Maybe by making a special emoji? Just like the Kiki ones? 
and calling them “nomination”
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But how to make the users aware that this emoji is to pick to add points to a work posted? Or do you mean to introduce a second emoji-button to the button with the reactions we got right now?
Michelist
The issue is the plugin only offers a emoji there is no text explaining what it is so it becomes hard to explain to a new member in the forum.
I looked at “nomination” image because I had no idea what could be used… until I saw a ballot box! I don’t think that it would be an emoji people would use regularly, unlike a star or a heart.
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I never looked into it but perhaps I can simply make a new plug-in for this? I know like 10 programing languages or so, surely I could get something to work that would be better than abusing a function meant for something else.
Another issue is, how do we handle posts with multiple different images in it.
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Well… whether the plugin proves practical or not, at least the discussion has picked up! 
I think this would be problematic since we’re then making a clear value judgement on people’s art. I mean - that exists anyway to a degree but it’s only based on positive feedback a present - the number of likes you accumulate.
I haven’t actually explained this in detail since I was more focused on getting the conversation going around the feature system, and what I wrote was already very long.
Expanding the available reactions for the art section is something I’ve wanted for a long while. I just don’t feel like having a single ‘like’ option is enough flexibility - Because I can’t give distinction to the pieces that I rate highly (apart from commenting on them).
I think I’d be more relaxed about ‘liking’ posts if I can also ‘favourite’ e.g. I might like a piece in recognition of effort or progress even if it’s not technically impressive.
I think the reason I use ‘favourite’ rather than another term is because I wondered if we could track those images in a similar way to our portfolios i.e. have a button in our profiles that leads to a gallery of favourited artworks.
To be honest - this is probably another idea I’ve borrowed from Artstation. I think it’s an interesting feature for discovery though, and a nice way to reward the art we love.
So - that was my original motivation for likes/favourites, but it also seemed like it could work well for the feature system; It’s simple to understand and could generate values to distinguish what posts are being rated highly.
One caveat I have in mind with this system is maybe it would need be time-frame limited, since images can accumulate likes over a long period.
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@Takiro What a great idea, and generous on your part, to think of making a plug-in.
Discourse seems to be written in Ruby and JavaScript (using Ruby on Rails and Ember.js). I haven’t come across any documentation on how to make a new plugin, so that is a mystery to me.
Would this help? (I don’t know if this is good resource or not)
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I didn’t do much ruby since except maybe one time ten years ago for a tiny fix on something, so not really exited about it, tbh.
If all our forum software is open source, it could be feasible to only tweak the existing plugin, like maybe limit the emote options, or add a thumbnail to them or some other element to indicate that this reaction is a nomination.
The main risk is additional maintenance that may make future upgrades more risky and painful.
TBH these days with copilot available, it’s not that intimidating to ask about a few things that are unclear with a new programming language. Most of them are very similar, it’s the APIs and programming paradigms that may be more challenging. But tweaking existing software should be simpler than coding something from scratch.
I can’t remember if it is Unsplash or Flickr, but there people can create ‘Collections’ of photos.
As a simpler implementation, I like the idea of an option to add someone else’s picture to your personal Art Gallery, the pieces that you like best.
People could visit your Art Gallery to see the pieces you enjoy.
I guess it works the same as the ‘Featured’ category but specific to your taste. Come to think of it, it could be that when you nominate a work for ‘Featuring’ it goes into a personal ‘Featured’ gallery. And it would be great if you and everyone else could visit your personal Featured gallery. This gallery could be sorted by recent time order or by likes.
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I’ve already seen someone give a ‘star’ emoji to a reply they really liked.
If we are going to make our own plugin I strongly suggest forking the voting plugin.
I was about to suggest using the same plugin for both since it can be enabled on select category and it has the feature to give limited number of votes per member and everyone will know they are voting and not just reacting etc. it will also show the most voted entry which will make life of moderators easier.
But one major issue is that currently the number of votes given to the user will be for both feature request and also for the artwork so that complicates things. User will have less votes for feature requests and for the artwork etc.
So I we can fork the voting plugin and modify it in a way to separate the votes for feature request and the artwork feature row then it will be helpful.
The modifications needed are -
- separate action labeled as feature artwork voting and this action will get votes separate to that of feature request vote
- No mechanism of topic closing and vote release like it is in the current plugin because we do not want to close the topic of the artwork. Instead user votes will lapse for each month / week or fortnight and then they will get new votes
Of-course forking a plugin has its own headache in maintenance.
Another alternate wild proposal -
- Constitute a user group consisting of moderators and users who have won monthly challenge.
- This committee will then choose artworks that are on top weekly or monthly based on the number of likes and reactions to the posts.
- Regular members can also ping this group collectively to notify the artworks they want to put in the pool for consideration, in case there are some artwork which got low traction and got unnoticed by users but are worthy of a feature. Some one from the group will take notice of the artwork and take into consideration for featuring (it is not guaranteed to be featured though). The committee can discuss and debate any artwork or criteria. It can have internal voting too.
- If there are more than 6 artworks (number of artwork in the featured row) all will be featured with some time gap, so that each artwork gets enough time in the front page.
- Actual featuring that is adding the tag to the post can only be done by the mods based on the suggestions of this group.
- In addition to this there can be a new tag called “No-feature” which the users can use who want their artworks to be not taken into consideration.
I know this sounds a bit bureaucratic but this doesn’t need any plugin maintenance and there is no need of new mechanism for the forum software
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Maybe we can use Kikibot for nominations? However it has the disadvantage to being pretty hidden again but is maybe a bit easier to extend than a plug-in. Shortcodes and Bot-Commands are however pretty common for stuff like this, like in IRC or something. So calling the Bot in a thread for nominating an artwork and do the voting like we do now with a poll in another topic. The topic can be created by the bot too, based on a template. It already does something similar in the tutorial. I’ve seen the bot used a lot more in other Forums, for example guiding People through opening a Support-Topic with the relevant information, but I don’t know how much vanilla that is.
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@sooz Yes, that tutorial does look useful! (I admit I didn’t check Discourse’s forum for information.)
The thing is, there’s a difference between pieces I enjoy and pieces I think are worthy of being featured. I can appreciate the quality of a piece without being personally interested in it, just as I can be interested in a piece without it being ‘the best’. (Or maybe I’m just weird, and too stingy with likes.)
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This is a bit like how it works on Pixilart website. The featured works are selected daily by the moderators, but people comment with the main moderators usernames so that it appears in their image stream. However, they are constantly accused of selecting mainly Anime girls and landscapes.
I can understand that. It depends on how complicated the implementation gets. Just thinking that being able to list the artworks I’ve voted for ‘featuring’ would be relatively simple addition while being a relatively small compromise.
We had it in reverse even though we had selected anime girls here we were accused of not selecting anime enough. Part of the reason for that was because there were no noteworthy anime submission. Someone also falsely attributed me as saying that anime is low effort artwork (it was a blatant accusation and assumption because I personally love anime and I may spend perhaps 3-4 hrs of my day watching and enjoying anime). And for that reason I initially opened up the featured artwork mechanism for public nomination earlier only mods selected and featured things. But alas there is not so much anime artwork still. And the people who complained are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it is easier to complain behind back 
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And I’d love to see more pixel art. Scratch the featured part, there isn’t even a lot of posted artwork in the Finished Artwork category! Maybe sometime in the future, there will be enough pixel art for it to need its own category… That’d be cool!
Maybe the ones who complained were sour because of some kind of inferiority complex? It’s easier to complain rather than take the bull by its horns and say “Hey, if there are no noteworthy anime submissions, then I’ll make it happen!”
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