I get it, after some time there is a chance the author can upload a previous art of higher quality and the new source have a bigger resolution and quality.

Still find a bit weird that for now all replacements for some of my uploads have the exact size and resolution, but that didn't bothered me because in the report it says "not penalized".

But I saw some recent replacements that do say "penalized", tried to find something in the wiki or something about what that means (less uploads limits, etc) but found nothing, just want to be sure that I am not penalized just because I can't foresee the future about the author uploads on pixiv and he has a big problem of not uploading everything like some nice sketches...

Maybe it's penalized because their Twitter profile has been banned but that's also something I can't foresee, as you can see I am pretty confused lol.

If you look at "Upload limit" on your profile, you can see on the second set of parentheses an underlined number that represents your replaced, or deleted posts (Hold your mouse over it to verify!) and you can see directly how it affects your upload limit. In your case, you still are allowed to have up to 93 pending posts at once, and your replaced posts are taking away 2, so I wouldn't stress about it.

Help:Upload limit

I get it, just don't want to one day wake up and see I dunno 50 replacement notices just because one week later the author finally uploaded on their pixiv, that gives me a message that I should forget about Twitter and only wait for when it appears on that page.

notknow said:
But I saw some recent replacements that do say "penalized", tried to find something in the wiki or something about what that means (less uploads limits, etc) but found nothing, just want to be sure that I am not penalized just because I can't foresee the future about the author uploads on pixiv and he has a big problem of not uploading everything like some nice sketches...

Maybe it's penalized because their Twitter profile has been banned but that's also something I can't foresee, as you can see I am pretty confused lol.

Replacements can be penalized or non-penalized when approved. A replacement approval without a penalty doesn't affect the original uploader's upload limit. It has the same effect as if they hadn't uploaded that picture in the first place. A replacement approval with a penalty counts the same as a regular deleted post. The original uploader would need four of these replacement penalties to have their upload limit reduced by one, same as if they'd had four posts deleted via other reasons. It's not really all that much of a penalty.

I get it, just don't want to one day wake up and see I dunno 50 replacement notices just because one week later the author finally uploaded on their pixiv, that gives me a message that I should forget about Twitter and only wait for when it appears on that page.

In general, replacements are only penalized if the original uploader "should have known better" (which sounds harsher than it really is). A common reason is that the picture is already available on several galleries when it's uploaded to e621, but different galleries have different resolutions and the uploader grabs the wrong one. An infamous example is FurAffinity. Even today, it imposes limits to pictures uploaded to it, even if they aren't the old 1280x1280 limitation, but another site, such as Twitter or Inkbunny can have a much higher resolution. However, if a user either unfamiliar with an artist's other galleries or is simply not paying proper attention posts the FA version when those other resolutions are also available, they will get penalized when the picture gets replaced. Replacing an FA .png with a Twitter .jpg is common because of that (if the Twitter .jpg is a much higher resolution than the FA .png, it can actually have more information in the picture despite its artifacting), but replacing a Twitter picture is also common when the original uploader forgets to change that ending bit of the picture's url to orig, which also gets penalized. About the only way to avoid this penalty is to be aware of as many galleries the artists uploads as you can, have a reasonable idea of their upload frequencies, and make sure you're grabbing the best version of the picture from the site instead of a reduced-size version. Needless to say, uploading a paywalled picture will not just get you a replacement with penalty if there's a smaller free version available, but also a record. Another way to avoid a penalty is to provide that replacement yourself, which can be a bit of a race, sometimes.

But now, you're wondering about your hypothetical situation, in which a Twitter picture gets uploaded one day, but a Pixiv version comes along, say, a month later. In that scenario, you wouldn't be penalized. You provided the best quality free version available at the time. How could you possibly "have known better"?

I wonder why, if the penalty can just be turned off, is all the grandfathered content not just removed? I heard the reason for it staying was so that uploaders wouldn't be penalized

cloudpie said:
I wonder why, if the penalty can just be turned off, is all the grandfathered content not just removed? I heard the reason for it staying was so that uploaders wouldn't be penalized

At the time, it was valid uploading content. It seems rather cheap to nuke it all just because it's not valid now. (For-pay stuff was an exception.) Besides, regular old deleting a post will still net a user that 1/4 post penalty regardless, so a lot of users could potentially have their upload limits wiped out through no fault of their own if grandfathered content got nuked.

