Phaethon's Discussions

Hey jerry,

It seems like you had tagged some other submissions, and tags on those submissions were removed.

Hölpenköster, we've planted 20 trees on your behalf: https://pics.alphacoders.com/pictures/view/254552

David West
Alpha Coders

I should have this fixed now. Thanks a ton for reporting it! and let me know if you are still having any issues.

For new players, the game was trying to find a ship and body before they were created for that player. It ended up being a pretty simple fix - but I had a lot of other in-progress stuff I had to fix to push that through.

Hölpenköster,

Thanks a bunch for the report. There is definitely a bug when creating a new player. I am hoping to have this fixed later today or tomorrow. I will post again once the fix is live

Hey sue

To be honest, I'm not sure. You probably could find that from a not just wallpaper site.

For Alpha Coders, we have no issue with tons of content of any type as long as it's high quality.

Holpenkoster,

We have converted your prize to trees! We decided to match it so 6 trees will be planted

https://pics.alphacoders.com/pictures/view/249354

Thanks for donating your prize!

Hölpenköster,

If you don't want the prize we can always donate it to a charity. Would something like One Tree Planted ( https://onetreeplanted.org/ ) be OK?

The special raffle for June is an author raffle!

Add author information to your submissions, or other submissions without author information, and get a chance at a nice prize for helping out! Alpha Coders is made better when we have lots of accurate author information for content - so your help is VERY appreciated!

You can check out the scoring at: https://alphacoders.com/contest/author-score

David West
Alpha Coders

I've made a couple more edits. The biggest addition is:

• Never submit anything that remotely sexualizes underage people/characters/etc.

No pedo stuff. It almost goes without saying - but now we are saying it

It's entirely possible that you and another family member in your household both enjoy content on Alpha Coders, and could each have an account.

From the administrator's perspective, it's very difficult to accurately determine if accounts from the same household are two individuals, or just one individual attempting to gain an advantage.

For this reason, we treat multiple accounts from the same household as a single person.

We ban people for the following reasons:

• Using multiple accounts to bypass moderator decisions.
• Using multiple accounts to bypass the untrusted upload limit.
• Two accounts from the same household rating each other's submissions
• Using a separate account to re-submit content a moderator moved
• Using multiple accounts to get multiple chances in raffles, or extra ACP.
• ANY action that would not be OK for a single account.
• If one multi household account gets banned, we will automatically ban any other accounts associated with the multi household

It is the responsibility of the multi account household to ensure they aren't violating Alpha Coders policy.

So how do you have a multi-account household and not violate Alpha Coder's policy?

The safest route is to not interact with each other's content. A stray rating or favorite here or there won't suddently get you insta banned - so you don't have to walk on pins and needles, but do as much as you can to keep the accounts separate. If you are both untrusted users submitting content, try to get trusted - or just don't simultaneously submit more than 25 submissions at a time.

Please let me know if you have any questions

David West
Alpha Coders

I really appreciate all the input It really helps to see what the community thinks about a particular change.

The posts here led me to create another topic about Showcase Quality , and I think we can safely not put in explicit rules for kaleidoscope type content. Instead we can use the showcase quality criteria as a bar for this type of content - same as other types of content.

So what will this mean moving forward?

• I would expect to see more moves to Image Abyss if you submit several of a similar content type at the same time, or they aren't necessarily exemplars of their class.
• If you have multiple versions of an image, try to focus on maybe one or two best versions for the showcase sites. We aren't implementing a hard and fast version limit, but will be a little more strict about this.

Please keep in mind you're more than welcome to share all of the content you create on Image Abyss, while submitting your best pieces to Art Abyss/Wallpaper Abyss.

Again - I really appreciate all the input on this topic.

David West
Alpha Coders

Hey everyone,

This is a long post The short of it is: Showcase quality means that an image is an exemplar of its class, largely free from artifacts. Too many rules? Just submit to Image Abyss, and you can ignore all this!

In our continuing journey to make sure rules and terminology is clear, here is a post about what 'Showcase Quality' means!

In the rules for uploading, you will notice that some sites have a large green 'Showcase Quality Only' text

An important note: NONE of this is about whether something qualifies for our creator program! The rules and guidelines for the Alpha Coders creator program can be found at https://alphacoders.com/creator/join . You can submit creator content that is not considered showcase quality! It just needs to go to a site that isn't marked for only showcase quality submissions.

Now that we have that out of the way, lets move onto what showcase quality means for the different parts of Alpha Coders that only accept showcase quality content:

Part 1: Showcase quality means the image is almost entirely free from artifacts, or other image quality problems.

Example 1: https://pics.alphacoders.com/pictures/view/326900 Load up the image at full size. You'll notice the lines and text are reasonably crisp. It's just an image generated from a template at 100% quality. As we will read later, it's not really showcase quality because of other reasons, but the image quality is fine.

