I'm not extremely regular here. I don't post or even comment often, I mostly lurk and have fun, but there's an issue lately that's really been bothering me. I've been reading and enjoyed an artist on here reformedwriter who recently started a harry potter series, where every one has been flagged and slowly removed for qcc reasons.

It's gotten bad enough I went to look at the rules for the QCC stuff and found where it says:

The following are examples of images that are often flagged for quality:

Text manips with little relation to what is portrayed in the image or has excessive grammar and spelling errors
Excessive anatomy issues or stick figure depictions
Crude manips or coloring is incomplete and doesn’t stay within borders
Art that is intentionally made to be bad may be removed without a QCC vote.

And maybe it falls under crude manips, but the stuff is relevant to the text, the artist is clearly putting effort into the drawing and the text, they're taking constructive criticism and applying it to future art. It's rough art certainly, but not even the worst art I've seen pass qcc on this before. There's rarely any discussion or criticism about what's wrong with the piece, or I've not seen any.

I just really don't like the idea of squelching someone who's clearly trying, who's work is improving and is willing to try to improve. Everyone starts somewhere but standards that are too harsh means they literally can't start here, and that really bothers me personally.

I agree the standards for the site can be a bit much and can be discouraging for artists starting out but the standards are there for a reason. I like reformedwriters ideas but the art just wasn't up to snuff. The rules state "Excessive anatomy issues" as a qcc problem and that was very prevalent with RW posts. An unusually long neck, pencil thin waist, huge hands. Sure there are artists who stylistically have unrealistic proportions but the Hermione piece looked like it tried to go for an accurate depiciton of Emma Watson with big boobs.

The site has a forum post for artists to practice and get critical feedback so if they're interested in improving then they should hit up the post for advice. The thread might be buried at the moment but they can find it by putting "feedback" in the search bar.

I've been saying this for years. It's why I stopped posting a majority of my work here and moved mostly to my Discord for sharing my stuff. I've only gotten hit with a qcc flag once as far as I know, which was frivolous and struck down, but it's real fucking frustrating to put in the work to share stuff here and then have some jackass in the community decides they don't personally like it so it should be stricken from everyone's eyes forever. It's always felt petty and selfish and has rubbed me the wrong way for a long time. Sure, sometimes I get it, but a vast majority of the flags I see are just annoyingly picky.

Then I propose a bit of a solution: QCC flags are invisible to all but mods. I have no foresight or critical thinking capacities, so I don't know if this would make things worse, but from the horrible position I stand in it seems like a somewhat-decent patch on the issue.

I get that some standards have to be maintained, but I feel like a good community should encourage people that are clearly putting forth effort even if it's rough, people that show they're improving, and that genuinely just want to contribute. When standards are too harsh it really hurts introducing people to the community, growing it. And after watching someone who genuinely seems confused about why his works keep getting flagged and removed essentially without any more comment than the quality flag up top, I think that discussion should happen. If nothing else, it's put a really bad taste in my mouth, and I'm just a casual visitor.

I can't say where that line should be drawn, or what the solution is, but genuinely I think the current system isn't good for encouraging beginners or new people. When the answer is to search for a buried thread in the forum that a new person may not even know exists, that's a clearly flawed system too. Perhaps a beginner, rough, or feedback tag that could let some of the rougher pieces that aren't just jokes or stick figures stay up. Or if storage/bandwidth is the concern then perhaps a sticky thread for it, or one that explains it and where they -can- safely post things like threads or other sites that will accept porn that some place like deviantart won't allow and that isn't 'up to scratch' here. Or at the very least let the artists have a little more visibility on the vote, the reasons why, than a few words in a line at the top of their art, like when it's removed just a cc to the artist or something. I'm not sure, but this was enough I wanted to speak up.




I really don't think that's a good compromise, people's work just vanishing without any warning will most likely just lead to a lot of reuploads or other things.

Yeah, there's what I missed.

To be honest, I've never felt that a gallery site was a great "community" for beginner artists. I mean, there are plenty of more ephemeral places to share your work as a newbie. Chan drawthreads, tumblr /twitter, discords, and subreddits all exist for showing something off and collecting feedback. The point of a gallery site like this is to keep everything that's worth being on it searchable forever, not just to share it. From that standpoint, I think the QCC rules are extremely forgiving to anyone who's put even a couple months worth of serious effort into making art.

