https://e621.net/posts?page=1&tags=order%3Ascore+status%3Apending

This is a link to the art that's currently status:pending. How come moderators are not looking at this? There are pending posts with literally thousands of upvotes that will be auto-deleted in a matter of days if nobody approves them.

It seems animations take much longer to get approved than still images for some reason, animations also get a lot of upvotes very quickly.

There's numerous reasons the approval queue is so bad, but I'd say the biggest one is the lack of staff approving.

• The janitor team is small, and is expanding at a slower rate than the site is growing.
• Upvotes don't always equate to high quality posts, low quality memes often get highly upvoted as well as sloppy motion-tweening edits of art.
• Lots of this stuff is video content, and as far as I'm aware most janitors don't want to touch that and leave it to Mairo.
• Plenty of this is also borderline relevant to the site, for example post #3922997 pretty much just looks like human/human content to me and probably hasn't been approved for that reason.

Because staff are humans too. They can only do so much so fast, and sometimes can be a bit indecisive at times or things slip their minds.

Also, notice that the vast majority are WebM animations. Mairo's the only Janitor with the skill and knowledge to approve them, especially since they are frequently not the best version available. He has to go and get that better version. The rest of us... just can't match him, so we're often forced to just dump it all in his lap. But again, he can only do so much, and like the rest of us (sans NotMeNotYou), is a volunteer.

As Mairo recently pointed out on the Discord, he can see all the flaws and lack of quality in these uploaded animations while 99.9999% of viewers can only see "a hot animation! Oh, myyyyy! :9 " (So, show him some appreciation for his efforts, because he's actively trying to make those hot animations the best version you can drool over.)

As for those that aren't animations or CG, by the time 20 days have passed, at least two approvers have likely looked at the post, but for some reason, haven't chosen to delete or accept the post. It's in some borderline relevancy and/or quality limbo that makes it difficult to decide to pull the trigger on it or not.

How can I help out the e621 staff with their work? Or become a staff member myself? I have been contributing to e621 for many years, I'd love to help out if I can.

What is the process for which e621 decides to expand the janitor team? How are users evaluated? It seems that the team needs to be expanded more.

But for the animations, indeed I am not an expert on those so I would defer to Mairo as you suggest. Although maybe it would be helpful to specifically look to recruit moderators that can spot details in video content to help out Mairo.

aaronfranke said:
How can I help out the e621 staff with their work? Or become a staff member myself? I have been contributing to e621 for many years, I'd love to help out if I can.

What is the process for which e621 decides to expand the janitor team? How are users evaluated? It seems that the team needs to be expanded more.

But for the animations, indeed I am not an expert on those so I would defer to Mairo as you suggest. Although maybe it would be helpful to specifically look to recruit moderators that can spot details in video content to help out Mairo.

As far as I understand things around here, you just keep helping organizing the site in any way within your reach, that being uploading properly, partaking in tagging projects, flagging content when appropriate, and eventually your contributions should be noticed. Kinda like a meritocracy thingie.

Not quite an efficient way of recruiting, on my point of view, but is a safer way of ensuring important roles aren't given to users with ill second intentions, as I believe is something that ocassionaly happened with older administration. I'm not familiar with this topic though.

Can I nuke all atomic heart twin posts please? All I can see is humans in funny suits and/or silver bodypaint and mask, what are they doing on furry site?

aaronfranke said:
How can I help out the e621 staff with their work? Or become a staff member myself? I have been contributing to e621 for many years, I'd love to help out if I can.

What is the process for which e621 decides to expand the janitor team? How are users evaluated? It seems that the team needs to be expanded more.

But for the animations, indeed I am not an expert on those so I would defer to Mairo as you suggest. Although maybe it would be helpful to specifically look to recruit moderators that can spot details in video content to help out Mairo.

I started by complaining in comments about problems with posts and consistantly replacing the posts with higher quality copies and better handled transcodes. Still remember how there was multiple users who would upload GIFs from flash files where it was stutterfest, cursor and recording software visible, it wasn't looping correctly, there was slight crop, filesizes were massive, etc. etc.

There's also much more complications with animations as well. One is that most artists still export as h264 which we don't allow for possible licensing issues as it's commercial format, even if technically speaking VP9 WebM export should be as easy on paper with even similar settings between encoders. Even without that, many artists do stuff like post animations only as GIFs on Pixiv and Twitter where they are now JPG image sequence and absurdly bad quality h264 MP4, etc.

