Hello everyone,

After a recent conversation with staff, I was encouraged to open a public thread where users can respectfully share their experiences and opinions about moderation on the site.

The goal here isn’t to call out individual moderators or start arguments. It’s simply to give the community a place to discuss how moderation policies and decisions are experienced from the user side.

Staff have confirmed that respectful feedback is welcome, provided discussion remains civil and follows the site rules.

If you’re comfortable sharing, I’d be interested to hear about your experience with moderation on this site, particularly whether mod decisions/takedowns feel clear and consistent.

Please keep the discussion constructive and respectful.

Thanks to anyone willing to share their perspective.

I'll throw my two cents in, as someone who's no longer going to post art here. Tl;dr on this wall of text: man complains about rejection.

Moderation decisions don't feel consistent to me, and it also feels like the moderation approach is to look for reasons to disapprove submissions. I understand that the goal is to keep a high quality of posts, but the current approach feels like letting perfect be the enemy of good. Rejections for things like major anatomical errors are fine to me, it says I missed a major detail that would detract from the work, and I should either attempt to fix it, or switch to a different base image if the problem is fundamental enough.

However, I've also had posts rejected for things I see as trivial errors that the vast majority of users of this site wouldn't actually care about. As an example, I've had a few recent submissions denied for errors such as the nostrils of a black canine nose, in shadow and tilted down, being not up to the standards of the staff. The problem is, I've already inpainted that nose in an attempt to head off the problem (having been rejected for it before) and have gone through hundreds of inpaint runs (240 total images according to my A1111 log) trying to get something that looks decent (non-human noses in particular appear to be something my models all struggle hugely with), going so far as to manually make some adjustments in GIMP to try and improve the best image I got. After putting forth that effort and still getting rejected for it, my conclusion is this is something I cannot make to the standards of staff and therefore the entire image cannot be submitted here. Another rejection reason cited was one fingernail having an artifact on me. This is absolutely on me, I missed that defect, but is that actually something most people looking at the image will notice? To me, posts being rejected for this is the equivalent of a professor taking your essay, seeing a couple typos as he reads through it, ignoring everything else about the essay, and giving you a zero for the assignment. Meanwhile, a casual reader will either not notice the typos, will choose to just ignore them, or will comment pointing them out if it's something they just can't ignore.

I'm certain my earlier submissions here have had similar errors to these, but they weren't rejected, hence the feeling of decisions being inconsistent. My work is certainly not perfect and never has been, and AI generation is inherently imperfect. If we were to compare the majority of submissions from a year or more ago, would they be approved under these standards? The excuse always trotted out is that this site is "curated", which is fine, that's your prerogative. I'm just going to continue inpainting things as best I can, post them elsewhere, and not deal with having to worry about my work being accepted or rejected. People's up or down votes and general engagement will tell me whether a work is liked or disliked. If there's a problem, someone will comment (as has happened on a few of my posts here), and I can fix it and replace the image.

I make my images in a realistic style, because I feel this is one area that AI is good at and isn't usually done by human artists. Does this style introduce more details that can go wrong? Almost certainly. Does the human eye naturally detect things that are wrong in such images, and have an easier time doing so compared to less realistic-looking images? Maybe. If I generate an image that contains a human face, I then need to put forward extra effort to censor it to comply with the rule about having featured obscured. I understand the reason for the rule and do think it's prudent for a site such as this with a company backing it to have such a rule, but I still dislike censoring my work (plus inpainting those features introduces more possibilities for errors).

The majority of the content I make is for myself, I share it because I think others may get some enjoyment out of it. If others won't see it here because it'll get deleted, I'm just not going to bother, there's no point to posting it. This is one area where I think a feature suggested in another thread would help: submissions could be put into a state where they're not visible by default, but a toggle in user settings would make them visible. Submissions that truly have major issues or contain material that isn't allowed would still be deleted. This would greatly help in my opinion, since I could still get feedback on my work, possibly submit a replacement image to improve it, and in the meantime it's still visible to people who have opted in to seeing submissions that have minor issues.

If you want a method for implementing this that shouldn't involve much developer time, create a tag for it (quality_issues?) that can only be applied by staff, blacklist the tag by default, and add a toggle to a user profile that just adds or removes the tag from the user's effective blacklist. While this isn't the best solution, it's one that I think could be applied while a more robust solution is implemented.

