Author Topic: Quality and Content Rating System - Simple Implementation (Read 7828 times)

Leo Blanchette · « **on:** June 30, 2013, 18:44 »

In the stock photography and illustration business there are lots of different types of "contributors" of varying skill and content.

Symbiostock seeks to maximize everyone's freedom. Also trying to exert control over everyone's own site is not only impossible but will not be well accepted. The whole point of Symbiostock is to allow you to do things your way

I'm going to put in a quick and efficient rating system that allows you to mark quality and rating according to reasonable opinion. Lets talk about the easy one first:

Quality

There will be 3 levels of quality you can assign to your images:

Premium - It simply states that you have reason to believe this is your best or most sellable work. Maybe you put your best into it and want to spotlight it. Maybe you know its a good seller, and thus give it premium status. Its your choice.
Typical - Generally useful and well targeted stuff. Its good useable work but takes second to your "premium" images.
Everything else - Its so easy to upload...why not upload it??? Someone will use it! But you certainly feel its not your best or even second best work.

Your search results will order things by these 3 tiers both in your own search results and the network search results. This will help your sales since the best stuff will jump in front of people's eyes soon. Its really just a way to maintain quality according to your own opinion, ranking search results accordingly, making sales easier. And of course someone else isn't judging your work in a way you may not agree with.

Rating

Again it would be silly to try to enforce any sort of rules over what people do with their own site. But you can control what comes onto your own site. For any number of reasons you may have an image to uphold, and so there should be some sort of rating system to help people to do that. Also, with all personal opinions aside - Google is going to rate your site based on whats leaking through as well.

What is the modern "rating" system applied to images? Is it the typical g, pg, pg13, r... etc? In any case, we might need one.

Unrated - Means there is no rating. It does not imply anything other than it simply hasn't been rated yet.
G, PG, PG13 ... need we explain?
R - You know what that implies better than I do I'm sure.

Your network members will be able to apply filters on what gets through to their search results. Simply stated, the results will be provided by your site, but every image will be conditionally included or excluded based on rating.

Your welcome to comment. Especially you people who are familiar and perhaps involved with this.

Symbiostock's Quality And Reputation

As of next release I'm going to be removing my name from the Theme. The "Symbiostock network" implies a shared reputation among many different types of people. So you won't see Leo Blanchette or necessarily even Symbiostock branding coming into your site except in network specific areas. I think its important to allow people to make and control their own reputation and branding on their site. Let me know if you feel the same.

We are getting close to 2.5 which by amazing cooincidence happens to be where things are becoming quite stable. From here it can only get easier.

I feel this system of self-regulation has potential to cause people to compare quality against their own work, and not that of others, possibly making a naturally quality controlled atmosphere where your personal best floats straight to the top. Giving you control over your site's content as far as how things are ranked and what comes in will help in many ways.

steheap · « **Reply #1 on:** June 30, 2013, 18:52 »

Hi Leo

I understand the rating (the PG type), but it all seems to be an area that is not worth bothering with, at this stage, in my view. I think most incoming buyers will come via Google. It could be different for illustrators where someone may like your style and book mark you, but for photographs, a buyer has a specific need in mind, and my site (if he finds it for that need) is not likely to have an image for the next search. Hence the buyer will come in, see my shot, either like it or not, and then move on. Why would I worry them with "premium, basic etc.?" If they like it, they buy it assuming the price is OK.

So, I think there are better things to spend your time on.

Steve

grsphoto · « **Reply #2 on:** June 30, 2013, 18:56 »

I would be much happier if the editing of images, keywording, releases etc was working better before we started adding another layer on top of the images.

Having to go back through and setting each image with the present system will be such a PITA

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #3 on:** June 30, 2013, 19:18 »

Feel free to express your opinions. This thread will be here when there are 100 sites making up the network. It will be nice to collect thoughts here.

In the meantime I have to get my name off the footer

And regarding how to spend my time - yes, there are at least 10 other things I'd rather be coding, half of which involve actual profit

steheap · « **Reply #4 on:** June 30, 2013, 19:31 »

Another thought - I 100% agree about the issue of adding things retrospectively - I'm struggling to get all my images online and I know I have to go back and change those settings for model and property releases and possibly an editorial marking. Lots of work, but I can see the value. I don't see value in restricting the choice that a buyer has of our relatively small library of images (compared to any of the main agencies. Any restrictions on what they see based on a quality or rating level is not a good idea and I can't believe that a buyer of images will be put off by the sort of nude images likely to appear on our sites. I'm sure they have seen far worse!!

