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Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - 17:09

Note: This competition actually ended on the 4th, but due to a glitch with voting, I had to change the end date to the 12th to allow the voting phase.  No submissions were made during that time.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - 15:09

I'll look into it today or tomorrow.  Still dealing with drama. :(

 

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - 13:27

If you have posted in this thread, please see OGA's official statement in this post:

http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/admin-official-statement-on-grouping-a...

This thread will remain locked.  You may discuss this further in the new thread, although this specific incident is over and done with.

Bart

 

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - 11:32

This thread is now locked.  Any thread on this topic (either specifically or in general) made between now and when I can make a formal statement on this (in a few hours) will be deleted.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - 19:17

@Sharm:

Just so you know, you can sort by favorites from the art browse screen.  Just change the sort order on the bar on the left to popularity, then hit the search button (leave everything else as-is).

Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - 12:47

Also, a word on art "style", and "good" versus "bad" art.

Speaking frankly, we've all seen people try to pass off a lack of art skill as their "style".  As a general rule, you should probably only call this your "style" if you can accurately emulate other art styles by skilled artists.  If you can't, then you're probably using the word style as an excuse not to push yourself to get better.

There's also a fairly popular idea out there that there's no such thing as "bad" art.  And sure, in the philosophical sense, you might make the argument that art is completely subjective and such, but realistically, this is something that we tell kids so that they keep working on improving their art skills rather than getting discouraged.  At some point in life, the fact that you succeed at something becomes more important than the fact that you attempt something.

One other thing that is perfectly justified in the general art scene but not so justified here is the idea of "pushing the envelope".  Artists have been exploring the "what is art?" question since people started making art out of urinals and drawing moustaches in postcards of Mona Lisa.  However, if the point of a piece of art that you post here is to push the envelope of "what is trivial?" or "what is useful in a video game?" then you need to consider the fact that art here is supposed to be useful and nontrivial.  If you're actively trying to straddle the line, then you're acting in bad faith.

If you've ever been in a college art class, there's always "that guy."  You know the one I'm talking about.  He's the dude who draws all sorts of weird, trippy pictures, and then when the art professor gives an assignment, he does everything he can to subvert the actual point behind the assignment while still (mostly) following it to the letter.  In the real world, if someone is paying you to do art, they're not going to be happy if you go out of your way to subvert their request.  Please don't be that guy.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - 12:30

I need to chime in here.

There are a couple of factors at work here and we need to strike some sort of balance between them.

  • The vast majority of artists who post here are doing so because they want to contribute something.  Discouraging active participants is rarely a good idea, because artists improve over time, and that person who posts something trivial when they're starting out might, with encouragement and practice, eventually become a very good artist.
  • On the other hand, let's be realistic.  People looking for game art don't come here to look for trivial submissions.  There's even a rule about them in the submission guidelines.  If anyone, regardless of skill level, could reproduce a particular work in a very short amount of time, that work is 'trivial'.  There's no judgment about whether it's bad or good; if it takes just as long to find and download a work as it does to produce it, there isn't much point in it being in the archive, and it's not the kind of thing people are going to be downloading.

The first bullet point is why the triviality rule is poorly enforced.  I don't want to drive people away by coming off as a bunch of nitpicky jerks.  As for making it something that the community decides on, my opinion is that perhaps a button to bring trivial submissions to the attention of administrators would be a good idea, but actually making things disappear from the page solely due to community moderation is a bad idea.

Look at sites like Reddit, Slashdot, and Wikipedia.  While community moderation and editing succeed at preventing really bad stuff from rising to the top, they also have a tendency to force discussions to conform to the average opinion of the community at large.  If marking a submission as "spam" or "trivial" removed it automatically, people would start using it to remove submissions that they personally don't like, or remove submissions from authors they don't like, or remove submissions that they personally don't feel belong on OGA (we already get too many "this doesn't belong on OGA" comments on legitimate, useful submissions, and on at least one occasion those types of comments have driven away very talented people).

While it's important that the triviality guideline be enforced (particularly in cases where it's questionable whether someone is submitting in good faith or deliberately trolling), it's very important that it be enforced gently and with some degree of tact and discretion.

Anyway, having blathered on about this for a while, I'd like to propose an alternative.  If someone submits a large number of trivial or low quality submissions, I'd like to build a way so that admins can combine those submissions (at least the ones with the same license(s)) into a single one, and leave redirects in place to prevent link rot.  In this way, we could reduce clutter in the archive and on the front page (which IMO is the main problem).

As an aside, the reason there are 8 "popular this week" submissions on the front page and only 4 latest submissions is to deal with this exact problem, where high quality art would be knocked off the main page by someone flooding the site with trivial submissions.  This is also why there's no longer a "most submissions this month" list on the front page, because it actively encouraged this behavior. :)

Monday, October 7, 2013 - 13:44

I've been kind of out of touch lately due to work and life, so I haven't thought to come up with any.  If people would like to submit some ideas in this thread, I'll add some new contests.

Bart

Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - 00:08

Right click on the filename and choose "save as".

Monday, September 23, 2013 - 00:12

Look at the bottom of the art submission, just above the comments.  There should be a files section.  If you're downloading an image, right click on the image and click "save as".

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