Twitter has an effective resolution limit and resizing, too, right? It's sad that FA sources now are not reliable.

clawstripe said:
Replacing an FA .png with a Twitter .jpg is common because of that (if the Twitter .jpg is a much higher resolution than the FA .png, it can actually have more information in the picture despite its artifacting)

It's the opposite, actually. Replacing a Twitter .jpg with an FA .png is common, because lossless PNGs are preferred over lossy JPGs even if the PNG is smaller. In the past with FA's old 1280p limit, resized images would be converted to JPG so Twitter's larger JPG would be better than FA's smaller JPG since they're both badly compressed anyway. But with the FA update, PNG images stay as PNG when resized.

clawstripe said:
But now, you're wondering about your hypothetical situation, in which a Twitter picture gets uploaded one day, but a Pixiv version comes along, say, a month later. In that scenario, you wouldn't be penalized. You provided the best quality free version available at the time. How could you possibly "have known better"?

That seems to be hit and miss. I've seen people (and have been myself) penalized for a replacement image despite the replacement not being available at the time the original was uploaded. Might have just been because the moderator accepting the replacement wasn't aware (which is why I try to make a note of it in the replacement reason if the replacement was a recent upload from the original post), but I've seen it still happen.

alphamule said:
Twitter has an effective resolution limit and resizing, too, right? It's sad that FA sources now are not reliable.

Yes, Twitter seems to max out at 4096 for width or height (whichever's larger). It'll also sometimes resize images up or down to have a width or height of 1024, 2048, or 4096 if it's "close enough" (though sometimes not; there doesn't seem to be any particular pattern or reason for why it does for some and not others). What's more annoying is when artists posts JPGs to FA, DA, Pixiv and Twitter, and only the Twitter post gets sourced here because sometimes Twitter will recompress JPGs making the FA/DA/Pixiv JPG better, but sometimes not. You have to do some pixel-hunting to determine if there's more artifacting on the JPG posted here from Twitter vs the one on FA/DA/Pixiv to tell if a replacement is warranted, or if just adding the FA/DA/Pixiv sources is sufficient.

Whenever Twitter is used as a primary source for a post, it's nothing but ambiguity about whether there's a better version somewhere else that's worth digging up (on top of forcing poor JPG image quality). Twitter makes everything worse.

watsit said:
It's the opposite, actually. Replacing a Twitter .jpg with an FA .png is common, because lossless PNGs are preferred over lossy JPGs even if the PNG is smaller. In the past with FA's old 1280p limit, resized images would be converted to JPG so Twitter's larger JPG would be better than FA's smaller JPG since they're both badly compressed anyway. But with the FA update, PNG images stay as PNG when resized.

They're both common. The FA .png is indeed preferable a lot of the time when the Twitter .jpg is close to the same size. But FA still enjoys screwing with artists, so it's also not uncommon for the Twitter .jpg to be significantly larger than the FA .png. I'm not talking about a 1020x900 .png versus an 1110x988 .jpg. I'm talking about a 1020x900 .png versus a 2153x1900 .jpg. In the first case, we'd obviously rather keep the .png despite it being smaller sized, but in the second case, the .jpg actually contains more valid and undamaged information in the picture in spite of the artifacting. There's many times when this disparity in size is even greater. It is those second cases that are when the .jpgs are actually more desirable.

When there's multiple sources, I generally prefer to look at non-FA, non-Twitter sources like DA, Inkbunny, Newgrounds, Itaku, Pixiv, and the like, since they're more likely to have the best versions available than either FA or Twitter. But FA and Twitter are the two big sources for furry art, and artists often don't want to go to the effort of mirroring their art on other sites for whatever reason, so we can be stuck between choosing which is the lesser evil upon art.

That seems to be hit and miss. I've seen people (and have been myself) penalized for a replacement image despite the replacement not being available at the time the original was uploaded. Might have just been because the moderator accepting the replacement wasn't aware (which is why I try to make a note of it in the replacement reason if the replacement was a recent upload from the original post), but I've seen it still happen.

