$12256 / $11500
This is a post about the bit of drama that's come up recently. To the people involved, I apologize in advance for addressing this publicly, but I need to make sure people are aware that OGA has an official stand on this issue so that it doesn't come up again like this. Please note that this is not intended to be punishment or a lecture. The people involved have both apologized for the situation in separate comments, and I don't feel that any sort of penalty is needed at this point. Rather, I'm putting my foot down right here and declaring this drama to be over so that it doesn't escalate further, because it clearlty doesn't need to.
As I see it, there are two issues at work here, which I will address in the order that they appeared:
Large numbers of small submissions
Occasionally, we'll get artists who, with the best of intentions, submit a large number of small items. I did this myself when the site was new, because I thought it would make things easier to find. Ultimately, it had the precise opposite effect, and the archive is cluttered with a bunch of old entries that should have been bundled into single submissions.
Another adverse effect of this is that it messes with the front page. Unfortunately, there's never going to be a 100% fair way to make sure that all the art submitted here gets an even amount of exposure on the front page. There just isn't room. However, it's frustrating for an artist who might have spent many hours working on a large piece of work to have it immediately knocked off the front page by a bunch of small submissions that could have been grouped together.
Finally, we need to be aware of the fact that the purpose of OGA is for artists and game developers to collaborate. Showing off your work is fine, but it's courteous to people who are looking for art is you group your similar items together in a way that's easy for them to find and download. Your work will ultimately get more exposure this way.
Resubmitting and attributing CC0 art
First off, I'm sure most people are aware of this, but I'm going to repeat it here for clarity: The CC0 license is equivalent to the public domain. Legally speaking, anyone can do anything with CC0 art, and there are no requirements for credit.
However, as a general rule, even with CC0 art, we need to remember that if someone releases their own work on OGA (which they took time and effort to do), the respectful thing to do is credit them for it when it's reasonably possible.
Also, OGA understands that there are many purposes for art, and one of those purposes is to make statements. That being said, if you are making a statement with a piece of art, and you ask people to link to OGA in your credits, please be mindful of the fact that you're implying that OGA is endorsing the statement that you're making. I don't want to scare people away from asking to link back to OGA in their credits. Just be careful. :)
What to do about it
First off, a quick note on how to change the author of a submission. If a submission is credited to you and you want to edit the submission and change the author to someone else, look immediately below the license selection. Where it says, "Is this your own work?", click the "no" option. When you do that, a box will appear underneath it that will allow you to enter an author. Also, if you request it, I or one of the other admins can actually change ownership of the submission to the actual author, but that's up to you.
Secondly, there are some coding things I've had on the back burner that might alleviate this situation, so I'm going to just bump them up and deal with them today. One, if it's reasonably possible, I'm going to make it so that only one work per submitter shows up in the "Latest Art" section of the front page at any given time. That way, if someone submits a large number of small items, it won't knock a bunch of people off of the front page. Please note that this will not affect the "Popular This Week" section in any way. Although I'm going to be working on this today, please give me your feedback on this idea. If the response is mostly negative, I won't do it.
I also am going to try to make a way for people to join existing submissions together into a single one. This will require that the submissions all have exactly the same author and exctly the same set of licenses. This will create a new submission that contains all of the descriptions, files, and preview images from the original submissions, and remove the originals from the archive. The links to the originals will be set to redirect to the newly grouped submission, to prevent link rot in case someone is linking to one of the submissions you're grouping together.
Admins will be able to do this with art by anyone, although the restriction that the author and licenses have to be the same will still apply. While we don't plan on doing this willy-nilly, OGA reserves the right to group submissions together if we feel that it will be helpful to people browsing the archives. The original submitter will retain ownership of the new submission, and be able to add to it and edit it, like always.
Finally, a reminder to everyone: If you're not directly involved in this situation, please do not escalate it or comment on it further. I realize that a small amount of drama is inevitable on a site OGA's size, but I'd prefer to keep it to a minimum, and I'd like to avoid ruling with an iron fist. Feel free to comment and add thoughts on this post, but leave specific individuals out of it.
Thanks,
Bart
This website's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Single entry per author on latest art might confuse people but may help to solve the issue. For instance, I visit the site very often, when I dont see any familiar submissions in latest art on front page, I will go ahead and check latest art. However, if someone publishes two entries in sequence and only one of them is shown, I might just loose the chance to see it.
