Reapproving your own uploads

So I just ran across post #744989, and my curiosity was piqued, so I ran some tag searches of the form user:XXX approver:XXX, replacing XXX with the name of each user at Test Janitor level or higher. To the best of my knowledge, this tag search finds only posts which were posted by XXX, flagged for deletion by another party, then reapproved by XXX him/herself, thus stonewalling any attempt at a review of that post by an unbiased third party.

In lieu of pulling a McCarthy and waving a list of users around, I will say this: this practice is more widespread than I had hoped it was.

Now, by the nature of this problem, the offenders are restricted to people who are, generally speaking, model Danbooru users, and it is a very rare occurrence, so I don't want to, as they say in the vernacular, make a federal fucking issue out of this. But seriously, come on, guys. Surely we can all agree that this is:

1) an abuse of power
2) circumventing the purpose of the unapproval system altogether
3) not a cool thing to do

and not do it anymore?

It's not necessarily any of the above because they can be flagged for bunk reasons (dupe or something equally stupid) and reasons aren't recorded, you shouldn't be forced to bypass something just because you posted it and someone else flagged it for a bunk reason.

Also things can only be flagged once so without albert manually setting it as never have been flagged nothing can be resubmitted afaik.

Oh, Seem. If I remember correctly, this user has had a history of approving a lot of stupid shit, and reapproving them when flagged for a valid reason.

http://danbooru.donmai.us/post/index?tags=approver%3ASeem%20order%3Ascore_asc&commit=Search&page=1

... Good Christ.

Anyways, getting back to the point, yeah. Reapproving your own posts is indeed scummy. Totally agree on that.

Reapproving your own posts is indeed an abuse of power. I had a feeling something like this would happen with the new test janitors.

Is there someway that we can stop users with test janitor and above from re approving their own posts. Perhaps making it so if an image uploaded by a test janitor or above is flagged, the uploader cannot reapprove their uploads. It must be reapproved by someone else.

If that makes sense.

hidetheunforgiven said:
the uploader cannot reapprove their uploads. It must be reapproved by someone else.

This.

http://danbooru.donmai.us/post/index?tags=approver%3ASeem%20order%3Ascore_asc&commit=Search&page=1

All of this should be flagged and put through the queue.

I was looking at all the scores of the images. About 98% of them have all negative scores and are poorly drawn. Something needs to be done.

Agreed, people shouldn't approve their own posts.

A post shouldn't be approved twice by the same person either.

It's not an abuse of power or circumventing of the system, it's going through the system as intended. You seem to misunderstand what unapproving and the moderation queue does - it sends posts to the moderation queue for moderators to look at and decide if they think it should stay or not. It's not a review by committee or majority rules, if a mod, any mod, thinks an image should stay, it stays. Log also posted a bunch of pretty obvious reasons for having the ability as well.

More importantly, the OPs example is kind of immaterial - it wasn't reapproved because of who posted it, it was reapproved because I saw it in the queue, read the flagging reason and disagreed with it. I would have made exactly the same call regardless of poster.

Granola said:
All of this should be flagged and put through the queue.

Quite a few of the first couple of pages there are re-approvals from the times when flaggings were both anonymous and hadn't been fixed to disallow no reason flaggings, or bad flagging reasons. I culled stuff a while back but never finished due to it just not being very important.

hidetheunforgiven said:
About 98% of them have all negative scores

Scores mean absolutely nothing. And even then a quick glance shows that it takes just a couple of pages before it starts hitting the "downvoted because it's rating:e" or because people just didn't get it territory.

I'm not going to lose any sleep over the bottom 100-150 approvals out of about 9000 total.

Additionally, since glasnost didn't elaborate I went and looked up the exact numbers of this.

We have 46 people with Test Janitor, Janitor, Mod or Admin status. They account for 193,053 (!) posts on the site. How many cases are there of someone reapproving one of their own posts? 71.

To call this a non-issue would be an understatement.

Seem said:
More importantly, the OPs example is kind of immaterial - it wasn't reapproved because of who posted it, it was reapproved because I saw it in the queue, read the flagging reason and disagreed with it. I would have made exactly the same call regardless of poster.

I'm pretty sure the point was, by being the person who originally uploaded it in the first place, you're already biased towards thinking the image is fine - and when people disagree and want a second opinion from someone else, you're allowed to just negate that by re-approving it yourself.

