A relevant question: do people get value from the art topics we admins share from Twitter on the public forum, e.g. this Saturn mod topic. Because, if I made these topics private, as @UrbanReflex suggested, you would no longer have the opportunity to comment on them here.
I don’t want to discourage non-admins from sharing art, but how we admins do things could potentially be revised.
Why not make them private, but then have another single art topic that contains all of the art, that way we can still comment on them. Then you could privately keep track of the submissions, while posting them all in one single topic that could be stickied at the top…?
Or would that be too much of a hassle to go back and forth between the two?
So, you’re suggesting duplication - that we post the art in a private topic and a public post in a shared art topic? Possible, although a little messy for admins. I would like to hear what other admins such as @Draikin have to say since they have to work within the system, and we already post in quite a few places.
I’m also wondering if this “problem” is relevant only because there has been a reduction in the number of non-art discussion topics. If the non-art discussion topics are something people want to promote, people should make more of these posts so the topics are bumped to the top.
Yes, I too find it easy enough to scroll past the contributions topics. All of the topics are marked with a (hopefully) appropriately coloured square which maps to a category so I find it easy enough to pick out topics related to Panzer Dragoon, Sega, Other Games, etc discussion.
It’s also worth noting that on our Facebook page, art posts often get a number of comments. So I think the lack of discussion in the art topics here is largely due to the lower activity rather than because they don’t warrant their own discussion thread/topic. Perhaps the solution is simply for members here to make the effort to reply to art topics more often in order to start a conversation around the art?
I don’t find this too much of an issue myself, but I can see the separate private art threads for moderators and one public thread for everyone being the optimal solution, aside from the fact that it makes things (even) more time-consuming for us to manage. Might also be worth asking the question if anyone hasn’t already seen the art elsewhere before seeing it on the forum?
Yes, and that is a real concern - we should look at streamlining the contributions pipeline where possible so that what we’re doing provides real value and respects the time of those who volunteer to work on the project. It is perfectly acceptable for us to say no to additional work. We need to think about how well the contributions pipeline scales over hundreds of contributions.
We would need to post the art in the public forum to ask that question, which is a good argument for making these topics public.
Each piece of fan art is in a seperate post and contains a checkbox labelled “Published” at the bottom, using a checkbox plugin for the forum software. Once we’ve published the art on the website and social media we’ll check this box. Let’s see how well it works in practice.
I’ve merged all of the existing single fan art topics into a new topic called The Old Fan Art Contributions Topic. I’ve also moved @Azel98’s art into a single topic and deleted a few of them that offended some users on Discord. Let me know if you have any concerns.
If you’ve got new single pieces of fan art to submit to the website, they can go in the new Fan Art Contributions Topic or in a new topic in the Contributions category if the contribution is likely to generate further discussion - we’ll reorganise it (if required) in any case.