Also, in my desktop I can read first blog entry to the last line without scrolling. I think it would be possible to add another line of recent art. I definitely would not mind scrolling on my laptop.
Hey Bart,
Well said, thanks for taking ahold of the problem. As far as site changes go, I was wondering if you don't mind some suggestions?
For the "Recently Submitted Art", I was thinking we could possibly organize it as most "Recent Submitter" or author, whichever you'd prefer more (From Your Idea). Then after clicking on that user, a window would scroll down and list the artwork posted by that person within in the last week (or whatever timeline would fit best now that its organized this way). Although people who post a lot will be near the front, it will be easy to skip over these people and view authors you tend to like (viewing all their recent art).
Another idea would be to have a "Subscribe to User" button. This way you could split the "Recent Submitter" into two rows. Only the users you're subscribed to would show up on the 1st row while the 2nd row would list everyone else.
Since I don't know how hard it is to impliment this, please feel free to comment on what will or won't work. I also have some ideas about how to unclutter the artwork, though not knowing how the website is programmed, it's hard to think out which changes are practical.
Thanks for the feedback! :)
For the "Recently Submitted Art", I was thinking we could possibly organize it as most "Recent Submitter" or author, whichever you'd prefer more (From Your Idea). Then after clicking on that user, a window would scroll down and list the artwork posted by that person within in the last week (or whatever timeline would fit best now that its organized this way). Although people who post a lot will be near the front, it will be easy to skip over these people and view authors you tend to like (viewing all their recent art).
My worry here is that this may end up being kind of counterintuitive, if you click on an art submission and are instead taken to a page with multiple art submissions rather than the submission itself. I'm not sure how I'd do this in a way that would be intuitive to users and not take up extra space. I'm open to suggestions.
Another idea would be to have a "Subscribe to User" button. This way you could split the "Recent Submitter" into two rows. Only the users you're subscribed to would show up on the 1st row while the 2nd row would list everyone else.
This is awesome. We have a mostly unused "friend" system, so we could just harness that and have a "new art by my friends" block on the home page. The potential drawback here is that a new block (or a new row of images) would bump the latest blog post below the fold for most people. While I don't update the blog frequently enough, sometimes it's important enough that everyone see it without scrolling. This is compelling enough that I'll try to come up with a way to fit it in, though.
Regarding the "New Art by my Friends"/User Subscriptions: YES. Love it.
For submissions which are grouped together into one larger one, are Favorites assigned to the original submitter or to the aggregating user? Likewise, if there are any Favorites, comments, etc. on the individual submissions, do they stick around or are the Favorites/comments lost to the ether?
My project: Bits & Bots
Thanks! I have thought for a while that it'd be nice to "subscribe" or "friend" artists. Hopefully it'll grow community!
> For submissions which are grouped together into one larger one, are Favorites assigned to the original submitter or to the aggregating user?
If submissions are grouped together into a larger one, then the owner will be the same.
> Likewise, if there are any Favorites, comments, etc. on the individual submissions, do they stick around or are the Favorites/comments lost to the ether?
Comments will probably have to be combined, which could be messy. Favorites will have to be aggregated. Basically, if someone marked one of the submissions as a favorite, then the new one is automatically marked as a favorite for them. Unfortunately, if someone marked two or more, it's still only one favorite per user. However, popularity points are added when favorites are added originally, so those won't be revoked.
I don't know about everyone else, but I always scroll down on the main page. I want to see the active forum topics and if there are any new challenges. I don't think the added line of graphics will be a problem.
All these awesome changes are making me wish for an older request even more. (I'd love the work that I did but was posted by someone else to show up in my contributions and add to my popularity.) Still, this is a much more important change and will benefit everyone, not just me. I'm really looking forward to it.
Now that we are at it, couldnt a new row, or just one bigger preview be added?, one that shows randonly the all time most popular art, think on the lizardman or barbarian models that are buried forgotten and invisible to new users.
A workaround around this would be to show and link to them on the empty brackets for publicity on the left of this site.
I'm not particularly in favor of grouping recent submissions by a person together in the latest art page - unless it's clearly marked and easily expanded (in a web 2.0 way).
Lacking a 'view new art since last visit' button, I mostly browse the latest art section until I reach some familiar stuff. What if someone posted a couple of fully rigged and animated characters and a sound clip as the last submission? I'd probably miss what I'm most looking for on this site, if I saw only the sound icon, especially if there's a lot of new submission since I last visited as then I don't check them out in such detail.
