an unfair proposal (long)

I think this would be a great idea also! I've done the same thing that you have, and broken it down on my own for my larger collections from specific series. It'd be great to have the option built in somehow ...

As far as banning future DBZ galleries.. I totally can understand where you're coming from Jason. Personally, it wouldn't matter to me one way or another - I rarely look at DBZ sites unless it's a friend of mines site.

And E... heh. I definately know what you mean about the jerks in DB/Z/GT driving others away. Thankfully I've also got many other series I enjoy and can collect from. I can't say I "hate" DBZ ... but it's pretty darn close. :P

Sheri

Hey Sheri! ^-^

It's been a while, but you and I know the "story" of DBZ very well, and you (*bowing down*) much better than I. JN now there is an expert opinion (Sheri) if ever you needed one on DBZ. She is a master.

Nice to see you have moved on too btw, and BIG TIME ^-^.

Nothing against DBZ collectors btw, no..not at all, I wish you the best with your collecting. And please help JN clean up the losers.

Peace,

E

Hey all! New to this forum, but those from other cel forums will recognize me =^.^=

As for this whole issue...in the end, it's your site. You're providing US with a FREE service, and if things start to get frustrating for you, then you're allowed to do what you want. Unfortunately, we have no right to complain about what is "fair" when we're not even paying for a service. It's like me complaining about the fact that the free service provider at geocities sucks...it's FREE, so I have no right. If I was paying, then I could lodge a complaint.

Granted, I myself don't think it's fair either...but it's not my site. And I will agree the plethora of DBZ sites gets annoying for a non-DBZ fan, but...well, pedestrians are annoying to me, but that doesn't give me the right to mow them down. Or does it?

As for generalizing...yes, DB/Z/GT fans are generally 13-20 boys who are obnoxious and talk about how cool Goku is, but FY fans are generally 13-20 girls who are equally as obnoxious and get into horrible bitter battles over who gets to marry which other personality void pretty boy from the series (as you can tell, I'm not big into FY. In fact, I think it has all of the allure of watching a potato rot, but I digress). So I think we can safely say that any series has it's stigma, when it comes to fans. This is not a personal attack on anyone, but since I seemed to see that series pop up a lot in this thread, I thought I would just, uh, point that out.

I guess the point of this long-winded diatribe was: your site, your rules, do as you wish. If you feel too much energy is being expelled into something that's a free service created from your generousity...then that's what it is, and that's enough reason to stop it. You don't owe anyone anything.

It all comes down to what you believe is "right" (not necissarily what is "fair", as they are not always the same thing).

-Misha

Wow.

Guess what? There are galleries out there not unlike Rubberslug that have had this exact problem before, only it deals with galleries of artists' *completely original artwork*, not art purchased from others and put on display. I wonder... no, I'm NOT the only one from these galleries to find RS, because I found two other artists already here.

Here's one scenario: Yerf.com (which I eventually left) began receiving floods of original, yet bad, Sonic the Hedgehog fan art. People complained about it, and Sonic art *speficially* was banned. The problem art went away, but only after much complaint. Now the ban's been stretched, but to include artwork of ALL trademarked characters (for legal reasons), and there's generally been few complaints besides the errant stolen pieces.

The others generally go the same way, except Side7.com took in the artists whose Sonic artwork was banned... but then got hit with people who didn't know the difference between "Anime fan art" and "Anime-styled art" (the latter of which can't really be categorized as the former). I think they're still dealing with THAT problem.

But anyway, since cel collecting is quite a bit different from showcasing one's own original artwork, I don't believe that putting a ban on ANY series would work, as much as that would cut down on the problem. It's sort of like making people starve in order to punish one troublemaker. There's going to be troublemakers, regardless--they might just end up moving on to a different series once Dragonball is done being aired in the US.

And I'm going to feel stupid if the "part two" thread agrees with me :) but I'm just killing time anyway...

I looked at the two sites you mentioned, yerf.com and side7.com. How is Rubberslug different?

Compartmentalization. Individual members have strictly limited influence on the public interest. This is by design.

Those sites seem like they can be easily clogged by anyone who feels like uploading pictures of their cat. I could be wrong, since I didn't look at them too much.

Think of RS as a big message board separated by user instead of thread. To participate in a conversation, you're not required to interact with specific users if you choose not to.

You can upload pictures of cats all day here, RS and it's members still wont care because they don't have to "go through" you to get to what they want. It's very difficult for one person here to annoy everyone at once. That's not saying it's completely bulletproof. However, it's much harder for one person to break the system. We could lock it down even more, like by not listing all the galleries, but that would severely cut into the community aspect.

Luckily for us, anime doesn't have the media saturation that would cause a trend change in a matter of weeks. We're looking at an order of months or years. If all the wanna-be DBZ collectors (i.e. - the ones we don't like) move onto something else -- let's say Samurai Pizza Cats makes it big on Cartoon Network -- then the marketing machine would have to kick into high gear for months if not years for a site such as RS to feel the effects.

A more direct example -- Ayashi no Ceres arguably attracts the exact same demographic as Fushigi Yuugi and there's nearly as many FY collectors as DBZ collectors. However, even after more than two years of circulation, AnC collectors aren't nearly as populous as FY collectors.

In summary, I think eventually you'd have to re-evaluate who you block, but it's not a decision that would have to be made on a weekly basis.


jn