I think a really useful feature for a lot of us would be the ability to set a
bookmark or place mark in the main gallery that keeps track of where you last
browsed. If you browse the main gallery once a day for instance, you could set a
bookmark at the first and last gallery item you viewed, and then the next day
you can quickly and easily identify all the new gallery items that have been
posted since your last visit. It could be something like a page break in the
gallery page or different color borders on the thumbnails, etc. Another option
would be a gallery that only shows new and or updated gallery items since your
last visit.
Right now I keep track of my position in the gallery by keeping a text document
on my desktop that I rename to the ID number of the latest gallery item when I
was browsing last. If I could just click that gallery item and hit "set a
gallery place mark here" instead it would be very convenient.
I too have noticed the less then even dialup speed of loading images in recent
weeks, I assumed it was some problem with the MT pipe and the admins were likely
already aware of the situation so I just worked with whatever speed I could get.
It is annoying to the users when the site is slow or down, but I'm sure it is
many hundreds of times worse for the administrators trying to solve the problems
and keep everything running smoothly. Since I run a couple small sites of my
own, I know how annoying it is when one goes down and people complain about it,
so I generally just wait patiently when some site I visit goes down rather then
reporting a problem.
I'm 25, I've been studying Japanese off hand for about two years, and I know
enough to watch anime episodes raw without missing too much, and I know I could
learn far more by actually taking courses and classes in it. The results I have
are just from what I was able to do and learn by myself with no outside help.
The hardest part is getting over the idea that it should be hard.
Unfortunately my credits are not visible. So I also wonder if it still took away
from my credits, but I doubt it did. Just by the nature of this bug I doubt many
people would notice it (most people aren't going to go downloading before their
FDQ regenerates). So I am thinking the same thing, the engine in the back
thought my FDQ had rengenerated while the display in the front still said zero.
I have spotted an odd bug with downloading and the FDQ. I have noticed that if I
download something within about an hour before my free download quota would have regenerated, meaning it
has been around 23 hours since I used up my FDQ and it still uses the free
download quota even though it says I have 0. Last night, I downloaded two walls
while my FDQ was at 0, and around midnight my FDQ started to come back, but I
only got 3 all day, even though when I downloaded those two walls it said I had
0 FDQ for almost an hour afterwards, and it showed me the price of the walls.
And I am sure it is not just that two of my FDQ regenerated ahead of time and I
didn't notice because the night before that I used all 5 in a matter of about 5
minutes right around midnight.
Something else since I don't think it's worth starting a new thread over. Does
anyone else think it would be nice if the price of gallery items was rounded to
two places behind the decimal point instead of one? So for instance when you
look at the price of a really small wall instead of saying "Download (0.0
credits)" it would say "Download (0.08 credits)".
I haven't even had a floppy drive in my PC for years, all the floppy disks in
the house are bad. I totally gave up on floppys and use RW optical media or USB
Flash drives in their place any time I need to use something.
Thanks, in the mean time I have used a small work around, when I go to download
an image I stop right when the image starts to show on the page, and right click
the small portion then save as and it downloads and saves the full image using
very little extra bandwidth (or time) from downloading it twice.
Edit: I just went digging around in about:cache in firefox and looked up a
wallpaper I downloaded today. Could the items in bold have anything to do with
this problem or help you track it down faster?
Code:
key: http://...Azumanga.Daioh_223650.jpg
fetch count: 2
last fetched: 2006-03-15 23:49:48
last modified: 2006-03-15 22:09:46
expires: 1969-12-31 18:00:00
Data size: 225883
file on disk C:\Documents and Settings\...\Cache\BDB3FAA2d01
Security: This document does not have any security info associated with
it.
---------------
Client: HTTP
request-method: GET
response-head:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 04:09:13 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.0-pl1-gentoo with Hardening-Patch Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=3600, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
content-disposition: inline
Content-Length: 225411
Content-Type: image/jpg
I am using the latest version of Firefox (1.5.0.1) and adblock is the only
notable extension I am using. I've noticed in the last few weeks when I go to
download anything on MT, that after the page loads and shows the image, when I
right click and save the image it downloads all over again. Even if I right
click and save as while it is still downloading, it will download again when it
saves it to the disk. I know when you save something in Firefox even if it is
cached Firefox will ask the server if whatever it is has changed from the cached
version. Normally unless the item you are downloading has changed the server
would respond with: HTTP/1.1" 304 - which is a HTTP status code meaning
"Not modified". If the MT server was responding with that status code
when we right click and save as on a gallery item that Firefox has cached it
should just copy the image out of the cache instead of downloading it again.
