On Approval

Log said: These new test janitors are ridiculous, 4 of them wouldn't even have contributor if they weren't made test janitors (and if they were already contributor they shouldn't have been.)

I mentioned this to two people who mistakenly contacted me about the test. One had one post, the other not many more. I said that while it wasn't in albert's requirements, it should be. Being a contributor or at least priv (merit priv, not paid priv) already should absolutely be a requirement.

Being a janitor gives you contrib powers and then some. To give the position to someone without at least a hundred accepted posts (and not just cg/doujin spam) and a low deletion percentage just seems wrong to me.

roastbeefy said:
A feeling of competition is good if it leads people to strive to approve higher quality posts than the other applicants. The problem is that it instead led people to approve higher quantities of posts, ...

Except that like ultima said, you have much more control over quantity than over quality when quicker staff members get the good material before you have a chance to. And I guess it can pretty much lead to some hasty approvals as well, the same way daily pixiv raids lead to hasty uploads.

roastbeefy said:
... because frankly that seemed like the deciding factor in who got the job.

I remind reading something along the lines of "new janitors are expected to start approving stuff or I'll grow suspicious about them" from albert in the previous thread, which could have been misleading.
That said, as long as everyone is playing fair and established janitors are letting some room for applicants to prove themselves, if they're all doing a decent job they should all get fully promoted, so I don't get the "who got the job" part, unless I'm missing something.

Cyberia-Mix said:
if they're all doing a decent job they should all get fully promoted, so I don't get the "who got the job" part, unless I'm missing something.

If you do a good job and everyone else did a great job, you wont get promoted. At least, that's what the letter sent out to new test janitors suggests.

Regardless of the competition, people need to realize that approving many sub-par images will lead to them looking comparatively worse than those that approve few excellent images. Being critical and discerning is the crux of the job.

Ehh. Don't you think any one of the approving staff can already instantly recognize an excellent image and approve it? The fact that there is a lot of competition for these good images is proof of that. I think the real test comes when there's some sort of quality judgment to be had with an image, where it could go either way. The deletion appeal thread, which somewhat sparked the new test janitor influx I assume, generally does not get much of this excellent content appealed. That is not an invitation to approve of sub-par images, to be sure, but I don't think all the emphasis should be on getting very few, high quality images in.

roastbeefy said:
If you do a good job and everyone else did a great job, you wont get promoted. At least, that's what the letter sent out to new test janitors suggests.

Like everyone said, doesn't approving only quality posts already qualify as great job?
Assuming the quality ratio fits the requirements, quantity shouldn't be a concern past some minimum threshold, especially when compared between applicants knowing that they can easily fuck up each others' statistics.

I hope that's misreading because it seems totally backwards to me, given that this extra stimulation is likely to make people slack off when it ends, in addition to the aforementioned overshadowing issue that may lead to demoting the actual best candidates in the long run.

I agree with Cyberia. Quality matters most of all, but you do want to be actively approving. I could hire a staff at Mcdonald's and they could really do awesome work every once in a while. But customers don't come in every now and then, they come in constantly.

Except, this isn't McDonald's, or any other lowest-common-denominator-centric place of business. It's Danbooru, and we have a stated goal of uploading, approving, and tagging quality artwork. There is no competition, stated or implied, with other sites to be the chief supplier of anything under the sun; there's Gelbooru and the like for that.

Approve quality posts only, or don't approve anything at all, I say. If there's just that little quality artwork being uploaded, so be it.

Honestly, this is why I'm against more and more new janitors. I realized about a week into my trial period that if I was only approving images that I found to be of a high enough quality that they should obviously be approved, what point was there in me even being a janitor? I'd like to believe everything I approved would have been approved by someone else anyways. At the same time, a few of the other people in both my batch and later batches approved a ton of images I never would have let get through and I found it disappointing to say the least when they were promoted, because it made me feel like quantity really did matter beyond that "minimum threshold".

As an aside, the deletion appeal thread has always annoyed me. It can be seen either one of two ways: A) a place where images that were overlooked can get a second chance, or B) a place where janitors+ can comfortably lower their standards and approve images they were iffy on in the queue. And it seems way more like B, because I honestly can't understand how that many images are missed. The queue isn't that unmanageable. (Though I'll admit that this sentiment could be a result of my oodles of free time or just outright paranoia.)