Example 2: https://pics.alphacoders.com/pictures/view/326901 Again, load up the image at full size. You'll notice the lines and text have artifacts around them. The image appears ok before its viewed at full size, but not at full size. Artifacts hurt this image, and completely bar it from being considered showcase quality.

Below are the thumbnails of both examples 1 and 2 side by side:

Can you tell the difference? Don't worry - I definitely can't. We compress thumbnails to help them load fast - but never compress original images. The point of this is that it doesn't matter if it looks fine at a thumbnail size, or almost full size. Image quality is determined when the image is viewed at full size.

Part 2: Showcase quality for Wallpaper Abyss means the image must be an exemplar of its class

So if it's an image of a car, it needs to be a really good image of a car. If it's a picture of a bird, it needs to be a really good picture of that bird. If it's an abstract image, it needs to be really good.

• If you can have multiple variations of the same image with simply different colors, it's probably not an exemplar.
• Spending a large amount of time on something does not automatically make it showcase quality
• Simply being large and an image without artifacts is not enough
• The barrier for something being showcase quality is slightly relaxed if you are submitting your own work.
• Most general photography would not be considered an exemplar, unless it presents as professional/semi-professional
• For media, no cinematic black borders.
• For video game content, see our video game content guide.

With the showcase quality guideline, it's impossible for it to not be at least somewhat subjective. So please see what decisions moderators are making, and tailor your submissions to how moderators move things around.

Lets do some examples

Below are a few abstract images that I generated.

None of the above are showcase quality. They are all 4k resolution rendered as JPGs with 100% quality. But nothing about them is particularly exceptional, noteworthy, or not reproducible by anyone that can click a few buttons in an online photo editor. Red and black isn't really any better than blue and black, green and black, etc.

Lets take another quick example:

It's not showcase quality. I think a desert tortoise semi-burrowed by a cactus is cool, but it's not an exemplary example of photography, cactus, or tortoises. I personally probably like it more than someone else would because it's one of my tortoises.

For Mobile Abyss:

The above applies

For Art Abyss:

We allow exceptions for your personal bests. If you are sharing content from a source other than yourself, all of the above would apply. If you are submitting your own art, you would be able to share your high effort pieces, independant of whether they are truly exemplary. Beginning artists and photographers are more than welcome!

A final point for now:

• The criteria for something like a brand new movie, vs a really old movie will be slightly different. Common sense says that there will be more high quality content for a newer movie in the HD age, than one made decades ago. So there's probably less good HD content of the old movie, making meeting the criteria of an 'exelmplar' of its class a bit easier to obtain.

I hope this helps, and keep in mind - you can create what you want to create. We just need to keep the showcase quality sections of Alpha Coders exactly that. If you aren't interested in all these rules, just submit your content to Image Abyss! We know it's a lot to take in, and can be hard to understand, so we made a place to bypass all that - and let people be a bit more free.

Please let me know if you have additional questions or comments.

David West
Alpha Coders

Hey everyone!

I wanted to start a discussion about some of the abstract content being submitted to Wallpaper Abyss, particularly kaleidoscope type content.

Currently, there is too much low effort abstract and kaleidoscope content being submitted to Wallpaper Abyss. The admin/mod team is converting a few things here and there, but I wanted to ask for the community to also chime in before we lay down any hard and fast rules.

• Wallpaper Abyss is for showcase quality work only: https://initiate.alphacoders.com/upload/rules
• Multiple versions of an image just kaleidoscoped to different degrees does not meet our showcase criteria.
• We need some moderately reasonable way of determining and communicating kaleidoscope rules.
• If we can't, as a team, come up with a ruleset that can be reasonably communicated, all future kaleidoscope content will not be eligible for submission to Wallpaper Abyss. I don't necessarily want this option - but it is at least clear.

Please give your input!

David West
Alpha Coders

Space Abyss will have bugs and incomplete bits. When reporting a bug, the more information you can give the better. Below are some of the things that will help me:

• Your player name or ID
• If it's applicable, a screenshot can help a ton. Firefox has a built in screenshot function.
• Exactly what you were doing before the bug showed up.
• If you are more familiar with browsers, you can also open up your browser's console window to see things like variable state at the time of the bug.

I'll expand on the guidelines soon!

Hey everyone!

I'm excited to announce that I've been working on fun project. Space Abyss.

Space Abyss is a 2D pixel art mmorpg. I've been working on it for quite a while.

Head over to https://space.alphacoders.com and you can link your Alpha Coders account to Space Abyss to play it!

This discussion community at Community Abyss will be the main place to communicate with me about Space Abyss. THERE WILL BE BUGS! Things will be broken and unbalanced. There's also a lot to come. This is a project I'll be working on for a long time to come

I very much appreciate any bug reports, ideas, and other comments anyone has!

David West
Alpha Coders