This is also a waste of server bandwidth since every image I save to disk has to
download all over again, though at least I am not charged twice the credits for
downloading the same thing over again in this situation.
This wouldn't bother me so much if you could download more then one image at a
time and if the server transfered faster then 20-40k/sec max. I have checked and
rechecked all of my browsers caching settings, the size of the cache is 128 MB
which should be more then enough, and the browser is set to only check for new
versions after the document expires, and the browser is set to use HTTP 1.1 as
it should be.
I decided to run a test by clicking download on a doujinshi, waiting for it to
load completely, then closing the download window, and downloading it again. The
second time I went to the download, the whole image showed from the cache for a
moment, then blanked out and downloaded again. This problem ONLY happens on MT,
other sites when I save an image it saves directly out of the cache without
downloading again.
Happens to me sometimes, there is no indication of a network timeout, instead of
the wallpaper you were expecting you get a "pwn3d" image, refresh
immedately and the wallpaper shows up.
Actually there is something different about how it loads when you get the pwn3d
image: Normally when you go to download a wall, it takes a few seconds for the
connection to the download server to kick in and start sending you the wall, so
all you see a blank background page for that time. When you get the pwn3d image
it loads INSTANTLY with the page with zero delay connecting to the download
server. It is not a network timeout, for whatever reason the server connects and
sends the pwn3d image instatnly instead of the wallpaper. I am absolutely
positive it is a bug in the system not a network issue.
Generally what I have heard is if you PC is able to run Windows X.P it will also
be able to run Windows Vista. Now the difference is in order to fully use all
the features and interface in Vista your computer has to meet some minimum
requirements. It is highly possible any current generation DX9 video card that
can do PS v3.0 is all that will be required. I think I recall one site saying
that DX10 will be for Vista only, and DX9 support will remain in Windows X.P,
and since Microsoft is not planning on dropping X.P support till 2011 it is
reasonably safe to assume DX10 will not introduce anything that drastic as far
as features go over DX9. DX10 might only be something that requires a different
minimum of hardware support to function then DX9. I would guess that it is
reasonable to assume my Geforce 6800 Ultra / 256 MB card will be able to run
Vista with all the extra options turned all the way up. My Athlon X.P CPU @ 2.4
GHz on the other hand might slow Vista down a bit, and 1 GB of RAM might work
but 2 GB would probably be better. I am planning on upgrading my PC to a
multicore CPU, probably a few months after Vista becomes available to allow them
to get all the show stopping bugs out before I switch from X.P
Professional.
The thing to keep in mind is I saw a website recently where someone got Windows
X.P to run on an original Pentium processor running at a mere 20 MHz with only
18 MB of RAM. So it is pretty safe to say if you are able to surf the internet
and post in an online forum like this, your PC will be able to run Windows
Vista, even if you have the worst of the onboard intel video decelerators and
only 128 MB of system ram. It may not run Vista well but it will be able to run some of the flavors of Vista for
sure.
The door swings both ways on this subject, if you watch TV you will see plenty
of times when men are made out to look like incompetent fools who can never get
anything right and have to be rescued by the savvy woman.
Porn/hentai/etc does objectify woman, it can also objectify men, it is a shallow
form of entertainment largely targeted towards men. The way porn portrays people
sells, and that is why it does it.
One woman allowing herself to be portrayed as an object can and often does lower
all woman. Just like one man behaving like a fool because of it also can and
often does lower all men.
Which brings you right back to the time vs money debate.
Ahh well, It is re-assuring to know that the staff is working on it, I won't
expect quick results given the nature of the issues, but as long as they keep
working on the system I can deal with the bumps along the road.
What if I call it paying my fines since I don't have the 'artists get out of
jail free' card? :P Though somehow I don't think that analogy will go over too
well with the staff.