Steve

quailrunphoto · « **Reply #5 on:** June 30, 2013, 19:58 »

Quote from: Leo on June 30, 2013, 19:18

In the meantime I have to get my name off the footer

I respectfully disagree. I believe you are the Creator/author and should remain so named. If you want to spread the praise, add the major code contributors to Symbiostock or link to that information. You started out with a vision and have accomplished amazing results.

I would agree with others that a rating system would not be a wise use of your time right now. Maybe as a paid plugin for the future.

Bug fixes should be your coding goal and preparing to cut Symbiostock loose. I have the impression you have several irons in the fire, including the need to increase your own income. So it is time to let go.

David

djpadavona · « **Reply #6 on:** June 30, 2013, 20:14 »

I like the idea Leo. Steve is right - the vast majority of people will land directly on an image from some sort of organic search. However for those who perform a search on our site, or take a look at the "similar images", it is useful if we can show them our best stuff at the forefront.

When Warmpicture first formed, I went through everyone's portfolios at the major agencies and logged which images had a strong history of sales. I gave those a hidden "rating" to allow them to show up at the forefront of searches. It made the site look a lot better.

It's totally optional. If someone doesn't want to bother with it, they don't have to. But I will definitely highlight my top 5%-10% and ensure they are always near the top of searches.

steheap · « **Reply #7 on:** June 30, 2013, 20:17 »

Quote

However for those who perform a search on our site

You've highlighted one of the areas that I think is a much better area to focus on - the internal search. It is pretty primitive right now, and so my money would go on a much better "best match" search that takes compound keywords into account.

I can see the logic of putting your best images forward in a search on the site - it currently puts newest ones there, and I've tended to put my best images on the site first - hence they get lost. REversing the search display would be a nice option for me.

Steve

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #8 on:** June 30, 2013, 20:52 »

Hey guys, these features will be optional. So we don't have to be fearful of any more complexities.

In case anyone was confused, the QUALITY rating system is an internal ranking system, which is relative to your own work. It puts your best at the front in a relevant search.

RATING is also internal. Lets say I'm fully aware children can, do, and will visit my site because they like robots. AND MY ROBOTS ARE CUTE.

It just so happens a big breasted sexy model with a sensuous look on her face posed and ready ... is also CUTE by another person's definition. And by cooincidence they've listed CUTE in their promoted keywords.

So, now my robots share search results with images meant to excite the males of the species.

See the necessity?

I need to block your your "sexy" "nude" women if we must share a network and mind my audience's eyes. So if you can do me and many others the favor of setting the rating:

GREEN
YELLOW
RED

Ahead of time on a batch of images, and take that extra moment to be mindful of the children...everyone wins no?

I use myself as an example because I'm one of the few guys here that might be concerned about the issues. Knowing my dad, for instance, if he were a photographer or illustrator in the network he'd probably network with all you nude sexy girl guys and put your network results right at the top and be his own best search customer.

as perhaps many of you manly men would be.

Of course I'm having a little fun with this, but I'm sure you can see the necessity for my youngsters looking for mascot imagery for their school projects.

Also I've put the system in already

it only took a few minutes and to be honest its really not that hard to include for future use.

grsphoto · « **Reply #9 on:** June 30, 2013, 21:53 »

Instead of a morality rating system ( which will be bypassed by some irresponsible people ) why not add a "safe search" into the search system. With safe search on images with specific keyword will be left out.

This way I have much more control over what gets seen on my site.

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #10 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:05 »

Quote from: grsphoto on June 30, 2013, 21:53

Instead of a morality rating system ( which will be bypassed by some irresponsible people ) why not add a "safe search" into the search system. With safe search on images with specific keyword will be left out.

This way I have much more control over what gets seen on my site.

I'll add a field into the network panel which will provide some default values which you can override.

Also please understand that I'm very aware we all come from different backgrounds and am not trying to enforce morality. This is simply a system to show consideration for the others, and a way to control what comes onto your own site, since we all have different values.

grsphoto · « **Reply #11 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:29 »

Quote from: Leo on June 30, 2013, 22:05

Quote from: grsphoto on June 30, 2013, 21:53
Instead of a morality rating system ( which will be bypassed by some irresponsible people ) why not add a "safe search" into the search system. With safe search on images with specific keyword will be left out.

This way I have much more control over what gets seen on my site.

I'll add a field into the network panel which will provide some default values which you can override.

Also please understand that I'm very aware we all come from different backgrounds and am not trying to enforce morality. This is simply a system to show consideration for the others, and a way to control what comes onto your own site, since we all have different values.

