Now that little bit is taken care of, I'd like to address the serious candidates, or the now serious candidates, and I look forward to some responses, and I hope the vast majority of serious members of the forum do. Some concerns that I found on the old forum where the quality of posts. I'm not talking the quality of art, in respects of a new pixel artists in comparison to a great. I'm talking about quality in terms of well thought out replies, or something someone has generally taken time, and put pride in. I don't really like these posts "I know it sucks, but here it is...lol!" That's no attitude for improvement, and if you're looking for sympathy, and a pat on the back that says it's good, you're in the wrong place. Pixelation is a critique forum. Does this give everyone the right to rip everyone apart? Hell no, that isn't teaching someone by just pointing out faults of a piece in such a stylistic and malicious way with hopes of gaining some sort of "outlaw, no holds barred" critiquing reputation. Sure, it's great to express views, and I'm all for being honest, but there is also some degree of morals that people need to hold when critiquing. I'm a fan of the 1/3 ration for critiquing. One positive aspect of the piece for every three genuine critiques. If you can't find something good, that means one of two things. One being, you're in no position to reply, or the other being this person took little time in a piece. And instead of calling the second option to every ones attention with a reply such as "you took like 5 minutes on this crap, other people who's threads deserve c+c get bumped because of crap like this" Leave the thread alone. If everyone leaves it alone, the people who need and deserve c+c will get it, without needless arguing and defacing of other members. I have been on the other spectrum of a member, I sure as hell wasn't always a moderator. I know how problems arise, very few are because of grand scale events, they result over little things that are easily prevented. That's where you candidates are left, to propose to us, yes even the moderators how such issues I have mentioned should/could be resolved.
Quality of posts: From what I saw then ( a year ago ) and what I still see to this day, maybe more so then before were the ammount of silly posts gone too far. It's ok to have fun and post funny stuff, but honestly I think it gets out of hand a lot of the time. One of the things I hate the most is when someone posts a serious topic, and it gets "raided" by silly posters and I almost always want to look for a "delete this response from your thread" button because not only is it disrespectful to the person who's posting, but it's really a let down for anyone reviewing the post for serious information.
As for replies to someone asking for crits, honestly, I see a great crit every once in a great while, lately, it seems only when cohersed, and by that I mean, when a mod, or a respected member of the community voices their concerns about such issues, and suddenly you get a few folks posting what seems to be "forced" crits, and this is usually short lived. Honestly, I think people can tell when you're being genuine about your crits. I never see anyone giving an awesome crit on someone who is well, awesome, like kenneth or something. I still remember a crit I gave to, I think his name was xanthier, he made this alien looking thing, and it had a lot of mistakes, but I took about a hour to actually circle points in the piece, give them numbers and go step by step in my crit on what I thought could make it look better. The problem is, criting is alot of work, even for some of us older members, especially a good crit, which we would all like to give.
My suggestion, and this is inspired by my last trip to craigslist. They have a system on there, on the forums, where if someone posts something decent they get a few points by someone, if it's really out of place, they get negative points. This could work on the forum, getting crit points maybe, and I know someone right now is thinking " well this can be seriously abused by those who are silly, the same people that post ridiculous stuff" well, my solution to that problem would be, only people who "have" critpoints can "give" them. So we would all begin with maybe 5 crit points, and in the beginning the newly appointed reps and mods would be responsible for monitoring the entire forum, and giving/taking away crit points. Maybe people can have a special flag, coded into the forum, which designates it a "crit wanted" post, and only people with positive crit points can actually post there. Only mods can give negative crit points beyond 0 so if someone had -25 crit points, they may be on a "time out" from the forum for a day or something, I think this might be a good behavoir control tool, but not too extreme, it would keep order and also give people a little incentive to actually post good crit, and also to recieve it.
Maybe someone can design some kind of flash tool, to embed into the forum, i noticed SMF has flash enabled, and this tool would allow the criter to draw simple shapes on the image in question, like circles, so you can circle areas that you would like to talk about and stuff.
Thinking more complex into the above system, people who consistently give great crits, and actually help community members, will eventually achieve high levels of crit points, they could have a title like "excellent criter" i know criter is such a bad word, but that can be worked out. Just throwing these off the top of my head, you wanted responses, heres mine
I hope i've given you a little insight on how my brain works, and actually show some of the people on this forum, I actually do care about how this goes, and I've had ideas like this ever since I came across pixelation.
I think the idea of electing reps is a good one, my only concern is I hope people actually vote for people who will actually make a difference, and I'm not talking about myself, because I will send ideas to the mods, regardless of weather I am one or not. I think the idea of having it rotating, is actually a good way to control it too, because people who do a good job will probably stay in office, this prevents people from making a lot of "promises" but never delivering on them, because once they are voted out I don't think people would be inclined to vote them back in again.
To close: Pixelation is growing, it always does, yes, we've hit a lot of bumps, by moving the forum around a lot, and it's hard, but every time we grow, and we're growing now, and the bigger we get, the more organization is required. I think documenting rules, and how systems work is very important too. Anyone remember the pixelation test that you HAD to pass to join? Yea, it wasn't one of those tests you could just guess the answers on either. Anyway....
Thanks!
- Dog
