There are too many unsourced uploads. There may be legitimate reasons for leaving the source blank, but for most uploads, those reasons don't apply. Uploaders are either being lazy or they don't understand the importance of proper sourcing. I have a couple of ideas to improve this. Do either of them sound feasible?

1) Require new members to source their first few uploads.

Anecdotally, it seems like most unsourced uploads come from members who haven't uploaded much (fewer than ~10 posts). So, for those members, don't let any upload succeed until they've put something valid in the "source" field. This restriction would be lifted after a few of their posts have been approved and they've shown that they can properly source.

One potential problem could be people typing garbage into the "source" field just so the upload succeeds. In practice, I hope no well-meaning person would actually do that.

2) Require deliberate action to leave a post unsourced.

Just like how uploaders now need to explicitly choose one of safe/questionable/explicit – the rating won't default to questionable if you don't pick anything.

Leaving the source blank would be an error that could be overridden by checking a box that says something like, "Yes, I have done my due diligence to find the source of this, and I really do not know where it comes from." This might prod people out of their laziness.

I'd think the 2nd option would be good if it worked properly, but there's some problems with it. What would stop someone from just writing "4chan thread" as the source, or "https://www.google.com "?

the second option would get really annoying to me since i tend to upload my art first here and then edit the sources in after i have uploaded the art to other sites

Maxpizzle said:
There are too many unsourced uploads.

and the admins don't care
tagging the right genitalia is much more important

Munkelzahn said:
and the admins don't care
tagging the right genitalia is much more important

Replace 'admins' with 'most users' and that's not a joke anymore.

In all seriousness, whenever I decide to do approvals, I do the most in-depth checks on posts without sources.

Lord_Eggplant said:
the second option would get really annoying to me since i tend to upload my art first here and then edit the sources in after i have uploaded the art to other sites

This really is balance of making it extremely fool proof but at the same time more cumbersome to use for those knowing how to properly do things.

Munkelzahn said:
and the admins don't care
tagging the right genitalia is much more important

Problem is that it's impossible to enforce sourcing when there are cases where there are no sources. Extremely old stuff from users personal storages, commissions not yet posted elsewhere, artist first or only posting here (which still feels bad idea, but happens), etc.

Similar to 4 tag minimum, pretty much all posts should have way more tags in general, but because of the cases where it's near impossible to get more than 4 tags the rule is as it is.

With both sourcing and tagging, I have seen so many users who are just disregarding whole thing and even poked admins about the situation that is there really nothing to be done. I think in one case, user was simply tagging some mario character, but because of all the implications it had the required 4 tags applied, even if the user only put in single tag.

One of the biggest issue with sourcing is that people think that direct URL upload suffices, when in many large websites including furaffinity this is not the case. Then salt in the wounds are poured when I saw former staff doing exactly the same deal, using direct URL uploading without sourcing. Hence I have requested in the past to require source field to be filled if user is using direct URL upload, because pretty much in all cases they are at that point looking at the submission page if they do have direct URL, but I think that someone was againts.

Mairo said:
Then salt in the wounds are poured when I saw former staff doing exactly the same deal, using direct URL uploading without sourcing. Hence I have requested in the past to require source field to be filled if user is using direct URL upload, because pretty much in all cases they are at that point looking at the submission page if they do have direct URL, but I think that someone was againts.

Yeah, I was uploading the higher res Tumblr posts from my old browser download history. So all I had were the direct links. In most cases the artist blogs are long deleted, so there's no other sources to be found.

But I already stopped uploading those, got tired of the repeated complaining about 'not sourcing them correctly'.

JAKXXX3 said:
I'd think the 2nd option would be good if it worked properly, but there's some problems with it. What would stop someone from just writing "4chan thread" as the source, or "https://www.google.com "?

Ultimately, it probably still has to fall back on moderation. I don't think upload-time checks can completely eliminate the problem, but they can certainly do a lot more than they're doing now. (And "4chan thread" is already infinitely more helpful than nothing.)

Lord_Eggplant said:
the second option would get really annoying to me since i tend to upload my art first here and then edit the sources in after i have uploaded the art to other sites

Frankly, if that's the cost of better sourcing site-wide, that doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff.

Mairo said:
Similar to 4 tag minimum, pretty much all posts should have way more tags in general, but because of the cases where it's near impossible to get more than 4 tags the rule is as it is.

It is a similar problem, yes, and I think the current form design fails in both cases. True, the system must allow the lowest common denominator, but it should also discourage it. The form should be optimized for the most common case: where the source is known, and dozens of tags are expected. I think there are ways to encourage better upload-time tagging, too, but that's a separate issue so I won't get into the specifics.

The point is that bad sourcing (and tagging) isn't just some fact of life that we have to accept. These are tractable UX design problems. I understand that any restriction has the potential to make things more annoying for experienced users. But it would be for the greater good.

Genjar said:
Yeah, I was uploading the higher res Tumblr posts from my old browser download history. So all I had were the direct links. In most cases the artist blogs are long deleted, so there's no other sources to be found.

But I already stopped uploading those, got tired of the repeated complaining about 'not sourcing them correctly'.

Oh yeah, I actually forgot about this, but in your case you actually had good reason for doing that.

Also I really don't want to search the thread anymore, but I though that I commented that these kind of cases are really rare and if we had that sort of system you could always bypass it by downloading the file and then putting direct image URL in sources.

Maxpizzle said:
It is a similar problem, yes, and I think the current form design fails in both cases. True, the system must allow the lowest common denominator, but it should also discourage it. The form should be optimized for the most common case: where the source is known, and dozens of tags are expected. I think there are ways to encourage better upload-time tagging, too, but that's a separate issue so I won't get into the specifics.

The point is that bad sourcing (and tagging) isn't just some fact of life that we have to accept. These are tractable UX design problems. I understand that any restriction has the potential to make things more annoying for experienced users. But it would be for the greater good.

For site which main purposes include tagging and sourcing, it would most definitely be nice if everyone uploading would do things properly instead of after 100 uploads I'm in the comments like "hey, dude, you just uploaded 100 inferior posts, which nobody saw because there's only 4 tags and you didn't give any proper sources to anything"

Having settings to turn off some safety measure features shouldn't be problematic either for power users.

It would be great if you could upload from FA post links:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/17014061/

And e621 would upload from the direct image link and put these three links in the Source field:
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/theblackrook/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/17014061/
http://d.facdn.net/art/theblackrook/1436051554/1436051554.theblackrook_chibirpg1.png

Not necessarily in that order, some people might prefer the 2nd link 1st.