maybe you are too enraged and going over the top, but i agree and think this page could use a puntuation system or a dedicated approver like blendswap does ( all art needs to be approved before being shown in main showcase) to keep quality to a minimum.

I agree that some sort of quality check would be good, but it's a tricky thing.  Something I think is completely useless may be awesome and useful to someone else.  It would also take an actuall person looking over everything.  The "Populuar this Week" section helps, though I would like a few more versions of that for people who are new or don't come around very often.  Like "Popular this Month" and "All time Favorites".  I'll admit, the first time I came here I shut the page pretty quickly because of the low quality of stuff on the first page.

"That is the sole purpose of this site."

I think this is something of an overstatement.  First, many artists here aim to provide viable, polished game assets, not just placeholders.  And while the major goal of the site is to make these available there is more to it than that.  OGA also aims to help develop the open source game and graphic development community as a whole, and to some extent that does involve trying to provide a welcoming environment for new artists.  As such there has to be some amount of balance in dealing with issues like this.  While it's annoying when a lot of unusable assets are uploaded, we also don't want to alienate anyone unecessarily.  Because of this finding a good solution has been a topic of some discussion in the past, though with Bart currently otherwise occupied there hasn't been a chance to implement anything.  Personally, I think the best solution at the moment is to just bundle the submissions into a single one, though that would take an admin's action.

To be fair to MrMadBr, that piece you cited is at least animated, as are several others that he has posted, so he's not flooding the site with useless crap he banged out with no effort put forth.

But you're right, he is flooding the site, and should be posting his assets in one post.  He's also not the first person to do this.  The site has had the feel of a storage closet for some time, and needs an overhaul to give developers more avenues for feedback and approval of what shows up in the main showcase.

Yes, absolutely, noone new knows the amazing barbarian, lizardman or dwarf models we have. Those  are professional quality assests, and are lost among piles of other art, a "best ever" showcase could be created, since even collections are starting to get all messy and cluttered

I am tired of people posting a bunch of useless crap to this site.

Take this for instance: ...

Bullying someone because you don't like his art style

every 32x32 piece of art he posts, he puts a tag like thi, "Like all my Sprites...simple, but great. :)

Disliking enthusiasm

This website is not here as a popularity contest, this is not a C&C site, this is a art archive, and flooding the server with this space wasting crap serves no purpose.

Policing submissions

On top of this he sets it at cc0 but says "...if you don´t wanna put my credits, send me a link to your project."

Objecting to non obligatory requests

Not quite pleasant ... Please tone it down and keep the site friendly. Because hostile behavior does more damage than less than ideal submissions

I am not worried about submission qualities, sometimes they are what you are looking for. However, having a way to combine disjoint submissions would be a good idea. Its hard to deal with single submissions, and collections doesnt seem to be the kind of tool for the job.

I agree with vk. Hostile behavior does more damage to the site and its community than "less than ideal" submissions.

However I have felt the same way as Blarget2 a few time myself.

Maybe it would be a good idea to pack a few of these kind of submissions into a larger pack and remove the original ones from the database? Something like this could be combined with the collection feature, which is missing a "download all" option anyways.

So what I am proposing is that you can make a collection with "less than ideal" submissions, and an admin can than mark the content as to be removed and "reuploaded" as a combined pack in order to clean the database.

"Bullying someone because you don't like his art style"

To be perfectly fair to Blarget, this really isn't a matter of style.  The artist in question is still in the learning phase and his works still lack technical polish.  My hope is that he'll stick around and hone his craft while still liking open licensing.

trying to judge what is useful isnt always cut and dry it seems. some things that seem easy for experienced artists may be difficult for someone else. This really seems to be the case with animation. animation is pretty hard no matter how simple it looks. There is trash that is sometimes posted but there have been things that I have thought were useless but many people posted how they liked it.  Since its all a point of view who decides whats worth it. should that be left up to the downloader?

It seems that the real problem isnt so much the trash that gets through but what is shown on the main page. pehaps it would be easier to display better works on the main page then try and filter every submission manually.

Red strike (Brovo) that comment was spot on. that was how I was filling about the site. being an artist and not being appreciated. (by a free art site (its freee!!)) isnt worth the hasle of uploading stuff to the site. and to be frank it gives the site a bad felling.  

                          PS for quality concerns why not do like Dart  3 votes for in 3 votes out  and green light the voters work that you picked for quality checking (dosnt have to be a admin ether (lightn the loooad the loooad )soory Thinking of a movie)

Quality is a real problem, because people have different skill levels, one beginner may be proud of his first finished art, but for advanced users it is just crap.

