Can a normal user hope to get unrestricted uploads or will it remain a privilige only the first few accounts got?
It is possible for a normal user to get the rank of janitor? It seems the help is desperately needed.

Can I ask these questions without automatically disqualifying myself from the possibility of achieving either?

What I'm saying is I'd love to help but I'm not sure what channels to go through.

You can try to send an email to dragonfruit to apply for janitor. I got a response and an interview, but no reply after that unfortunately.

Also you will be obligated to follow the same rules as the other janitors, so unapproved posts will remains unapproved and anything that looks remotely underage or like a photo will not get approved

You can find the email here: https://e6ai.net/forum_topics/38

I’ll be honest, the fact the janitors/mods here can just arbitrarily decide “Well, we’re just not going to approve pics and let them get auto-deleted in a month” makes me not want to upload anything. Looking at the pending uploads, there are several I personally see no problem with, yet they’re unapproved just the same for seemingly no reason.

dragonranger said:
I’ll be honest, the fact the janitors/mods here can just arbitrarily decide “Well, we’re just not going to approve pics and let them get auto-deleted in a month” makes me not want to upload anything. Looking at the pending uploads, there are several I personally see no problem with, yet they’re unapproved just the same for seemingly no reason.

To be fair this site seems to be given very little regard by the e621 admins/staff and from what I've read they just don't want to deal with it. So it seems we've only got a few janitors that are volunteering their time here. And as such they're probably overworked between both sites. Sometimes it takes some time for something to get approved, and I'd assume anything that sits unapproved for long periods of time (>2 weeks) probably breaks a rule and is intentionally not being approved. I would advise patience and waiting to see.

drakkenfyre said:
To be fair this site seems to be given very little regard by the e621 admins/staff and from what I've read they just don't want to deal with it [...]

The problem is that e6ai has rules concerning quality that aren't as troublesome on e621, and there's no transparency as to why something is rejected if it's left for 30 days without remark. Auto-deletion should not be an option (since the upload is not truly deleted and can be restored on appeal, thus it still takes up storage on the servers). The Upload Guidelines page has a multi-faceted bullet point that is unclear, leaves too much room for interpretation when it comes to submission acceptability.

Low quality submissions: Highly visible artifacts, scribbles, low-quality creations, "1000h in MSPaint" images, computer generated mosaics, cropped images, anatomical diagrams, bad edits, screenshots, artificial upscales (waifu2x or similar), AI / neural network edits (denoise or decensoring), etc.

• What are the upper and lower limits for "highly visible artifacts"?
• An example image of "this is the cleanest we've seen that we've rejected" would help as a baseline.

• What are "scribbles" in terms of AI art? The same as for traditional art?

• What are "low-quality creations" in terms of AI art?
• Is the bar significantly higher than for manual art?
• Definitely needs example images, or the stipulation needs to be replaced with something more precise.

• What are "bad edits" in terms of AI art?
• Is the bar significantly higher than for manual art?
• As above, needs example images or needs more precise definition.

• What does this mean: "AI / neural network edits (denoise or decensoring)"?
• Needs example images, but the definition seems precise enough if only I knew what it was. :P

However, I understand this is all a bit much to ask. It takes a significant time investment to help with this site, and to top it off you need a decent amount of prior experience working on projects to qualify. These furs work for free and are skilled. But if it is too strenuous to run two sites with the staff they have, then the website may not be viable at the end of the day. There must be dedicated staff for this site exclusive from e621, and the bar is high.

raaazzledazzle said:
The problem is that e6ai has rules concerning quality that aren't as troublesome on e621, and there's no transparency as to why something is rejected if it's left for 30 days without remark. Auto-deletion should not be an option (since the upload is not truly deleted and can be restored on appeal, thus it still takes up storage on the servers). The Upload Guidelines page has a multi-faceted bullet point that is unclear, leaves too much room for interpretation when it comes to submission acceptability.

• What are the upper and lower limits for "highly visible artifacts"?
• An example image of "this is the cleanest we've seen that we've rejected" would help as a baseline.

• What are "scribbles" in terms of AI art? The same as for traditional art?

• What are "low-quality creations" in terms of AI art?
• Is the bar significantly higher than for manual art?
• Definitely needs example images, or the stipulation needs to be replaced with something more precise.

• What are "bad edits" in terms of AI art?
• Is the bar significantly higher than for manual art?
• As above, needs example images or needs more precise definition.

