[X] My Assistant

I'll try to keep this as brief as possible, but I can be long-winded sometimes.
It's been an interesting year, that's for sure. (That incident in July... )
Things have passed, though, and we should look to a new year--and hopefully lots more!--of degeneracy.
I hope you've all made some resolutions, and I hope that you keep to them .
With that said, though, I think some improvements could be made to the site.

In particular, imagesets should be penalized.
that's the title!

There's a number of reasons why I believe this should be done, but I'll try to explain the main ones.

1. Imagesets are trivial to create
Let's take a look at the definition of an imageset:
https://ehwiki.org/wiki/Gallery_Categories

Drawn content that does not constitute a comic or cg set (e.g. loose images, screenshots, image dumps, etc.)
Images within such galleries are preferred to have a singular theme (e.g. singular artist, series, character, or fetish).

After classifying hentai into various categories, imagesets are essentially everything else.
With that, it should be somewhat obvious that there are very little requirements to create an imageset.
And indeed, unless an imageset is a compilation or has forbidden content there is very little reason for an imageset to be expunged.
Some requirements exist such as having at least 8 images, but it is trivial to find 8 images.
A gallery can also be expunged if it's updated more than twice per 30 days, but artist imagesets are an exception to that, and that can also be skirted around by, well, creating another imageset.

That's pretty much all that you have to avoid. It might seem a little strenuous because of the wording, but it's actually really simple, and it's far more likely that any given imageset should not be expunged than the opposite.

Procuring images is probably the easiest step. There are a lot of sites out there you can get those images from. There are third-party sites such as other gallery systems, boorus, image boards, and whatnot.
You can get them from the artists themselves, as there are thousands upon thousands of artists just posting content on a number of sites.
Either way, it's ludicrously simple, and quality-checking is not needed.

Really, it's not needed at all, because, well ...

2. There is no such thing as a "complete" imageset and there is no benefit in trying to create one

The first part is explicitly stated in the wiki
https://ehwiki.org/wiki/Expunging#Different_Versions

Different Versions -
All versions of the following may exist simultaneously:
Imagesets of any theme, if uploaded by a different user. There is no such thing as a "more complete" collection in this regard.

This means that, unless your gallery has the exact same images as another gallery and does not violate the rules above, your imageset can stay, and there is little anyone can do about it, even if they want to.
Okay, I know that doesn't sound too bad, but that's where the second part comes in.
Past a certain point, looking for new images to add to your imageset is pointless. Why should you? Aside from an intangible sense of pride or accomplishment, there is not much to gain from doing so.
In fact, it can be argued that it's beneficial to do the opposite. If you don't have the "complete" content of an imageset, that means you can add more later, and bump your gallery.

This aspect of imagesets is noticeably different from every other gallery.
If you upload a similar quality doujinshi as a previously-uploaded gallery, it is likely that your gallery will be expunged as it is "already uploaded."
If you upload an incomplete CG set, it is possible for your gallery to be expunged by a newer, more complete gallery as it is "replaced."

Taking that into account, I think it's pretty simple to say that ...

3. Imagesets are inherently lower quality and should deserve less rewards, or else there is not much incentive to upload anything else



Those are my stats. Note that I've done in a year (or less) what's taken other users multiple years to do.
Frankly, I do not believe I (and imagesets in general) deserve most of those views and hits, for those reasons listed above.

It can be easy to say "just disable imagesets and filter uploaders!" but that is obviously not what's being done.
The general viewer will wank to the first thing that catches their eye, and when imagesets are so easy to create and upload, they're far more likely to see those.
And when so many of them are viewing imagesets, and they decide to contribute to the site, what do they do?
Do they spend the time to purchase and scan a doujinshi? Do they learn how to use image editing software and typeset a translation?
Thankfully, some of them will, but the immediate other option is obvious; they will make imagesets, because they're easy to make and there's little-to-no quality regulation to keep them in check.

It's a bit of a slippery slope argument, but given recent trends I've observed, I think it's at least somewhat true.

