Danbooru

Procedure for dealing with users who consistently fail to properly tag their uploads

Posted under General

This issue has been brought up before in forum #76931, and while it was agreed upon that it's an undesirable practice that warrants warnings, a clear procedure for dealing with offenders hasn't been established aside from some references to giving neutral records.

While a mail message or a neutral record should suffice in getting their attention about the problem (and I believe some Janitors already routinely warn new users about their practices), it doesn't bring to attention said user's practices to people other than the uploader and the person who sent them mail.

If the person who warned the uploader did not correct said uploader's failed tagging (due to lack of time or lack of series tagging knowledge), and the uploader does not retroactively fix his prior uploads (or worse yet, ignores the warning altogether or goes inactive), these images essentially become "unfindable", for tag gardeners and regular users alike. For this reason, I believe that a "user reporting thread" of sorts should be made for users to report people who do not properly tag their uploads even after a few days, not so they can be ostracized by the community, but so tag gardeners can be made aware of the existence of these poorly-tagged images and hopefully remedy them.

For instance, someone who notices poor tagging behavior could make a post and explain the tagging practices of the involved users briefly (since there are varying degrees of severity):

Aristocrat said:

http://danbooru.donmai.us/user/show/136354 - Uploads with nothing except chartag/copytag and occasionally a tagme.
http://danbooru.donmai.us/user/show/342732 - Does not tag his uploads beyond a bare minimum and incomplete set of gentags and a copytag, no characters are tagged even for well-known series.
http://danbooru.donmai.us/user/show/359759 - Submits one gentag/copytag/chartag and leaves the post as-is without even a tagme.

This does not mean that users mentioned in the thread get a free pass for not tagging their uploads (lest more image upload machines be created like http://danbooru.donmai.us/user/show?name=Herrmobel or http://danbooru.donmai.us/user/show?name=UnChocolate who upload tens of thousands of images with minimalistic tagging). However, it would mitigate the issue somewhat by giving these posts more exposure to people capable and willing of tagging, and gardeners are likely more willing to fix the uploads of a single user as opposed to everything in tagme or gentags:<5.

Any thoughts on this? Or is it a hopeless cause?

Updated by Serlo

A forum thread to find images to garden? It was sounding like a good idea until I remembered about

which I used to get my 3,000+ tag edits (particularly, working from the back of touhou gentags:..5). However, using those searches easily finds you either fresh uploads that will be tagged in a few days or very old images that you might not care about, not month old images that everyone missed. Those're a little harder to find, so it's sounding like better idea again.

But whether it'll encourage post-and-run tagging by letting users use that thread to justify their behaviour should be thought through. Should such behaviour even be discouraged if this thread got going; would splitting the job between good taggers and good uploaders be a healthy system for danbooru?

I'm not suggesting this, I'm just thinking about how such a thread would change uploaders' behaviour if they knew they might be named and shamed. Having said though, I'm not sure the kind of lazy taggers we're talking about even know the forums exist...

But whether it'll encourage post-and-run tagging by letting users use that thread to justify their behaviour should be thought through. Should such behaviour even be discouraged if this thread got going; would splitting the job between good taggers and good uploaders be a healthy system for danbooru?

I thought about it and decided that nobody would be audacious enough to post their own name in the thread or to use the thread's existence to justify their behavior, especially if it's made clear that it's something they are not supposed to be doing.

Good uploaders are not necessarily good taggers; that much we have to accept, especially since most uploaders of Japanese content don't speak a word of Japanese. Plus, a lot of uploaders wouldn't be familiar with the more technical tags like dutch_angle or zoom_layer that are obvious elements in the image whose name is not widely known. The current system relies on the uploader putting a healthy portion of tags into their upload, with tag gardeners filling in the less common ones and correcting any mistakes.

Gardeners should not be the ones responsible for filling in the vast majority of tags on an image. There is no good reason for most uploaders to not tag their uploads to at least level 1 in the checklist. In fact, for users who rarely uploads anything like me (or has a low upload limit by virtue of being new), not tagging images to at least level 3 after each upload is just being lazy for no good reason.

I'm not suggesting this, I'm just thinking about how such a thread would change uploaders' behaviour if they knew they might be named and shamed. Having said though, I'm not sure the kind of lazy taggers we're talking about even know the forums exist...

It'll be better than nothing; it won't replace the mail/records sent to those uploaders as warnings, because those two things will be better at making the uploaders aware of their behavior. Such a thread would be more effective at bringing those posts to the attention of taggers, though, which is the primary reason I suggested it in the first place. Users who notice these things are not necessarily going to be great at tagging (I would, for instance, do a terrible job of properly tag gardening those images), so having a centralized place to report these uploaders and thus their uploads would get the more qualified taggers on the task.

Since a lot of the offenders are contributors (who hopefully earned their position by virtue of having good upload standards), these poorly-tagged images are likely to actually be high quality images that users want to search for. However, the lack of tags means that these images are going to be completely unfindable unless you happened to stumble upon them in page 148 of hatsune_miku or whatever.

