# Comments...such hostility



## brownbeltrob (Feb 20, 2009)

I have, in the past, registered at FA, hoping to make good friends and such, and support my friends across the US through FA's portals and such. I have to say, I am quite disappointed in how much hostility has arisen in FA's borders.

I have a friend, who is becoming an aspiring artist and she is constantly, on a day by day basis, attacked by flamers.

Yes, the annoying flamers. Okay, I know that they are just a nuisance and everything, and the best way to get them off your back is to ignore them. In reality, and I can speak for most of the people out there who agree with this statement, it would be wonderful to be able to hide and/or delete said comments from submissions. Like deviantArt (holy crap, I'm referring to dA o: ), such flaming comments can be hidden with the hit of a button, and all of our troubles are gone!

Okay, yeah, we can block them and everything, but lemme be frank, and say that honestly, those comments are just trash on our submissions and look horrible on them!

And who wants to resubmit, when that person can just trash the artwork anyway?

I'm honestly requesting that a hide comment and/or delete comment feature be added to the submissions, rather than be limited to the shoutbox.

Thank you.


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## Immelmann (Feb 20, 2009)

Firstly: I, actually, would like this option too.

Secondly: Um, why don't you cry about it?
People are mean _all over the internet_. This is a universal concept no matter what site you go to. When you post things online, you have to accept this eventuality and be mature about it. Otherwise, I would really recommend not posting things on the internet at all.

How can bad comments make the submission look bad? If the submission itself is any good, then people won't care all too much about the contents below. Who cares what they say?

Besides: How big a problem can it possibly be for you? I don't know how many views you get, but I have never had a problem like this, and I know very few, if any, people who have.


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## lobosabio (Feb 20, 2009)

This whole thing really make me curious as to what your friend is doing to attract all these trolls.  If it's something really, really stupid, then she kind of deserves it.  

Also:  grow thicker skin.  You'll need it to survive on the internet.


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## brownbeltrob (Feb 20, 2009)

Okay, to clarify, I'm not the one complaining. I'm just stating an observation. Please refrain from telling me to get a spine, as I'm just stating an observation and wanting opinions based upon my observation. I've seen this going around a while now on FA...it's not targeted towards my friend only.

I, honestly, don't care, but I wanna hear other people, to see what they have to say about what I have seen.

People are mean, there's no doubt about it. There's always a flamer waiting to try and break one's spirits >.>

My friend hasn't done anything wrong either. If she references the pictures and stuff, she gives the appropriate credit and everything.


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## PriestRevan (Feb 20, 2009)

I personally don't care for the idea of blocking comments. Just a waste of time.

I mean, just ignore the flamers. Easy enough.


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## Endless Humiliation (Feb 20, 2009)

I hate when people say mean things.

That's why I make it a point to never say mean things back to them except in my head.

That way no one's feelings get hurt but mine.


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## brownbeltrob (Feb 20, 2009)

PriestRevan said:


> I personally don't care for the idea of blocking comments. Just a waste of time.
> 
> I mean, just ignore the flamers. Easy enough.



Same here. Like I said, just an observation *shrugs*


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## lobosabio (Feb 20, 2009)

brownbeltrob said:


> My friend hasn't done anything wrong either. If she references the pictures and stuff, she gives the appropriate credit and everything.



She's tracing, isn't she?  

*checks*

Oh yeah, that's definitely tracing.


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## brownbeltrob (Feb 20, 2009)

lobosabio said:


> She's tracing, isn't she?



No, she isn't tracing. She's borrowing poses from other pictures, because she's liked them.


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## Immelmann (Feb 20, 2009)

Oh, so that's why.

I've never seen anything inciting more angry comments then stuff like that. No wonder she gets flamed.
She should really stop, for a variety of reasons.


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## lobosabio (Feb 20, 2009)

brownbeltrob said:


> No, she isn't tracing. She's borrowing poses from other pictures, because she's liked them.



Ha!  Quit with the delusions.  She's definitely tracing.  And if I am wrong, I will eat my tail.


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## Stratelier (Feb 21, 2009)

PriestRevan said:


> I mean, just ignore the flamers. Easy enough.


Sorry, Revan, but the water-torture of a constant, daily annoyance (_especially_ the minor ones) doesn't work that way.


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## Lobar (Feb 21, 2009)

And this is why comment-removal should not be left in the hands of the users.  If someone is leaving negative comments, they've generally been earned, like in the case of tracing.  Trouble tickets and block lists are enough to handle genuine harassment.  Personally, I think even letting users control their own block lists is too generous.


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## NightWolf714 (Feb 21, 2009)

Lobar said:


> And this is why comment-removal should not be left in the hands of the users.  If someone is leaving negative comments, they've generally been earned, like in the case of tracing.  Trouble tickets and block lists are enough to handle genuine harassment.  Personally, I think even letting users control their own block lists is too generous.



This is ignoring that fact that many times people will get into arguments under a picture (rather sparked by you or not) over really stupid things. Yeah, you can block them, but then the damage is done. Especially since people like to assume and preach stuff before even even asking for proof.

