While the vote delete function is useful and needed on many bad shots that have large black borders, reposts etc, I do think it is being overused.

I have seen many shots deleted for "bad quality" on films which are old and just dont have that great of a source to start with. I have seen a couple of votes of "bad quality" on film stills from the 1930s/40s that are just black and white and grainy. Im not just talking my own shots here, I have seen it on many other peoples. Many great stills have been lost because of this.

Please dont be too eager to dismiss a still as bad quality, especially if you dont know what the film is and dont know if that is how it looks....

Rant over :)

I usually only vote for deletion if it is a color movie. I don't know a lot of B&W movies. So usually I don't vote on them.

but if a B&W movie is blurry not clear enough I will vote for deletion.

Yes, that's quite amazing.
Hobopok will surely remain the only deletion-voters for this (good) shot, so he will be surely identified by our almighty moderators. By the way, I don't understand why this shot has only 3.5 average note ! I guess voters haven't seen the movie...

got some bars-votes for this one too. if the voters would grab it in a better quality but I wouldn't bet some money in.

Just click on the skull, to see who voted for deletion;)

OK Ive officially had it with uploading to this site. I think the last 5 shots I have uploaded have been deleted by the great unwashed. Now they are gone I cant see why.

Basically if your shot doesnt contain boobies, gore, or isnt really obvious what film it is, it wont get through. I cant be arsed to spend my time uploading stills any more.

the thing you forget is: the more time flies, the more players become CL. it's hopless or as we say in germany "ein teufelskreis".
and as soon as guys like Hobopok are able to mark shots as undeleteable the whole fun and fairness will be gone.

Dont get me wrong paposaure, I am still going to enjoy playing the game, writing reviews, solving movies etc.. but this democracy thing is not working out IMO for new submissions, so I wont be adding any more until changes are made. Quite often, once one fool has voted to delete a movie, everyone else does the same when it wasnt really justified.

Unfortunately you give some people a little power and it goes to their head. I think the vote-delete should be more of an elite thing, it shouldnt be something that anyone can do. Perhaps it should be a power awarded to people who contribute most to the site, not dependant on your rank.

Going through the current new submissions, there are quite a few shots marked for delete as low quality when really, they arent bad quality at all,

http://whatthemovie.com/shot/21328#

for example. This is a low budget indie film, and this is exactly how the film looks. For this film, it really cant look any better. Fair enough if the shot gets GRADED badly, thats democracy for you, but I really see no reason to delete it.

It always seems to be the same 3 or 4 people I am seeing marking these shots for deletion. Maybe they have had some of their shots deleted for bad quality and are on some kind of vengeance mission to get everyone elses removed :)

i also agree that the vote deletion thing is getting a bit out of hand.
as long as you don't know the movie, you can't really judge if it is bad quality etc. And it is true that with a lot of
stills judged as bq, a few names keep coming up. Perhaps post a shout on their page?

Papo, the "revenge" thing was said with tongue firmly in cheek, I didnt really mean that. Although I did mean that the same people seem to be marking shots for deletion. Perhaps it should be that 1 person can only mark for deletion 1 shot a day. There are enough people on this site that if a shot REALLY deserves deletion, it will still get deleted.

And chogori I fully agree :)

I don't understand why everyone rants about how a shot will be deleted if nobody knows it. I think it's absolutely natural to vote a shot higher if you know the movie, because often you can only truly appreciate a certain scene when you know it from the context of the movie. This one for example http://whatthemovie.com/shot/21422 I think it is very moving if you have seen the film... I don't know if it would mean anything to me if I hadn't seen it?

I'm not saying this is always the case, some shots are outstanding by themselves. This one for example, no idea what it is but it looks interesting http://whatthemovie.com/shot/21431

Personally, I skip voting on screenshots that I think might be meaningful IF I had seen the movie. But I also rate down shots that are low quality and participate in the deletion vote. Even if it's an old black and white film, it should still be possible to get rid of the black borders.