We should assume that we are mostly adults on the network. We can also assume that most of the buyers will be adults as well. I think that it would be better if the system was set as open, and we could close it as we go instead of closed ( default values) which have to be over written.

cascoly · « **Reply #12 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:34 »

I'm strongly against any rating system - quality or morality -- it will only hurt those who try to play along, unless there is some form of enforcement.

google will be sending most traffic to most sites, and it wont care what rating a picture has -- it's like those silly 5 star ratings for recipes -- few real people bother to rate anything. you'll end up like sites like panther and the other bottom level sites that show images based on ratings which in turn are just popularity, no real quality control

it's a system crying to be abused

in addition, those of us with 1000 or more images are not about to go back and rate all those images for no possible gain. and forward, we upload in batches -- who's going to waste time assigning a rating to individual images?

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #13 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:35 »

Sounds like a good plan. We'll keep things open by default and leave filtering to the webmasters, and simply ask people to mark images maturity level as they upload. I'll streamline it for future uploads to encourage it.

The nice thing is it allows people to work an honor system, and honor / trust systems are proven to work in most areas.

cascoly · « **Reply #14 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:40 »

Quote from: Leo on June 30, 2013, 20:52

RATING is also internal. Lets say I'm fully aware children can, do, and will visit my site because they like robots. AND MY ROBOTS ARE CUTE.

.....So, now my robots share search results with images meant to excite the males of the species.

.....I need to block your your "sexy" "nude" women if we must share a network and mind my audience's eyes. So if you can do me and many others the favor of setting the rating:

.....
I use myself as an example because I'm one of the few guys here that might be concerned about the issues. Knowing my dad, for instance, if he were a photographer or illustrator in the network he'd probably network with all you nude sexy girl guys and put your network results right at the top and be his own best search customer. as perhaps many of you manly men would be.

Of course I'm having a little fun with this, but I'm sure you can see the necessity for my youngsters looking for mascot imagery for their school projects.

sorry, but I don't see the problem -- i'm not selling to children, and I don't control what other people have on their sites. i'm selling my images to adults who are looking for specific content. any reasonable buyer will realize that their keywords may bring up some surprising results.

children's use of the internet is their parent's responsibility. no reason we should self censor when the purpose of the sites does not include children in the first place. there are some people who would object to any image of an unveiled woman -- should we mark those as potentially objectionable?

cascoly · « **Reply #15 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:43 »

Quote from: Leo on June 30, 2013, 22:05

Quote from: grsphoto on June 30, 2013, 21:53
Instead of a morality rating system ( which will be bypassed by some irresponsible people ) why not add a "safe search" into the search system. With safe search on images with specific keyword will be left out.

This way I have much more control over what gets seen on my site.

I'll add a field into the network panel which will provide some default values which you can override.

Also please understand that I'm very aware we all come from different backgrounds and am not trying to enforce morality. This is simply a system to show consideration for the others, and a way to control what comes onto your own site, since we all have different values.

ONLY if the default value is 'safe', otherwise anyone who uses the system is going to be automatically blocking out most of the images in the search since most will not be rated at all

grsphoto · « **Reply #16 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:43 »

As for your other comment about taking your name off the theme.... bad idea.

With the amount of effort you put into this you deserve as much traffic as the network can send to your site.

Thinking about the maturity level, don't we already have a way of disabling searches by sites? Won't that allow you to protect your child clients?

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #17 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:48 »

Quote from: cascoly on June 30, 2013, 22:34

I'm strongly against any rating system - quality or morality -- it will only hurt those who try to play along, unless there is some form of enforcement.

google will be sending most traffic to most sites, and it wont care what rating a picture has -- it's like those silly 5 star ratings for recipes -- few real people bother to rate anything. you'll end up like sites like panther and the other bottom level sites that show images based on ratings which in turn are just popularity, no real quality control

it's a system crying to be abused

in addition, those of us with 1000 or more images are not about to go back and rate all those images for no possible gain. and forward, we upload in batches -- who's going to waste time assigning a rating to individual images?

Generally its optional. A system with no filtering is beckoning even more to be abused.

You may be confused regarding the QUALITY rating:

Quality rating simply allows you to place your images as priority on your search results. It gives you control. Also, you don't have to use it. Its completely optional and harmless since it only pertains to you. Left alone your images will rank according to when they were uploaded. Its a 3 level quality system to put your best in front, everything else in the middle, and your random-no-effort-third-rate-stuff in the back.

