Where the Gallery goes from here

Thanks to everyone who's supported this site, and thanks for all the suggestions — and the criticism too.

I built the Gallery submission feature to bring more content onto the site (the discussion boards were the same idea), which in turn was meant to help ad revenue — that's what makes the free features possible in the first place. After a few months of trying, I have to admit it hasn't done that. In some ways it's done the opposite.

I know the image moderation has caused a lot of confusion and frustration. Honestly, it's been frustrating for me too. Every time I open the review page there are thousands of images sitting there. At first clearing it took a few minutes, then an hour, and now actually looking at all of them properly just isn't realistic. I can't approve everything, because a lot of it really shouldn't be public — plenty of posts complain that the AI rules are weird, and fair enough, but it does catch a huge amount. Think about the images you've hit "report" on: the queue has a hundred times that. And I can't reject everything either, because there are genuinely good prompts and image stories buried in there that people put real work into. I also have other work — all of this happens in my free time. So days go by and the pile just keeps growing.

I underestimated this. I'd heard people say that running a content community is basically impossible without a whole company behind it. I didn't get it then. I get it now. I used to think moderation just meant dealing with borderline NSFW stuff. It's much more than that — violence and gore, political content, images insulting real people, disturbing content, copyright issues, religion, anything involving minors, and on and on. How far does something have to go before rejecting it is the right call — without discouraging the person who made it, and without putting the site at risk? And when someone keeps submitting a lot of borderline NSFW images, how do I tell them it's not okay?

Waiting for your image to get approved is tiring. It's tiring on my end too. I don't think the feature as it exists now fits a small site at this stage.

So what now? I haven't figured it all out yet, but here's what's likely:

• The daily submission reward event will be wound down, so submitting goes back to just being normal sharing.
• People who constantly post borderline NSFW images or get reported a lot may get submission access pulled, or banned.
• Manual review won't be on by default anymore. Where the AI is reliably accurate, those rejections will just stand — and if you think the AI got it wrong, you can ask for a human review.
• ...
There'll probably be more. Still thinking. Thanks for sticking with it.