On blendswap for example they moderate the models that are submitted and reject submissions below a certain production standart, for example a model should be finished, not work in progress and textured, maybe we should establish some kind of production standart here.

http://www.blendswap.com/search?term=unfinished

http://www.blendswap.com/search?term=untextured

http://www.blendswap.com/search?term=wip

http://www.blendswap.com/search?term=minecraft

Considering those are on the site, if my model gets rejected, I wouldn't bother to come back with something better and upload to that site. In my opinion, rejecting is bad.

You might add a special tag (e.g. scrap unfinished wip) which removes the entry from the front page's Latest Arts section (but not from the Latest Arts page, probably it should appear Popular This Week if it is popular regardless of this tag).

For packing on site, I have an idea but I am not sure if it is feasible. You add tags to the entries to be packed as pack_username_id (i.e. pack_vk_pixelset02) and only one of these entries is shown in the front page's Latest Art section.

My other idea is adding a check box titles "individual entry". For the first entry it is checked. For the entries made in a certain amount of time after the previous one, it is unchecked. When it is unchecked, it adds the entries to the first entry.

As noted, it's an animated image, so it's not something you could make trivially in 5 seconds (at least I couldn't). It lacks polish, but that's true of an awful lot of the art on this site, and there are quite a lot of free games that have a similar cartoonish style of graphics.

I'd also argue that some of the better looking artwork isn't necessarily better for games - this example may be simple, but it's an animated icon that's game ready. But on the other hand, there are plenty examples of images or 3D meshes that might be much more polished, but aren't useful for most games due to not having an animation.

What do we mean by "space wasting"? I presume there isn't a shortage of server space for 1.1KB images :) Is it making a problem for searching? Can we do something to improve the search?

I'm also not sure that combining images into one submission is better. When I search for, e.g., coin, it's much easier if I can see that single image. I find it harder when what shows up in the result is a collection of a large number of icons, and I have to look hard to find out what the relevant image is. Now I'm not saying that everything should always be separate images - obviously there has to be a balance, and if someone uploads an icon pack of 100 images, it'd be silly to break that up into 100 separate uploads. I'd say a criterion should be whether the images are naturally related into a group, e.g., "RPG icons". Some of mrmadbr's look related, but not all of them - I don't think images should be bundled together for the sake of it.

Redshrike said on the coin page: "Having each one as an individual submission makes it harder to navigate the site and harder for devs to find all of your work." - surely the latter is done just by clicking on the author link, which shows all the author's work? In what way is it harder to navigate - do you mean too many results in search?

On the issue of the front page, I feel that all uploads should appear on a "latest art" on the front page, as currently happens - otherwise there's the problem that even when new good art is uploaded, people may not find or notice it.

If the problem is that the quality to new users looks too poor, then I think the answer is to do more to showcase the better (and game-ready) art. There's already the "Popular this week" which does this in an automated fashion. Maybe there could also be some process where people decide on the best art on this site, and then a random selection of that gets shown to people on the front page?

I would be against any sort of quality restriction to be on the site - or rather, because people have very different views on what's ready or useful for a game, I don't think it would be workable. We already have the Favourites system which is a way of rating art, which can be used when searching. Are there other things we could do?

"Maybe there could also be some process where people decide on the best art on this site, and then a random selection of that gets shown to people on the front page?"

We need that urgently, base it on number of liked times or total download, it doesnt matter, both should be close. But our best content shouldnt be buried by all the relatively new art.

@Danimal: there is currently a method that determines popularity. But that said, I think its not a very valid method. Finding something nice does not constitute adding it to favorites, as you may want to keep favorites to the items you want to find easily or may be items that you are planning to use. A better ranking method would be nice. 

I agree with mdwh in that the 'new art' submissions is for excactly was the title describes. The problem here may be that one user is submitting art too frequently, flooding that section.

That isn't the user's fault. If there are three subsquent submissions from a single artist, these submissions should begin to overlap each-other in the 'latest art.' I.e, latest art only shows the three latests assets of a given user at one time.

I also disagree that packaging them makes assets easier to find. We have collections for this very reason. You can group multiple submissions into a collection.

I manage a number of complete OGA collections (all sidescrolling assets, all isometric, etc) and in making sure they're complete I've been through the entire archive a number of times.  There are currently quite a few sets of assets which are split up into individual entries.  While it might make it easier to see them as they're coming in, when you're going through the archives it quickly becomes overwhelming and makes everything harder to look through.  For this reason I actually excluded one very large set of assets from my isometric tiles set--having them in made the whole set almost impossible to browse (fortunately they were all collected elsewhere and I could link to it).  Basically it makes everything harder to find.  It simply isn't necessary for every single asset to be viewble in its entirety in search; that's what representative previews are for.  The listing itself is supposed to be what shows you everything.  If every asset it exploded out into a single entry you'd need nested collections to make the collection as a whole reasonable to browse, and the result would likely not be as navigable as the current state.

