A better feature + awards system? Your thoughts and ideas needed! ⭐

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Greetings fellow Krita artists!

I ran this by the mods last week. The feedback seemed positive and I’ve been asked to re-post it now as a public discussion.

I’m leaving it pretty much as I originally wrote it. It’s quite long, so you might need a hot beverage (and maybe even a slice of cake!) :face_with_monocle: :teapot: :cake: Here we go!..

I have concerns about the viability of the new feature system. I think it mostly boils down to two things; Complexity, which will limit participation, coupled with a limited capacity to reward the flow of quality artwork as it comes.

I was glad to see the previous system being dropped as it clearly wasn’t working. I had been thinking for a while about alternative ideas, but hadn’t come up with a coherent idea to propose. I was also thinking it would be good to have a system for annual awards - so I’m glad to see an initiative to do that.

I’m struggling a bit to articulate all my thoughts on this, but at least I can start a conversation.

  • It’s meant to be a current monthly/annual rewards system, but there’s no fixed time frame for eligible entries; So the pool is basically everything in the finished section since the site’s inception - as long as it hasn’t been featured already. Even in the space of a month, there’s more worthy art than we can easily accommodate.

  • The amount of quality content posted can vary from month to month, so if people are posting during a busier time, they’re less likely to get featured than quieter times.

  • It relies on members being pro-active with making nominations. As we’ve seen with the previous system, relatively few are interested in doing that. That seems to be case again with the new system, judging by how few nominations there’s been over the past month.

  • As a consequence, a lot of recent images are being overlooked and only the few who have been nominated, according to the tastes of those who are willing and able, will make it to poll.

I went through the last 4-5 weeks and picked out some images that I personally felt were feature-worthy but not nominated:

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This is only a portion really (I could easily pick out a few just from Elixah’s output for the month!). So I feel like the annual best-of initiative is already being rendered pointless as most of the quality art is being left out.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about as a possible working solution. I don’t know to what extent it’s technically possible though:

  • A system directly tied to the responses art gets in the artwork section.

  • If possible, introduce a ‘favourites’ option for artwork - So we can ‘like’ stuff we feel is worthy of merit, and ‘favourite’ works we feel are more deserving of accolade. I think this might be possible using the reactions plugin: Discourse Reactions - plugin - Discourse Meta

  • If it’s possible to automate, then nominations could be made based on making a threshold of likes/favourites. Then either featured if it passes moderation (content appropriate), or maybe put to public vote (that might be superfluous though if it’s already passed a likes/favourites test).

  • Expand the featured art banner to include more images - Maybe like the varied wall they had on Artstation i.e. a matrix of images where some are larger based on set criteria e.g. newly featured, or current popularity.

This way, high quality art will naturally make its way to the featured section without the complexity of a nominations system, and is less likely to be overlooked.

Maybe an additional system could be implemented for rewarding participation and accomplishment e.g. ways to visually acknowledge those who have had multiple featured images, or reached high like/favourite milestones. It’s not something I’ve put much thought into though. :thinking:

*Since I wrote this last week, we’ve completed the first round of submissions/votes. I nominated one of the images I mentioned above which brought the total to 11, the total number of voters was just 22.

One thing I want to add is - I’m aware there’s something of a value judgement when I say ‘quality art’ and that will mean something different to everyone. My personal meaning is images that meet a subjective level of technical excellence - to my mind, the images that best showcase what can be achieved in Krita. I think this is also something that should be discussed though - What we believe the feature system should represent? Is it the above, or should it be broader/more inclusive?

I think at least with a system based on likes/favourites, works that are enjoyable but might not tick many technical boxes can still find their way to the feature banner.

Okay - I think that’s enough for now. If you made it this far - thanks for reading! This is an open discussion so please share your thoughts and ideas (and cakes!) below… :upside_down_face:

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This is fabulous feedback and you’ve put forward some really great ideas.

Thank you for getting us started.

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The limitations of selecting four artworks per month had been in my mind too. Not only is it not flexible to the variance in how much ‘feature-worthy’ artwork might be produced during a set time period, but it makes the featured gallery more static (basically showing the same few artworks for a month).

And nominating and voting does take a lot of effort. I haven’t participated in the nominations process myself, but with a system more similar to the ‘likes’ system I might consider it. (Although I admit sometimes I forget about the like button too, but it’s just a simple click.)

About what I would consider ‘feature-worthy’ artwork, I guess I would put the influencing factors as:

  • Technical quality: well-executed in whatever style it’s in, the sort of thing that makes you think “this is done by someone skilled”;
  • Heart: meaning or feeling, the sort of thing that evokes emotion or tells a story, and draws people to it;
  • Unique style: extraordinariness (out-of-the-ordinary-ness), the thoughts of “I don’t see many artworks like this” and “you can do that in Krita?”.

I’m not saying it has to fully reflect all of those things, just that those factors would contribute to my impression. The goal would be a featured gallery full of a variety of good-looking artwork in different styles and tones that you’d want to show anyone you’re recommending Krita to, basically.

Anyway, that’s my thoughts. (It took far longer to write those than to read the long post. I don’t have any cake, so I’ll share my chocolate instead :chocolate_bar: .)

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Won’t this be too much for mobile displays? :thinking: I use Krita-artists mostly on my Android phone.

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Could you be more specific? Is it the dimensions or readability you’re worried about (or both?). :thinking:

I imagine any implementation would need to fit within certain boundaries, and maybe adapt or scale to fit smaller screens.

When I say ‘expand’ I’m thinking more vertically - Like double the height or something.

