tsurara

Welcome to the wonderful world of gallery modding. You'll find that the Gallery, in spite of requiring tremendous maitanance, isn't generally first on anyone's priority list (members and other staff included). As a result, the infraction system in place isn't exactly gallery-friendly and a majority of the site's population and staff could give a **** about what you do.

This can be good: gallery mods are left to play fast and loose with rules interpretation and rarely run into opposition from the rest of the staff. But this can also be bad: you may have to open your veins on the Mesa carpet to get any features added or changes.

In any case, it's an interesting job... and one where you can really see the result of your efforts.

Sec I. The Daily Grind:

What to do in those open hours when you should be working at the office or doing your homework...

1. Image Approval

Because image approval is only required for members in the "newbie" user group, this isn't a job that often needs doing. Unfortunately, because unapproved images do not appear on the front page: you will need to check the admin panel to find out if there's anything in queue. A red check will appear by the Admin link if there's anything to approve.

From the main page choose Admin from the gallery toolbar. Choose the second option (approve photos) from the menu on the left side of the admin panel.

If there are no images to approve, the queue will be empty.

If images exist in the queue, you will see a series of thumbnails, information about the upload's size, the category it's been uploaded into and three buttons: delete, approve and hold.

Full images can be viewed by clicking on the thumbnails. This is recommended before any changes, deletions or approvals are made.

If the image it of acceptable resolution, size and contains no objectionable content -- toggle "approve". If the image is unacceptable (broken, inappropriate, pixelly, tagged, a duplicate etc.), toggle "delete". If you want to infract users, you will need to make a note of their usernames. Images you're unsure of should be held by toggling "hold".

When you've finished click "Submit Changes" at the bottom of the screen.

Images in the wrong categories can also be changed from this menu.

2. Editing Entries

Sometimes images aren't jacked-up enough to delete... they just need a little love. In this case, you're going to be using the "edit" feature included in the image entry itself.

Feel free to add relevant tags, change titles or alter spelling when called for. Try to lay off nitpicky edits or do the users' job for them. If people upload images with no tags once: write the tags for them and warn them. The next time they do it, delete them until they learn to put decent tags on their uploads.

Images can be moved or deleted in bulk through the Admin Panel. (Choose the third option "bulk actions".

From the bulk actions menu, you will need to choose the category you want to manipulate through a drop-down menu. There are other ways of sorting images... but I can't think of an instance where you'd actually need to use any of them (except to be nosy and see what images are getting the most... or least hits).

3. Busywork

If you have nothing better to do -- you can help with the ongoing efforts to clean the gallery. Meaning, pick a category and browse the heck out of it. If anything appears to be out-of-order: delete it. Most of the galleries still include numerous tagged, plagiarised, undersize, pixelated, inappropriate or spammy images. We're trying to get rid of them whenever we find them. Broken images, partial uploads and "phantom users" can also be deleted. (ie. if an image of a member no longer has a member attatched (thanks to a past inactive member purge) -- it should be deleted... as there's no longer a point to it's existance).

Other good uses of your time are commenting like crazy on other peoples' work (to encourage commenting in general and create the illusion of activity in hopes of inspiring actual activity); contributing work yourself; or heading over to the regular forum to play mod (we can do pretty much everything they do, after all).

4. Infractions

Infractions can not be given from gallery entries or gallery profiles. Nor can infractions be linked to specific gallery entries. All gallery infractions are profile infractions. Meaning you must view a user's forum profile and infract the user from there.

This can cause a great deal of problems but hasn't, as of this FAQ's writing, been addressed.

The current infraction process follows:

Click the username hotlinked in the entry itself, this will take you to the user's gallery profile. Choose "Statistics" from the menu and you'll get to a screen with a "click here to see the user's forum profile" link at the very bottom. Clicking that link will take you to the user's ZOINTS profile. From the user's ZOINTS profile you can ~finally~ get to the user's forum profile (by choosing "Forum profile". Yes... that's three different profiles you need to navigate to issue a single infraction. Yes, it's profoundly retarded. But that's the way it is.

Choose "issue infraction".

Common Gallery Infractions -

Inappropriate Upload (30) for upload of offensive, racist, plagiarized, or unmarked/inappropriate sexual content.
Poor Resolution Image Upload (15) for upload of images that are heavily pixelated, faded, far too dark/light, or otherwise unusable thanks to poor quality.
Uploaded Image too large/small (15) for upload of images that do not meet poted size guidelines or are inappropriate for their respective gallery. ie. avatars should not be 300x600pixels; wallpapers should not be square, renders should not be 1kb and/or the size of your average business card. Go with posted limits when available, use your own best judgement elsewhere.

everything else will generally fall under Ignoring Section Rules.

The first offense in each category should be a warning, UNLESS the user has been here quite some time or has committed a serious offense (claiming someone else's fanart, identity theft, fake member pictures, floods of inappropriate images, hard porn in general sections, etc.).


Sec II. Frequent Gallery Issues:

1. Multiple Image Uploads

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2. Plagiarism

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3. Under Size/Poor Resolution

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4. Poor/No Tags/Titles/Description

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5. Adult Images

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6. Comment/Rating Trolls

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