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I've noticed that quite a lot of Dakka users don't cast any votes in the Gallery. Why is this, are they afraid to upset someone with a bad score
I don't think its laziness, plenty of people take the time to view the photos they just don't cast a vote.

Also why do we get the same photos again and again on the main page

 Rolsheen wrote:

Also why do we get the same photos again and again on the main page

You don't... although you sort of do. For the most part, the repetitions of the same miniatures are the result of the user uploading multiple images of the same miniatures, and all of those images being popular.

As the keeper of the gallery I've thought about it quite a bit.

One reason is decision making takes energy, deciding if an image is a 4 or a 5 or whatever takes time and thought. Over time I've put together a scale in my head and can do it pretty fast but it did take time and it was something I wanted to do.

But if you don't then you only vote for the no brainers, the 10/10s or maybe vote 1/1 out of anger "how dare someone put up that POS".

And well after a while most things don't stand out enough to be worth rating. There tens of thousands of space marines and guardsmen up there, so unless someone does something unique it's not worth my time to give them an average score.

Personally, I have the Dakka forums bookmarked instead of the frontpage, so I don't encounter the gallery often.

 Absolutionis wrote:
Personally, I have the Dakka forums bookmarked instead of the frontpage, so I don't encounter the gallery often.

Same here.

I've been using the Turbovoter every so often recently - I was aiming to vote on five images a day, but I've not been hitting that - and I keep running into three things that stop me voting.

1, WIP images - particularly of conversions - that haven't had voting turned off. Given that one of the two categories to vote on is Paintjob, this seems a bit odd.

2, Battle report images - I've got no issue with them being in the Gallery, but again, they could really do with voting turned off on them.

3, Poor photography - there are quite a lot of badly taken photos in there. Poor lighting, the camera deciding to focus on a weird point on the figure, blur from the camera moving slightly, etc. Do you ping the vote, or just move on? I'd add pictures at odd rotations here, but that isn't quite so bad.

I know a lot of people like myself usually view the site on their phones, and the gallery can be awkward to use there (especially if you want to comment as well as rate)

From what I've seen, at least among my own picture uploads, is it takes about a 100 views to get a vote. Obviously people have thoughts, as there are pictures I have that have way more comments than votes, I just think a lot of people usually don't vote unless its something that stands out. I also feel like people rate a bit higher than they should, there are models I've posted that have scores at least 3 pts higher than I would give them and I'm sure there are way more examples out there if I took the time to look. And let's be honest, I'm a guard player. It's gonna be rare that you see something truly new or outstanding on the gallery for that army. You need either an A grade paintjob or a really crazy conversion to get noticed.

Also it can feel a bit weird rating a pic only to realize it's from something like 5 years ago, which the random gallery feature will do from time to time. Leaving a 2/10 on some guy's space marine that was painted with wood varnish 6 years ago doesn't exactly feel right you know?

Weird as it sounds, if I want honest critique, I'll go to /wip/ on /tg/. They're brutally honest but that's what I'm looking for when it comes to painting. They're not all grade A painters, but they can at least give you ideas on where to improve.

I turbo-vote from time to time, but as mentioned above, it is time consuming and yes, some types of image do turn me off from voting, especially reposts of memes and whatnot, which should also have voting disabled.

What's this turbovoting you're mentioning. Some kind of feature?

Turbo-voting is open to some users, I'm not sure what the criteria is, but I have access to it, maybe due to years of service or because of reaching a certain post amount.

You can check by clicking the Gallery Votes link under your avatar. It should be at the bottom of that page under the "You Are Special..." subject.

I usually go with the third option, which while boring, does help out improving the overall gallery.

I think a lot of it comes down to how people use the gallery... Speaking for myself, when I'm browsing I tend to be looking for inspiration or ideas for an upcoming project, so at that point I'm more interested in looking through a lot of images to cherry pick the best examples and ideas rather than give each pic the attention it deserves to have a vote cast on it, sometimes I'll set out just to go and vote on stuff, but then I'm spending a lot longer on each image than I normally would so it's fairer.