I don't know how you guys think, but I visit the side for three years now, but I never felt that there are any "poor" artists on here, nor that the side looks too amateur.

Call me a dreamer, but I consider releasing art under GPL or CC should be honored. Like participating the olympics, to participate is what counts.

I understand that people should not flood the front page, because from what I see here is that there are mostly freelancing professional artists on here who try to display their skills as a portfolio. And if e.g. 3d modelling was my career and not a hobby then I would also get upset when someone floods the page and my hard work gets drowned. Therefore I understand the want for more "professional" and "ready to use" artworks in order to get the attention of video game companies.

HOWEVER there are some here who appear snob and contraproductive when saying things like a 3d model is unusable if it isn't rigged and as such not animated. Well I see many professional 3d modelers on DA who make awesome models but can't animate. During his tutorials, Jonathan Williamson even mentioned high class artists who fake poses since they never bother rigging and who in fact feature, terrible, terrible topologies.

In my opinion, in Creative Commons/GPL you can't get picky. It's "take it or leave it, pal."

-That counts for everything, be it source code or whatever you want.

Back to the topic of the front page, I still feel like "one man's trash is another man's treasure." IMHO this side doesn't need quality standards because the small people who don't earn their bread in this industry also contribute a lot here. What this site needs is an anti-flood script.

The suggestion with the approval before upload not bad, but you need the manpower for it.
A volunteer program?

PS:

There is only one kind of "poor" art and that is plagiarism. From time to time I encounter (sound) works who seem blatantly ripped as  it was the case with a sound file which in fact was Axel F some months ago. . . .

Rather than raging on the forums, give him/her suggestions to improve. I've had a discussion about background color, and he/she was very willing to discuss it:

http://opengameart.org/comment/23619#comment-23619

If you have some artistic skill, post an example of cleaning up some of his art. Everyone has to learn somehow, and it's easier to learn when someone is showing you how, rather than just saying 'you suck'.

well said, sir.

I need to chime in here.

There are a couple of factors at work here and we need to strike some sort of balance between them.

• The vast majority of artists who post here are doing so because they want to contribute something.  Discouraging active participants is rarely a good idea, because artists improve over time, and that person who posts something trivial when they're starting out might, with encouragement and practice, eventually become a very good artist.
• On the other hand, let's be realistic.  People looking for game art don't come here to look for trivial submissions.  There's even a rule about them in the submission guidelines.  If anyone, regardless of skill level, could reproduce a particular work in a very short amount of time, that work is 'trivial'.  There's no judgment about whether it's bad or good; if it takes just as long to find and download a work as it does to produce it, there isn't much point in it being in the archive, and it's not the kind of thing people are going to be downloading.

The first bullet point is why the triviality rule is poorly enforced.  I don't want to drive people away by coming off as a bunch of nitpicky jerks.  As for making it something that the community decides on, my opinion is that perhaps a button to bring trivial submissions to the attention of administrators would be a good idea, but actually making things disappear from the page solely due to community moderation is a bad idea.

Look at sites like Reddit, Slashdot, and Wikipedia.  While community moderation and editing succeed at preventing really bad stuff from rising to the top, they also have a tendency to force discussions to conform to the average opinion of the community at large.  If marking a submission as "spam" or "trivial" removed it automatically, people would start using it to remove submissions that they personally don't like, or remove submissions from authors they don't like, or remove submissions that they personally don't feel belong on OGA (we already get too many "this doesn't belong on OGA" comments on legitimate, useful submissions, and on at least one occasion those types of comments have driven away very talented people).

While it's important that the triviality guideline be enforced (particularly in cases where it's questionable whether someone is submitting in good faith or deliberately trolling), it's very important that it be enforced gently and with some degree of tact and discretion.

Anyway, having blathered on about this for a while, I'd like to propose an alternative.  If someone submits a large number of trivial or low quality submissions, I'd like to build a way so that admins can combine those submissions (at least the ones with the same license(s)) into a single one, and leave redirects in place to prevent link rot.  In this way, we could reduce clutter in the archive and on the front page (which IMO is the main problem).

As an aside, the reason there are 8 "popular this week" submissions on the front page and only 4 latest submissions is to deal with this exact problem, where high quality art would be knocked off the main page by someone flooding the site with trivial submissions.  This is also why there's no longer a "most submissions this month" list on the front page, because it actively encouraged this behavior. :)

Also, a word on art "style", and "good" versus "bad" art.