RATING (having to do with nudity)

When Symbiostock starts getting BIG your going to have the issues of BIG operations. And your going to have to filter something. AJT for instance will come to a point when someone uploads a detailed X rated picture(s) onto their site and it ends up in his search engine. He has no choice but to make a moral judgement. So really the question of filtering is almost as complex as the question of no filtering.

And here's little me with my robots trying to keep innocent eyes protected

The funny thing is I knew this question was coming before I even wrote my first line of code.

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #18 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:50 »

Quote from: cascoly on June 30, 2013, 22:43

ONLY if the default value is 'safe', otherwise anyone who uses the system is going to be automatically blocking out most of the images in the search since most will not be rated at all

Yeah, also I can block out "orange" from my search so nobody competes with my orange men, so thats where trust and respect for the network comes in. Right now its easy because we all know eachother and are growing together.

I think really if we are masters of our own domains first, and ask for consideration second, we should do well. The problem, of course, is more human than programing. A system to regulate humans perfectly will never come out of human creation

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #19 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:52 »

Quote from: grsphoto on June 30, 2013, 22:43

As for your other comment about taking your name off the theme.... bad idea.

With the amount of effort you put into this you deserve as much traffic as the network can send to your site.

Thinking about the maturity level, don't we already have a way of disabling searches by sites? Won't that allow you to protect your child clients?

Wow, this thread took off.

Yeah, I can block entire sites like anyone. But this makes things a little less all-or-nothing.

Travelling-light · « **Reply #20 on:** June 30, 2013, 22:58 »

Leo I think you are right to get these systems in. Although I agree that most of our buyers will come in through Google, I don't want explicit images to come up on our site when for instance I put in the keyword beautiful. I don't want to see them myself, and I'd rather they weren't pushed onto potential customers who may just happen to browse. I haven't seen anything yet that bothers me, but the day will come.
As for the quality rating, I quite like that idea. I don't think it's a biggie, but quite nice to have it there, just for the potential browsers.

Pilens · « **Reply #21 on:** June 30, 2013, 23:33 »

I like the idea of having some control where my images show up in a search. I wouldn't call it "quality rating", though.

I am not sure a PG rating/filter system is a good idea at this point. Is there enough offending images among the app 50,000 on the network now that it would make a difference? Would we really go through the hassle of PG-rating every single images? And even if everyone of us would, what advantages would exactly justify the additional effort? I mean if kids find Leo's cute robots, are able enough to dig deeper and find other "cute" images, chances are they would do anyway somewhere else on the internet.

I don't see crediting Leo for making the theme on my SY site breaking my branding at all. It would actually feel bad asking buyers to credit my images to me wherever possible and not mentioning Leo for making this great WP theme.

I agree that uploading/processing images is still a PITA if you want to do it right. There's much streamlining to do that would a big time saver for everyone. And if doing it right really helps SEO it'll be an advantage for everyone.

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #22 on:** June 30, 2013, 23:47 »

With a night of coding almost complete - here's what we got:

A quality system that orders your images by priority 1, 2, 3. Maybe its a good idea not to call it quality. Call it priority?

klsbear · « **Reply #23 on:** July 01, 2013, 00:09 »

Quote from: Leo on June 30, 2013, 23:47

With a night of coding almost complete - here's what we got:

A quality system that orders your images by priority 1, 2, 3. Maybe its a good idea not to call it quality. Call it priority?

"Priority" rating is exactly what came to mind for me instead of "quality" rating. I'd vote for using that term.

The content rating would rely on everyone actually using the ratings when uploading so I can see that being a challenge to actually make it work.

Pilens · « **Reply #24 on:** July 01, 2013, 00:10 »

Quote from: Leo on June 30, 2013, 23:47

With a night of coding almost complete - here's what we got:

A quality system that orders your images by priority 1, 2, 3. Maybe its a good idea not to call it quality. Call it priority?

"Priority" sounds definitely less offending

. - Why not more than 3 priorities? - I am going to use this for sure!

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Author Topic: Quality and Content Rating System - Simple Implementation (Read 7828 times)

Leo Blanchette

steheap

grsphoto

Leo Blanchette

steheap

quailrunphoto

djpadavona

steheap

Leo Blanchette

grsphoto

Leo Blanchette

grsphoto

cascoly

Leo Blanchette

cascoly

cascoly

grsphoto

Leo Blanchette

Leo Blanchette

Leo Blanchette

Travelling-light

Pilens

Leo Blanchette

klsbear

Pilens

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