I'd like to ask (not state) whether it is plausible that you're sometimes too picky in approving movies... From a couple of movies (like Festen, the famous Dogma film), all my shots have been disapproved under the 'bad quality' terms. However, some movies simply are not made in the quality that DVD's can offer, but are famous, recognized easily by enough people and definitely sharper than several movies that -did- make it into the database.
Apart from this, from a couple of movies, I took the most famous moment, with enough action or unique events for a film, and they're rejected with "boring", while there is no more easily recognizable moment or no more spectacular moment in the film with enough quality to upload. The film Zebraman has been denied multiple times like this.
I'd like to know, what the reasons are in a bit more satisfying answer than given in the simple mail i received.
Is it because the movies are not known to you, and therefore less appealing? Is it because the number of movies uploaded and offered is so big, you've chosen to just select the best of the offered ones? Anything?
From my point of view, I could not have done better with a couple of movies... and in all cases, they're taken from the original DVD too.
I can imagine several reasoning, but would like to know... From my point of view, it was really unnecessary to disapprove certain shots I uploaded. I can understand a couple of others I posted, but enough of what I uploaded seems more valuable to me than ones that made it...
You can believe me, it's a quite difficult task to approve or disapprove movies. We mostly have to decide on movies, we haven't seen before, which makes recognizing "the famous moment" quite hard.
If you write us an E-Mail with a list of the films you think were rejected out of no reason, we'll have a second look and/or tell you a detailed disapprove reason.
quiz@whatthemovie.com
You are kind of right with the fact, that we are bit picky at the moment, because people complained about the huge number of movies every day ...
I uploaded a key moment of a very famous movie a week ago. It was disapproved. E-mails were not sent yet, so I don't know the reason. Anyhow, I will try to upload it again at a later time... ;)
I uploaded a key scene from another big movie a few weeks ago where we see the image of a video film. It's bad quality. But it's supposed to be bad quality. I think that it was disapproved because of just that... :-/
On the other hand, it's a bummer when I see that a lot of TV movies, movies recorded from TV (with the channel logo superimposed), and duplicate pictures are all accepted... ;)
It would be great if we could add a short comment for the moderators when we upload a still. It would be possible to describe why we think this is a key scene or why the picture quality is bad. Maybe this would help in approving the still... ;)
I'll write the mail later this morning, thanks for your response.
I can imagine moderating all submitted movies is both time consuming as sometimes confusing. Confusing in the sense that only very little time is taken to judge all the available stills and therefore little or less appropriate response could occur.
Although it was a complaint, the nature of your choice was what I was looking for more than getting my stills approved after all. (of course, in a couple of cases, this would be appreciated :P)
I think you should never disapprove a still just because there are too many uploads. Because this selection is bound to happen completely arbitrarily. And that's simply not fair to the uploaders who spent a lot of time finding nice stills.
Instead you should improve your workflow to avoid duplicates. There's another one that went online a few hours ago.
I suggest you present the thumbnails of all the stills of the movie to be evaluated to the moderators. Use the IMDb-Tag an a unique key for filtering. A quick look at these pictures will help you identifying a potential duplicate.
Oh oh... Uploaders are rebelling against the almighty power and wisdom of the failproof moderators. All mutineers should be banned, their screenshots should be burned on the public place and their Internet connection removed. Let them serve as examples !
Anyway, more seriously, it's really hard to decide which shots should be accepted and which should not. We have already discussed a few times about how to judge quality of screenshots precisely because all movies don't have the same quality of image. The problem is that if we haven't seen the movie (or don't remember it well enough) it's hard to judge if the screenshot is well chosen or not (and believe me, some are not well chosen, even when knowing the movie).
Also, because of the huge number of submissions I admit that I tend to enter a "disapprove" frenzy and be very harsh when moderating (in which case "bad quality" serves as a good excuse).
However, most of the time, when I don't know the movie enough to decide whether or not the screenshot is representative, I don't vote at all. But if we all do this and no one has voted on a given screenshot when the queue time is over, the screenshot is disapproved (I think, well at least it should be).
And yes, the features you mention are already present and we try to use them to avoid duplicated, although one might have slipped through...
very well put Zanapher :) We'll definitly add a textbox in the upload form, to give the contributors a chance, to add something to the upload. To explain, why they picked a certain scene etc.
