Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests
I was browsing through some Venom artworks that got deleted for being "human only" despite many others getting through with very similar content.
Like, how does this get deleted:
5092892
5003258
But this gets approved?
5103255
4974033
Some of these were approved/deleted by the same moderator too. The human-only requirement is very vague and inconsistent and I think needs to be more specific...
Or relaxed. Saved for the blatantly obvious, because now, there are too many false positives.
Updated
Why those got deleted but the others didn't? Good question.
From the rules at https://e621.net/wiki_pages/11143
"The things that make humans not-human under our rules are visible, anatomical deviations from the standard human.
This means that orcs, elves, plant-people, humanoid aliens, are all fine."
I would argue that a parasitic alien organism covering a human body would fall in that category.
If not, the Venom posts would need to go through a massive purge.
captainrober87 said:
I would argue that a parasitic alien organism covering a human body would fall in that category.
If not, the Venom posts would need to go through a massive purge.
Venom, and perhaps a huge chunk of "transformation sequences" for that matter.
I've seen a bunch of art where some human gets "posessed/consumed" and turns into some anthro creature - not unlike Venom.
Regardless, it is odd jet-black skin, a giant gaping maw and white gashes for eyes aren't considered "noticeable anatomical deviations."
The requirement needs to be more lax or better defined.
mathemabeat said:
Venom, and perhaps a huge chunk of "transformation sequences" for that matter.I've seen a bunch of art where some human gets "posessed/consumed" and turns into some anthro creature - not unlike Venom.
Regardless, it is odd jet-black skin, a giant gaping maw and white gashes for eyes aren't considered "noticeable anatomical deviations."
The requirement needs to be more lax or better defined.
To be fair, what place would you draw the line that wouldn't include, for instance, Spider-Man?
lendrimujina said:
To be fair, what place would you draw the line that wouldn't include, for instance, Spider-Man?
Honestly, I don't know.
We could argue Spiderman's costume is a dead thing, ergo he's "human only". But then again, there is the black suit too, which looks exactly the same as his normal costume but is posessed by Venom.
Then there's a whole other can of worms like Felicia and Nadia Fortune who look even more "human" than Spiderman in his suit.
But, more importantly: the mods themselves aren't sure either - as you have seen.
And yet, they continue to delete posts based on this vague criteria, despite said posts being similar to many that have appeared before. That's the problem I'm trying to point out.
mathemabeat said:
But, more importantly: the mods themselves aren't sure either - as you have seen.
There are more than thirty approvers. It is literally impossible for us to be consistent across the board.
That second post was likely deleted because it's a human in a suit as shown by the skin, plain and simple. I'll see if the janitors want to come forward and give a more detailed explanation from their perspective, but you really should be arguing the deletion with the one that deleted the post (if it's your post, else the deletion isn't really yours to contest) rather than dragging it out into the forums.
We've had these policies in place for years and they aren't changing any time soon.
donovan_dmc said:
There are more than thirty approvers. It is literally impossible for us to be consistent across the board.
That second post was likely deleted because it's a human in a suit as shown by the skin, plain and simple. I'll see if the janitors want to come forward and give a more detailed explanation from their perspective, but you really should be arguing the deletion with the one that deleted the post (if it's your post, else the deletion isn't really yours to contest) rather than dragging it out into the forums.We've had these policies in place for years and they aren't changing any time soon.
I just wish the deletions were not this inconsistent.
Another example: this entire pool
https://e621.net/pools/39584
Sunspot isn't a human, is he?
Frequent examples like this are why I went to the forums. I can't contest the deletion myself, and I'm sure DMing mods/janitors themselves often is frowned down upon.
It'd probably be fine if it could be reuploaded but the "previously deleted" rule won't allow it regardless.
Problems like this are why this forum topic was made in the first place, right? There's definitely room for improvement here.
mathemabeat said:
Sunspot isn't a human, is he?
For our purposes, yeah, that's a human
we don't care about lore or what their species "actually" is
Have you considered that we are a furry-centric booru, and that humanoids are not, and never will be our focus? The ones we allow are typically barely scraping by on technicalities
Ah, yes, Venom. One of the many banes of a Janitor's existence.
The problem here is that Venom sits smack dab on the borderline of relevancy. Which side he falls on can be different depending upon picture. Furthermore, different approvers have different tolerances for what borderline material is acceptable and what isn't, but we do have some guidelines developed over the years which we try to stick to.
Skin color is irrelevant for TWYS (the Simpsons rule). Are those eyes, some sort of glasses, or part of a hood? Are they actually nonhuman or are they a human in a costume (the fursuit rule)? Are they part of a comic or sequence (relevant) or do they stand by themselves (nonrelevant). Do they have some sort of anatomy that isn't human in some way (the pointy ear rule)?
For Venom in particular, it's his mouth o' fangs and ridiculously long tongue that are what makes him nonhuman. If they're not visible, then according to TWYS, he likely won't be relevant. Remember, we go by TWYS, not lore.
Of the provided examples:
As you can imagine, it isn't easy, and sometimes, it really is like figuring out where exactly to split a hair.
Symbiotes are in the class of awful characters to upload at the periphery of relevance. They are worse than typical humanoids. We could just cull most of the tag and still be consistent with the uploading guidelines. They are approved because the approver is giving them a chance.
post #5092892 - we have a button we can press that says "Borderline Relevancy" and pressing it is recorded as a "disapproval." The approver saw the post and passed on it for weak relevance. This post personifies that. Its potentially relevant features are poorly shown.
post #5103255 - current transformation/pseudo-tentacle stuff. Shouldn't need explanation. Base approval decisions on the most obviously relevant feature and ignore everything else, where possible.
post #4974033 - I think I approved that for the claws bottom right or the extended mouth. That's pretty weak and could be deleted.