I get the basic idea you guys are trying to convey "your time is worth more
to us then your money". But the same is true for many people who
"leech" here; parting with a few dollars to download quickly without
worry about a tumbling credit balance is far preferable to wasting hours of time
composing posts in the forums and comments that earn absolutely nothing for us.
11-12 year olds visiting here probably have the time to do so, compared to
people who do have enough money to donate. If you don't have money, odds are you
have time, if you don't have time, odds are you have money. If you want to talk
of being fair, what about the people who only have the time to do a quick once
over the gallery every day or two, you can browse and collect all 20-30 of the
interesting submissions posted in the gallery over the course of a day in less
then 15 minutes if the server can keep up. When I am working, 15-20 minutes a
day is about all the time I can spare to check a site like MT, most of the time
I would only check MT on weekends. Is it so unfair to buy something in exchange
for the time that I absolutely can not afford? Right now it is unfair to people
who can appreciate the art just as much as someone who can surf here all day but
have jobs and responsibilities that don't give them the luxury of a huge credit
supply.
Quote by EternalParadoxBy
"decreasing the perceived value of credits" we mean we don't want
members to see the numerical value as some sort of a status symbol. In other
words, we don't want the mentality of "ooo, I now have 200 credits. But for
the sake of self-satisfaction, I want MORE MORE MORE!"
That's what we mean by the "perceived" value of credits. The
"real" value of credits is indeed increased, but that's why the
credits was implemented in the first place. Credits are there to be
used.
Regardless of what you say the goal was, the "percieved value" of
credits will always follow the real value of credits. If you make credits more
important people will want more credits and will be even more picky about
spending them. Artists earn far more credits then someone who simply posts
comments in the gallery or forum, I suppose from the artist standpoint there is
nothing wrong with MT even if you removed the FDQ completely and doubled the
price of everythig... as long as said artist never wants to share their
work.
People talk about the motives of the admins and mods and I understand what they
mean. I don't think of the admins or mods as my enemies, but I know from their
actions they are not my friends. I do not get the impression of any personal
grudges coming from the staff, they act professional and fairly when working
with the users. But the apparent motivations of the policies they have been
implimenting have changed recently. The original introduction of the credit
system seemed mostly motivated to slow down the out of control bandwidth
consumption. And all reports I have heard since then are that it has worked,
bandwidth is kept at reasonable levels. But the policy shift lately feels like
"if you aren't an artist we hate you". The most effective methods of
earning credits are exclusive to people who submit items to the gallery, and
that changes the motivations of people submitting artwork here.
I feel that rather then sharing your work, the primary motivation for submitting
something for many artists has changed to earning more credits and that is why
the quality of gallery submissions is dropping while the quantity continues to
rise. The artists no longer care about putting out the best possible wall, they
want to submit something that will get noticed. So it is a race to slap some
ecchi scan that is sure to get attention on a bunch of filtered brushed
backgrounds and wait for the masses to swarm to your wall earning you a ton of
credits. The artwork really does seem to be taking second place to the pressure
to earn more credits. I know this is not the goal of the staff, but this is the
effect of the credit system and recent policy. On MTv2 I was around level 16 I
think, I still commented on gallery items and favorited stuff I really liked, I
was not standing still like a lot of the "hated leechers". I also
didn't feel any huge motivation to submit artwork, once in a while I would see a
wall and think it would be fun to make a wall of my own and submit it to see the
reactions of others. Now the only reason I ever feel like making something is to
earn more credits, the current system killed the artist in me.
Trying to notify users of changes is not really that great of an idea on a site
this big, there are almost a quarter of a million registered users on here. Who
knows how many are active, but even if its only 5% that is still a lot of
people. I think if you want to notify users, a more up front "news"
section would get the job done better then anything, and would make more sense
on the top then the recent forum threads.
As far as some people say 30 free quota was too much, maybe it was, maybe it
wasn't. I just recently got to the point where I was using more then 20 in a day
on average, I figured if I had them I might as well spend them, then a few days
later bam, gone. As for
credits, I was saving those for the next time I take a trip and can't check MT
every day. Just like the last time I was gone for a little over a week, I don't
earn that many credits so I have to ration them carefully. After I caught up
from that week away it took a month to regain the credits I spent. The free
quota allowed me to save up credits for the next big spend when I am gone and
have to catch up, I was pretty comfortable with that setup and did not feel
overly presured to try and find the ever elusive ways to earn credits.
