Hi, Kutter, how are you these days? Interesting topic; I've brought it up before. I am always astonished when I see the wonderful images posted in this gallery. I think we do have a much higher percentage of excellent stuff here in the Vue gallery than most other galleries. I, for one, am not a vote-shark. I am more interested in comments and feedback on my images. We have had instances in the recent past where an individual created many clones of himself to take over the Top 20. That pretty much soured me on the whole vote idea, although I do vote for images that I think are really outstanding. But I find the comments, encouragement, and help I get through the comments (and IMs) are the best thing, and make me feel like folks are really looking at my images and giving me feedback. I've had some very serious, critical feedback given to me, usually in IMs, so it is between the other person and me, which is cool. I take it seriously. But Kutter has an important point to make that I'd like to echo. It's one thing to pop in here and drop a bunch of images and leave. And read any comments you get, feel good or bad about that, and that's it. But it's another to spend a bit of time looking at others' images and offering a comment, or an IM on it. There are a lot of folks who's images I will ALWAYS comment on because they offer the same courtesy and encouragement to others (and not just me), folks like rds, Kutter, sacada, Winged One, wabe, etc. They are not only what I consider excellent artists, but decent caring people who make the time to give as much or more than they get. There are other folks (some of whom have been in the Vue gallery for a while) who seldom or never bother to make a comment on anyone's image. Some of these people do great images, that's not the point, the point, as Kutter said, is the "community". Some of the newer folks in the galleries seem to maybe be too shy to comment on others' images or don't seem to understand the tit-for-tat of commenting; another problem is that I am on dialup and when new people post 500k images, I'm not gonna open it. I have IMd several and mentioned they might want to consider resizing image resolution since not everyone has DSL. Anyhow, I have gotten so many nice IMs from people who said, "thanks, I really appreciate that you took time to comment on my image" or "thanks for the IM regarding my image". So you know that commenting can mean a lot to people. Kutter, your rant is contageous, lol!!

Sgiathalaich