The other thing that sometimes puts me off or encourages me to vote is the number of votes or score a mini already has. If I see something on 4 votes, I'll almost always give it the 5th the one thing that bugs me about the Dakka Gallery is you need 5 before you can even see a score, which in turn disincentives voting on stuff with 0 or 1 votes as it's ultimately not going to help or encourage whoever posted the image, which is what I think the main aim is.

Likewise, if I see a mini that's got a score significantly lower or higher than what I'd give it, I vote. Sometimes I'll see stuff in the 5-6 range that I'd easily give a 7-8 to, so I make sure to vote on stuff like that to try and bring the score up to what I think it 'deserves'.

What I'd really like to see is a 'provisional score' system, whereby scores still show up with less than 5 votes, just in a different colour or with a symbol to show that it's not had enough votes to figure out an average yet. It's really annoying to have a pic sit for months on 3 or 4 votes, because then you have no idea (beyond sorting your gallery by score) whether that's averaging at 2/10 of 8/10 ect. That way, voting would be a much more immediate process, and I think a lot more people would vote.

 BrookM wrote:
Turbo-voting is open to some users, I'm not sure what the criteria is, but I have access to it, maybe due to years of service or because of reaching a certain post amount.

You can check by clicking the Gallery Votes link under your avatar. It should be at the bottom of that page under the "You Are Special..." subject.

Hey, wouldn't you know it, apparently I am special too.
Guess mom was right all along.

Now off to turbovote!

I usually click on whatever looks interesting from the main page. A couple of "1 more vote needed" and a few tags later, off I go to the forum.

I put a link to the Turbovoter in my signature to try and get people to vote more often; I think people just forget most of the time unless they involve the Gallery a lot with their visits to DakkaDakka.

Even so, just a vote a day by each user would go a very long way

 Dysartes wrote:

1, WIP images - particularly of conversions - that haven't had voting turned off. Given that one of the two categories to vote on is Paintjob, this seems a bit odd.

WIP images should have voting turned off, but a lot do slip through.

Having voting on for 'finished' conversions (as in, built but not painted yet) is fine, and in the Turbovoter '0' is the same as the 'N/A' option in the regular screen. So you can give them a score for Coolness and N/A for painting.

It'd be nice if the default state of an uploaded image were to have voting turned off with the option having to be enabled for pictures by the uploader.

 Absolutionis wrote:
It'd be nice if the default state of an uploaded image were to have voting turned off with the option having to be enabled for pictures by the uploader.

Or a option you could select in the settings. Some people might just post finished works, others a lot of WIPs. Would be nice to default to the one that matches their posting habits.

Same with the “I own this picture” thing.

(I spent a few minutes in the turbovoter after reading this thread to do my bit)

I think the ones that vote stuff like 10/10 on their own images are also part of the problem. Fair enough if they can give it an honest vote and while it does eventually get dragged down it spends a bit too much time up high.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:

From what I've seen, at least among my own picture uploads, is it takes about a 100 views to get a vote. Obviously people have thoughts, as there are pictures I have that have way more comments than votes, I just think a lot of people usually don't vote unless its something that stands out.

I just counted up my views, 1100 for a total of 4 votes. Half my galleries are the only view of a model the other half are multiples of the same model, I don't have voting enabled on my WIP project (Necromunda terrain)

 Absolutionis wrote:
It'd be nice if the default state of an uploaded image were to have voting turned off with the option having to be enabled for pictures by the uploader.

There's a rationale there. The gallery displays search results based on scores so if an image has a rank it's easier to sort and make sure you see the best "Mordian officers" (or whatever) first.

Generally I only turn off voting if there's literally nothing there to score, an unopened box, a pile of bitz etc. Everything else keeps scoring turned on (unless the poster turns it off) on the logic that bad stuff, unfinished stuff etc will sink to the bottom.