I spoke of an ideal, averaged guidelines by approvers always on top of their game and all equally of like mind. You speak of what we end up with in reality, a not always consistent hodgepodge of individuals who can feel fatigue, make mistakes, aren't necessarily working from the exact same parameters as everyone else is, and basically are human and not robots. If you feel you've been penalized unfairly and feel it's not a windmill to tilt at, politely discuss it with the approver. Otherwise, it's just one-fourth of one point on your upload score, which is not much of a penalty.

Your making a note of it in the replacement reason is a very good idea. Ideally, all replacements should have their reasons documented. Thank you.

Twitter makes everything worse.

Yes, and FA isn't much better. Both drive us up a tree too.

Partly stuff like this is why I wish artists and commissioners would upload it themselves. They likely have the 16MP lossless source! XD

I've actually recommended to some artists that they upload their (free) stuff to GumRoad as archives, then get tips for the convenience of both lossless raws and not needing to effectively be scraping some site (even if manually saved, it's still scraping from website's POV). Even with some minimum donation amount like $3-5, that's often fair. It's apparently not well-known that you can do free items there yet allow 'boosting' outside of it's artist userbase? Booth.pm was good at this until they went all bureaucratic & annoyed the hell out of artists! :facepalm:

An obnoxious thing (SEO-related?) is to resize images to a higher resolution so that image searches show them as the bigger resolution.

alphamule said:
Even with some minimum donation amount like $3-5, that's often fair.

Which would disallow it from be posted here, by making it pay content. If you have to pay any amount to get it, or if it's otherwise generating ad revenue for the artist, it's pay content and DNP.

watsit said:
Which would disallow it from be posted here, by making it pay content. If you have to pay any amount to get it, or if it's otherwise generating ad revenue for the artist, it's pay content and DNP.

I get what you're saying, but your comment implies commissions are dnp.

I think what you meant is that if something requires a payment to be seen then it ain't allowed here. Dunno if this is what Alphamule was getting at.

clawstripe said:
But now, you're wondering about your hypothetical situation, in which a Twitter picture gets uploaded one day, but a Pixiv version comes along, say, a month later. In that scenario, you wouldn't be penalized. You provided the best quality free version available at the time. How could you possibly "have known better"?

Well that actually happened lol but I am calm now, making the thread helped lol.

The replacement case described in the OP doesn't happen too often where artists upload a poor quality version first, which gets uploaded to e621, and afterward the artist makes available a higher quality version. Yes, it happens. Artists do preview lower quality versions to incentivize paywall support, claiming to release everything in full quality sometime later. I feel like artists claiming this often don't live up to their pledge completely and seldom at their stated public release schedule. This is an issue of professionalism for many amateur artists. What might happen more often is that artists use Twitter/FurAffinity as their primary active account and sporadically, months or years later, burst-upload their art in higher quality to better sources like Pixiv, where they want a presence but do not actively maintain it. Unfortunately, sometimes artists who upload to better sources merely reupload their garbage quality Twitter posts.

On e621, what I think tends to happen is the uploader was careless, didn't do a few minutes of research to figure out an artist's best source(s), and just uploaded to e621 something they happened upon and thought was worthy. This is very often content from Twitter, presumably due to its wide and rapid exposure. Something else I tend to find is an e621 user uploads from an artist's gallery (good), but the artist posts consistently lower res versions to that gallery (uh oh!). Most of their art is commissions, and they give commissioners the high quality version to do whatever with. Those commissioners are often not too hard to track down, and if they're on InkBunny at least, the commissioners are very likely to upload the full quality versions to their account. I've been marking such posts with the bvas tag, adding the superior source link, and letting someone with replacement permissions do the easy final step.

E621's artist ? pages are, on average, decently sourced and a good starting point for researching potentially higher quality sources. Some of our artist pages are excellent, containing information that'd be very difficult for even experienced users to locate. Good artists will crosslink their various accounts and galleries in their profiles, ideally using a link manager like carrd or linktree. Saucenao produces some good leads, but may take a few pieces of art to discover alternative accounts. Then there's good, old fashioned Googling artist names and searching those artist names on various art hosting sites. Unfortunately, this unearths auxiliary, non-crosslinked, abandoned, or "low profile" accounts far too often. Commissioner posts are actually pretty good leads because they usually credit the artist, often direct linking to the artist's account where they placed their commission or the artist's primary account or they'll at least say "[such and such artist] over on [previously unknown artist account]." Happens far too often where that's a new lead. Our own post sources on E621 are also good leads because sometimes those sites just weren't added to our wiki for the artist.