• What does this mean: "AI / neural network edits (denoise or decensoring)"?
• Needs example images, but the definition seems precise enough if only I knew what it was. :P

However, I understand this is all a bit much to ask. It takes a significant time investment to help with this site, and to top it off you need a decent amount of prior experience working on projects to qualify. These furs work for free and are skilled. But if it is too strenuous to run two sites with the staff they have, then the website may not be viable at the end of the day. There must be dedicated staff for this site exclusive from e621, and the bar is high.

One major issue seems to be that there are very few janitors actually looking at the pending posts. I also suspect some might have blacklists on and the order in which submissions are reviewed does not seem to be chronological.
All this said I just kind of wish they'd be open to creating more janitors but my attempts to reach out have gone fruitless. So not only does the frequency of which posts are approved suffer, it also makes the work load for the very few people approving posts larger.

You can take a look here to see how few they actually are and in fact I think only two of them are actively approving posts. It's kind of crazy to think that it's just two people.
https://e6ai.net/users?commit=Search&search%5Bcan_approve_posts%5D=true

jelloponies said:
You can take a look here to see how few they actually are and in fact I think only two of them are actively approving posts. It's kind of crazy to think that it's just two people.
https://e6ai.net/users?commit=Search&search%5Bcan_approve_posts%5D=true

Holy moly, that's an absurd workload. :( It doesn't bode well and I really like what this site has to offer so far, I wouldn't want it to go away. There's another website https://rule34.xxx/ that allows AI uploads but the content posted there is much less my speed (too many humans and much more human-centric furry content) and the website's colors are kind of eye-searing. :P

raaazzledazzle said:
Holy moly, that's an absurd workload. :( It doesn't bode well and I really like what this site has to offer so far, I wouldn't want it to go away. There's another website https://rule34.xxx/ that allows AI uploads but the content posted there is much less my speed (too many humans and much more human-centric furry content) and the website's colors are kind of eye-searing. :P

When my eyes had finally adjusted to the color scheme and could make out shapes again, and I saw that Lisa Simpson, Meg Griffin, Betty Boop and Bob's Burgers are among the most "popular" posts on rule34, most of the stuff I find here suddenly lost its terror.

In their defense, though, at least they don't ban content needlessly, waiting for some precedence court order over something that was never illegal to begin with... even though they have very classy sponsors with high moral standards, as is hard to miss.

rantas said:
...I saw that Lisa Simpson, Meg Griffin, Betty Boop and Bob's Burgers are among the most "popular" posts on rule34...

rule34 basically throws you out of the furry-land comfort zone and into the mainstream with everyone else. But yeah I saw that list too, and I recall my reaction being "if this is what normal is, then I'm glad I'm not a normie". Yikes!

Although, that said, calling it "most popular" may be misleading. That ranking only works for defined, named characters which seem to only be from media (shows, movies, games), so that excludes a large chunk of general NSFW art.

raaazzledazzle said:
The problem is that e6ai has rules concerning quality that aren't as troublesome on e621, and there's no transparency as to why something is rejected if it's left for 30 days without remark. Auto-deletion should not be an option (since the upload is not truly deleted and can be restored on appeal, thus it still takes up storage on the servers). The Upload Guidelines page has a multi-faceted bullet point that is unclear, leaves too much room for interpretation when it comes to submission acceptability.

• What are the upper and lower limits for "highly visible artifacts"?
• An example image of "this is the cleanest we've seen that we've rejected" would help as a baseline.

• What are "scribbles" in terms of AI art? The same as for traditional art?

• What are "low-quality creations" in terms of AI art?
• Is the bar significantly higher than for manual art?
• Definitely needs example images, or the stipulation needs to be replaced with something more precise.

• What are "bad edits" in terms of AI art?
• Is the bar significantly higher than for manual art?
• As above, needs example images or needs more precise definition.

• What does this mean: "AI / neural network edits (denoise or decensoring)"?
• Needs example images, but the definition seems precise enough if only I knew what it was. :P

However, I understand this is all a bit much to ask. It takes a significant time investment to help with this site, and to top it off you need a decent amount of prior experience working on projects to qualify. These furs work for free and are skilled. But if it is too strenuous to run two sites with the staff they have, then the website may not be viable at the end of the day. There must be dedicated staff for this site exclusive from e621, and the bar is high.