Speaking frankly, we've all seen people try to pass off a lack of art skill as their "style".  As a general rule, you should probably only call this your "style" if you can accurately emulate other art styles by skilled artists.  If you can't, then you're probably using the word style as an excuse not to push yourself to get better.

There's also a fairly popular idea out there that there's no such thing as "bad" art.  And sure, in the philosophical sense, you might make the argument that art is completely subjective and such, but realistically, this is something that we tell kids so that they keep working on improving their art skills rather than getting discouraged.  At some point in life, the fact that you succeed at something becomes more important than the fact that you attempt something.

One other thing that is perfectly justified in the general art scene but not so justified here is the idea of "pushing the envelope".  Artists have been exploring the "what is art?" question since people started making art out of urinals and drawing moustaches in postcards of Mona Lisa.  However, if the point of a piece of art that you post here is to push the envelope of "what is trivial?" or "what is useful in a video game?" then you need to consider the fact that art here is supposed to be useful and nontrivial.  If you're actively trying to straddle the line, then you're acting in bad faith.

If you've ever been in a college art class, there's always "that guy."  You know the one I'm talking about.  He's the dude who draws all sorts of weird, trippy pictures, and then when the art professor gives an assignment, he does everything he can to subvert the actual point behind the assignment while still (mostly) following it to the letter.  In the real world, if someone is paying you to do art, they're not going to be happy if you go out of your way to subvert their request.  Please don't be that guy.

As an aside, the reason there are 8 "popular this week" submissions on the front page and only 4 latest submissions is to deal with this exact problem, where high quality art would be knocked off the main page by someone flooding the site with trivial submissions.

I do like having the larger Popular This Week section on the front page, but is there any reason you couldn't have a larger Latest Art front page section as well?  When there's a flood of new submissions, it tends to make it much, much harder for any individual piece to get noticed in the first place, let alone garner enough attention to get into Popular This Week.

And for the record, I was only ever "that guy" in my writing classes. :)

I would really like it if submissions could be combined by moderators.  There are a few things that I never favorited because they were broken up into pieces and I'd have to go through the entire archive to find where they are now.  I would also really love some way to browse things sorted by most popular or most downloaded or something.  With both of those things I woudn't need a higher quality baseline.

@Sharm:

Just so you know, you can sort by favorites from the art browse screen.  Just change the sort order on the bar on the left to popularity, then hit the search button (leave everything else as-is).

I didn't know you could leave the search blank.  On most sites that's disabled.  Thanks Bart!

and again the same as mrmadb happens but with twin_mice with submissions like this:

http://opengameart.org/content/strange-bird

Really, lattest art needs some kind of change. Cause rigth now, is just a dump for whatever people want to send. As much artist friendly we are, there should be a point where something gets denied and deleted

Well, my submission got burried by those :(

@cemkalyoncu:

I have seen it and I will look at it soon.:-)
I contacted the artist in question with some tutorials in order to give them some inspiration.
I did the same with another artist on here who did not understand why their work was not
well received.

I now understand why blendswap put in place these guidelines here:
http://www.blendswap.com/news/view/60

And I now understand why many here are so upset. Thanks Bart I now see my error :)
If I want to contribute here, I must be sure that the 3d model needs to be USEFUL to someone
i.e. ready to animate or to be put into a scene without much ado.
After all, for showcasing and stuff like that there is deviantart. :O

I'd hate to see anyone's work get rejected on a site dedicated to providing freely-licensed art. Especially while turnip armor exists here.

Maybe it's time to establish a set of production-ready standards, and to create a showcase only for production-ready assets.  Along with a set of required tags ("rigged", "animated", "4 directions", "top-down", etc...) for that showcase. It would certainly save developers some time when they come here to search if there was a set of assets that were clearly marked "ready to go".

I agree with you salt on the deviantart  but my links been down since I updated my contact info 2 weeks ago(Ps I try to upload stuff for free in hopes of getting work)

I see, you mean the WIP.

Well, what I meant Anthony is,I see here a lot really good artists who try to distribute their work in order to get attention and as such a job. That's where I understand the grievance towards things that cost the professional only a couple of clicks. And if you get burried by one user it gets very hard to be seen. I myself am only a hobby artist and will remain as such as I know from DA contacts and their blogs how tough the business is.

@dalonedrau: The turnip armor may be silly, but it's also a polished, professional asset which really could reasonably be used in a professional game.

