Glossing Over

I've been wondering about posting something like this for a while. Last night there was a rather rowdy argument on MTF concerning Gloss' latest release. I can understand both sides, I'd of liked to added something there but here will do too.

The problem some people have is that Gloss is now notorious for releasing icons every other day, and them generally not having high quality. There's no easily obtained solution for this. You can't stop him from releasing whatever he likes, because MTF does not have a bar of quality you must adhere to, in order to create a thread in the Releases forum. The most polite way is the old saying; if you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything.

My own personal view is that Gloss doesn't spend enough time on each icon, by far. And doesn't seem to understand that if you're going to base a piece of your work heavily on someone else's, then you must at least tip your hat in that direction. Gloss isn't too capable of putting his thoughts across well (it seems obvious English is not his first language) but the jist I got was "I wanted to create this for me". And that's fine, for things you're not going to release publicly. He could copy Minium down to the last pixel happily, as long as he didn't publish it as his own work.

Advice to Gloss? Work on your stuff for more than what seems like a few hours. You might get excited about it, but you really need to work on details. Shading, shadows, textures. Everyone would be ecstatic if you released an awesome icon once a week, rather than four lesser ones.

Now, advice to MTF; you can go two ways. Either every original release is fair game, and shitting on a thread should give you either a temp ban or an infraction (see end). Or you moderate the Release forum and only "approved" quality threads are filtered through. The former antagonizes frequent visitors to an extent, the latter seems stuck up. You do have a third option for a Featured forum, where only approved designers may create threads and would reward frequent releasers, but that also has it's own obvious problems.

In the end, the drama from last night underlines one thing in my mind: Forums need a form of infractions or otherwise public hand-slapping. It's not enough to say people will be temporarily or permanently banned for being an asshole enough. The casual observer sees none of that going on, they don't know you gave him a shiner over PM, and so they'll keep complaining until you inform them.

A huge amount of rude, intolerable people would snap in to line if every time they wandered in to a thread and threw up they received a very public infraction. It might humble some of them in to a form of actual good posters. But for now the complete lack of any greyscale of punishments is doing harm. Black and white, banned or not, isn't going to cut it.