Stacey,

While I am in that minority, my main complaint is NOT with the policy itself.  It is your site, and you would be within your collective rights to make whatever policy you wanted, even over the objections of a majority of the users.  

Rather, my main complaint is with the heavy-handed action you take in response to a thumbnail violation, i.e. pulling the image itself.  I have made the suggestion that you pursue another approach, one that addressed just the thumbnail, not the image that was actually in compliance.  

One suggestion was merely to replace the violating thumbnail with the generic Content Advisory one.   JumpStartMe2 replied that, "...we have no problem placing a standard content advisory for violating thumbs, but because we have to do this manually, we have allowed members to grab a copy of this thumb and use it if they want...but you have to upload it..it wont be done automatically by the generator."  So, that seemed to be acceptable, except that it was work, and had to be done by hand.  And yet, the violations are still currently handled by hand, while causing much more ire than I believe this solution would.

I then suggested a more automated approach, one where the thumbnail itself could be flagged as being in violation, allowing the gallery code to show the Content Advisory thumbnail automatically when appropriate.  However, you shot that down as being too low of a priority for the programmers compared to other ongoing projects.  When I reiterated my perception of its importance, your polite dismissal translated to: We've already decided, so please be quiet now.

Thus, I am left with the perception that you have already made up your minds not to address this issue of how you deal with thumbnail violations, and that you don't particularly care if the artists are upset.

Nor am I swayed by your statistics of sitewide happiness as justification that we're all happy with this policy.  Around the same time you did this, the gallery performance picked up significantly.  Ditto with forum performance.  All in all, you and your team have made excellent progress on improving the usability of the site, and you have been properly rewarded by a swelling of traffic and site use.  However, to point to that success as a sign of approval for the handling of thumbnail violations is inappropriate.  I could just as easily say that the site success is a sign that my art has improved.  Correlation is not the same as causation.  

You also say that it's such a small, trivial percentage of thumbnails that run into violations.  If it is such a small number, then doing the work of replacing the offending thumbnails with the Content Advisory one (rather that hitting the "Suspend Image") button should be a small enough workload to handle though existing mechanisms.  Or, if there are indeed too many to do that feasibly, then this really SHOULD be a priority to address in an automated fashion. 

In the meantime, I know artists who continue to think that you do not take their position into account.  You can say you do, but your actions indicate otherwise.  You eventually responded with a good solution to the whole image-resizing uproar, but you're not giving me any hope that you will do so here.  So, let me ask you straight out.  Is it your ongoing desire to always treat thumbnail violations by suspending the image itself, or do you desire to find a solution that allows the image to go on uninterrupted while the thumbnail is suspended separately?  If the former, then I would be interested in how you justify that sanction with your statement of taking the artists' feelings into account.  If the latter, when might we see some progress?

Dan among Den