I wouldn’t say that we’re saying “lying by omission is good”, but rather “you should tell the truth rather than deceive.”
I'm not talking about what you (or any mod) write, how you comment, or even your privately held opinions. I'm saying that the kind of actions that we are concerned about, which are taken by mods as a whole,
testify to the idea that lying by omission is good, and
against the idea that you should tell the truth rather than deceive (which is of course opposite), as seen in miascugh's and my case, versus eg. Slay. Comments such as "To be fair to others because you freely admit to some index painting this will be sent back" also imply the idea that lying by omission is better than telling the truth, especially since indexpainting does not effect the pixel-accuracy of something at all
(ironically, its cleanness is comparable to floodfill, which can also be easily abused.)
I’ve done the billion color thing when younger too. While PB mentions high color counts being something that immediately disqualifies, I would disagree. We don’t look at just the color count (perhaps I can only speak for myself here), but we pay attention to how they’re used and if they look as if they’re manually placed, regardless of how many colors are used. Dubious arrangement of tons of colors draws immediate suspicion, and rightly so.
Yes. Has that come up? I mean, it did with my 'flowers' pic, but I hope we can agree that, in view of the evidence, there is not dubious arrangement, nor tons of colors, nor was there previously, so that particular criticism had no basis.
No one here is advocating literal single pixel placement. The quote was a misrepresentation of our actual stance, nobody in there right mind would take it literally, though we have already discussed rewording confusing statements like these, and they will be amended in the future.
And I’ve downloaded and plan to check out grafx2, and PB has expressed interest in finding a copy of promotion for a long time. We’re not as closed-minded as we’re made out to be.
I can’t really jump into much of the argument here, as it seems to be “tools are irrelevant, final product is what matters”, which I personally agree with. It seems to me that arguments are being given that push our views to one extreme of the spectrum, when in fact one can look through the thread and see a deal of agreement and differing opinions.
I like and agree with your opinions as expressed here, but again (I believe I can speak for Helm and Ptoing also in this matter) this is about the
actions that actually take place, which is led by the culture of PJ mods and PJ in general, rather than anybody's views; and the ideas communicated through those actions. Clarifying the definitions provided, as a first step, would reassure me that these actions would change in the future. I believe that more is required to achieve consistently reasonable treatment of submitted pieces, such as
objective measures of things like: Amount of banding, Total Number of colors, Average colors per 16x16 tile, Random noise, overall contrast ratio, contrast ratio per tile (these are all metrics which are relatively simple to take). I am not privy to the exact approval process, I wonder also whether it could benefit from more formalizing (
standard set of questions to answer, to inform the decision process and provide a framework for handling disputes? Someone brought up the idea of having such a list of criteria visible when browsing the Public Queue, which is a great idea too!)
:
Personally, I do appreciate that you work quite hard on PixelJoint (and I try to express animosity only towards ideas, not people). I think it might help if you keep in mind, we're discussing here a flaw in PJ rather than what we like (personally I like plenty about PJ, for instance the ability to see how I rate my own work, the continuous activity stimulated by the constant challenges...), and I'm aware that you were not solely responsible for my situation (just that I found you the most grating in your so-called antagonism); Also don't you think you're fairly vocal on, and about, PJ? Feeling responsible for this kind of thing (and being treated as if you were) is one of the downsides of being so vocal, honestly, and so is copping more animosity than may be warranted
Anyway, if it bothers you, I personally think that more transparency and a little more formality, like outlined above, are the way to go to improve PJ, since basically in this thread, people are saying "NO to mysterious and somewhat arbitrary decisions". We're saying, the current decision process is not known to the majority of submitting members and appears to both be inconsistent and reward dishonesty. It needs to be
seen to make sense a majority of the time. Just a really clear and obviously available description of what currently happens (say, on the submission page or linked from it) would be a good start.
EDIT: Cure, I hope the above helps in regards to "what we should be doing". First the process that is used needs to be defined clearly and in detail for anyone to see (beyond a simple 'we use this single-sentence criterion', which, while more-or-less true, is very undescriptive), then IMO it will be appropriate to move on to how the process could be improved, since I'm sure the existing process will account for things that we haven't here, since we are largely uninvolved with PJ moderation process. Need to have everything in the open before changing it.
Also, now I'm mystified. "Bucket fill = NPA"? Was that the former title of one of your posts in this thread, or what?
I noticed that Gil said he brought this same subject (vague moderation on PJ) up on PJ, I couldn't find that, either.