The upload limit is also a (more minor) concern of mine. Can it hit zero? What would happen if it did? Would I have to place a support ticket asking for it to be changed back to 1? I've never posted more than a couple images at a time, but the number going down does still feel like a punishment. Specifically, it feels like a countdown to a point where you're not allowed to post anything anymore. There's no indication that I've found as to what the lower limit is, if there is one, and it may be helpful to indicate to people that even if they submit many things that get rejected, that number won't hit 0 (if that is actually the case).

Thank you for reading my stream-of-consciousness blogpost.

bagelmonster said:
[...]

The upload limit is also a (more minor) concern of mine. Can it hit zero? What would happen if it did? Would I have to place a support ticket asking for it to be changed back to 1? I've never posted more than a couple images at a time, but the number going down does still feel like a punishment. Specifically, it feels like a countdown to a point where you're not allowed to post anything anymore. There's no indication that I've found as to what the lower limit is, if there is one, and it may be helpful to indicate to people that even if they submit many things that get rejected, that number won't hit 0 (if that is actually the case).

To address your concerns about the upload limit: if it reaches zero, ask an admin to raise it. We know that deletion ratios are high on this site (the numbers were picked for e621, which operates quite differently), so limit raises have been given in past to accommodate this.

drla said:
To address your concerns about the upload limit: if it reaches zero, ask an admin to raise it. We know that deletion ratios are high on this site (the numbers were picked for e621, which operates quite differently), so limit raises have been given in past to accommodate this.

Good to know, thanks. Would staff be willing to consider limiting the minimum to 1 for this site? It would still accomplish its main task (at least from my understanding) of preventing people from spamming submissions, without people feeling like they're going to get into a place where they can't post anymore.

I'm not a Ruby dev and not familiar enough with the site's codebase to know if this would cause significant knock-on effects (or if this would even work in the interpreter), but I propose a one line insertion in app/models/user.rb!upload_limit before the current return:

return 1 if (pieces[:pending] == 0)

If you've dug a deep hole with deletions, you'll still require the same amount of approved posts to get back to being able to submit multiples at a time.

Edit: Of course immediately after hitting submit I realize this would probably mess up the user display of their upload limit on their profile.

bagelmonster said:
Good to know, thanks. Would staff be willing to consider limiting the minimum to 1 for this site? It would still accomplish its main task (at least from my understanding) of preventing people from spamming submissions, without people feeling like they're going to get into a place where they can't post anymore.

I'm not a Ruby dev and not familiar enough with the site's codebase to know if this would cause significant knock-on effects (or if this would even work in the interpreter), but I propose a one line insertion in app/models/user.rb!upload_limit before the current return:

return 1 if (pieces[:pending] == 0)

If you've dug a deep hole with deletions, you'll still require the same amount of approved posts to get back to being able to submit multiples at a time.

Edit: Of course immediately after hitting submit I realize this would probably mess up the user display of their upload limit on their profile.

Thanks for the suggestion! I appreciate you even taking the effort to look at the site's code.

While this is an interesting idea, we currently have the same developers working on e6ai as we have on e621, so deviations like this most likely make merging updates more of an issue than it's worth.

Luckily, it hasn't really been much of an issue with users reaching an upload limit of 0. In the times it has happened, we have helped them remedy it by having a talk and then raising it again.

It is worth noting that to reach an upload limit of 0, there has to be some underlying issue with the user's uploads that needs to be addressed. Otherwise, the upload limit would just keep shrinking again because of deleted posts. So, rather than seeing it as a punishment, view it as a gauge for whether the user understands the site's specific quality standards.

I think experiences with any admins/mods on any site can never be consistent since theyre all individual people like us. This sounds really "well, duh", but it can be hard to remember that in some one-sided interactions like removals.

On one hand i had a great experience with a mod, deleting many of my old and bad images in one go like i wanted to. With that we get to the other hand, which is the quality standarts.

I know they have been raised massively with all the stuff we can do today compared to 2 years ago. The problem is just, not everyone has the patience or resources to actually do all those things, and you can still make "bad" images just as back then. But back then, they would often be approved much more easily. Every one of my old images i mentioned were so bad, that i didnt wanna have them on the site anymore. They were terrible, had artifacts etc. And none of them were deleted, only 1-2 images were ever rejected and both for having a different number of toes on each foot. Which is completely understandable. But by todays standarts, none of those images would likely have been approved now.