Finally, I want to say that the two major dings to my account from replacements were both self-reports. I marked my own uploads with bvas (22/24) after I found the superior sources, which are absolutely outside even advanced expectations of uploader diligence. The first major ding was Plurk as a source, an artist's social media gallery I scrolled entirely. I invite anyone to try sourcing from Plurk. Browsing it is even worse than Twitter because it doesn't have a "media" tab, but Plurk can host full quality PNGs as I discovered (but also does downscaling often?). Sometimes artists post the art in comments to their own posts, which isn't searchable? The second big ding (yesterday) was an artist I spotted uploading their own stuff to Paheal (checked on a whim), which is normally not a trustworthy source and often won't even pop up in Google. And a thumbnail that FurAffinity couldn't create because the original file was too large (lol) that I clicked on a whim, and a commissioner uploading their art to rule34 xxx. Of course, I had already made peace with the dings or I wouldn't tag my own posts bvas.

Ayo, what in the world are post replacements, and is there an announcement about them or ANY info about them anywhere? These seem cool and all but I just stumbled across them and am a bit stumped because this causes some issues trying to find a post via old metadata.

Imagine the scenario I'm running into:

I have an image file of post #3121128 downloaded but I don't necessarily know that post ID, I just have the file. I grab the md5, in my case it's the "original" so it's md5:8d988bc057c8eb02d46d2753e995f03b. At the moment I use the https://e621.net/db_export/ of posts for a bunch of things. Up until now I could search that for the md5 and get the post ID, even if it's deleted or whatever.

I still have a posts-2023-02-15.csv and it has an entry 3121128,55747,2022-01-13 19:01:25.742462,8d988bc057c8eb02d46d2753e995f03b,......

I just "updated" my local file to posts-2023-05-09.csv and it only has 3121128,55747,2022-01-13 19:01:25.742462,e5d11da21f1cce525b32c29db6e0ed78,...... with the replacement md5sum. That seems _hella_ inconvenient imo.

I can't even search the site for md5:8d988bc057c8eb02d46d2753e995f03b status:anyeither it just turns up nothing. Is there some new syntax for this? Is there going to be a fix to find posts via old checksum?

I did also stumble across https://e621.net/post_replacements from the history links section of posts, but I'm not even sure if this has an API endpoint to get maybe a json out of it. Or maybe the replacements data will be another db_export?...

Is this a fresh feature you guys are still cooking up? I admit I only skimmed this thread for now, looking for any mention of the checksums and such.

emserdalf said:
Ayo, what in the world are post replacements, and is there an announcement about them or ANY info about them anywhere? These seem cool and all but I just stumbled across them and am a bit stumped because this causes some issues trying to find a post via old metadata.

...

Is this a fresh feature you guys are still cooking up? I admit I only skimmed this thread for now, looking for any mention of the checksums and such.

It's been in closed beta for a while now, and only for people who are good at finding better versions of existing posts (like larger versions or PNGs over JPGs), or if you ask politely, whichever comes first.

Unlike with flagging something as inferior, the comments, votes, and parent/child posts are transferred over.

emserdalf said:
Ayo, what in the world are post replacements, and is there an announcement about them or ANY info about them anywhere? These seem cool and all but I just stumbled across them and am a bit stumped because this causes some issues trying to find a post via old metadata.
...
Is this a fresh feature you guys are still cooking up? I admit I only skimmed this thread for now, looking for any mention of the checksums and such.

Post replacements are simply that: replacing the picture that is uploaded here as a post with another, better quality version of that picture. Examples include replacing a .jpg with an identically-sized .png or replacing a picture with a larger-sized version. Granted, these are not always bigger or lossless replacements. The above-mentioned huge Twitter .jpg versus little FA .png happens, as does replacing a large Patreon-exclusive picture with a smaller free version.

