I've decided to change up the changelog (hah!) system.

For now I'll post them in this category, one topic per major set of changes, sticky but not locked, so that people can comment and discuss.

Changelog

• New uploads now wait in an approval queue and stay hidden until approved.
• Images and videos now load from our CDN.
• Page loads are now rate limited; the API is not affected. Normal browsing won’t hit it; opening dozens of posts in tabs at once might.
• robots.txt changes: all crawlers are allowed, and search engines can now index tag pages. (bad actors weren't listening anyway)
• Imported videos now have their alternate quality versions.
• Default sort is now order:approved, newest approved first; upload order is order:created.
• Prev/next arrows now follow your sort and show on sorted searches.
• Fixed cropped avatars (broken since the CDN switch).
• Cheatsheet sorting section updated.

I approve the change to allow for commenting! Copying my DMail to you here:

Hi Hinoserm,

Your recent changelog items have raised some concerns for me and I wanted to politely bring them to your attention.

• New uploads now wait in an approval queue and stay hidden until approved.
• Default sort is now order:approved, newest approved first; upload order is order:created.

Feel free to discount these, but please do consider them; I am concerned they may impact the platform more broadly than just as personal preference:

Personally, I think this is a backwards move: I enjoy seeing unapproved posts, knowing that they're the "bleeding edge", and knowing that another user has already uploaded a post, so I shouldn't go to the effort of attempting to upload it and tag it myself. If I can't see unapproved posts, I don't know whether an artwork has already been posted. Even if seeing unapproved posts confers a risk that anything I favourite could later be removed; this is not really any different to takedown requests retrospectively removing approved art.

More broadly, letting users see unapproved posts provides a valuable opportunity for artists to get early reactions and feedback on their work. Poorly-received subjects or styles may help inform an artist to choose alternative approaches in the future; well-received images and encouraging comments helps to keep artists engaged. Removing the broader community from this process means that submitting an image becomes a black hole - artists get no feedback until an approval action (a delete or reject is a harsh thing to receive) and won't necessarily be able to iterate their generations as quickly if there aren't users to spot problems before the moderation step.

Can I ask what the root-cause intent was behind these changes? Could I instead propose that unapproved posts are only shown to logged-in users? That may help to alleviate some of the issues I've pointed out above.

Thanks for your time, and for continuing to work on Blep.art despite all the recent drama.

derpetologist said:
I approve the change to allow for commenting! Copying my DMail to you here:

Hi! I'm sorry, I saw your dmail and just haven't had a chance to respond.

We made the change to post visibility due to concerns the recent drama might cause people to come deface the site, or try to upload something potentially illegal. We're still deciding how we want it to work going forward, but figured this was the safest choice while we're still understaffed.

We're playing around with different ideas, and I think we probably will try to go back to the way it was, possibly allowing our automated moderator hide any potentially offensive posts until they're reviewed.

Once I have more details I'll talk with my team about posting a plan and opening it for discussion.

hinoserm said:
I've decided to change up the changelog (hah!) system.

For now I'll post them in this category, one topic per major set of changes, sticky but not locked, so that people can comment and discuss.

Changelog

• New uploads now wait in an approval queue and stay hidden until approved.
• Images and videos now load from our CDN.
• Page loads are now rate limited; the API is not affected. Normal browsing won’t hit it; opening dozens of posts in tabs at once might.
• robots.txt changes: all crawlers are allowed, and search engines can now index tag pages. (bad actors weren't listening anyway)
• Imported videos now have their alternate quality versions.
• Default sort is now order:approved, newest approved first; upload order is order:created.
• Prev/next arrows now follow your sort and show on sorted searches.
• Fixed cropped avatars (broken since the CDN switch).
• Cheatsheet sorting section updated.

how to see only not approved posts?

xruyi said:
how to see only not approved posts?

Right now you can't: posts waiting for approval are only visible to staff. They show up for everyone once they're approved.

ardenfox said:
Right now you can't: posts waiting for approval are only visible to staff. They show up for everyone once they're approved.

can you make it possible? if this is a measure about defacing, then adding something like order:pending will do no harm, since you will only see it if you explicitly type it in the search bar

xruyi said:
can you make it possible? if this is a measure about defacing, then adding something like order:pending will do no harm, since you will only see it if you explicitly type it in the search bar

That one's a policy call rather than a technical one, and staff are still working out how pending posts should be handled. I've passed your suggestion along.

xruyi said:
can you make it possible? if this is a measure about defacing, then adding something like order:pending will do no harm, since you will only see it if you explicitly type it in the search bar

Yes. I've asked Arden to add it to my todo list.

hinoserm said:

• New uploads now wait in an approval queue and stay hidden until approved.
• Default sort is now order:approved, newest approved first; upload order is order:created.