And It would only half fix the problem of people getting "knocked-off" the front page anyway, what if/when there's an increase in people submitting art? I think perhaps the site has grown past a certain point where this layout/search/functionality is totally adequate - if not, it certainly will, the archives are only ever increasing.
So, a few brainstorm ideas, who may or may not be good/feasible:
- a showcase / gallery page, available under browse or collect menus,
- could tie the above in nicely with Danimals idea, randomly show a high favorite submission in a spot on the front page (just like ads)
- a few more browsing and search options, browse 2d / 3d art is quite broad and contains a lot of submissions, textures have nice categories for example, but sometimes it's hard to put it in one category only, so maybe a set of predefined tags or categories that can be mixed and matched - tileset, sprite, gui, rigged&animated, character, etc..
- artist spotlight, randomly feature a established/helpful/favorited/whatever artist in a spotlight place for a week or so (similar to first point)
- give some additional token for a well made, fully fleshed out art submission - one that contains adequate preview images, full description with technical specs and all.
- turbosquiod for example has some additional certification a submitter(seller) can acquire, so buyers are assured that the art asset meets at least some certain technical criteria set forth by turbosquid.
- related to above, a label "game ready" could be put on certain submissions, for example a textured and fully animated (with a minimal set of standard game animations) 3D character in fbx format (so no need to export it first). Granted the lines are very blurry on what could be considered game ready, in some types of art more then others, but still, a lot of submissions are very black and white on this - single frame sprites, untextured models, etc, all these require some additional work 99% of the time.
TLDR: Yeah, there are a lot of small improvements we could make use of.
I think the biggest problem is new art being pushed out from the front page, if someone submits several items in a short time. Ideally this could be improved, independent of how art is actually categorised. So I would add my agreement to the comments about expanding the amount of latest art shown on the front page. I've always thought it odd that, for a site dedicated to art, the front page gives only a tiny amount of space to the Latest Art - only the latest 4 contributions are shown, which seems ridiculously small! Meanwhile, more space and more entries are shown for things like forum topics, comments, and art collections (don't get me wrong, those things are useful, but they are surely less important than the art itself).
So as as cemkalyoncu, Sharm, Danimal say, it seems it should be easy to add an extra row. But why stop there - Consider for example https://freecode.com/ - the front page gives prominent attention to the 25 most recent projects. The side-bar then gives the ones before that in text links for the last several days, in all, about 100 projects are shown. Despite being a busy site, the worry of apps getting pushed out by multiple submissions doesn't arise.
3 rows would give 12 or the most recent entries, and yet more older entries could be listed as text links only down the side, similar to the recent comments. I also note that a large amount of space is given to the blog. I realise the admins would want to give prominence to the blog :) But at the same time, this is only occasionally updated, with an entry from May still showing on the front page. Blog entries from May, but only 4 of the most recent art uploads - that balance just seems wrong to me. Perhaps limit to the last couple of blog entries, and give a lot more space for latest art? Whilst redesigning a front page may not be straightforward, it is surely easier than more complex feature requests being considered?
The idea to only show one submission from an artist on the front page if they submit several seems reasonable too, though I agree with cemkalyoncu and para about possible confusion - I might think that only 1 new item has been uploaded since last time I looked, but not realise there's another hidden entry, so ideally this should be optional. (And certainly for the separate page http://opengameart.org/latest it should be off, or optional, as users looking there surely want to see it all, not just one per author.)
For the debate about grouping multiple entries, I feel this should be done where there is a commonality in the art, not simply that it's by the same author. Otherwise it makes searching harder - if I'm searching for "goblin", I don't mind if 100 goblins appear (that's what I'm searching for), but it is harder if I get an entry of 100 unrelated icons, and then have to search through that to see what the "goblin" is in that entry. On that note, perhaps one feature that might be useful is more specific tagging - e.g., per file rather than per entry? I don't know how feasible that is though.