This discussion brings up a question I've had for a while: how are the images on the main page chosen? Is it by number of votes? Rating? Randomly chosen? Bribing the mods (I'm kidding with that one )? I can think of exactly once that I saw one of my models on there (it was the Bloodthirster), and it only got a handful of votes, so I'm not sure it's by votes. I'm not complaining or anything, but I am genuinely curious.

I believe it's by combined votes over the last week or two to keep it fresh.

I quite like using the Turbovoter, and quite often spend a few minutes going through and voting - It's nice to see the variety of models and paintjobs

Whenever I have had a rules query or a question about paint or glues, or identifying a particular model et cet c, the Dakka community has bent over backwards to answer my questions. I cannot praise you guys enough

So I decided, last year, that the least I could do was to return the favour and cast some votes to encourage people who have worked long and hard to paint their miniatures.

There are some great miniatures, and some God awful ones, but I give each one a fair hearing. Rarely do I use the 10/10 choice.

I don't go overboard, just one or two votes here and there. Every little helps.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Paradigm wrote:
I think a lot of it comes down to how people use the gallery... Speaking for myself, when I'm browsing I tend to be looking for inspiration or ideas for an upcoming project, so at that point I'm more interested in looking through a lot of images to cherry pick the best examples and ideas rather than give each pic the attention it deserves to have a vote cast on it, sometimes I'll set out just to go and vote on stuff, but then I'm spending a lot longer on each image than I normally would so it's fairer.

The other thing that sometimes puts me off or encourages me to vote is the number of votes or score a mini already has. If I see something on 4 votes, I'll almost always give it the 5th the one thing that bugs me about the Dakka Gallery is you need 5 before you can even see a score, which in turn disincentives voting on stuff with 0 or 1 votes as it's ultimately not going to help or encourage whoever posted the image, which is what I think the main aim is.

Likewise, if I see a mini that's got a score significantly lower or higher than what I'd give it, I vote. Sometimes I'll see stuff in the 5-6 range that I'd easily give a 7-8 to, so I make sure to vote on stuff like that to try and bring the score up to what I think it 'deserves'.

What I'd really like to see is a 'provisional score' system, whereby scores still show up with less than 5 votes, just in a different colour or with a symbol to show that it's not had enough votes to figure out an average yet. It's really annoying to have a pic sit for months on 3 or 4 votes, because then you have no idea (beyond sorting your gallery by score) whether that's averaging at 2/10 of 8/10 ect. That way, voting would be a much more immediate process, and I think a lot more people would vote.

An excellent post.

Generally, I'm not here to vote on other folks paint jobs; I'm here to read posts that interest me. Every once in a while, though, one image will grab my attention enough that I'll click on it and vote, which leads to looking at the next one or five images and voting on them.

KK, you may be able to answer this - am I right in thinking that the Gallery Vote count on your profile isn't a "live" figure, but one that updates every so often?

Certainly seems to be the case when using the turbo-voter, but thought I'd check.

 Dysartes wrote:
KK, you may be able to answer this - am I right in thinking that the Gallery Vote count on your profile isn't a "live" figure, but one that updates every so often?

Certainly seems to be the case when using the turbo-voter, but thought I'd check.

Yes. I believe you have to log out and back in for it to update itself.

Yes, you must log out and in again to see the change happen.

I vote whenever I upload images... 'give a penny; take a penny' thinking. Although I think Dakka lost some of my votes :S Also, I do not vote on things that I would assign a score of less than 6. It just strikes me as a bit cruel.

I would say disable the voting by default, or at least let the user do so by gallery (which they have named). I disable voting on images that I really don't think need a score. Which is almost everything I've uploaded.

 filbert wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
KK, you may be able to answer this - am I right in thinking that the Gallery Vote count on your profile isn't a "live" figure, but one that updates every so often?

Certainly seems to be the case when using the turbo-voter, but thought I'd check.

Yes. I believe you have to log out and back in for it to update itself.

That's a touch weird, but good to know, nonetheless.

Hmm, think I'll go vote on a few images now.