I like the wallpapers on this site, some of the best anime walls you can find
are posted here. A lot of the time in forums when there is a "post your
desktop" thread I get PMs from people asking me where I got my walls, or if
they can have a copy of one in paticular. But it is getting to be such an uphill
battle, I just feel tired and frustrated. It is getting to be not worth the
effort for the 1-3 wallpapers a day that are desktop worthy out of the 20-25 I
will check normally, it is so much work and so little in returns.
I was mostly satisfied, up until the hidden credits/DQ, and even less after some
of the changes today.
Things I have not liked for a while: the forums, the MT feedback forum is the
only one I visit even semi-regularly anymore. The computer hardware and software
forum (my specialty) is inundated with idiots (no offense guys). Granted with
such a large community it is impossible to maintain something as complex as a
tech support forum, the more people you have the more bad advice is posted in
each thread, and good posts from knowledgeable people are drowned out by the
foam of nonsense. In general I have had a strong dislike for the MT forums
almost since I first looked at them. And there is nothing the moderators or
administrators can do to fix them. The problem is written right on the
Frontpage: Members: 241,000. Internet forums degrade the more members there are,
if you visit a forum with around 2,000-3,000 members you will find that is about
the sweet spot, out of that many members around 100-300 might be active and it
is possible for everyone to know everyone else who posts regularly. The higher
ups need to understand some of their apparent goals for this community are
impossible given the sheer volume of members. There are too many people for this
place to ever feel like a "close knit community".
Was there a real bandwidth use problem that cutting the free download quota down
to only 5 solves? Seriously what was the problem? Why should the majority of
people here be forced to "contribute" to the community when most
methods of contributing do not earn them anything? Last time I checked, you can
post thoughtful comments on gallery items and reviews, and post useful items in
the forum and get absolutely nothing in return.
The major fault I see with the line of reasoning in these recent changes is
here: "reducing the perceived importance of credits". The policy
actions reflect the exact opposite of this, the free download quota did not just
reduced the perceived importance of credits, it reduced the real importance of
credits a lot, and probably cut back on the amount of useless spam on the forums
and everywhere by a lot.
You say one thing, but every step you have taken will only make credits more
valuable rather then less. You have cut the number of free downloads which makes
credits more important. You have cut out many of the methods of earning credits,
making it much harder to earn them, and thus raising their value tremendously.
Out of pure frustration I have to ask, why do you hate us so?
On a side note in the changelog "Corrupted images no longer cost money to
download" Nice!
Need this change now, more then ever.
I'd have to say I dislike it, was there a real problem with people knowing how
much "MT money" they have? What is "low"? Having these
values hidden is unnerving to say the least, I strongly disagree with this
change.
I'm using a water cooler and a very overclocked Athlon X.P. 1700+ CPU, my chip
defaults to 1.47 GHz with 1.5v core, I'm running it at 2.4 GHz with 1.8v core,
my CPU even under the worst case full load stress tests barely breaks 30c temps.
It has been running this way for a couple years now. The highest overclock I
reached was 2.6 GHz but that required 1.95v core and wasn't completely stable so
I backed off to 2.5 @ 1.9v which was stable at full load for 40 hours of
testing, so to be absolutely sure I keep it at 2.4 / 1.8v just to improve the
lifespan of the chip. The highest POST speed I have reached was 2.8 GHz but it
won't even start booting at that speed unless I run ice water through the
system.
The main advantage I have is my computer is reasonably powerful however compared
to most systems it is almost silent, the loudest thing on my computer is a small
box fan I have blowing into the case to keep the hard drives cool. The radiator
is actually mounted in another room; the water lines go through the floor into
the basement to the 120mm radiator that I have a 120mm delta 4000 RPM fan (190
CFM) mounted on it. That is the true usefulness of a radiator and waterlines for
cooling; if you have a pump that can handle it you can transport the heat from
your CPU into a different room entirely if you want to. Using water you can get
the best of both worlds, a PC that is quiet as a mouse and has a ridiculously
powerful cooling system at the same time.