So what should be done?

I think the most important step is for the gallery system to be able to distinguish imagesets from other types of galleries.
Okay, okay, I know there's the "Imageset" category, but that exists solely for imagesets of Eastern origin. Western imagesets are lumped into "Western" and we do have a "western imageset" tag.
However, there is no effort to distinguish Non-H imagesets from standalone works. 3D imagesets, western non-h imagesets, and cosplayer imagesets all exist as well, and we don't distinguish them.

Penalizing solely the imageset category does nothing, as uploaders interested in reaping the "benefits" of uploading imagesets can just upload in other categories.

Alright, so let's say we're able to separate imagesets from stand-alone galleries. What's next?
We can slap a Gallery Point penalty on them, just like we already do for Misc galleries, yeah?
I mean, we could, and I definitely think that's important, but I think Toplist points should be penalized as well. A lot of people upload partially to reach those rankings.

Even then, I don't think that's nearly enough. In fact, it may have a detrimental effect. If imagesets get 25% (or 1/4) of what other galleries get, then why not just upload 4 imagesets?
The amount of effort to create multiple imagesets is still practically nothing compared to a "proper" gallery.

This is just an idea, but I think a really elegant solution would be to "hide" imagesets by default on the first 1-10? pages of the Front Page. That would simultaneously decrease the views given by imagesets and encourage the creation of "better" imagesets. If they're only readily visible by default through searches, there's incentive to organize and tag imagesets properly so they can be searched, instead of getting easy views from front page crowding.

I'm tired now and I don't have much else to say. I might edit this later.

TL;DR imagesets are really easy to make so they should not be as rewarding to upload

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I only started contributing to the site about 3 months ago (I'm guilty of uploading pixiv imagesets too, don't get me wrong) but I can see it hasn't always been like this. Even over the last few days, I've noticed an increase of loosely themed imagesets with very poor metadata which were probably thrown together in a matter of minutes by downloading a ton of images from a booru tag.

With that said, I don't have a solution aside from GP penalisation, so I'll just leave it at that. Thanks for making this post

This post has been edited by nasu_sensei: Dec 29 2019, 22:10

I'm not active in the forums so I don't know of what efforts might have been considered already but after the averted apocalypse I started archiving galleries related to my tastes with the help of someone else.

We both are arriving at a point where we need to consider how to approach image sets and what's described here is pretty much the problem we see.
There are tons of image sets with some sort of topic but it is difficult to filter out content you're not interested in.

I for example am very much interested in complete Pixiv sets. They have a clear topic (1 artist) and won't ever overlap with other Pixiv galleries and I'd consider those to be "high quality galleries" not deserving a (heavy) penalty.
Now, I could search for "Pixiv" to find those galleries but not everyone puts "Pixiv" in the gallery name and there's also Twitter, Fantia and so on.

Then there's galleries where the topic is some sort of fetish or character. I understand many people look exactly for those but they will inevitably overlap with other galleries and I'd consider them "low quality galleries" because as correctly stated in this thread they take very little effort to create and you could reuse the same images countless times as long as they match multiple topics.
Currently, it doesn't seem possible to filter out these kind of galleries but those are the ones I'd agree in putting some tag and / or penalty on.

This post has been edited by majin-3: Dec 30 2019, 00:12

Formalizing the other imageset type into categories is an eventuality (I hope). I'd be fine with a GP penalty.

No objections to any modification that would make (especially fully public) imagesets extraneous content as some are particularly abusable - unfortunately, a retroactive countermeasure isn't that easy to implement* so that would only "penalize" new instances.

I'm surprised this is more of a GP problem than a bandwidth/storage problem if ~1 million potential uploaders did the same exact thing (that and you'd see nothing but imagesets, assuming uploaders go as far as miscategorize their shit on purpose to force it to appear).
Also, this has been a thing for over 9 years; it had less impact due to a much smaller userbase back then but it was still ridiculous at the time.