This was a feature rolled out for selected users to test back when the site was redone to updated software. It's eventually intended to be allowed more widespread use, but when this will happen is currently unknown. Before the site update, replacements were made by uploading the new, superior version to the site as a separate upload and then flag the original, inferior version for deletion. This is still possible, but the post replacements feature has the advantage of preserving comments, up/downvotes, and any parent/child relationships. As to how to fix your searching issue, I haven't a clue. Programming isn't one of my skills.

notknow said:
I get it, just don't want to one day wake up and see I dunno 50 replacement notices just because one week later the author finally uploaded on their pixiv, that gives me a message that I should forget about Twitter and only wait for when it appears on that page.

this kind of thing just happened to me, before i had like 5 replacement, but now i have over 40. and whats more annoying some are replaced from the same source as i got it from so im just like why are these replaced i got them from the only source. and im penalized with it all so i went from like an 18 post limit to now 6.

flux-yiff said:
this kind of thing just happened to me, before i had like 5 replacement, but now i have over 40. and whats more annoying some are replaced from the same source as i got it from so im just like why are these replaced i got them from the only source. and im penalized with it all so i went from like an 18 post limit to now 6.

Was the source Twitter? If so, make sure the url of the image ends in orig and not something like small, large, or 900x900. If it's on another site, you may find it better, when right clicking on the image, to choose "Open Link in New Tab". Without knowing what that site is, we can't really advise on how to avoid grabbing the wrong size of the picture.

clawstripe said:
Was the source Twitter? If so, make sure the url of the image ends in orig and not something like small, large, or 900x900. If it's on another site, you may find it better, when right clicking on the image, to choose "Open Link in New Tab". Without knowing what that site is, we can't really advise on how to avoid grabbing the wrong size of the picture.

https://e621.net/post_replacements?search%5Buploader_id_on_approve%5D=243840

FA, DA and Twitter.

clawstripe said:
Was the source Twitter? If so, make sure the url of the image ends in orig and not something like small, large, or 900x900. If it's on another site, you may find it better, when right clicking on the image, to choose "Open Link in New Tab". Without knowing what that site is, we can't really advise on how to avoid grabbing the wrong size of the picture.

yeah most were twitter, like 2 DAs, and at least 1 was FA

kemonophonic said:
https://e621.net/post_replacements?search%5Buploader_id_on_approve%5D=243840

FA, DA and Twitter.

flux-yiff said:
yeah most were twitter, and at least 1 was FA

There's three different things tripping you up. For the replacements coming from Twitter, those would have been avoided by changing the very end of the image's url to name=orig instead of what you originally get. That way, the original size file would have been grabbed. It's actually a common mistake, so you're not alone there.

What screwed you on DA was that you right clicked on the image you got on the page, which was actually a smaller preview image. There's two ways to get around this. Ideally, the best way is to look underneath that picture and click on that downward pointing arrow that says "Free download" when hovered over. That gets you the file you can then upload to e621. If you don't want to do this, would rather have e621 grab it directly, or that arrow isn't there, click on the picture itself to make it as big as possible, then right click on it and choose "Open Image in New Tab". You can either save the resulting picture or use the url in the Source field when uploading it to e621. Check in the description to see what the resolution of the picture is to compare it to the one given on the upload page.

Note: Sometimes, the descriptions of DA pictures that don't have a Free Download button will give a larger size for the picture than can be gotten via the enlarge-right click-save method above. If you can't get to the full-sized picture by either of the methods I gave above, just use the one you can get. E621's policy is to respect the artist's wishes, and if they don't provide the full-sized picture on DA, then we shouldn't use any gimcrackery to circumvent that.

On your sole FA-sourced replacement, I think it was the artist themself who got you there. That picture was originally posted to FA in 2019, well before FA's 1280x1280 resolution limit was removed, thus FA forcibly resized the actual file uploaded to it so it would fit those dimensions. However, there was an exploit that allowed artists to get around this, and that was to update the source file and replace the shrunk picture with the properly-sized one. Naturally, there'd be a space of time between the original upload and its update, and you happened to snag that picture during that timeframe. (To be fair, there could have been quite a bit of time in that space. There's no guarantee the artist knew about the reupload trick when they first uploaded that picture.)

I hope these help, and good luck rebuilding your upload limit.

clawstripe said:
There's three different things tripping you up. For the replacements coming from Twitter, those would have been avoided by changing the very end of the image's url to name=orig instead of what you originally get. That way, the original size file would have been grabbed. It's actually a common mistake, so you're not alone there.