I don't think it is a bug because it is still possible to earn credits. Posting
in the forums/guestbooks/groups or commenting on submissions don't earn you
credits anymore but it is still possible to gain them by contributing in other
ways. Another reason I don't think it is a bug is because I have never seen the
admins fail to quickly resolve a bug that effects this many people before. If it
were a problem they would have fixed it a long time ago, so I believe it is
intentional. But realistically the 30 free download quota is enough to get all
of the really good submissions every day without missing anything. And if you
are hunting for a scan or something which ends up costing a lot more then 30
downloads, odds are if you do good work you will earn all your credits back from
feedback on the submission anyway.
I think a really useful feature for a lot of us would be the ability to set a bookmark or place mark in the main gallery that keeps track of where you last browsed. If you browse the main gallery once a day for instance, you could set a bookmark at the first and last gallery item you viewed, and then the next day you can quickly and easily identify all the new gallery items that have been posted since your last visit. It could be something like a page break in the gallery page or different color borders on the thumbnails, etc. Another option would be a gallery that only shows new and or updated gallery items since your last visit.
Right now I keep track of my position in the gallery by keeping a text document on my desktop that I rename to the ID number of the latest gallery item when I was browsing last. If I could just click that gallery item and hit "set a gallery place mark here" instead it would be very convenient.
I too have noticed the less then even dialup speed of loading images in recent weeks, I assumed it was some problem with the MT pipe and the admins were likely already aware of the situation so I just worked with whatever speed I could get. It is annoying to the users when the site is slow or down, but I'm sure it is many hundreds of times worse for the administrators trying to solve the problems and keep everything running smoothly. Since I run a couple small sites of my own, I know how annoying it is when one goes down and people complain about it, so I generally just wait patiently when some site I visit goes down rather then reporting a problem.
No change, still seems to be doing it to me. I tried clearing my browers cache before downloading something but it had no effect.
I'm 25, I've been studying Japanese off hand for about two years, and I know enough to watch anime episodes raw without missing too much, and I know I could learn far more by actually taking courses and classes in it. The results I have are just from what I was able to do and learn by myself with no outside help. The hardest part is getting over the idea that it should be hard.
Unfortunately my credits are not visible. So I also wonder if it still took away from my credits, but I doubt it did. Just by the nature of this bug I doubt many people would notice it (most people aren't going to go downloading before their FDQ regenerates). So I am thinking the same thing, the engine in the back thought my FDQ had rengenerated while the display in the front still said zero.
I have spotted an odd bug with downloading and the FDQ. I have noticed that if I download something within about an hour before my free download quota would have regenerated, meaning it has been around 23 hours since I used up my FDQ and it still uses the free download quota even though it says I have 0. Last night, I downloaded two walls while my FDQ was at 0, and around midnight my FDQ started to come back, but I only got 3 all day, even though when I downloaded those two walls it said I had 0 FDQ for almost an hour afterwards, and it showed me the price of the walls. And I am sure it is not just that two of my FDQ regenerated ahead of time and I didn't notice because the night before that I used all 5 in a matter of about 5 minutes right around midnight.
Something else since I don't think it's worth starting a new thread over. Does anyone else think it would be nice if the price of gallery items was rounded to two places behind the decimal point instead of one? So for instance when you look at the price of a really small wall instead of saying "Download (0.0 credits)" it would say "Download (0.08 credits)".
You can already do this with your FDQ, just only browse MT once a day, and download all the most expensive stuff first. :P
I haven't even had a floppy drive in my PC for years, all the floppy disks in the house are bad. I totally gave up on floppys and use RW optical media or USB Flash drives in their place any time I need to use something.
Thanks, in the mean time I have used a small work around, when I go to download an image I stop right when the image starts to show on the page, and right click the small portion then save as and it downloads and saves the full image using very little extra bandwidth (or time) from downloading it twice.
Edit: I just went digging around in about:cache in firefox and looked up a wallpaper I downloaded today. Could the items in bold have anything to do with this problem or help you track it down faster?
