How can we improve the graphics section on Utopian

First of all let me clarify that this is my personal opinion and not one of the Utopian moderation team. As a moderator on Utopian we see a lot of good and very good contributions. But as always there's a flip side to every medal. We have to hide contributions that are not ok with the rules. We try to go soft on this and help the contributors as much as possible. Most of the time posts get hidden because the user doesn't fully understand the rules or because the entry is a duplicate.

Duplicates are a waste of time. Both for the moderator team but also for the user. He spend a lot of time creating an entry that doesn't get rewarded. In some categories duplicates are quite easy to detect and our development team has been working on a feature that tries to show similar entries as you type. You can find more info here. The graphics section is hard in this respect.

This is specified in the rules in general:

Contributions must be unique. Users must look first if the same or very similar contribution has been submitted. A moderator will check if the contribution has been reported before and won't accept it in the Utopian feed again if so.

and in the graphics section:

Never post about graphics you have already shared before or someone else have already shared before.

How can we improve quality and decrease detect duplicates?

• Require the user to provide an image that is representative for the content. This image can be used as a thumbnail. Utopian could then provide an overview of graphic contributions per project in the form of a photo gallery.
• Search this gallery with a service such as Google's reverse image search. This would detect similar images.
• The graphics contain a lot of images that, in my humble opinion, don't add a lot to open-source apart from the publicity. I have the feeling that some of the contributions are only made because of the strong vote Utopian brings. Maybe it would be better if graphics can only be contributed on the request of the project. We have the same concept for translations. Translations should contribute directly to the project and this can be done because the project requests them. We have seen how many contributions the community can provide upon request with the t-shirt designs for Utopia.

This is only a starting point for discussion. Let us know what you think about it!

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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