Reeks of gatekeeping to me, but I at least understand where you're coming from, even if I disagree.

Honestly I'd put forward the idea that only flags with actual, constructive criticism be addressed. Being unabashed assholes when flagging because you feel emboldened by the shield of anonymity hurts the community far worse than a sub-standard upload.

If a flag says "this is shit, delete it," the mods just remove the flag regardless of the quality of the image, because that shit shouldn't be rewarded with results.

If it says "the neck is a bit long, it makes the anatomy look weird, and the arms bend at odd angles," then that feedback can be given to the OP. It encourages improvement, which increases the amount of material we all get in the long run.

There's whole threads on this forum about ideas that people wished they saw on this site. Sometimes I wonder how many of those wishes would have been fulfilled if the prospective artist who would have made it hadn't gotten scared off because some asshole flagged their first upload with rude, unhelpful and condescending shit.

That's my two cents, now back to mostly just lurking.

I can tell you that i don't bring flags like that to the qcc.

That's part of the issue though: The site isn't meant to really act like DeviantArt for beginners to post their work. Now, that's not to say that new work is actively discouraged (quite the contrary in many cases), but I do understand how it can be discouraging to not receive any feedback and instead have your art simply removed.

That being said, I do want to make two things clear:
1. If an artist, manipper, or general poster receives a flag on their post, asking for an explanation in the comments will get somebody to respond and possibly clarify things.
2. hypnohub.net/forum/show/34379
This thread has existed as a good place for artists, new, amateur, and even those with some experience, to get an idea of what areas to improve upon + what tips they can learn.

As you brought up, it has been semi-obscure and thus hard to find, so to remedy that, I've stickied the post to the forums. Now it will appear as one of the immediate top results for anyone who goes into the forums looking to get some feedback on their art.

I promise you, practically all flags that have been vague*, rude, or just downright shitty have been thrown out. It doesn't help staff in the slightest when it comes to keeping track of past deletions anyway, so there's no reason to keep it.

While yes, explaining what the specific issues are with a post would be helpful, I think the comments are better suited for it versus writing it all up in a flag reason. At least there it can be further discussed.

*by vague, I mean posts that don't point to any general issues and just say stuff like "looks bad."

While I personally think QCC standards are too lax in general, I do agree that flags should be constructive or at the very least not rude. If people are abusing the flag feature, the moderators should deal with them the same way they'd moderate comments and forum posts.

"General Site Rules
Behavior
Be courteous and respectful to other members on the site. Opinions are welcome, but flaming, trolling, intolerant comments, or personal attacks on members will result in a warning or ban."

So if someone flags a piece as "The art is shit", they should definitely get at the very least a warning about their behavior. Maybe they could word it as simply as "May not meet QCC standards, pending review".

As for artists/writers/manippers whose works are flagged and/or taken down, please don't be discouraged. Try not to think of it as "my art is bad", instead look at it as "it's not quite there yet". YET being the keyword. Art is an iterative process. Professional art goes through many passes, being revised and polished, again and again, until it's finally ready.

This is good to hear, at least. It should be noted that my frustration is with asinine flaggers, not the mod team. You guys seem to do a decent job keeping the peace, and as someone who does forum moderation for a living, I know that's a rough line to walk sometimes.

I mean I've said it before, but not every site has to be for everything everyone wants to use it for. Having rules that prohibit low-quality work is gatekeeping, yes. It's saying "put some effort in, first." It isn't an unreasonable bar to clear. Like, when I was posting really *really* bad art on chans, where there's obviously no QCC or whatever, I got no comments except for people telling me I sucked. So I said, okay, well, I guess I need to practice if I want to get any kind of positive attention from doing this. That's not something you can expect to cheat your way around in any community, flagging system or no. That's just the way it is. And, when you get to the point where you *know* your art's good enough to at least be worth posting somewhere, frivolous flagging regarding your skill won't matter to you because you know it's frivolous. If there was some weird nepotism where only friends of mods got their art posted and other talented artists had theirs deleted, yeah, there would be a problem - but I don't think anyone's making that claim about this site here.

I will say that from a purely UX design standpoint, having the "negative" feedback of QCC flags be able to force itself to the point of maximum visibility on the post page could be improved upon. You could at least put it down somewhere in the sidebar below the tags, or add a "flags" tab to the comment/edit panel.