blp said:
the rules actually changed quite recently, quality standards became much more strict.

I hinted at it before as I believe it's not intentional, but basically the rules as posted do not align with how the posts are being evaluated. To the point that it's an overstep to art police. It's probably well intentioned to make this a respectable site of quality work, but it places undefined rules on what qualifies. I think some reasonable guidelines can be established for quality traits, but my recommendation would be to focus on content restrictions.

I actually suggested this awhile ago as an add-on for automating the approvals (https://e6ai.net/forum_topics/178) and it might be worth bringing back up here. Would it be possible to implement a quality evaluation function that users can crowdsource and filter on? It's a little bit of work but the building blocks are there, and would resolve everyone's concerns I think. I think most of us would set the filter to remove the bottom of the posts, and those can serve as flags for cleanup later once enough time has been given for a fair evaluation.

<Excerpt from there.>

For quality control...
Tags or a score system could be added for quality to help crowd source identifying submissions that don't meet quality, and personally I'd like to just search using something like this.
- One category or score for level/style of realism
- One category or score for artifacts and quality issues

I wouldn't mind doing a quick score on the quality on a lot of what I look at if it was a simple system. Especially the ones I really like or don't like. Most would be in the middle, the 80% majority, would probably be unscored or neutral which would be fine in an approach like this.

Back to the rules... for example

•Only upload images that meet your highest quality standards. We want the best representation of your work, not placeholders intended for later fixes. Please complete any necessary edits before uploading.

This indicates a desire for the best work a person can produce within reason, and "your highest quality standard" means the posters, not the approver's. Basically asking folks to self-moderate which makes a lot of sense. This along with the first part of the next sentence "We want the best representation of your work" sets the tone for what should be uploaded, not the standard. In the the next sentence ",not placeholders intended for later fixes" along with the last sentence was added with the recent changes because of the high number of posts where an error was found, fixed and reuploaded later causing more work for the janitors. Understandable but would be a non-issue if the poster could replace the image without penalty. I know for myself I do review the images several ways, and still miss things until they are uploaded. Enough so that I wonder if my image viewer is doing something to them lol. As the creator we focus on what's important to us, and not every i dotted and t crossed. By the way I had that job for several years and it was one of the worst jobs I ever had. It takes a special kind of person to do that work, which isn't a bad thing. It's just not for everyone. I should add those people are very important and critical to many many things.

By the way blp & Jelloponies, thanks for the advice before. I've made some progress and it's working out well. That was clearly the way to go. Might not want to use that post but making a sticky with information like that would be amazing to everyone I think. It would be nice if we could add tips, tricks, and settings we use and such to so we can learn and improve from each other. That might help a lot of people out and help with some of the concerns.