I am using the latest version of Firefox (1.5.0.1) and adblock is the only notable extension I am using. I've noticed in the last few weeks when I go to download anything on MT, that after the page loads and shows the image, when I right click and save the image it downloads all over again. Even if I right click and save as while it is still downloading, it will download again when it saves it to the disk. I know when you save something in Firefox even if it is cached Firefox will ask the server if whatever it is has changed from the cached version. Normally unless the item you are downloading has changed the server would respond with: HTTP/1.1" 304 - which is a HTTP status code meaning "Not modified". If the MT server was responding with that status code when we right click and save as on a gallery item that Firefox has cached it should just copy the image out of the cache instead of downloading it again. This is also a waste of server bandwidth since every image I save to disk has to download all over again, though at least I am not charged twice the credits for downloading the same thing over again in this situation.
This wouldn't bother me so much if you could download more then one image at a time and if the server transfered faster then 20-40k/sec max. I have checked and rechecked all of my browsers caching settings, the size of the cache is 128 MB which should be more then enough, and the browser is set to only check for new versions after the document expires, and the browser is set to use HTTP 1.1 as it should be.
I decided to run a test by clicking download on a doujinshi, waiting for it to load completely, then closing the download window, and downloading it again. The second time I went to the download, the whole image showed from the cache for a moment, then blanked out and downloaded again. This problem ONLY happens on MT, other sites when I save an image it saves directly out of the cache without downloading again.
Happens to me sometimes, there is no indication of a network timeout, instead of the wallpaper you were expecting you get a "pwn3d" image, refresh immedately and the wallpaper shows up.
Actually there is something different about how it loads when you get the pwn3d image: Normally when you go to download a wall, it takes a few seconds for the connection to the download server to kick in and start sending you the wall, so all you see a blank background page for that time. When you get the pwn3d image it loads INSTANTLY with the page with zero delay connecting to the download server. It is not a network timeout, for whatever reason the server connects and sends the pwn3d image instatnly instead of the wallpaper. I am absolutely positive it is a bug in the system not a network issue.
Generally what I have heard is if you PC is able to run Windows X.P it will also be able to run Windows Vista. Now the difference is in order to fully use all the features and interface in Vista your computer has to meet some minimum requirements. It is highly possible any current generation DX9 video card that can do PS v3.0 is all that will be required. I think I recall one site saying that DX10 will be for Vista only, and DX9 support will remain in Windows X.P, and since Microsoft is not planning on dropping X.P support till 2011 it is reasonably safe to assume DX10 will not introduce anything that drastic as far as features go over DX9. DX10 might only be something that requires a different minimum of hardware support to function then DX9. I would guess that it is reasonable to assume my Geforce 6800 Ultra / 256 MB card will be able to run Vista with all the extra options turned all the way up. My Athlon X.P CPU @ 2.4 GHz on the other hand might slow Vista down a bit, and 1 GB of RAM might work but 2 GB would probably be better. I am planning on upgrading my PC to a multicore CPU, probably a few months after Vista becomes available to allow them to get all the show stopping bugs out before I switch from X.P Professional.
The thing to keep in mind is I saw a website recently where someone got Windows X.P to run on an original Pentium processor running at a mere 20 MHz with only 18 MB of RAM. So it is pretty safe to say if you are able to surf the internet and post in an online forum like this, your PC will be able to run Windows Vista, even if you have the worst of the onboard intel video decelerators and only 128 MB of system ram. It may not run Vista well but it will be able to run some of the flavors of Vista for sure.
Timed out "pwn3d" images still cost credits or FDQ on refresh, I had it happen to me yesterday. Even after the changelog already said it was fixed.
The door swings both ways on this subject, if you watch TV you will see plenty of times when men are made out to look like incompetent fools who can never get anything right and have to be rescued by the savvy woman.
Porn/hentai/etc does objectify woman, it can also objectify men, it is a shallow form of entertainment largely targeted towards men. The way porn portrays people sells, and that is why it does it.
One woman allowing herself to be portrayed as an object can and often does lower all woman. Just like one man behaving like a fool because of it also can and often does lower all men.
Crappy pixelation and other problems can exist even on uncompressed images, the file size of the wall is irrelevant.
I also think it would be nice if the various thumbnail images were given a little less compression.
Which brings you right back to the time vs money debate.
Ahh well, It is re-assuring to know that the staff is working on it, I won't expect quick results given the nature of the issues, but as long as they keep working on the system I can deal with the bumps along the road.
