DavidWest's Discussions

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

David West
Alpha Coders

Another update on the moving of smaller wallpapers. We have started moving 1280x800 and smaller wallpapers!

In total this will move 7247 wallpapers to Image Abyss over the next 5 months. One every 30 minutes.

We don't currently have plans for more moves, but I anticipate that once the 5 months have passed, other small resolutions will also be less popular, and ready for conversion.

Yeah it's a bit odd and quirky

One of the goals at Alpha Coders is that each piece of content gets fair visibility. A higher rating count implies that our community found a piece of content more exceptional than a piece of content with less ratings, and that content will generally be easier to find, show up in more places, and get more views.

Due to this dynamic, it's an area that people try to abuse, or maybe just take advantage of.

The goal: We want ratings to be a clear representation of how much our community likes a piece of content.

There are things that we don't allow, since they don't line up with our goal around ratings:

• You cannot rate your own content
• You cannot rate your own content from an anonymous account
• You cannot create multiple accounts to rate your content (this applies to favorites too)
• Members of your household cannot rate your content

The three above things give content unnatural ratings compared with other content on Alpha Coders

So my mother/brother/sister/father/pets can't rate my content?

This is correct. It's impossible for us to know whether it is you, or another member of your family rating your content. Rather than try to parse each situation indivually (an impossible task for us), we simply don't allow ratings from members of your household.

What about my friends rating my content?

For this it depends a little. If your friend is over at your house - from our end it'll just look like you are using two accounts to rate your own content. Just like in the situation above, we can't know whether it's a friend or you, so this would not be allowed. A friend down the street, in another city, etc that sometimes rates your content will be fine. But it won't be fine if that friend rates only your content every day. It just looks like abuse at that point.

Let me know if you have questions!

David West
Alpha Coders

Hey everyone!

In addition to the normal raffle, for the month of May we are having a special tag raffle! You get a chance to win just by tagging content this month!

For more info check out the Cool Stuff link in the header.

David West
Alpha Coders

Yeah I've noticed a trend for movies on digital marketplaces

1. A new movie is coming, but it's far off. So they put the old movie on streaming services to generate a little bit of hype

2. Once the new movie is closer, they remove the old one from the digital marketplaces, kind of forcing you to watch the new one to get your fix of that franchise.

It doesn't happen all the time - but I've seen it more often than not. For example, you can't even BUY a digital copy of the old Alladin on Amazon, since the new one is coming soon.

After quite a bit of back and forth, and testing of boundaries, the Artistic Nudity guidelines have been updated quite a bit. If you saw them 4 months ago, now is a good time to look again.

I've heard rumblings recently about a new Dune movie - and had never actually watched the older one. The other day I saw that it had popped up on prime video, and I thought that was a good time to give it a shot.

I remember some things from the book, but not too much. It's pretty clear that the movie is shoving a ton of concepts and ideas in your face really fast to try and build the world visually. Having some background with the book helped in that regard. The overall pacing was a little hit/miss but overall I'm happy to have seen it now.

Huge worms, really creepy people and things, and such an interesting gothic vibe, mixed in with some spaceships

All Alpha Coders sites other than Image Abyss require categorization. Good categorization can be really difficult when you first come to Alpha Coders. Below are some of the nuances of categorization.

No categorization is better than bad categorization. If you have no idea how to categorize something, you can just leave it uncategorized and submit to Image Abyss. You can always figure out categorization later!

For objects and things, we use the singular instead of the plural. Examples

• We use Earth - Flower , not Earth - Flowers
• We use Animal - Bird , not Animal - Birds

If you are submitting content related to a movie or a tv show, generally you'll want the movie/tv show name as the subcategory, even if it's an image of just one character from that show.

• Anime - Dragon Ball Z , not Anime - Goku (Goku would be a good tag!)

For photography of people, we generalize the sub category unless it's a public figure.

• A photo of you looking cool would go in something like Photography - Men
• A photo of a group of people could go in Photography - People
• A photo of Steve Carell would go in Celebrity - Steve Carell

In addition to the category / subcategory system, we have tags - and they can be one of the most power tools to help you categorize content you submit to Alpha Coders. There's already a ton of well categorized content here! Lets do an example:

You are submitting an image of a city, but you aren't sure what category /subcategory an image like this should go in. You know 'city' describes your image. Search Wallpaper Abyss for the term 'city' and you'll see that we have content in Man Made - City, Fantasy - City, etc. If your image is of a real city, Man Made - City would be a good fit.