So the moment I start seeing someone commenting how the video is fucked as dublicate frames are causing stutter and 24 FPS render was incorrectly encoded into 30 FPS video file, I can see someone actually helping me out in serious manner.

There's also constant rise of new stuff and I do also help with image files, so if my time is taken with flags and replacements, animation approvals can wait. I do also have real life social- and worklife which take time.

mairo said:
There's also much more complications with animations as well. One is that most artists still export as h264 which we don't allow for possible licensing issues as it's commercial format, even if technically speaking VP9 WebM export should be as easy on paper with even similar settings between encoders. Even without that, many artists do stuff like post animations only as GIFs on Pixiv and Twitter where they are now JPG image sequence and absurdly bad quality h264 MP4, etc.

So the moment I start seeing someone commenting how the video is fucked as dublicate frames are causing stutter and 24 FPS render was incorrectly encoded into 30 FPS video file, I can see someone actually helping me out in serious manner.

Mairo, can you write some documentation for the help pages on how to upload videos correctly? Including a list of common problems and how to fix them? And a section on what are the correct encoder settings in programs like ffmpeg? This could be linked to on the Uploading Guidelines page. I think this would be very helpful for anyone looking to help you out, and for users uploading correct images in the first place, and at the very least it would be good to get the thoughts in your head written down for everyone to read.

Also, when will e621 get WebP support? Animated WebP images are vastly superior to GIF.

aaronfranke said:
Mairo, can you write some documentation for the help pages on how to upload videos correctly? Including a list of common problems and how to fix them? And a section on what are the correct encoder settings in programs like ffmpeg? This could be linked to on the Uploading Guidelines page. I think this would be very helpful for anyone looking to help you out, and for users uploading correct images in the first place, and at the very least it would be good to get the thoughts in your head written down for everyone to read.

Also, when will e621 get WebP support? Animated WebP images are vastly superior to GIF.

howto:transcode and convert
I have no time and even if I did, I cannot write or teach in nice manner. I would need someone to do writing from my braind dumb and all I have done throughout the years is use my eyes and google up shit.
And this would only be for stuff that needs to be transcoded and converted and not any other areas. I removed my bio completely as people kept referencing it with outdated information without any personal research and I also haven't had time to update that either.

Did also add tools section here, but the problem with recommending tools is that they change over time, even now youtube-dl is essentially outdated and superseeded by yt-dlp already.
howto:sites_and_sources#tools

WebP last time I checked was derived and limited to VP8 and the fact it can be both lossy and lossless sounds like benefit, but also makes it pain to actually deal with. It would be amazing sample format for previews and thumbnails.
For animations APNG is currently what is supported and works but nobody uses. For images AVIF and HEIF. AV1 support I have bothered sites coders several times about.

mairo said:
One is that most artists still export as h264 which we don't allow for possible licensing issues as it's commercial format, even if technically speaking VP9 WebM export should be as easy on paper with even similar settings between encoders.

VP9 encoding's not supported by CUDA, or OpenCL on non-Intel, sadly. Which makes it massively slower to encode for many people, so h264 is probably gonna be the default setting for a long time to come.

riscyfox said:
VP9 encoding's not supported by CUDA, or OpenCL on non-Intel, sadly. Which makes it massively slower to encode for many people, so h264 is probably gonna be the default setting for a long time to come.

At least decoding seems OK... It's almost worth it to just use an older machine set aside, if that's true about needing specific hardware to do it fast.

Decoding/playback is supported on just about anything these days, yeah. And even so, for short animations it really shouldn't matter much at all whether you have hardware support or not, encoding a short video will take a short time even in software mode. But, because it's slower, it's not the default, and most people just leave their settings on the defaults. :P

EDIT: Because I was curious, I did a quick test. Using a short (~5 minute), low quality (480p) animation: VP9 in software mode (libvpx-vp9 in ffmpeg, single pass constant quality of 30) encoding took about 5 minutes (almost exactly 1:1 timescale), h264 on CUDA (h264_nvenc on ffmpeg with the 'slow' preset) took just over 8 seconds. Larger difference than I had thought!