Since tracing has been brought up, let's use that as an example. Say that someone is better at referencing to get proportions correct than just eyeballing it. The stuff that they referenced may look better, so people will assume that it is traced. Trolls latch until this and flame the picture that it is "obviously traced" despite not having tested to see if that's true.

That, and trolls may use one person's picture to argue with another. Deleting the comments would be a nice shortcut to try and stop the argument before trouble occurs.

And finally, multiple people have argued that they have seen troubles as a result of not being able to delete the comments, but there isn't really a negative to being able to. Will some be immature? Yes, but that's a much less of a negative than what many face now.


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## Stratelier (Feb 21, 2009)

NightWolf714 said:


> And finally, multiple people have argued that they have seen troubles as a result of not being able to delete the comments, but there isn't really a negative to being able to. Will some be immature? Yes, but that's a much less of a negative than what many face now.


*Agreed*, we are seeing a new request for deleting comments every week.

The fact that it _can_ be misused is a weak argument -- I seriously doubt a large portion of users would actually do the sort of behavior that staff members are so concerned over.


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## selth (Feb 21, 2009)

people may find it usefull to rate comments, no? that way we can decide what comments to hide or not. Famous sites like youtube and newgrounds have this in place.


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## net-cat (Feb 21, 2009)

I should start myself a nice list of responses I can copy/paste from.

The reason users cannot delete comments is a technical reason that will not be an easy fix. (Would likely involve bringing the site down for a day.) And on FA's "list of shit that's broken," it's something that's a high priority.


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## Stratelier (Feb 21, 2009)

net-cat said:


> The reason users cannot delete comments is a technical reason that will not be an easy fix.


Fair enough.  Adding a new column to a large table (or having to do an UPDATE across all rows) is never an easy thing.

A more lightweight solution (i.e. same effect, less downtime) is to create a table specifically for deleted comments only, and set up a trigger to automatically INSERT rows whenever a comment is deleted from the existing or table, e.g:


```
-- (the below written using postgres flavored SQL)
CREATE TABLE deleted_comments LIKE submission_comments WITHOUT DEFAULTS;

CREATE FUNCTION delete_comment LANGUAGE 'sql' RETURNS 'trigger' AS 'Insert into deleted_comments Select OLD';
CREATE TRIGGER delete_comment AFTER DELETE ON submission_comments FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE 'delete_comment';
```
No table alterations or massive queries need to be run with something like that.



...In all, I'm just a little tired of hearing that old argument about how any comment removal / soft-deletion "must" or "will" be reserved to moderators/admins so as to prevent abuse.

I really want to play the "or the terrorists trolls win" card.  Can I?  Pleeeeease?


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## net-cat (Feb 21, 2009)

Well, soft delete is another issue. That still doesn't solve the problem, which is you can't delete comments that have been replied to without fucking up the entire tree.

A more crafty solution would be to create another table and LEFT JOIN it. If IS NOT NULL, then comment isn't deleted. If IS NULL, it's deleted and show a placeholder. But that stops being a trivial solution, especially as FA's code has no central place that manages comments.


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## Stratelier (Feb 21, 2009)

net-cat said:


> Well, soft delete is another issue. That still doesn't solve the problem, which is you can't delete comments that have been replied to without fucking up the entire tree.
> 
> A more crafty solution would be to create another table and LEFT JOIN it. If IS NOT NULL, then comment isn't deleted. If IS NULL, it's deleted and show a placeholder. But that stops being a trivial solution, especially as FA's code has no central place that manages comments.


That's right, I didn't take the comment-reply hierarchy into account.  You could join the table's identifier into the query so as to have some means of telling visible/deleted comments apart from each other, but yeah, it quickly complicates from there.


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## Firehazard (Feb 22, 2009)

NightWolf714 said:


> This is ignoring that fact that many times people will get into arguments under a picture (rather sparked by you or not) over really stupid things. Yeah, you can block them, but then the damage is done. Especially since people like to assume and preach stuff before even even asking for proof.


Is it not within our abilities to get some moderators on staff who can be authorized to remove obnoxious arguments and harassing comments?  Ideally this should have been a priority from Day One, but as we all know, a lot of terrible mistakes were made on Day One, and making up for them is the current staff's cross to bear.  I'd like to see some high ranking admin weigh in on this option, actually.


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## tsawolf (Feb 23, 2009)

Administrators can remove comments.


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## Fiz (Feb 23, 2009)

tsawolf said:


> Administrators can remove comments.



No shit?


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## tsawolf (Feb 23, 2009)

Fiz said:


> No shit?



They can ban users too.


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## Kesteh (Feb 23, 2009)

There was a thread on lulz about "pose theft" ... i wittingly posted an image of a book called "How to draw what you see"
People are easily butthurt, and there is no such thing as not committing pose theft. Chances are every pose has possibly been done before.
Like the book says, I am referencing things I look at to keep them in perspective and to practice. If they want to bitch about it then they fail to realize that more successive artists than them (most likely pure consumers) use the same method.

Just get thicker skin and ignore the people. Don't reply to them or acknowledge them.
Allowing user-owned comment deletion is a little sketchy. DA had the right idea of allowing people to "hide" comments and everyone had the ability to un-hide, but they recently removed that little perk...so userbases of a page are seriously biased in favor.


