That's a great idea -- I'll get that in place shortly.

And we have a winner.

Yep. As noted previously, there is a hard cap on number of posting credits you can have at one time. We left it off this weekend to encourage people to post what we'd hoped was a back-log of submissions saved over the previous week.

I put the cap back in place this morning after the weekend of testing.

Have you ever done a mission on your own that was clearly impossible at the level it was intended?
What was the name of that mission?
What made it so hard?

Today. We got an unexpected jump on approving items (we didn't expect anything to be ready for approval until this morning, but y'all surprised us with a week's worth of voting in a single weekend), but those items will be in-game in short order.

With some people using refresh to vote only on flags (a hole closed this morning), the flags in the system degenerated to little to nothing to vote on quickly. Normally, roughly half the submissions are flags and half are sails, but with people voting ONLY on flags over the weekend, flags ran out.

I've added a tunable parameter to the system that lets us weight more towards flags or sails in voting. I don't expect to have to use it very often, but when we do (as we do right now), it's available. Right now, you can expect to see sails somewhat more often than flags. Once flags catch back up to sails in the queue, I'll tune it back down.

We don't want it to be an exact ratio, but rather something we hand-tune, because we don't want to have anyone's items stagnate in the system, just because it happens to be on the "side" with fewer items, but we can definitely improve it. I'm hoping the tuning parameter I just added will be a good step in that direction.

Stolen content should be significantly less common now -- since we're compositing flags and sails onto a background, except in the case of full flags, someone would have to do quite a bit of work (almost as much as just creating the work anew!) to "de-composite" the sail or flag off the background. Even in the case of full-size flags with no transparency/tattering, they at least have to chop it out, change N% of the pixels, then re-submit.

So far, less than 1% of the submissions (closer to 1/2%, even) are getting reported for copyright violations or as offensive content, and almost all of those being reported are being put back into the pool after review, despite some folks trying to prove that there's a problem here.

We're definitely keeping an eye on it, though, and if we see a problem, we'll act on it. In the meantime, we log reports, and don't advise that any individual abuse the system by repeatedly reporting items not in violation.

Unfortunately, this would open the system up to abuse, as people could use that information to bury legitimate submissions by users they don't want to see get items into the game.

Part of the intent is to get the 2D steering committee to pick a number of submissions that almost made it and review them here on the boards, so folks can learn what items do and do not get approved.

This is in place now; a bug was preventing the email from getting to anyone but admins over the weekend, but that's cleared out now.

You can be sure that, not only are we monitoring the copyright violation and offensive content reports, but every part of the system, to ensure that it's having the intended effect, and we have a lot of tunable parameters we will be tweaking over the coming weeks until we're satisfied with the exact numbers of items being auto-rejected, reported, and up for review.

We even have pretty graphs (or, at least, we will when we have enough data to graph things over time).

I heartily endorse this.

C'mon guys. Please stop trolling each other.

The current system is designed to get items into the game significantly faster than the old system, but keep in mind that the bottleneck has and always will be the human element in reviewing the items.

Spending an hour (and don't expect it to be anywhere as little as an hour in normal operation) voting in order to vote your own item into pending approval doesn't shave much, if any, appreciable time until your item is reviewed.

The real speed-up is two-fold:

1) The bottom chunk of items, which wouldn't be approved anyway, are rejected automatically. Rejections "cost" a lot more in terms of time -- as I'm sure you've all noticed, we never simply reject an item out-of-hand once it goes in front of an admin. We provide feedback for each one. On the other hand, an approval is simply that: an approval.

The better the approvable::rejectable ratio is, the faster we can move through the queues. By dumping the bottom N%, we get items into the game much faster than just N%. Even though we're only shaving the very bottommost items, it will improve the time-to-approve dramatically.

2) We've sped up the approval admin process drastically, by providing templated answers -- if nine in ten of the items we reject are due to one or more of a handful of items, we shouldn't need to rewrite those answers over and over again. Now we don't have to.

The voting process' purpose is to give the users some input into the process (unlike the old voting system, these votes do contribute to the overall process), and to save time on the admin side by having fewer rejections to filter through. Combined with the new admin, we expect to have items go through the approval process in a timeframe measured in days, not weeks or months as in the old system.