I'm of two minds here. I agree that this is a problem, but I think it's one that will be hard to fix automatically. As for RaisingK's set, with those, most shouldn't be applicable except in a sequence, and for almost every sequence, the artist should be known, and count as a tag (in fact every one of those has an artist tag). For sequences with an associated copyright, one could argue that the copyright should be added as well (though this could be contentious if the copyright isn't visibly evident). Even without that for many of these {simple_background white_background} would fill the rest of the quota. In that case, a limit of 3 tags is still quite reasonable even for a post that should ostensibly be difficult to tag.

On the other hand, the fact that a user could tag {tagme translation_request artist_request character_request source_request} will get them past the restriction and provide absolutely nothing meaningful about the image, which would render the restriction sort of moot. I also know that even thorough taggers (myself included) accidentally hit "enter" before they mean to. It'd be sort of annoying to accidentally throttle myself, especially given all my posts end up thoroughly tagged within the first few minutes. If there is a throttle restriction like this it should be time delayed. If a tag hasn't been filled out within say 5 minutes, then trigger. (of course in this case active gardeners could inadvertently save a poor uploader).

Anyway in short, I sort of agree an automatic penalty could help with the problem, but disagree that the trigger for the penalty can be easily defined. A flat trigger where any upload <5 tags throttles the user may be harsher than appropriate in the case of quickly corrected accidents, and may not be sufficient to penalize someone who might easily game that system.

I think certain tags wouldn't count for the restriction, such as tagme, translation_request, and so on, but really there has been in influx of people not tagging their posts.

I don't think things need to be over-complicated, we have user reports, so reporting people with a tendency to leave poorly tagged images is the simplest way of dealing with them, rather than an automated system. It is relatively rare for this to happen (from what I've seen), so I don't think the workload would be too much.

how about making this check apply only on posts older than 1 week, and instead of being an outright throttling, it just removes it from the approved posts count as though it was a double deletion of the post?
My idea here is that if past a week, your post still has no tag, then it becomes an issue and thus your allowed upload number shouldn't be allowed to go higher since you can't do basic tagging.

On the other hand, in case a picture is really hard to tag, then it'll be a minor scar on the postcount.

Updated

Well how about this: Anyone who uploads a post with fewer than 5 tags gets throttled to 3 uploads a day.

Easy to bypass, IMHO. Besides what about people who upload first( it would be much easier if there were a feature in DanbooruUp checking if some art is in the DB already, without attempting to upload it) and then tag such post at their own pace (in reasonable time of 1-5 min.)

As for system for fighting lazy tagging, you might think of system which analyses recent 20 posts of such user tag-wise. I don't think that throttling users for posting one such post is the best idea, because as we know - shit happens and such restriction should be based on a better evidence. Ofc it's way more complex method than simply punishing users for posting a single post with less than 5 tags.

Hillside_Moose said:
Any hard-coded tag moderation will end in failure, and probably break half the site along with it.

Agreed; any system put in place will be gamed.

So what about the original suggestion, a thread naming and shaming uploaders who don't tag? Is this redundant over reports? If so, could/should poor tagging reports be used by tag gardeners to find images to tag?

On the topic of reports, it seems really easy to look at someone's report history. I think OP mentioned mods being unaware of repeated offenders, but that point seems moot now.

Why are we creating an issue out of a non-issue for the third or fourth time?

If someone is desperate to be upgraded but they just can't find things they are comfortable with uploading, posts with few tags provide them an avenue to earn an upgrade. Just because these people aren't super easy to find doesn't mean some mods don't actively seek them out.

I also don't see how a shaming thread will do anything.

Oh no someone called me out on the forums for tagging poorly! *uploads another 300 images*

@albert: There is no good reason to automate this because it'll simply be bypassed anyway once people learn of it. See what http://danbooru.donmai.us/user/show/85307 said.

Log said:
I also don't see how a shaming thread will do anything.

Oh no someone called me out on the forums for tagging poorly! *uploads another 300 images*

The existence of a shitload of posts with fewer than 5 tags is not a "non-issue". What's the point of having contributors upload great images if they are impossible to find because they're poorly tagged?

Additionally, such a thread isn't meant for "shaming" so much as giving exposure to these essentially unfindable images. It's stated explicitly in the OP:

Aristocrat said:
...a "user reporting thread" of sorts should be made for users to report people who do not properly tag their uploads even after a few days, not so they can be ostracized by the community, but so tag gardeners can be made aware of the existence of these poorly-tagged images and hopefully remedy them.

Just make it a twitter, the people who care can follow it and we don't have to deal with yet another thread that someone demands be on the front page constantly falling off or having it constantly bumped despite only a couple people using it.

I'm starting to lean towards Log's point. gentag:..3, tagme and such make such a thread redundant for gardeners; reports make it redundant for mods (it's really easy to view a user's report history) and it would be no deterrent for bad taggers (the forums aren't visited by many users), whilst reports appear as a big YOU HAVE MAIL notice on every page.

Wypatroszony said:
I fail to see your point, Log.

Read http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/meta-is-murder.html . Danbooru's forum is meta; every new thread created here is meta and more time and effort not tagging, uploading and pooling (not that that isn't useful sometimes).

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