What screwed you on DA was that you right clicked on the image you got on the page, which was actually a smaller preview image. There's two ways to get around this. Ideally, the best way is to look underneath that picture and click on that downward pointing arrow that says "Free download" when hovered over. That gets you the file you can then upload to e621. If you don't want to do this, would rather have e621 grab it directly, or that arrow isn't there, click on the picture itself to make it as big as possible, then right click on it and choose "Open Image in New Tab". You can either save the resulting picture or use the url in the Source field when uploading it to e621. Check in the description to see what the resolution of the picture is to compare it to the one given on the upload page.

Note: Sometimes, the descriptions of DA pictures that don't have a Free Download button will give a larger size for the picture than can be gotten via the enlarge-right click-save method above. If you can't get to the full-sized picture by either of the methods I gave above, just use the one you can get. E621's policy is to respect the artist's wishes, and if they don't provide the full-sized picture on DA, then we shouldn't use any gimcrackery to circumvent that.

On your sole FA-sourced replacement, I think it was the artist themself who got you there. That picture was originally posted to FA in 2019, well before FA's 1280x1280 resolution limit was removed, thus FA forcibly resized the actual file uploaded to it so it would fit those dimensions. However, there was an exploit that allowed artists to get around this, and that was to update the source file and replace the shrunk picture with the properly-sized one. Naturally, there'd be a space of time between the original upload and its update, and you happened to snag that picture during that timeframe. (To be fair, there could have been quite a bit of time in that space. There's no guarantee the artist knew about the reupload trick when they first uploaded that picture.)

I hope these help, and good luck rebuilding your upload limit.

yes that will help me in the future, and it sucks to be penalized for this stuff i didn't know but it is what it is so thank you for the info and i hope to post better now :)

also i think it could be nice if in the replacement post page it also showed what original file size you posted, along with the new/current sizes it already has. i just think it might help show what the difference in posts were over just the updated information. since reason=larger is overall vague to me on how much of a change it was or why it was before this new understanding here.

alphamule said:
Partly stuff like this is why I wish artists and commissioners would upload it themselves. They likely have the 16MP lossless source! XD

I've actually recommended to some artists that they upload their (free) stuff to GumRoad as archives, then get tips for the convenience of both lossless raws and not needing to effectively be scraping some site (even if manually saved, it's still scraping from website's POV). Even with some minimum donation amount like $3-5, that's often fair. It's apparently not well-known that you can do free items there yet allow 'boosting' outside of it's artist userbase? Booth.pm was good at this until they went all bureaucratic & annoyed the hell out of artists! :facepalm:

An obnoxious thing (SEO-related?) is to resize images to a higher resolution so that image searches show them as the bigger resolution.

watsit said:
Which would disallow it from be posted here, by making it pay content. If you have to pay any amount to get it, or if it's otherwise generating ad revenue for the artist, it's pay content and DNP.

wolfmanfur said:
I get what you're saying, but your comment implies commissions are dnp.

I think what you meant is that if something requires a payment to be seen then it ain't allowed here. Dunno if this is what Alphamule was getting at.

Yeah, "Donation" and "Free". You're allowed to upload same exact files if available for free (not the full-sized stuff like many Patreon/Subscribe* users have) . The donation is just that, not a paywall. Some sites let you add money to free things as a tip.

One of the problems with having someone able to replace their own posts is you'll very rarely get vandals like people that use that maliciously.

flux-yiff said:
yes that will help me in the future, and it sucks to be penalized for this stuff i didn't know but it is what it is so thank you for the info and i hope to post better now :)

Good luck. I'm sure you'll do fine. :)

also i think it could be nice if in the replacement post page it also showed what original file size you posted, along with the new/current sizes it already has. i just think it might help show what the difference in posts were over just the updated information. since reason=larger is overall vague to me on how much of a change it was or why it was before this new understanding here.

Technically, there's more than one version of the Uploads page. There's the one you get from your User page, which isn't all that helpful, to be honest, and then there's one you get when you go to the post's page itself. Go way down the left side to under History and choose "Replacements". That will give you all the replacement versions of the picture that were uploaded, including the original. Unfortunately, both pages are confusing, even to veteran Admins, and I've both been reported and been yelled at via Dmail by upset users. Trust me, it's definitely on Earlopain's long to-do list.