brings up some random thing.

Is it possible to limit the next image that pops up to your search results?

I find that kind of annoying too, however, a link to the last image is located just under the voting panel on the left side of the screen, so you can go back quickly enough (or you can just press "back" on your browser I guess).

Wise words indeed.
Good stuff.

I really like the idea of a 'please rate me' button. Sure some people will always check it off but it's a good idea esp if someone (mods, trusted users) could check it off.