Would the 2 and 1 stars for http://whatthemovie.com/shot/20283 and http://whatthemovie.com/shot/20284 mean that they don't pass? IMHO that would be a waste because somebody did a nice job funding the two stills and even if I don't know the movies, it cleary is a nice upload and also has some "educative value" for the solvers.
I'm a bit affraid that good stills of unknown movies would get voted down just because people don't know them. (But I don't know if it works like this, but it might)
I'm also affraid that with the new system good stills of unknown movies would get voted down just because people don't know them. This would be ashame in some cases.
I think maybe people shouldn't be able to vote for a movie if they don't know the movie.
You raised some good points. We are well aware of this drawback. We have some counter measures against this, but we definitly won't change back to the old moderated system.
I'll try to dig a little deeper, because I think a lot of you people out there think the same way.
1. Why did you abandon the moderated system? The answer is simple: It's time. Moderating the queue with a handful of moderators devoured *a lot* of the time, I spent with whatthemovie since august 2008. Time I could have spent developing. As you are now voting on movies, so did we in the last 10 months. And let me tell you: I'm no movie expert myself (who is able to see the genious in every snapshot). We sometimes did a good job, releasing just the right shots but I can remeber times when people sent us to hell for rejecting their shots. There will never be a WTM which pleases everyone. We have to find the right balance.
2. What are your countermeasures? We still have the same moderators, having the power to protect shots + we're building our own moderators through the rank system.
3. What can you do? You are now, for the first time ever, able to see all new submission to whatthemovie! Isn't this great? You are able to get all the impressions, we would have denied you. Concerning the votes: As with every democracy, the majority wins. It's plain simple. If you however have the urgent need to know the title of a movie, you are encouraged to contact the poster yourself. We improved social interaction in WTM2, just leave him/her a shout. We'll also add private messages in the near future.
Last words: Our intention is to make whatthemovie fun for everyone :) I guess a lot of the wtm grandmastes wanna stone me for this next sentence, but we try to make whatthemovie easier. Our intention is to open WTM for a greater audience. I don't know if you can recall our diffictuly poll some time ago. It told me the same thing as many of my friends, WTM is just to hard to play for a very very big majority. See the "New Submissions" as the nerd's playground. All the black & white, noisy, ultra-hard, still-life, sunset, whatever shots. Just for you.
Hopefully with a high enough number of solves stills to gain acceess to de moderator part, people would first ger a good impression of what kind of stills are "good". I don't know how many stills on average people have solved after say one month or so, but a restriction of "at least X time on the site and Y stills solved" would give somebody the idea of what are nice stills and what not..
But something like that is already in it, I think.
DiedEnFreek: Every User with more than 50 Feature Film Solves can access the New Submissions. Should we maybe raise this number?
connectiv: We have an automated routine which picks the 20 best shots over 24 hours. A still has to be at least 24 hours in New Submission to get picked. Sounds complicated, but we think this way the best stills get transferred. We are able to adjust the number of transferred stills any time. I already told tliff to raise it to 50, because we've got a bunchload of good movies in the queue right now.
But you can also vote for movies if you directly go to the page of the movie. To get to that page go e.g. to the lounge scroll down and search for the movie.