The more specific your search, the better. In the above example, if you knew the city was New York City, you can search Wallpaper Abyss for 'New York City', and you'll see that we have content in Man Made - New York

Hey wildflower,

We just made a big change for the untrusted user submission process. Selecting 'wallpaper' will come later.

I have posted about it at https://communities.alphacoders.com/topics/view/6836

Welcome to a tutorial on how to submit content to Alpha Coders!

1. In the header of Alpha Coders, there is a Submit button. Make sure you are registered or logged in, and click the Submit button.

2. Next you will see a page where you can upload files. You will want to click the 'Add Files' button, and once you have all your files selected, click 'Start Upload'. You will see progress bars as your files are uploaded to Alpha Coders. Once all the files are done, the page will automatically take you to the next step.

3. You are now at the add info page. At the top is the parts of Alpha Coders your content submission qualifies for. You will notice that Image Abyss already shows up.You don't have to add ANY information for a submission to be valid on Image Abyss!

All other sites will require you to categorize the image.

Once you have added the information you would like to add to your submission, hit the 'Add/Submit Info And Refresh' button. This will apply the information you have entered into the fields to the image, and the page will refresh.

An example of what the page might look like after you have added a Category and Sub Category is as follows:

As you can see, in this case, the content was valid for more sites after adding the Category and Sub Category!

The final step is to click one of the sites to submit the content to! You will be able to make changes to your content after it's live, so don't worry if you might want to change something later.

4. Your content submission is now complete, and if you have more files uploaded, you will be adding info to those.

Some notes and links

• Most of Alpha Coders requires moderator approval. The exception to this is Image Abyss content that is uncategorized.
• We have a community at Community Abyss for Alpha Coders. It contains a lot of useful rule and information posts. https://communities.alphacoders.com/c/view/1317
• Some of the important ones are Becoming A Trusted User , Working With Moderators - Rules and Guidelines , Duplicate Rules , Categorization Guidelines , Family Friendly Rules , Artistic Nudity Rules , and Tag Rules .

We know it's a lot of information to take in all at once. The short of it is that Alpha Coders is a community that works together, and we all have a part to play in making this a great site!

Feel more than free to post questions or comments.

This new system is now live!

There's a natural difference between someone new to Alpha Coders, and someone who's been around for years. It takes a bit of time to get used to how Alpha Coders is categorized and organized.

To help with this, we have created a more simple content submission experience for untrusted users. There are two goals to this:

1. Help new users not feel overwhelmed, and help them be successfull submitting content.
2. Allow the trusted submission process to focus on efficiency

An example of the Untrusted Submission page:

At the top is the parts of Alpha Coders your content submission qualifies for. You will notice that Image Abyss already shows up. You don't have to add ANY information for a submission to be valid on Image Abyss!

All other sites will require you to categorize the image.

Once you have added the information you would like to add to your submission, hit the 'Add/Submit Info And Refresh' button. This will apply the information you have entered into the fields to the image, and the page will refresh.

An example of what the page might look like after you have added a Category and Sub Category is as follows:

As you can see, in this case, the content was valid for more sites after adding the Category and Sub Category!

The final step is to click one of the sites to submit the content to! You will be able to make changes to your content after it's live, so don't worry if you might want to change something later.

The trusted submission page has more options, and is just one big long form. It's mean to be very efficient for users that are familiar with Alpha Coders

Feel free to post questions and comments here.

We have built a machine learning system to categorize images as family friendly, borderline, or not family friendly. When you submit content to Alpha Coders, this system will look at your image, and give it one of those categorizations.

The system will get it right most of the time - but not all of the time. Below are some scenarios where it might get it wrong, and what you can do.

Content that our system marks as not family friendly will be limited to Image Abyss.

If you submit content that is family friendly, and our system marks it as not family friendly:

• You can request a moderator to review this before you finish submitting the content.
• You can continue to submit the content as normal, and request a review once the content is live on Image Abyss.

If you submit content that is not family friendly, and our system marks it as family friendly:

• Please use this as an opportunity to show humans are smarter than machines, and submit your content to Image Abyss.

Our machine learning system is going to continue to learn and grow. We re-train it with examples that it gets wrong every week (Monday mornings). So you might notice it getting better over time.