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## Fiz (Feb 23, 2009)

tsawolf said:


> They can ban users too.



Such great wit from such a great admin.


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## Wolf-Bone (Feb 23, 2009)

lol hai Fiz remember me?


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## Ringus (Feb 23, 2009)

Wolf-Bone said:


> lol hai Fiz remember me?


THREAD IS BEING DERAILED.

ENTERING GROAN ZONE


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## Fiz (Feb 23, 2009)

Wolf-BONER said:


> lol hai Fiz remember me?



Oh no bro, don't worry, if there was a comment hiding/deleting feature, I'd never do that to your comments on my picture; they're too great.

Gotta keep it classy.


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## Stratelier (Feb 23, 2009)

Fiz said:


> Oh no bro, don't worry, if there was a comment hiding/deleting feature, I'd never do that to your comments on my picture; they're too great.


I can agree with that sort of atitude.  Even in sarcasm, some comments just aren't worth the time to click "Remove" on.


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## Armaetus (Feb 23, 2009)

Only seriously demeaning comments are worth removing, not constructive criticism. For those who get butthurt over little things such as the latter does not warrent any need for self-remove buttons so their fragile ego isn't shattered because they posted something that had glaring errors on it and refuses to acknowledge them.


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 23, 2009)

While it may come to comment hiding soft deletes in later versions, I sometimes wonder why people are so willingly in a rush to post their works in the first place. It's like acting like your art is a personal diary then then getting upset when people you have no idea who is reading says something.

Don't be in a rush to post works, take your time.

If you need to show it to a select group of people, then post it to those people.

Posting it publicly it's likely you want the watches and attention, unfortunately, it has its side effects.


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## Quiet269 (Feb 23, 2009)

Would it not be possibly to just simply give the User who submitted the piece to "Hide" an entire conversation tree? Then if anyone else so chose give them a bright red button that says "See Hidden Comments" and do a red dotted line around whatever was deleted (like what quotes look like)...

This way the user could get rid of the troll comments easily, but at the same time anyone who wished to, could go back and read/comment further...

Sorry if this was said already...


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## Freehaven (Feb 23, 2009)

Users should have very little, if any, real direct control over the deletion of comments.


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## oniontrain (Feb 23, 2009)

I like the way it's currently set up honestly. Comments shouldn't be deleteable by a user at all, and only by an admin if it's actually somebody harassing the person.


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## Kesteh (Feb 23, 2009)

Oh wow...decided to look over their little side forums...
Their argument is basically "mom he won't stop looking at me!" and are willing to take it to their fucking grave.
Maybe they should have considered...not...posting art in public after all if they can't even ignore a person (read as: clicking "Nuke all" button) "spamming" their message box with fav's.

I don't know. The lack of sense these few have just goes way over my head.
Apparently we are all "senseless and stupid morons" ...lol. Their forum, their opinion (or lack thereof)


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## HiroJudgement (Feb 23, 2009)

Being able to delete shouts is fair enough, but deleting submission comments in un-needed. Maybe implement something like the YouTube +/- system on comments, if really needed, but deleting them altogether isn't really necessary.


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 23, 2009)

Kesteh said:


> People are easily butthurt, and there is no such thing as not committing pose theft. Chances are every pose has possibly been done before.



Mmm yes and no. Depends on how much was taken from the original.

This was an interesting article about what was and wasn't: http://www.conceptart.org/copyright (this is a ppt, Power Point Presentation)

We are dealing with however, non registered works.

That being said, referencing is a good way to learn but I think the downside is that people who are doing it are just borrowing from pop culture, not studying stuff that could have real benefits like great master copies. You could probably learn more from Egon Schiele, than just copying something that looks cute from someone else's page and reposting it. I'm not of the mindset of total discouragement of the stuff, but if people did a wider spectrum than "hey cool, he's my favorite artist on FA" and studied more, they'll probably improve faster and with much better range.

http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2005/Reasons/museum1.asp

That and life drawing, but I guess that's not fun...but if it's not why are you drawing?


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## Wolf-Bone (Feb 23, 2009)

b-b-b-b-but I thought the purpose of this site, dare I say it, _the fandom_ was to surround one's self with people to reinforce whatever little make-believe world you live in! Letting people criticize someone's art goes against that fundamental principle of furrydom!

Exclamation marks.


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## Damaratus (Feb 23, 2009)

Unfortunately this thread leaves out a lot of the finer details about what had happened with this particular person.  It's also kind of hypocritical because the one being "flamed" decided to flame someone else via a second account.

Regardless, it wasn't that the image was merely a pose reference, it was the fact that it was *heavy* pose reference.  The kind where you look at the image and it's plain as day as to where the pose was taken from.  



			
				By You Policy said:
			
		

> You may post any Submission provided that the submission is an original work created by you. Joint works and collaborations must give proper credit to all contributing sources.



If you're going to rely that heavily on a particular piece, then you are still required to give credit to the source of that piece.


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 23, 2009)

I'm gonna close the thread then. We already have a lot of general topics for comments, and this thread was misleading.


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