Ok, so long fellows, I'm off snowboarding this weekend. See you Sunday evening :)
[Quote:Zanapher] Oh oh... Uploaders are rebelling against the almighty power and wisdom of the failproof moderators. All mutineers should be banned, their screenshots should be burned on the public place and their Internet connection removed. Let them serve as examples ![/Quote]
Ok, today we have TWO duplicate stills. I won't tell which ones because this would help other solvers. ;) But I will send an e-mail to quiz@whatthemovie.com.
How comes that #9435 was accepted? The picture quality is painfully bad. And you can even see why: there's a YouTube logo on the bottom right!!! Are you even looking at what you're judging? :-/
I understand neither how it can be that there are two shot's of the same movie. One of them is even in a poor quality and the black bars are not removed either. I have put in a lot of effort last weekend to upload a lot of stills which where rejected because they came of television (which was not the case but the dvd's where only in 4:3) or the content was to bloody (which is strange as well seeing pictures here from "Midnight...." which is not released to DVD yet?!). I don't quite understand how the stills are really judged but think there is space for improvement.
Btw, I just noticed in my inbox a few rejections (4 of 6) which almost all say that the still was taken from a tv-version of the film or from a trailer. Does this mean that for eg. that there is a tv-version of "The Terminal" which I have taken the shot from or from the trailer? This sounds stupid, but I get the strange feeling that a lot of time and work is rejected by moderators who either don't know the movie I am submitting from or wished that they had made the stills. I'm getting disappointed.
Did or did you not take the shots from TV? It appears, the shots we have disapproved all have exactly the same aspect ratio (which is not the correct one, I believe).
The shot of T******* is quite good btw, don't you have it on DVD?
All the shots are directly taken from DVD, none from TV. I made them with Cyberlink PowerDVD 7. And edited in photoshop to get rid of the bars. Some stills are from quite old movies or in 4:3 because the DVD wasn't available in 16:9.
then your DVD program is distorting the ratio. We already have many shots of some movies you uploaded, and they all have the same, but different ratio, than your shots.
Yeah , I've just send you an email to apologise. The program did mix them up indeed :( Sorry for that. When I've got some time next week I will make them again. Happy Christmas and keep on going the good work!!!
I've decided to up some of the shots I've made and they're disapproved to this location -> http://testing.gingapura.de/#0.0 feel free to leave comments over there cause I wasn't able to understand the reason for rejecting.
this is no offend. it's just about discussing why these ones can't pass through.
Hi again :-) I'll use this same thread as before...
I accidentally noticed a couple of the stills I have uploaded were approved first, but removed later. And the one I emailed about, in which I had accidentally made a mistake, still is there...
Could you please provide (automatic) notification (and preferably clarification) when stills are removed after all? I would like to know why.
Next to that, I still see it too often my stills are disapproved with complaints like they're taken from TV versions or something, when simply the movie is not in higher quality than it is on the original DVD's. Although I understand you won't approve the huge upload mass of everybody, I still think the rejection explanations need improvement... often it's simply not true.
I'll keep uploading anyway as long as I've got inspiration, but I still think you're too picky part of the time.
I had a still rejected because "you did not make the snapshot yourself". It's not true. I did the capture of the scene, directly from a original DVD of Alien, with the Kaffeine player and edit the image with Gimp. It's easy to guessing if the image is original or not. Show me the evidence. Anyway, this is a great site. Thanks.
nice idea showing your rejected ones anyway Mimimi. just yesterday i uploaded one of the exact same scene as one of LordMysts there. now im curious if it is also rejected because i too believe it is a good one.
When I look at your screens I can understand why they've been rejected : I can't guess more than 5% them! Maybe we should keep in mind that not everybody is a movie freak and lots of people will find the game boring if they can't solve one screen out of 50 (I know I will) I don't know for sure (correct me if I'm wrong) but the aim of the moderators seems to be : attracting people to play with us.. By uploading really hard screens from movies that have less than 1,000 votes on IMDb : it's not gonna help so they reject them. We have to understand the moderators! I have screens rejected too so I know how you feel but I think if you upload easier screens from more popular movies you won't have a 50% rejection ratio... Then again, moderators, feel free to correct me !
what I also said in another thread i don't care if my stills are rejected i still going to upload my photo's I think you must be proud that one of your stills are going on the site
Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry or what ever. I only think it's a nice idea (thanks joma) to give the screens a second change. :D And like LordMyst, I also will continue offering screens to WTM.
@ theoffice911: You can't guess more than 5%, but there are other people on this site you know. My overall score is 10.9% rank 357, last month 21.6% rank 186 and I'm still having fun. ;)