I don’t expect a larger banner will suit everyone, but I think it’s reasonable for Krita Artists to push the artwork a bit more. I’m obviously biased though! :wink:

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I came into this post to add a side-note conversation;

I’m really proud of the krita developers team for coming up with a free and open source product that can produce professional work. The featured section of this website is a testament to that. Krita is beyond a hobby software at this point.

Anyways… back to the original conversation…
Mythmaker makes all great points. I concur :smiley:

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Yes, I’m concerned about both.

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I would be cautious about making the featured artwork take up more space on top of the category pages, since people are looking at those pages to browse topics, not the featured artwork, and it already takes up around a fourth of the page height in my window.

But I would support making it easier to view them- a convenient link to the Featured tag somewhere for instance, although I don’t know where that could go. Or some kind of specially-laid-out page that shows just the images, with topic name on mouseover, like how the featured row does. Or make the featured row expandable, so more rows can be shown optionally.

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I think the most important places for featured artwork are the front page, artwork sections and maybe the expanded generic topics section. Personally I feel it’s okay to take up a bit more space on the front page - it just means scrolling a fraction more to get to the topics. :thinking:

I don’t think it would be a big issue to exclude it from other categories, unless people are landing directly in those areas. Maybe a compact version, or alternative banners could be implemented.

All this stuff is speculative anyway. I don’t know what the possibilities are with available plugins. It would be good to get some input from coders who might be able to advise on or implement such changes.

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Regarding the automatic featured selection, we could count the likes, but only on the opening post. Sometimes the thread goes into a discussion and that rakes in many likes that may not reflect the reaction to the artwork itself.

I’m not sure what else could be a good measure of engagement with the work (that wouldn’t be ambiguous). We could consider adding another reaction type in addition to the “like”, maybe just something like “featured votes” that would only apply to Finished Artwork posts? Then if the post reaches some threshold, it could be auto-featured (or sent for moderator approval, etc.).

I like the idea of having an easy link to the full featured gallery. Also it would be good if we could filter featured by additional tags, e.g. only browse featured works in anime category. Maybe it’s already possible, but I don’t know how to do it.

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Yeah - that’s one thing that bothers me with the art section - the likes displayed for each image (in the gallery view) uses the total for the thread rather than the image post. Some threads contain multiple image posts though (like sketchbooks), so I don’t think there’s an ideal solution to that.

Should be less of an issue for the feature system though as that would only apply to finished works. For finished works with multiple images, artists could be guided to include all images in a single original post (mainly for sequential images) or make individual threads for them.

That was the point of the likes/favourites suggestion - so we can mark images we rate highly and provide another metric for weighing the value. The algorithm could be based purely on ‘favourites’ or a mixture of the two. My thinking is either a threshold number, or a total value based on both with more value assign to favourites e.g. 1 for a like 3 for a favourite.

Maybe it’s possible to filter by more than one tag. It looks like it’s linked to the url, but I don’t know what a correct multi-tag url would be to test it.

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I have now enabled the reaction plugin as the first step. I have yet to test it and then try to think of plan to integrate it in the nomination process. I have not yet tested how it works. I will make a new post explaining this

I think we can denote one emoji ( that is this one - :star: ) for denoting nomination. If the user thinks the artwork should be featured they can use this emoji for reaction they can use other reactions for simply reacting and not nominating but still appreciating the artwork.

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I like the idea of being able to select a star to nominate it for Featuring. It is simple and I think it will work.
A note about feedback. On the Pixel Studio Network for Pixel Art they brought in an additional ability to rate a drawing on Beauty, Creativity, Style, Technique and Palette. I mention this because it did NOT work well. People didn’t fill it out much and when there was a good picture a few people would do it and it was generally 4’s and 5’s in most categories.

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Other than the star for Featuring Nomination, I would say keep it simple and keep letting people write feedback when they want to.

Oh, and I don’t tend to go to the nominations page because it doesn’t come up as a new topic like new works do, I need to specifically think about going there.

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Thank you for activating the emoji plugin, @raghukamath.

What if, instead of a selection of emojis, a series of numbers popped up allowing members to apply a score?

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In addition to the numbers we would want to have some emoji too as this mechanism will be shared by post in other categories. I do not know if this plugin can restricted to single category. I will try to search if it is possible. Adding 5 numbers in addition to other emoji will make the emoji popup too long to choose.

Also this makes it a bit complicated since we would have to calculate the score etc.

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I don’t like the idea of using the star emoji from the reaction picker for nomination for a very simple reason. When selecting the emoji from the list it is not clear to the user that it has a special meaning in a specific context. People might use it just because they like the emoji without knowing they just nominated an artwork. Especially since the emoji is available on every post on every topic, not just artworks.

I suggest a labeled button instead, so the user is more likely to find it and less likely to do it by accident. And most importantly that they know this does something special and what it does.

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That is really a disadvantage and thanks for pointing this out. Our issue is that we are trying to hack our way through the plugins and limitations of the Forum. We need to find a clever way to solve this.

To be fair @Mythmaker suggested having it based on likes and favourite and not tie it to one of the emojis. May be the total number of reactions would be a good indicator but the mods would have to choose something to be featured. On the other hand there can be some artwork which may get buried down among normal posts or due to bad timezone and never see that much reaction.

I am just throwing out ideas. Any suggestion is welcome.

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My feeling is: to be able to give either a heart or star or both. Leave the other emojis out, its just complicating things. Other emojis can be chosen in the message section. I think only give the option for emojis that do something additional.

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I just wanted to react on this, but @Takiro has already pointed out what I wanted to say about it.
So, the question stays, how to make the users aware of it?

Michelist

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