Brian on December 31st, 1969 at 5:00:00 PM

There is obviously a level at which many people find art to be not worth viewing at times. Sometimes people like to see paint images and doodles just as they sometimes like to see dark art, or collages. Because of this, the following changes will take effect as soon as I complete them...



- By default, the gallery view will contain only pieces of art that are considered to be serious. By serious, I don't mean that any funny subject matter will not be shown, but rather that small doodles and similar things will remain hidden unless the user chooses otherwise.



- In conjunction with the above change, each image will soon be accompanied by a small link that will give users the ability to help classify where art ends up. Basically, a list of the categories that a piece is listed in will be displayed and users can vote as to whether or not a piece of art belongs where it is listed. If enough users (staff members have more weight) say that a piece of art does not fall in a category that it is listed in, then that category will no longer apply to that work. An example would be a picture of a classic car ending up in a 'religious art' category. It obviously has no business being there, so users will be able to influence such categorization to provide a better browsing experience.



- Filters will be implemented that allow browsing of specific categories of art and blocking of art types that you just don't want to see. For instance, if you absolutely hate anime, you will have the option to never see anything classified as such.



What it all comes down to is the following: We will provide a customizable toolset to make your experience at subVariance the best it can be. It will be up to you to use them, however. Staff members will do their part to administrate content in a fair and productive way, but it all comes down to how you implement the features at your disposal. Obviously, once the tools go live, there may be problems with them. Although we'd love to be able to please everyone, it truly is impossible to do so without cooperation from everyone. We hope these features will help to make the community virtually universally pleasing.



Once I get some more work done on things, I'll post a follow-up to this regarding how to use the new feature set.

mahon on January 2nd, 2008 at 5:58:45 AM

This is a great idea.

Is this a guideline, or a rule? As in, if something is a doodle or sketch or is otherwise unfinished, but you're proud enough of it to put it in your main gallery, is that under the judgment of each member?



Further, is it okay for users to upload "dailies" or simple studies to this non-serious filter/folder, just for the sake of putting them up for others to see or critique?