These two changes break tools and how most people expect a site to function. If I write a tool it will check the latest id on the first page to see how many posts were created since it's last run. Then it might scan through all those ids looking at post data or metadata. With the new change, the first post's id no longer reflects the latest id. That can be resolved by using order:created, but some of the intermediate ids will not have been approved yet and thus are blocked. The tool will need to continually poll those ids until they get approved or until the tool decides the approval timeframe has ended and those are no longer valid post ids. This can be worked around by scraping the main pages to figure out where it left off and what's new, but that's a lot of additional work and hits on the server compared to just hitting each id once through the API.

For a person, if someone is reviewing the site daily they might be looking at the daily pages. If a post takes longer than a day to get approved, they'll never see it.

For uploaders, not being able to see the latest uploads means people may attempt to upload the same content multiple times wasting both their time, the mod's time, and the site's resources. It's probably not an issue right now but it will be when the site grows a bit.

Also for uploaders, sometimes people upload a sequence of images but not worthy enough to be in a pool. Order:approved will likely break that ordering. The user can fix that by using order:created, but when you do that you are unlikely to notice newly approved older posts.

I think a better solution would be to instead add non-approved posts to the default blacklist. This will prevent the general public from seeing them but allows uploaders and tools to see those posts. The users wanting to see these images can flag any issues (mistakes, duplicate, inferior copy, DNP, etc...) they notice, thus helping the mods with approvals. If non-approved posts are hidden, users can't flag them.

Edit: Described some workarounds. Added the image sequence use case. Added the flagging use case.

xorm said:
I think a better solution would be to instead add non-approved posts to the default blacklist. This will prevent the general public from seeing them but allows uploaders and tools to see those posts.

Thanks for laying this out so clearly. We're aware of these issues and already have plans to fix them. We're reconsidering the whole hidden-queue setup, and we can't share more details just yet, but trust us: it'll be good.

xorm said:
I think a better solution would be to instead add non-approved posts to the default blacklist.

this is even better than what i had in mind, now i want this too

Thanks to everyone who weighed in here, especially derpetologist, xruyi and xorm. We read all of it.

We've learned that a site like this comes with its own culture and expectations: seeing new uploads right away, knowing what's already been posted, and getting early reactions from the community. Hiding everything until it's approved cut against a lot of that. It was a safety measure we put in during a rough week, not how we want things to stay.

Where we're heading is a hybrid. It keeps what people expect from a booru, but modernizes the review process and fits the standards we want for the site. Here's an early look at the upload design we're building:

What you'll see as an uploader

• You upload a post and it waits for review. You can always see your own pending posts.
• If a moderator approves it, it goes public like today.
• If it needs work, it isn't deleted. It goes to a hidden state that only you and staff can see, and you get one short message saying exactly what needs fixing and where (for example: "Needs a fix before approval (Anatomical anomalies): extra finger on the near-side hand").
• Fix it, use Replace on the same post, and it goes back into the queue for another look. Notes stay attached to the post, so the reviewer can see what was flagged before.
• The rejection itself costs no karma, and fixing your post costs nothing. If you withdraw a rejected post, or don't fix it within 7 days, that counts as a deletion for karma.
• Posted the wrong file? Withdraw it yourself before it's reviewed, no penalty.
• If we never get to your post, there's no penalty; that's on us. It waits up to 30 days before it's removed, and that shouldn't ever happen.

Seeing posts before approval

For now, pending posts stay hidden from everyone except the uploader and staff. Once our automated safety checks are fully in place, we'll come back to opening up an opt-in way to see them. The suggestions in this thread are exactly what we'll be looking at.

None of this is live yet. We'll post a changelog as each piece lands, and we'd love your thoughts on the design above.

ardenfox said:

• If it needs work, it isn't deleted. It goes to a hidden state that only you and staff can see

will i be able to see it if i have direct link to the post?

Glad to see that the upload process will include a way to fix posts that have issues. It makes me not scared to post my art.

xruyi said:
will i be able to see it if i have direct link to the post?

Not at first. A direct link only works if you have the "show unapproved" setting turned on, and to start with that setting is staff-only. Later, once it opens up to users, anyone logged in with it enabled will be able to reach those posts directly by URL or through the API.

emx said:
Glad to see that the upload process will include a way to fix posts that have issues. It makes me not scared to post my art.

I mean, is it really posting if you don't have pure anxiety and then immediately notice an error after scouring the image for hours? /s