Gallery Makeover Project

The focus of this journal is to provide a discussion platform about the Gallery Makeover Project for the emote community. This is not the official journal for the emote community, but in the absence of one, does allow us to talk about possible changes. All thoughts and opinions will then be available for the the official Gallery Makeover team to hear the community's views and make final decisions.

Before we dive into the list of suggestions we have so far, I want to give a brief explanation of the project's aims. The main purpose is to simplify the gallery structure by removing and merging categories that are no longer used by the community. It also includes also renaming categories to help reduce confusion and make the whole submission process easier for all.

In addition, it seems like an opportunity to help reduce miscats (miscategorised deviations) by removing or renaming the categories that cause the most confusion.

Suggestions

Before writing this journal I spoke to Krissi001, Mirz123 and Waluigi-Prower to help bounce around some ideas and come up with a list of suggestions for the category structure. The details below are only suggestions and we encourage feedback (both positive and negative) on all of the points to ensure changes that end up being put forward are what the whole community feels is best for our gallery.

This is also an opportunity to suggest entirely new concepts for the community to discuss. Just because something hasn't been suggested so far doesn't mean it isn't a great idea, so you are welcome to share your thoughts and ideas in the comment section.

Suggestion 1 - Merging CF Small and Medium

This change involves merging the Chat Friendly (CF) 'Small (up to 25x50)' and 'Medium (up to 50x50)' to create a single category called 'Small (50x50)'.

It appears that the new community emoticon system (as seen in stash) uses emotes within either of these two categories. If there is no further restriction of where Small may be used and Medium not, it seems sensible to merge these two categories taking the size limit of Medium, but the name of Small.

Suggestion 2 - Removing Animated/Static subcategory split

This change involves removing the Animated and Static subcategories placing all of the corresponding emoticons in the folder one layer up e.g. 'Small (up to 50x50)' or 'Large (up to 150x150)'.

The animated and static split seems to be rather redundant in the current era, especially when adding in a blink will change an emote from one category to the other. It therefore seems sensible to merge remove the Animated and Static branches, with all emotes being placed in the category 1 tier up.

Suggestion 3 - Merging Visual Purpose and Other categories

This change involves merging the 'Visual Purpose Emotes' (VP) and 'Other' categories to form a single category called 'Visual Purpose Emotes'.

The 'Other' category has always been misunderstood with things from VP ending up on Other and visa versa. It would therefore make sense to merge these categories together to create a single category and avoid confusion.

Suggestion 4 - Renaming Packs

This change involves changing the name of the 'Packs' category.

'Packs' seems a much misunderstood name with the packs folder containing many packs of images, brushes or celebrities and renaming the category may help clear up confusion. The current suggested name is 'Emoticon Sets' though other suggestions are welcome.

Suggestion 5 - Rename Projects to Emoticon Projects

This change involves renaming the 'Projects' folder to 'Emoticon Projects'.

The inclusion of the word 'Emoticon' or 'Emote' would give further clarity to the fact this category is only for emoticons (and not many of the other miscats we receive).

Suggestion 6 - Removing the Bases & Templates and Entries subcategories

This change involves removing the tier separating the 'Bases & Templates' and 'Entries' subcategories, placing all of the corresponding project based emoticons directly in the 'Emoticon Projects' folder.

All of the names involved in the subcategory sections appear to be keywords that promote miscats in the emote gallery. Both 'Bases' and 'Templates' are often mistaken for avatar bases, doll bases, pony bases etc. and 'Entries' can be confused with entries for contests, other projects and challenges. This issue combined with the fact projects are less frequent in the community would suggest that removing these subcategories would aid the fight against miscats and bring all elements of projects together.

Suggestion 7 - Canvas size limits

This change involves inflicting canvas size limits on to all categories (except emoticon projects) to prevent large non-emoticon images from being submitted into the category.

We are unsure whether this change would be possible within the Gallery Makeover Project, but thought it was worth receiving some community feedback on. Our gallery is often abused and filled with photos or images with canvas sizes (e.g 1000 pixels) far larger than necessary for emoticons. It could therefore be proposed that we set a size limit (for example, 500x500 pixels) which would be large enough to accept all legitimate emoticons, yet prevent large miscats from entering the gallery.

This change would not affect the category which includes the bases for emoticon projects as we are aware the multiple entries can create large canvas sizes. This category would be 'Emoticon Projects' if the proposed change 6 goes ahead, or 'Bases & Templates' if the current project categories remain.

Feedback

The main focus of this article is to give the emoticon community space to discuss ideas and suggestions and to help make some decisions on the future of our gallery. Therefore, it would be appreciated if you could help out by:

Discussing the suggestions mentioned in this article
Putting forward any additional ideas
Replying to any additional ideas with feedback
Spreading the word about this article and encouraging others to get involved.

So please do get involved and leave a comment. Community feedback is vital in a project such as this, so even a few words on one or more of the topics is really helpful. The gallery structure is at the heart of our art form, so as a community lets come together to make improvements and create a better structure for the future.

All of the information from this journal will be passed on to the Gallery Makeover Project team for them to make final decisions about the changes to our gallery. I have also contacted our CV ChaosEmeraldHunter about this journal and await a reply.