A huge GP penalty to lower motivation for those who somehow care about GP and toplists (think Private/Misc galleries) is a fair step but if it was deemed enough, it'd probably already be implemented by now.

Other categories that are dead easy to pollute and game, causing issues in the long run:
- Fake Artist CGs: put together 8 pictures released "as a set", rinse, repeat
- Fake minisets (usually artistcg or western): same as above but you don't need 8 as long as it's considered a complete work
- Ongoing crap (mostly western): same as above, only need more than 1, and you get replacewars and community minifeuds on top (that can cause shit to hit the fan if it becomes a bit too annoying)
- Delayed Game CGs: fairly rare but exists - if it covers enough fetishes, it can quickly become a serious threat if bumped all the time

Gigantic galleries also are problematic bandwidth/storage-wise and splitting them is not recommended. At all.

*except of course a full wipe and full upload ban by the administrator which are last resorts

This post has been edited by Luna_Flina: Dec 30 2019, 01:45

Other categories that are dead easy to pollute and game, causing issues in the long run:

I think these are more manageable in the long run.
Compared to imagesets, they're a large yet finite source and much easier for the "common" viewer to filter naturally (by just looking at a gallery and going "Oh, I don't like that.")

- Fake Artist CGs: put together 8 pictures released "as a set", rinse, repeat
- Fake minisets (usually artistcg or western): same as above but you don't need 8 as long as it's considered a complete work

Unless it's a variant set (and those have a tag), they would need a story/sequence to be valid.
Otherwise, they can be cleaned up as <8. Putting together unrelated images would just be an imageset, and intentional false mis-classification can be handled too.

- Ongoing crap (mostly western)
- Delayed Game CGs

These are even less common than small sets, and only a few of these galleries truly cause notable issues or drama. Most cases are relatively easy clean-up, even if the users are persistent.

I think that compared to imagesets, everything exists within some degree of regulation, as there will exist a superior and complete version of a gallery.
The only major problem I see is if users start treating other galleries like imagesets, such as by purposefully using lower quality images or withholding content to bump a gallery.

This post has been edited by manbearpork: Dec 30 2019, 11:09

This was a point I've tried to make in the past. Imageset abuse killed toplists and GP. Working on a manga/doujinshi felt unrewarding except for the mere passion of having it released for the public. It also is the reason why I never felt motivated to pick up bounties. Those rewards are like a trickle for an imgset uploader in a day or even a few hours.

Rewarding imgsets the same as any other categories is a huge flaw in this community, and refusing to do anything about it because it'll be "difficult to implement hurr durr" is utter bullshit and an incompetent reason.

Interesting, after taking many advantages and GPs by creating imageset galleries, now you want to stop others from doing the same thing to make profits, is it a coincidence?

http://ehentaihip.com/?f_cats=991&f_sear...r%3Amanbearpork

Anyway, what I trust is supply and demand, if imagesets are terrible as being said, nobody would waste time clicking or downloading them at first place. However, truth is imageset uploaders could gain good amounts of visits and hits, which means we have LOTS OF ppls willing to pay GPs or spend time browsing for those galleries.

As long as there's no storage/bandwidth issue happening, nothing need to be changed, because we have category or uploader filter already, for those who hate imagesets they can ignore them completely. If we forcefully enable GP penalty, they will definitely upload more imagesets to get compensation, since man is greedy. Source of problem is demand, can't really do anything (except for forbidding) when we have such demands for imagesets, restriction or penalty would only encourage uploaders to bypass the rule or start more expunging wars.

This post has been edited by Miles Edgeworth: Dec 30 2019, 18:36

Anyway, what I trust is supply and demand, if imagesets are terrible as being said, nobody would waste time clicking or downloading them at first place.

Supply and demand is a valid way to perceive this issue, but I don't think that perspective is quite right.
The issue is supply and demand of hentai in general, not solely imagesets.
Imagesets are a perpetual, continuously-bumped source of supply which rapidly outpace other gallery types.
In turn, they decrease the amount and value of views/hits to other galleries which generally take more effort to create.