@redshrike: the turnip armor is actually unfinished.  The two frames that are provided are polished and good-looking by themselves.  I personally loved the base it was built on and wished there more accessories for it.  But the turnip armor is only two frames, running and standing. In one direction. Two frames that don't even transition together in an animation. The turnip armor is an unfinished asset that could reasonably be used in a professional game that required a vegetable that can only face south. Beyond those specific circumstances, it is not a production-ready asset.

Front standing is all that you'd need for an NPC.  Honestly I  think that that would be enough turnip for most games.

Now, of course I'm nots saying there aren't assets with very marginal usefulness in the archives; heck, I imagine that a number of things I've uploaded would only have niche usefulness.  But I don't think an asset which is professionally made (and which would also be relatively easy to expand if needed) is the best example.  A better example might be my personal favorite asset in all of OGA, Thunderpaw: http://opengameart.org/content/cat-print-horse

As much as "crappy" art annoys me, I feel that allowing the poor quality stuff is a small price to pay in exchange for encouraging submitters to stick around.

I can't act as if I am shopping in a highly specialized expensive art boutique when what I'm really doing is sifting through a huge marketplace full of free samples.

Improved enforcement of the 'trivial' art rule as well as a showcase of 'all-time community favorites' or something is all I think is really needed. Repeated submissions never really bury other submissions for me because every time i visit the site, i click on "latest art" and "open in new tab" all the submissions that I haven't seen before. Sometimes I have only 3 tabs to look at, other times I have 30 tabs to look at. 

However, I can say that artists like MrBadBr have damaged their own reputation in my eyes. Not because I dislike them or have anything personal against them. I have just learned that their "art style" is not what I am looking for. When I see that it is a submission by one of these artists, I quickly close the tab after only a cursory glance at the work because I don't feel like wasting my time with it.

That may seem harsh, but I feel it is ultimately a very fair outcome, since it can only really hinder individual artists based on their own actions, as opposed to discouraging many artists indiscriminatly via "quality control restrictions" that may or may not be purely subjective.

My two cents:

Although I do agree that changes should be made and submissions be combined, I think many of the offenders did not realize they were upsetting people.  A polite e-mail/notification to the person beforehand could save humitiation and reputation (for all parties).  I'm not stating this as to defend anyones actions, just to remind everyone that although we are trying to provide the community with quality game art, we are also trying to provide a quality atmosphere.  We have a right to keep our forums and art database uncluttered, so I feel your frustration.. but did anyone privately send any of these 'offenders' a message first?  

salt_flower did, but you see, not anyone have the energy to counsel one and every new amateur artist posting their art here. People try to keep the comunity feeling by not badmouthing every extruded cube posted around here, the silent treatement is their response.

The main problem is that anyone can post whatever they want and clutter everything, blendswap rules are nice and could be enforced here, so these "ofenders"  first post their work on the forums and look for guidance/advice before releasing; but the problem is everyone thinks their own art is great (even if its the ginger bread man from blender tutorial).

"...but did anyone privately send any of these 'offenders' a message first?"

"salt_flower did..."

As did Redshrike... directed at the OP's example "offender", no less. However, the response was along the lines of "Ain't nobody got time fo' that!": http://opengameart.org/content/coin-32x32-animated-spritesheet

A polite nudge is definitely the right opener, but not the solution by itself.

-@Danimal and MedicineStorm

Thanks for the heads up, I hadn't seen that.  I just wanted to make certain we at least approached the situation correctly and that he knew it was cluttering the site. 

Well, I guess I screwed the pooch on that one, guys. Sorry. I really wasn't trying to drive away an artist. My attempt to be helpful seemed very A'hole-ish to MrMadBr, I guess.

I hope this doesn't reflect poorly upon opengameart.org. Apologies. :(

http://opengameart.org/content/simple-sprite-sheets

I don't know that it will fix anything, but MedicineStorm, you can list someone else as the author instead of yourself on a post.

Yeah, I thought of that after submitting, but when I went to edit it, I didn't see an option to change the author, so I left him as collaborator. :(

I contacted mrmadbr maybe he will hear me out. The thing is that no one explained him the situation.
I told him that it's not about his art, but that there people here who want to have the euqual amount of attention on the front page.

No offense to anyone, but it's ... strange, it is as easy as that to say "please pack your stuff, this way we have the equal amunt of views and I need the money 'cause I do this for making a living."

This thread is now locked.  Any thread on this topic (either specifically or in general) made between now and when I can make a formal statement on this (in a few hours) will be deleted.

If you have posted in this thread, please see OGA's official statement in this post:

http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/admin-official-statement-on-grouping-a...

This thread will remain locked.  You may discuss this further in the new thread, although this specific incident is over and done with.

Bart