The thing is that list is just pulled straight from e621 and not altered for this site. I mean the AI upscale rule obviously doesn't apply here because using an upscaler is extremely common to get decently-large images (also the tech has evolved from the days of just Waifu2x which usually produced inferior, grainy results. These days actual AI upscalers can product very good results.) Granted I understand on the main site this is still not desirable but for here it kind of needs a handwave given the content to begin with.

raaazzledazzle said:
Holy moly, that's an absurd workload. :( It doesn't bode well and I really like what this site has to offer so far, I wouldn't want it to go away. There's another website https://rule34.xxx/ that allows AI uploads but the content posted there is much less my speed (too many humans and much more human-centric furry content) and the website's colors are kind of eye-searing. :P

I think they should open up a few janitorial positions here. Clearly this site isn't anywhere the size of e621 and the admins there seemingly don't really care about this site. But I like it and I don't want to lose it, especially not to a simple matter of few active staff. Toss out an application form and let people apply for here and here alone, and those workloads can be dealt with much quicker. I know I'd volunteer for it.

drakkenfyre said:
The thing is that list is just pulled straight from e621 and not altered for this site. I mean the AI upscale rule obviously doesn't apply here because using an upscaler is extremely common to get decently-large images (also the tech has evolved from the days of just Waifu2x which usually produced inferior, grainy results. These days actual AI upscalers can product very good results.) Granted I understand on the main site this is still not desirable but for here it kind of needs a handwave given the content to begin with.

Most of the upscalers I see are still pretty terrible. The best way to create high res images is 2 stage im2img with a high res second stage. Using just an upscaler even an AI one that's not a generation model still produces terrible results.

Agreed that the site could use more janitors. To be honest I have had zero issue with approval. Most of the people complaining about approvals are posting things that are on my blacklist. I bet its just the janitors don't want to look at ai gen nearly photorealistic [insert cursed content here]; can't say I blame them.

agreenfish said:
Most of the upscalers I see are still pretty terrible. The best way to create high res images is 2 stage im2img with a high res second stage. Using just an upscaler even an AI one that's not a generation model still produces terrible results.

Agreed that the site could use more janitors. To be honest I have had zero issue with approval. Most of the people complaining about approvals are posting things that are on my blacklist. I bet its just the janitors don't want to look at ai gen nearly photorealistic [insert cursed content here]; can't say I blame them.

Approvals seem to get handled reasonably fast. I've mainly had issues with tag alias/implication requests and flags. I've got flags that have been dormant for 3 months now... But I won't pretend like I know how much trouble it is to resolve either of these two, so I don't want to point fingers at the janitors. Especially when we only have two decently active ones to my knowledge.

agreenfish said:
Most of the upscalers I see are still pretty terrible. The best way to create high res images is 2 stage im2img with a high res second stage. Using just an upscaler even an AI one that's not a generation model still produces terrible results.

I've had good results with a few, including a couple standalone downloadable ones. The thing is though I'm only upscaling enough for wallpaper use usually, not blowing them up to 4K or anything like that.

Agreed that the site could use more janitors. To be honest I have had zero issue with approval. Most of the people complaining about approvals are posting things that are on my blacklist. I bet its just the janitors don't want to look at ai gen nearly photorealistic [insert cursed content here]; can't say I blame them.

Same concerning approval. I've uploaded 60 images so far and I think the longest wait for approval was 3-4 days on a few and I think it was just a matter of the staff being stretched thin, because all of them were approved within moments of one another when they eventually were.

I've seen one staff comment mentioning that things that go against the guidelines won't be approved, so they'll just sit in limbo until the auto-mod deletes them. One example was characters in sexual situations that looked too young, regardless of the style, i.e. cartoon versus realistic. And one person complaining about their uploads not getting approved was given the hint that that was why.

drakkenfyre said:
I think they should open up a few janitorial positions here. Clearly this site isn't anywhere the size of e621 and the admins there seemingly don't really care about this site. But I like it and I don't want to lose it, especially not to a simple matter of few active staff. Toss out an application form and let people apply for here and here alone, and those workloads can be dealt with much quicker. I know I'd volunteer for it.

I contacted the staff but got zero response. Not as in they said they weren't interested, they just completely ignored my messages.
Personally I think that's pretty rude but what can you do.

jelloponies said:
I contacted the staff but got zero response. Not as in they said they weren't interested, they just completely ignored my messages.
Personally I think that's pretty rude but what can you do.