I've been handling the "bad" posts at the back of the queue, trying to give them all their fair shake or giving them a more specific deletion reason than automod. I see a lot of symbiotes and regularly "take one for the team" handling that kind of annoying content. If I don't backstop the pending posts and make decisions on these bad posts, then automod would certainly delete even more symbiote and other borderline posts than I do and you wouldn't even see a "Human only" reason... though it should be obvious that relevance is the problem and no one wanted to make a final decision. Also, the users uploading symbiotes (mostly one person) would have these posts taking up upload slots for an entire month just for a non-decision. That's a rather lame result and posts pending for a long time have a chilling effect on their uploaders. A lot of this comes down to "making decisions," and with content like symbiotes both choices are kinda bad. Some things to keep in mind.
Felicia_(darkstalkers) is troublesome because her ears could pass for a headband a lot of the time, which casts doubt on the authenticity of the rest of her animal parts. Sometimes artists do go as far as making her animal parts an entire costume. I opt for the simple interpretation and usually approve Felicia posts because she has a tail that I can't see is fake, so I assume it's real. Real until proven otherwise is a simple way to handle these iffy posts that avoids leaning into arbitrary interpretation.
Nadia_fortune looks like an animal humanoid. Her ears are kinda bad, but this is a nothingburger. Not good rhetoric if you want to probe at inconsistency. Though, I did just check all her automodded posts and undeleted the approvable ones (don't feel like taking requests, don't ask).
If a sunspot_(fortnite) post reaches me, I have been deciding if his head spikes look like spikes or if they could be a part of his clothing. Sunspot often wears some kind of hood, sweater, jacket, whatever over his spikes, and clothing tends to "absorb" body parts and makes them not relevant (e.g., cat ear hat is the classic example, not relevant). For those wondering, tags like furgonomics for spikes sticking out of clothing shouldn't need to follow approver logic 1:1. I might also give this character a pass if his grey petals look enough like petals and not hair or fur lining on clothing. And I've been approving cold_fusion_(fortnite) for his carrot nose first of all.
abadbird said:
I've been handling the "bad" posts at the back of the queue, trying to give them all their fair shake or giving them a more specific deletion reason than automod.
Mmmh, I read somewhere in the forums that the automod hasn't deleted anything in a while... So it was thanks to you? Hats off for your hard janitorial work and for giving old unapproved posts a chance :D
Also thanks to both you and Clawstripe for giving these detailed examples to help better understand the thought process on these grey zone characters.
Maybe it would be a good idea to update the human part from the uploading guidelines with a link to forum posts like this one to help with clarification? Like a subsection that says 'reasons why your upload may have been deleted due to human only'.
captainrober87 said:
Mmmh, I read somewhere in the forums that the automod hasn't deleted anything in a while... So it was thanks to you? Hats off for your hard janitorial work and for giving old unapproved posts a chance :D
When I was new (I'm still the most junior staff member lol), I eventually went to the back of the queue and started thinning out what I could. Mairo has been doing that for years. Something or other was said in a staff Discord channel about those leftover posts being difficult, so Slyroon wiped out all the leftover difficult posts at the back. Group effort brought the queue down to zero. We touched heaven. First time in several years we were told. Queue was in good shape for a while. Then we had to do the young purge. I took it upon myself to review all the deleted posts for mistakes to undelete, taking myself off approvals except for a few breaks to mulch through the stragglers at the back. During this time, Strikerman had tremendous output. I finished reviewing all the purged posts, but still have ~4K I wasn't sure about when I saw them. Transitioned back to approvals for the foreseeable future until we're back in good shape. We kind of are but I'm not satisfied. Reduced the glut of pending posts from ~15 days down to 4~6 days.
This is a group effort that takes regular commitment. Even having a big day (e.g., 400-1000+ approvals, let's say) only clearing easy posts gets exhausting, and all that gets replenished every day. Can't rely on people having big days all the time. Honestly, I kind of don't want to see too many posts that are too easy pending for so long (main reason for those is bad sourcing from self-uploading artists and commissioners), because that's bulk work any of us could have handled.
What I'm trying to say is that this isn't just me. By numbers, lately I've been approving maybe 7% of our daily new posts. A fair amount of the posts I do approve have low relevance or relevance that is difficult quantify, so I'm not exactly contributing to our site's core mission.
Maybe it would be a good idea to update the human part from the uploading guidelines with a link to forum posts like this one to help with clarification? Like a subsection that says 'reasons why your upload may have been deleted due to human only'.
I want to write approval guidelines that are much more detailed than the uploading guidelines, but I haven't felt like continuing that project lately. And then, maybe, in the distant future make that, or a version of that, public. Describe how we view the more questionable anatomy, break down our deletion reasons into more deterministic logic, define the more niche deletion reasons that aren't written about anywhere official, and so on. But something like that will be challenging for most people to read and remember. People already struggle with the "body colors don't matter" rule that is written in the uploading guidelines.
Hey all, thanks for sharing insight process behind the process of approvals! Things make a lot more sense now.
It took me a while to realize just how grey the line of "humans-only" content is.
Frankly I'd prefer false positives than deletions by automods, so thank you for the effort sorting in all the uploads (and also looking through some of the deleted/purged posts!). It's easy to forget how well e621 has been kept as an image board - arguably the best one out there.
If there was one easily actionable suggestion, I'd put emphasis on the Simpsons Rule.
Or alernatively, a hyperlink included in the "deleted " box towards the rule in a deleted post? That'd take more effort though, but it'd save people from having to look up/assume the contents of the rule(s) again.
With that said, I really appreciate your time for making the responses! Thank you again for this great imageboard.