It's not circumventing the system, yes - but the problem is with the system itself and how it allows the uploader to re-approve their own submissions. To a lesser extent, also with how the site makes re-approved images unable to be flagged again.

Back when I was a test janitor I never reapproved any of my own posts that got flagged. I knew it was allowed, but I let other janitors/mods/admins decide anyway.

Of course, I ended up being rejected for promotion to permanent janitor so take that as you will.

Reapproving one's own uploads may not qualify as "circumventing" the system, but I think it's pretty obvious that it negates the intended use of the Unapprove function.

Also, I see a lot of "it's only a few incidents" arguments by Seem, but the fact is it is happening and we have the power to stop it. A minor change to the code can stop this from happening, so why on earth shouldn't we fix it?

You shouldn't need to approve your own uploads if its a good image.

Let someone else review it.

I am all for this: "You cannot approve your own uploads."

Seem said:
More importantly, the OPs example is kind of immaterial - it wasn't reapproved because of who posted it, it was reapproved because I saw it in the queue, read the flagging reason and disagreed with it.

I'm not sure that disagreeing with the flagging reason is a good enough reason to reapprove by itself. I recall reading, and I agree with, sentiments that you shouldn't reapprove a picture you wouldn't have approved in the first place. The reasoning being that if no one does reapprove it then it was rightly flagged, even if it was for the wrong reason.

As for the picture in question, the flagging reason was helpfully stored in the comment section:

The right leg/foot is both impossible, and totally out-of-proportion.

Pretty standard reason, pictures are flagged for things like this all the time. (And sure enough, there's some highly dubious anatomy going on there.)

This is a challenge on the quality of the picture though, so why do you feel you can just "disagree"?

By uploading or approving something you claim it is of acceptable standards. Flagging for quality is pretty obviously asking for a second opinion, and I'd think it would be common courtesy to think thrice before reapproving a post you already uploaded or approved. Even if the flagging is baseless, just wait for someone else to approve it.

Sometimes people slip up and post or approve low-quality posts, and except for demotion this is about the only recourse the board has, so please be a bit participative and don't bypass it.

+1 for making it impossible to self-approve and double-approve posts, though I'm surprised that it would be necessary.

I'm actually going to agree with Seem here, despite how horrible the first few pages of that search look. Disallowing janitors/mods from reapproving their own posts which have been sent back to the queue is basically giving people a free chance to second-guess the moderation queue and force at least two people to approve a post before it's accepted, which is against the spirit of the moderation policy. That's not the purpose of it - it's to point out and undo moderation mistakes. If a janitor or mod truly has bad taste and is uploading or approving images that are shitty, they need to be stripped of all their approval powers, not just the power to approve their own posts or their own previous approvals.

flamingspinach said:
Disallowing janitors/mods from reapproving their own posts which have been sent back to the queue is basically giving people a free chance to second-guess the moderation queue and force at least two people to approve a post before it's accepted

I thought this was its intended use.

Pretty sure that's the whole point of flagging an image for review. If people care enough to force an image to get reviewed by two people, surely it contains material of dubious quality.

Furthermore, I'd count deeming an unworthy image as acceptable as a "moderation mistake", wouldn't you say? If they re-approve it themselves they just keep their mistake in the image pool.

Seem said:
Quite a few of the first couple of pages there are re-approvals from the times when flaggings were both anonymous and hadn't been fixed to disallow no reason flaggings, or bad flagging reasons. I culled stuff a while back but never finished due to it just not being very important.
[...]
Scores mean absolutely nothing.

They've meant slightly more than absolutely nothing since voting was restricted, with negative scores if nothing else. If a mod or two is dead set on keeping, say, penis Reimu, downvoting it is the only thing left to us. "Quite a few" of those shouldn't even need the reason spelled out for you. Just how eloquent are you demanding the reason be before you'll let it go?

I'd just like to throw in the following two points:

1. I've been going on and on about this very point for ages.

2. In addition to removing the ability of Test Janitors and Janitors to reapprove their own uploads, there absolutely MUST be a revision of the "one flagging per post" system. It allows far too much garbage through.

Why not just have a post put on a one-month cooldown when flagged instead? That would, at least, ensure that any given petulant user wouldn't be able to simply flag the same image every five minutes.