I love OGA, however I've found that finding art takes much longer than it should because people submitting art use very different tag systems. Art Collections are great, but there's no way to judge their quality of curation without looking at every single one. I acknowledge that having a select few site admins trying to filter through all of the art and classify it properly would be extremely difficult, which is why I propose that you create some kind of sorting program. Someone hops on, they're shown a few random art nodes, and classify them according to a guide. You could create a library of official collections and have a range of community assessed properties of art by which they are filterable. Classifying art and making it much easier to find would only take a fraction of the time actually creating this art takes, and if most active users were to just chip in an hour or so - finding great gems in the process by accident - then OGA would be muh better curated quite quickly.
The interface of such a classifying system would be pretty simple - You have a page with a classifying menu on the side and dynamically loaded random nodes. A user would enter as much information as necessary, place it in any relevant collections, give it any relevant tags, and boom. The faster the UI is to work with, the more work that would get done. I personally would gladly spend a couple hours every now and again sorting through art, especially if it meant that I'd later be able to find good art much more easily.
I hope you do something like this in future, because you'd be surprised how much work would get done.
Great idea. Having users categorise submissions should (on average) result in submissions being given more relevant tags that reflects better what users actually search for when looking for something. Authors have to just assume that the info they give their work will be what users end up searching for.
But, let's just say this site is in a 'LTS' state, so I doubt a new major feature like this would get added, unless someone throws some money at someone to sit down and make it happen.
Stay a while and listen.
I've made something like that before... I've got a private web page with a few thousand images of people, and they're tagged and sorted by their age, skin and hair color. It's amazing for art references.
What might be easier is having some community-sponsored tags, when you submit? 16 pixel squares, 32 pixel squares, ect? It might be difficult to implement, though... people don't always read guides.
Yeah, I guess this site is in a sort of LTS state. I do think that it could do with a fair bit of a rework, but given that this is basically a huge side project I guess that they wouldn't have the time or money to do so. I'm almost tempted to build my own 'portal' for OGA and use it to sequentially go through all 60-70K art nodes.