I started uploading again recently, and one of my imo pretty high quality images got rejected for something along the lines of "has different number of digits on each hand, even if hidden". The hand was partly behind another body part, and there was no way to tell how many digits that hand actually had. And likely noone would have ever cared. Those are the moments i sometimes feel like its just luck who you get to approve your posts, because im 95% sure most other mods would have just approved that image. I wont try to upload it again ofc, even if someone else might approve it. But i dont wanna risk turning the wrath of one mod on me if they see that image again that they rejected.

So far my experience has been mostly positive, but i can only hope rejections like that one dont happen more often in the future, because that can feel very arbitrary and bad. If a finger is straight up missing, no problem, but if its just hidden, noone can know if its actually there or not.

Edit: Actually i can provide the exact reason given for the one deletion:
"Does not meet minimum quality standards (Anatomical anomalies)-finger count mismatch (including obscured thumb)"
Imo, if something is obscured, it really shouldnt count as a mismatch...

bigboyblaziken said:
I think experiences with any admins/mods on any site can never be consistent since theyre all individual people like us. This sounds really "well, duh", but it can be hard to remember that in some one-sided interactions like removals.

On one hand i had a great experience with a mod, deleting many of my old and bad images in one go like i wanted to. With that we get to the other hand, which is the quality standarts.

I know they have been raised massively with all the stuff we can do today compared to 2 years ago. The problem is just, not everyone has the patience or resources to actually do all those things, and you can still make "bad" images just as back then. But back then, they would often be approved much more easily. Every one of my old images i mentioned were so bad, that i didnt wanna have them on the site anymore. They were terrible, had artifacts etc. And none of them were deleted, only 1-2 images were ever rejected and both for having a different number of toes on each foot. Which is completely understandable. But by todays standarts, none of those images would likely have been approved now.

I started uploading again recently, and one of my imo pretty high quality images got rejected for something along the lines of "has different number of digits on each hand, even if hidden". The hand was partly behind another body part, and there was no way to tell how many digits that hand actually had. And likely noone would have ever cared. Those are the moments i sometimes feel like its just luck who you get to approve your posts, because im 95% sure most other mods would have just approved that image. I wont try to upload it again ofc, even if someone else might approve it. But i dont wanna risk turning the wrath of one mod on me if they see that image again that they rejected.

So far my experience has been mostly positive, but i can only hope rejections like that one dont happen more often in the future, because that can feel very arbitrary and bad. If a finger is straight up missing, no problem, but if its just hidden, noone can know if its actually there or not.

Edit: Actually i can provide the exact reason given for the one deletion:
"Does not meet minimum quality standards (Anatomical anomalies)-finger count mismatch (including obscured thumb)"
Imo, if something is obscured, it really shouldnt count as a mismatch...

I assume you're talking about post 157175? The issue is that the left hand has 3 "main" fingers visible with additional visible thumb, whereas the right hand has 4 "main" fingers visible with a thumb that isn't visible (but has to exist obviously). Therefore it's a finger count mismatch between hands.
You could've just messaged me for the explanation y'know (as I was the remover)
And no, that fourth finger on right hand cannot be a thumb, because you can't physically bend a thumb at that angle, for it to face the same way the "main" fingers do when curled inwards

technical-grid said:
I assume you're talking about post 157175? The issue is that the left hand has 3 "main" fingers visible with additional visible thumb, whereas the right hand has 4 "main" fingers visible with a thumb that isn't visible (but has to exist obviously). Therefore it's a finger count mismatch between hands.
You could've just messaged me for the explanation y'know (as I was the remover)
And no, that fourth finger on right hand cannot be a thumb, because you can't physically bend a thumb at that angle, for it to face the same way the "main" fingers do when curled inwards

Im sorry, i feel pretty stupid now because i just realized that i could actually see the remover in that window too... i thought i couldnt find out who it was, i think i just never looked. I would have done that if i would have realized.
Also thanks for going more into it, i now see much better what you mean, for some reason i just didnt see it this way before. Yes i guess it does bend too "wrong" to be a thumb, i probably just kinda ignored that before, now it makes sense and ye that is indeed just a mismatch.

Well now that thats cleared, i can actually say that my user experience so far has been only positive now. And now that i know i can just see and message a remover directly, that changes things a lot as well for the future. Idk why i thought we couldnt see that, i might have mixed that up with another site.