We created the discord server to hopefully encourage collaboration between all our members, and the initial reaction is encouraging, we have already had over 100 people join the server (though not necessarily stick around for long).

People may have seen that the activity section is currently disabled, that is because the database is struggling to cope at the moment.  The good news is there is a dedicated activity channel on the discord server.  It has image uploads, approvals and denials.

The big change is that denial reasons are publicly visible, we have had questions about this so I’ll try to explain why this has been introduced.

Firstly we are trying to foster a more transparent and collaborative atmosphere, we want our mods and up-loaders to be able to integrate better rather than engaging in a them vs us mentality, we are all in this together and working together we can make it an awesome place to be.

One of the major problems we have is that moderators are overloaded, we don’t have enough of them, and the ones we do have are time limited.  From a practical point of view what this means is easy to approve images are approved quickly, easy to deny images take longer, and borderline images can be sitting in the queue for a while and even then either wrongly denied or wrongly approved.

The bottom line is people should only be uploading images they are sure moderators will approve.  If they aren’t certain they should be getting input first.  Mods LOVE to approve peoples images, it’s a feel good for everybody.  Denying images is an awful task, nobody wants to be told the image they have spent time working on isn’t good enough, even with constructive criticism a lot of people take the news badly.

So why put this bad news out in the open?  Well it’s a two way street, we want mods to think about what they are saying to people and give detailed explanations because it will be public, and we want submitters to think about what they are submitting and also learn from others and their own mistakes.

But this only works if everyone gets involved, so I implore you all to embrace the new tools, join the server, have a laugh, make friends, tease the mods, and most importantly have fun!