But I also tend to give higher votes for shots I know, especially when I think they're in some way clever or capture the movie's meaning well. It doesn't matter to me if it's easy to recognize, as long as the shot evokes in some way the same feelings as the movie did!

take this frelling guy off the votes: http://whatthemovie.com/shot/21477#

@Muten : Ah. A Farscape fan!

@them00ch - Your original post was about deletion vote, but I saw several in here complaining about dumb people who vote low or vote for deletion because they haven't seen the movie and how everything has sex or gore content or can be solved too easily. But you're right, I should have been sticking to the original post.

Having thought about it: Let me rephrase my proposal.
The votes of people who actually solved the shot should be worth MORE than the votes of people who didn't.

@Zendrig: I don't agree with either comment (personal opinion), since half or more of the movies people guess correctly is due to going through the iMDB resume of an actor. I sure haven't seen all movies, and will be the first to admit that I've solved shots that way. I hit a correct answer without even seeing the movie, perhaps 750 out of 2100+ solves. That's just dumb luck, because I recognize the actor/actress in the shot, and if luck becomes the decisive criteria, well...let's not go there. ;)

Validation of deletion, as Fifty put it, is the right way to go, I think. Not autodelete as soon as it hits 5 votes.

Thanks for that Sara. however this complaint thread wasnt specifically about Hobopok and the black bars issue. He does seem to be a name that keeps popping up however he is not alone by far. Generally I was having a rant about anyone that judges a film as bad quality without knowing what the film was and if it was representative of the actual quality of the film, such as that Toxic avenger still that got deleted as bad quality, and my Stalker.

As an experiment i have just uploaded 3 modern well known films and they seem to be doing oK, however I am not going to waste my time uploading some of my favourite older films, such as Tarkovsky films, Fritz Lang and other German expressionist cinema etc.. because they will just be deleted as bad quality. THAT was my main gripe. Good shots of older films that dont even EXIST in pristine HD quality will not make it through, and that is a shame.

Lots of people could discover these great older films by seeing them on this site, and they just wont now the power of deletion is in the hands of the great unwashed :)

@them00ch : totally agree.
I'm not that into older crap, but i've seen stills that look crappy, but like you said, there IS no HD version of those, so discard all the older classics like "them" "they live" and a lot of other movies. it's a shame.

I've also seen a lot of stills going down the drain that were actually quite important for the movie and as such, really not that bad, but if you don't know the movie. well, you get only the main stream shit. compare it to television. THAT is a perfect example of letting the people decide what to pick. *** got talent. *** on ice. 5 morons in a house with cameras. and so on and so on. hard to find any qyality there..

Please post a summary of all your proposals here. --> http://forum.whatthemovie.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=347

Thanks bap2008. It looked suspicious to me, it's confirmed now.

http://whatthemovie.com/shot/22098#

you wouldn't see more, if the picture was in "correct ratio". thats simply the only thing on screen at this very moment.
so what is the problem? the still pretty crispy and just because the whole thing is not filled it has to be deleted? sucks..

@ Schwarzschild

Yeah Im afraid I agree with the delete-votes in that picture. It isnt "bad quality" as such - in fact as you pointed out it was quite a sharp high res picture - but it was in completely the wrong aspect ratio, making it look squeezed. As MZ points out, you dont have to fill the WTM frame, but the movie has to be in the same proportions as the director intended.

ie if you take a 4:3 shot, and upload it so its in scope fomat, ie 16:9, 1.85:1 etc.. its going to look horribly distorted and squeezed. At least now its gone you can take the picture in its correct aspect ratio and upload it again :)


just to be clear on my intentions with this thread, it was to point out that the "bad quality" vote delete is being used on shots which clearly dont deserve it, just because the film is grainy or old for example. A film being in the wrong aspect ratio does warrant a vote-delete IMO.

http://whatthemovie.com/shot/22316#

SnakePlissken voting for deletion on his own shot... :-)

some kind of joke ?
the shot isn't that bad ...

edit:
@astrododo - I agree ;)