What if I call it paying my fines since I don't have the 'artists get out of jail free' card? :P Though somehow I don't think that analogy will go over too well with the staff.
I get the basic idea you guys are trying to convey "your time is worth more to us then your money". But the same is true for many people who "leech" here; parting with a few dollars to download quickly without worry about a tumbling credit balance is far preferable to wasting hours of time composing posts in the forums and comments that earn absolutely nothing for us. 11-12 year olds visiting here probably have the time to do so, compared to people who do have enough money to donate. If you don't have money, odds are you have time, if you don't have time, odds are you have money. If you want to talk of being fair, what about the people who only have the time to do a quick once over the gallery every day or two, you can browse and collect all 20-30 of the interesting submissions posted in the gallery over the course of a day in less then 15 minutes if the server can keep up. When I am working, 15-20 minutes a day is about all the time I can spare to check a site like MT, most of the time I would only check MT on weekends. Is it so unfair to buy something in exchange for the time that I absolutely can not afford? Right now it is unfair to people who can appreciate the art just as much as someone who can surf here all day but have jobs and responsibilities that don't give them the luxury of a huge credit supply.
Regardless of what you say the goal was, the "percieved value" of credits will always follow the real value of credits. If you make credits more important people will want more credits and will be even more picky about spending them. Artists earn far more credits then someone who simply posts comments in the gallery or forum, I suppose from the artist standpoint there is nothing wrong with MT even if you removed the FDQ completely and doubled the price of everythig... as long as said artist never wants to share their work.
People talk about the motives of the admins and mods and I understand what they mean. I don't think of the admins or mods as my enemies, but I know from their actions they are not my friends. I do not get the impression of any personal grudges coming from the staff, they act professional and fairly when working with the users. But the apparent motivations of the policies they have been implimenting have changed recently. The original introduction of the credit system seemed mostly motivated to slow down the out of control bandwidth consumption. And all reports I have heard since then are that it has worked, bandwidth is kept at reasonable levels. But the policy shift lately feels like "if you aren't an artist we hate you". The most effective methods of earning credits are exclusive to people who submit items to the gallery, and that changes the motivations of people submitting artwork here.
I feel that rather then sharing your work, the primary motivation for submitting something for many artists has changed to earning more credits and that is why the quality of gallery submissions is dropping while the quantity continues to rise. The artists no longer care about putting out the best possible wall, they want to submit something that will get noticed. So it is a race to slap some ecchi scan that is sure to get attention on a bunch of filtered brushed backgrounds and wait for the masses to swarm to your wall earning you a ton of credits. The artwork really does seem to be taking second place to the pressure to earn more credits. I know this is not the goal of the staff, but this is the effect of the credit system and recent policy. On MTv2 I was around level 16 I think, I still commented on gallery items and favorited stuff I really liked, I was not standing still like a lot of the "hated leechers". I also didn't feel any huge motivation to submit artwork, once in a while I would see a wall and think it would be fun to make a wall of my own and submit it to see the reactions of others. Now the only reason I ever feel like making something is to earn more credits, the current system killed the artist in me.
Trying to notify users of changes is not really that great of an idea on a site this big, there are almost a quarter of a million registered users on here. Who knows how many are active, but even if its only 5% that is still a lot of people. I think if you want to notify users, a more up front "news" section would get the job done better then anything, and would make more sense on the top then the recent forum threads.
As far as some people say 30 free quota was too much, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I just recently got to the point where I was using more then 20 in a day on average, I figured if I had them I might as well spend them, then a few days later bam, gone.
As for
credits, I was saving those for the next time I take a trip and can't check MT
every day. Just like the last time I was gone for a little over a week, I don't
earn that many credits so I have to ration them carefully. After I caught up
from that week away it took a month to regain the credits I spent. The free
quota allowed me to save up credits for the next big spend when I am gone and
have to catch up, I was pretty comfortable with that setup and did not feel
overly presured to try and find the ever elusive ways to earn credits.
I like the wallpapers on this site, some of the best anime walls you can find are posted here. A lot of the time in forums when there is a "post your desktop" thread I get PMs from people asking me where I got my walls, or if they can have a copy of one in paticular. But it is getting to be such an uphill battle, I just feel tired and frustrated. It is getting to be not worth the effort for the 1-3 wallpapers a day that are desktop worthy out of the 20-25 I will check normally, it is so much work and so little in returns.