Bummer. So far from what I've seen it looks like all approvals are just on one mod who has to sift through endless pics by himself. It'd be nice to have more people who could approve uploads to help with an ever growing backlog of pending gens building up.

Yeah, this is something that should be handled by multiple people. Having only one or two people in charge of approving uploads can lead to burnout. It’s basically why I vanished off the face of the earth on the main site until after I was demoted to Former Staff.

aislopper said:
Bummer. So far from what I've seen it looks like all approvals are just on one mod...

There's 3 active janitors: Lance Armstrong, Draco18s, and Dasadevil

To see for yourself, run a search that looks like this:

-status:pending -approver:draco18s -approver:Lance_Armstrong

This would show you the ones that just dasadevil approved, for example, by process of elimination (lookup who approved the filtered results). You can juggle the query around to figure out the current janitor situation.

agreenfish said:
Most of the upscalers I see are still pretty terrible. The best way to create high res images is 2 stage im2img with a high res second stage. Using just an upscaler even an AI one that's not a generation model still produces terrible results.

Agreed that the site could use more janitors. To be honest I have had zero issue with approval. Most of the people complaining about approvals are posting things that are on my blacklist. I bet its just the janitors don't want to look at ai gen nearly photorealistic [insert cursed content here]; can't say I blame them.

This is really backwards, if you are a janitor by definition of the task you've accepted, you shouldn't have a blacklist. If you are too soft that a picture makes you so emotional that you can't even view it and see if it breaks any actual rules then you shouldn't take space from people that want to and can do that task.

And another thing. If a post breaks the rules, it should be deleted on the spot, not left to hang in limbo until the auto-mod deletes it, taking up space in your posts until that time.

kiyoka said:
This is really backwards, if you are a janitor by definition of the task you've accepted, you shouldn't have a blacklist. If you are too soft that a picture makes you so emotional that you can't even view it and see if it breaks any actual rules then you shouldn't take space from people that want to and can do that task.

i don't think it really works that way. there are a limited amount of people who'd be willing to do the job and would do it consistently, not abuse their power, etc. the admins with the power to promote people also have to know enough about a person to trust them enough to promote. they're almost certainly not taking someone's spot. if you removed one of the existing janitors because they use a blacklist, all you'd end up with is less janitors and slower submission approval.

kiyoka said:
And another thing. If a post breaks the rules, it should be deleted on the spot, not left to hang in limbo until the auto-mod deletes it, taking up space in your posts until that time.

it's stuff that's ambiguous that doesn't get dealt with. the janitors probably aren't sure about it and don't want to put their name on it as an approver. also since it's ambiguous, just deleting it is probably going to result in people breaking out their microscopes and law books, crying abuse, arguing about it, etc.

i agree it's better to just delete stuff even if it's ambiguous but i can understand the problems with that as well. maybe the expiration timer should just be halved.

terraraptor said:
There's 3 active janitors: Lance Armstrong, Draco18s, and Dasadevil

To see for yourself, run a search that looks like this:

-status:pending -approver:draco18s -approver:Lance_Armstrong

This would show you the ones that just dasadevil approved, for example, by process of elimination (lookup who approved the filtered results). You can juggle the query around to figure out the current janitor situation.

Of those 3, its Lance doing the overwhelming majority of approvals. One has about 2.5 posts approved a day, the other is 1 post every 3 days, and Lance is averaging 50 posts a day. Its crazy that basically all approvals on the site fall to only one person to have to go through by themselves.

aislopper said:
Of those 3, its Lance doing the overwhelming majority of approvals. One has about 2.5 posts approved a day, the other is 1 post every 3 days, and Lance is averaging 50 posts a day. Its crazy that basically all approvals on the site fall to only one person to have to go through by themselves.

Not to miss your point, but a more fair comparison would just be looking at approvals within the last month (since not everyone started the same day). It looks like Lance does about 8x more than draco per month... and I'll have to take back what I said about dasa, looks like he's not active anymore after all lol.

terraraptor said:
Not to miss your point, but a more fair comparison would just be looking at approvals within the last month (since not everyone started the same day). It looks like Lance does about 8x more than draco per month... and I'll have to take back what I said about dasa, looks like he's not active anymore after all lol.

Not that this specifically affects you though. You have unrestricted uploads after all.