I guess I'm just in conflict with the idea of approving more and more when I'd rather we approve less and less. But I'm happy to shut up about it since I'm apparently in the minority.

sgcdonmai said:
Except, this isn't McDonald's, or any other lowest-common-denominator-centric place of business. It's Danbooru, and we have a stated goal of uploading, approving, and tagging quality artwork. There is no competition, stated or implied, with other sites to be the chief supplier of anything under the sun; there's Gelbooru and the like for that.

Approve quality posts only, or don't approve anything at all, I say. If there's just that little quality artwork being uploaded, so be it.

Dude, chill. I never said fuck about competition in any way, and frankly, I don't see why there should be competition. On par with my statement mentioning MCD's, the fast-food industry isn't cut throat, and neither are approvals. With the many uploads that this site receives, I don't see why it should be hard to find some posts that you'd approve. If someone beats you to approving a few posts, look for some more. Of course you only want to approve quality works, but getting repeatedly edged out doesn't seem like much of an excuse. If you check the site at certain times of day, maybe you can change up those times, and that might help.

Might I suggest that for the criteria for the next batch of janitors include:

1. Contributor or higher status.
2. No TOS violations
3. No negative records.
4. Been on Danbooru for over a year.
5. 500+ favorites.
6. All around a good user who uses danbooru frequently.

I've noticed some of the test janitors have been pretty sloppy and slow. We need janitors that aren't lazy. Not that I'm saying any are. Whilst I would love to be a janitor and help out with Danbooru to the best of my abilities, I wouldn't fit the standards put forth. As a few users said earlier, a jump from privileged to test janitor is a pretty big step, especially if some of those with privileged status haven't done anything for danbooru hence why I suggested contributor status and above.

hidetheunforgiven said:
As a few users said earlier, a jump from privileged to test janitor is a pretty big step, especially if some of those with privileged status haven't done anything for danbooru hence why I suggested contributor status and above.

If you're above Contributor the point is moot.

Well, yeah, but we both get the gist of what he meant.

Still, I'm not sure about requiring Contrib status before inviting one to test for Janitor. I mean, how many new Contributors have we had over the last six months or so? Requiring Contrib might shrink the pool of applicants more than is necessary and proper.

They don't have to *be* contributor but they should at minimum *qualify* for contributor. If you have no/few posts you don't even qualify for contributor so why should you be able to bypass the queue and judge posts in the queue?

rather than being strict on specific qualifications (ie 500 favs) we should choose people who we by our common sense can judge from their history, forum posts, favs, etc

nominating people on the forums and having others actually discussing what they think of a certain user to become test-janitor would not be a bad idea.

Log said:
They don't have to *be* contributor but they should at minimum *qualify* for contributor. If you have no/few posts you don't even qualify for contributor so why should you be able to bypass the queue and judge posts in the queue?

I can agree with this, and would be in favor of making it policy.

Roarchu said:
nominating people on the forums and having others actually discussing what they think of a certain user to become test-janitor would not be a bad idea.

This, I dunno about. Some people would rather not have such a to-do made of it.
I think that if you'd like to recommend someone for promotion, positive records would suffice. The mods see those, at least.

Log said:
They don't have to *be* contributor but they should at minimum *qualify* for contributor. If you have no/few posts you don't even qualify for contributor so why should you be able to bypass the queue and judge posts in the queue?

In principle I can't agree with that, given that I myself would not and still would not qualify for contributor status. That policy is somewhat bias towards those who upload large numbers of images, while there are those that can and do contribute through other means. You're pretty much saying that if you can't contribute images, then anything else you contribute to the site is meaningless.

Though this is not to say that I don't agree that such a measure would insure a more reliable measure on determining if a user would make a good janitor. I just can't in principle agree to it, given my own position.

I think contributors should be chosen based on quality of images, not quantity

if I were a mod I would much much more likely promote someone with ~50 great to good quality posts than someone with ~700 ok quality posts

but whatever

NWF_Renim said: In principle I can't agree with that, given that I myself would not and still would not qualify for contributor status.

It's not that posting images is the only worthwhile contribution to the site, but certainly it's a very important metric for determining who should be allowed to approve images.

For a member of high standing with a long history of contribution in the forums, translation and other methods, exemptions can of course be made. Trust can be gained in other ways than posting. But those people are few, and it's possible to be incredibly on-the-ball in areas a, b, c and d but still turn out to be less than skilled at approving posts.

Roarchu said: if I were a mod I would much much more likely promote someone with ~50 great to good quality posts than someone with ~700 ok quality posts

I've promoted people with as few as 100 posts myself. Of course I think half the people I've invited stopped posting soon after, but not much I can do about that without becoming psychic.

Sorry if I missed this, but why is number of favs considered? Activity, or taste/standards gauge?