I'm referencing pool #109 specifically because I've recently made it public, and have since talked with miragio about the proper way to handle it, but it's a more general issue.
Basically, we have many pools with semi-subjective themes, particularly all the "Perfect *" ones. Much like judging posts good enough to be on danbooru, judging whether a post is a "perfect" specimen or not is inherently subjective. Opening them up completely is probably bound to yield something similar to the current "Disgustingly Adorable" mess, just with more porn for body parts. Yet closing them down completely means one person gets to decide fully what goes in, and moreover is the only one who can do anything about the pool, so they become a bottleneck. And if they go away for holidays or something, the pool gets stalled.
Moreover, it's not a given that their taste is perfect and flawless. I for one disagree with large parts of what miragio has included in pool #109, sometimes very much so. But everybody having their personal perfect feet pool is not workable either, if only for the simple reason all pools generate a navigation box, and that you'd have to explain their existence to the outsiders somehow.
For pool #109 I've been working around it with my mod powers, but it's very much not a workable solution in the general case. What we really need, I think, is:
- Splitting current "pools" into two related, but separate concepts: "series" and "collections".
- Series are posts which have a defined order, ie. sequential comics. For them the order is of prime importance, and they're more or less objective: either a post belongs to a series or not. Of course you can always get weird corner cases, but it's a good enough approximation.
- Collections are sets of otherwise unrelated posts that share some common characteristic. Ie. thematic pools. They don't have a strictly defined order, and the inclusion criteria are likely to be at least partially arbitrary.
- The ability to have completely private pools. They'd be essentially a specialised version of favourites, and not at all like the public pools which result in a huge, obnoxious UI box for everyone browsing their posts.
- The ability to have collective ownership of collections, or rather per-collection moderation teams. There would need to be some kind of dispute resolution system (just a forum thread linked from the description should suffice), specific rules and guidelines for content, and a submission system. People were dmailing miragio with submissions to pool #109, but that obviously falls apart if you have more than one "owner".
What we also need is to work out some sort of a substitute while there're no technical means to implement any of the above. One solution is to open up all pools, and have several more or less formally appointed "mods" scan all changes and fix what they deem wrong. Another is to stick with private pools where we have the private for the time being. I'm not sure which one is better, and there might be more proposals I'm not seeing currently.
Updated by DschingisKhan