I was mostly satisfied, up until the hidden credits/DQ, and even less after some of the changes today.
Things I have not liked for a while: the forums, the MT feedback forum is the only one I visit even semi-regularly anymore. The computer hardware and software forum (my specialty) is inundated with idiots (no offense guys). Granted with such a large community it is impossible to maintain something as complex as a tech support forum, the more people you have the more bad advice is posted in each thread, and good posts from knowledgeable people are drowned out by the foam of nonsense. In general I have had a strong dislike for the MT forums almost since I first looked at them. And there is nothing the moderators or administrators can do to fix them. The problem is written right on the Frontpage: Members: 241,000. Internet forums degrade the more members there are, if you visit a forum with around 2,000-3,000 members you will find that is about the sweet spot, out of that many members around 100-300 might be active and it is possible for everyone to know everyone else who posts regularly. The higher ups need to understand some of their apparent goals for this community are impossible given the sheer volume of members. There are too many people for this place to ever feel like a "close knit community".
Was there a real bandwidth use problem that cutting the free download quota down to only 5 solves? Seriously what was the problem? Why should the majority of people here be forced to "contribute" to the community when most methods of contributing do not earn them anything? Last time I checked, you can post thoughtful comments on gallery items and reviews, and post useful items in the forum and get absolutely nothing in return.
The major fault I see with the line of reasoning in these recent changes is here: "reducing the perceived importance of credits". The policy actions reflect the exact opposite of this, the free download quota did not just reduced the perceived importance of credits, it reduced the real importance of credits a lot, and probably cut back on the amount of useless spam on the forums and everywhere by a lot.
You say one thing, but every step you have taken will only make credits more valuable rather then less. You have cut the number of free downloads which makes credits more important. You have cut out many of the methods of earning credits, making it much harder to earn them, and thus raising their value tremendously. Out of pure frustration I have to ask, why do you hate us so?
On a side note in the changelog "Corrupted images no longer cost money to download"
Nice!
Need this change now, more then ever.
I'd have to say I dislike it, was there a real problem with people knowing how much "MT money" they have? What is "low"? Having these values hidden is unnerving to say the least, I strongly disagree with this change.
I'm using a water cooler and a very overclocked Athlon X.P. 1700+ CPU, my chip defaults to 1.47 GHz with 1.5v core, I'm running it at 2.4 GHz with 1.8v core, my CPU even under the worst case full load stress tests barely breaks 30c temps. It has been running this way for a couple years now. The highest overclock I reached was 2.6 GHz but that required 1.95v core and wasn't completely stable so I backed off to 2.5 @ 1.9v which was stable at full load for 40 hours of testing, so to be absolutely sure I keep it at 2.4 / 1.8v just to improve the lifespan of the chip. The highest POST speed I have reached was 2.8 GHz but it won't even start booting at that speed unless I run ice water through the system.
The main advantage I have is my computer is reasonably powerful however compared to most systems it is almost silent, the loudest thing on my computer is a small box fan I have blowing into the case to keep the hard drives cool. The radiator is actually mounted in another room; the water lines go through the floor into the basement to the 120mm radiator that I have a 120mm delta 4000 RPM fan (190 CFM) mounted on it. That is the true usefulness of a radiator and waterlines for cooling; if you have a pump that can handle it you can transport the heat from your CPU into a different room entirely if you want to. Using water you can get the best of both worlds, a PC that is quiet as a mouse and has a ridiculously powerful cooling system at the same time.
I don't think it is a bug because it is still possible to earn credits. Posting in the forums/guestbooks/groups or commenting on submissions don't earn you credits anymore but it is still possible to gain them by contributing in other ways. Another reason I don't think it is a bug is because I have never seen the admins fail to quickly resolve a bug that effects this many people before. If it were a problem they would have fixed it a long time ago, so I believe it is intentional. But realistically the 30 free download quota is enough to get all of the really good submissions every day without missing anything. And if you are hunting for a scan or something which ends up costing a lot more then 30 downloads, odds are if you do good work you will earn all your credits back from feedback on the submission anyway.