The only thing I'm concerned about with penalising image sets is it'll make purchasing sets or sets from subscriptions to patreon etc less worthwhile, even though they have genuine value due to not being readily available. Even the free ones ripped from pixiv/wherever are useful for archival purposes.

The ones that I think are the biggest problem are the generic "Big Tits Gallery 4" galleries and the like, as often they are just the same images in 100 other galleries. You can download any random generic gallery like that, add in another image, and just upload it = free gp.

This was a point I've tried to make in the past. Imageset abuse killed toplists and GP.

Agreed.
Unrelated, but if this penalty ever gets implemented then the toplists scores should radically change to reverse the abuse of Imageset galleries for the last decade. Make the room for those uploaders that do share more valuable stuff instead of something that can be found easily and freely on other sites.

The ones that I think are the biggest problem are the generic "Big Tits Gallery 4" galleries and the like

It would be useful if there was a quality metric. For people doing large series of uploads, usually the first couple will be decent then the quality of the galleries drop off.

Could even put a limit on the number of uploads of that style of gallery per user as an extreme measure, so they would have to put more effort into an upload but could still get the same GP.

Depends on how big the issue is though. GP does not really affect me so my opinion is probably a bit weird on this front.

that is indeed agreeable.
image set give less website currency is a nice plan.
image set gallery not being seen in first 10 pages is also ok idea too.
as visitor to the site can see the image sets by click on image set icon or just highlight image set on filter for search.
having maxed out website currency "if that is even possible" does not do anything worth while to try to get so much of those resources by posting many gallery for image set/western artist art image sets.
not sure how much it should effect cosplay type galleries

I flat out added OP to the blocked uploaders list in my options because he makes large portions of the site basically unreadable.

Unrelated, but if this penalty ever gets implemented then the toplists scores should radically change to reverse the abuse of Imageset galleries for the last decade. Make the room for those uploaders that do share more valuable stuff instead of something that can be found easily and freely on other sites.

That's not true. Once penalty is given, those uploaders will try to fake category or upload more trashes to get the same treat back. Moreover, those free stuffs are not always imagesets, could be western comic, artist cg or doujinshi, you can find a lot from place like pixiv, OP is one knowing that well, you can visit his galleries and see what happens.

In the other hand, galleries with paid contents from Patreon, fanbox or fantia could be imageset as well, it's unfair to punish those uploaders while they could have paid more than buying any digital books:

http://ehentaihip.com/g/1532343/139052153d/
http://ehentaihip.com/g/1471047/91950fccf6/
http://ehentaihip.com/g/1426412/7ace27a598/
http://ehentaihip.com/g/1426402/b5c3235642/
http://ehentaihip.com/g/1425497/505d7ba240/

Penalty for particular category is not viable for current mechanism we have, I am strongly against this idea.

I'd say it's better to punish those than the scanlation community. Increasing moderation is always a better solution for fakes than letting the rampant inequality of imagesets. It won't be unfair to premium imagesets if the non-premium trashy ones are regulated with limits. If you need viability, making a separate category for those is the best idea than doing nothing and giving the scanlation community a big "FUCK YOU YOU WILL STILL UPLOAD DOUJINS HERE SO WE'LL ABUSE YOU INSTEAD FOR THE SAKE OF OUR IMAGESETS".

This post has been edited by sakuracircle: Jan 3 2020, 14:54

There is no actual (visual) way to distinguish between paid and public content in the first place.
It's not done for doujinshi or CG sets, and it's an even less important distinction for imagesets, as they're all just gatherings of miscellaneous images in the end.

This post has been edited by manbearpork: Jan 3 2020, 15:28

Then that just means that considering paid imgsets is a huge nonsense.

Increasing moderation is always a better solution

From previous experiences (before my time here, and also a handful of other places too) it turns out to be very difficult to get good impartial mods for our community. For some reason the polarization of ideas is very evident in the EH community too - especially in gallery content.

Finding more technical solutions is often more viable.