A thought experiment: one person uploads 5 separate items at once, whilst another person does it over a long time. There must be plenty of artists here who have loads of different art entries, including those that may be related. Are the latter a problem too, or is it only a problem due to the "Latest Art" issue? If they aren't a problem, then it seems odd to say that one group should be collected together, and the other group shouldn't, for all time - surely a better solution is to resolve the Latest Art issue.
when you prevent uploading something twice (by pressing the save-button twice) you could solve the "Latest Art" issue a bit.
more about this here: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/double-submissions-please-remove-one
and i would like to have 8 "slots" for this
I think the biggest problem is new art being pushed out from the front page, if someone submits several items in a short time. Ideally this could be improved, independent of how art is actually categorised. So I would add my agreement to the comments about expanding the amount of latest art shown on the front page. I've always thought it odd that, for a site dedicated to art, the front page gives only a tiny amount of space to the Latest Art - only the latest 4 contributions are shown, which seems ridiculously small!
We used to have 3 rows of latest art. The weekly favorites box was put there due to this exact problem (namely, popular art being pushed off of the front page by a large number of submissions). Going back to how it was will make things worse.
Meanwhile, more space and more entries are shown for things like forum topics, comments, and art collections (don't get me wrong, those things are useful, but they are surely less important than the art itself).
Depends on what you mean by "less important". The way to get people to stay here is to draw them into the community, and the best way to do that is to feature things like the forum in a spot above the fold on the front page. As for art collections, we've had a lot of people ask to see consistent sets of art, so those are on the front page to help people find them. I don't anticipate removing the forum box or the collections box from the front page.
3 rows would give 12 or the most recent entries, and yet more older entries could be listed as text links only down the side, similar to the recent comments. I also note that a large amount of space is given to the blog. I realise the admins would want to give prominence to the blog :) But at the same time, this is only occasionally updated, with an entry from May still showing on the front page.
I'm hoping that I'll be in a position to update it more frequently later (like, several times a week).
Blog entries from May, but only 4 of the most recent art uploads - that balance just seems wrong to me. Perhaps limit to the last couple of blog entries, and give a lot more space for latest art? Whilst redesigning a front page may not be straightforward, it is surely easier than more complex feature requests being considered?
IMO the important thing here is to make sure the latest blog entry is "above the fold" (that is, visible without scrolling down). I'm not against, say, reducing the blog to the latest couple of entrires and then putting more rows of recent art below it.
The idea to only show one submission from an artist on the front page if they submit several seems reasonable too, though I agree with cemkalyoncu and para about possible confusion - I might think that only 1 new item has been uploaded since last time I looked, but not realise there's another hidden entry, so ideally this should be optional. (And certainly for the separate page http://opengameart.org/latest it should be off, or optional, as users looking there surely want to see it all, not just one per author.)
I'm not sure I'm going to do this at all, honestly. I don't know how I would do it without it either being cumbersome or confusing, so for the meantime I'm going to set this particular idea aside (particularly since it would be alleviated somewhat if I could squeeze more art onto the front page).
For the debate about grouping multiple entries, I feel this should be done where there is a commonality in the art, not simply that it's by the same author. Otherwise it makes searching harder - if I'm searching for "goblin", I don't mind if 100 goblins appear (that's what I'm searching for), but it is harder if I get an entry of 100 unrelated icons, and then have to search through that to see what the "goblin" is in that entry.
Don't worry. I'm not going to go grouping things together willy-nilly.
On that note, perhaps one feature that might be useful is more specific tagging - e.g., per file rather than per entry? I don't know how feasible that is though.
Probably not feasible. :(
A thought experiment: one person uploads 5 separate items at once, whilst another person does it over a long time. There must be plenty of artists here who have loads of different art entries, including those that may be related. Are the latter a problem too, or is it only a problem due to the "Latest Art" issue? If they aren't a problem, then it seems odd to say that one group should be collected together, and the other group shouldn't, for all time - surely a better solution is to resolve the Latest Art issue.
Well, I wouldn't say that anyone uploading art is ever a "problem", per se. :)
That said, let's say someone makes a bunch of small submissions that would be better off grouped together. If they're all submitted at once, that's more of an issue than if they're submitted slowly over a longer period of time, since what always brings this up (and this is, if I recall, the third time we've had issues about this) is art being knocked off the front page. However, in the grand scheme of things, some of the stuff in the archive would be better off grouped togther as well.
In all honesty, there is no way to completely solve the issue of large batches of submissions knocking art off of the front page. As I said above, back when the top two rows weren't occupied by the week's favorites, the problem was far worse, even though the latest art section was three times as big. Even if I put five more rows of art there, it will still happen occasionally, although hopefully the situation can be improved somewhat.