`Peyo` As has been said truthfully many times the site is wonderful! Thus, I of course must ask for more stuff. I just want to make sure any request like this is taken in the proper light of "things are great, here's something to consider" as opposed to "we NEEEED this!" However we kinda neeeeeed this. One thing that would be great is another layer! Right now the top layer is doing a lot of combined work at least on panels I do and one more layer would probably add a lot of dimension to people's work since it gives you a clear layer for background, colors, inks and then overlay effects. That would be the top thing I'd say to consider. The second would be masking, as in the ability to draw an alpha mask that would block out areas of a layer from being drawn on. Having it simply be hard edged would be fine, but if it was 256 levels of transparency of course that would be 256 times better! That would essentially be the equivalent of adding 256 new features. The main issue there would be the strategy of how it would work. I could see it as a thing that each layer could have, but then again being able to use one mask for the entire composition would be excellent. The third and probably the hardest and least likely would be a select and move tool such as lasso selection and rectangle selection. This is the one where I have no idea how it would even be handled so I know it's probably not that practical. However, if practical, it would indeed be wonderful. Thanks for running such a great art site! It's superb! TFD

`karosh` Oh thank you! I loved your ship design and opening panel too (and of course @CocoSplats the coconut water vampire!) I loved the idea of the ship sort of looming at an imposing angle. Very good strip!

Get better soon Peyo! And yes, this site is indeed fully equipped, welcome Karosh!

`jblask` THAT has way more comedic potential! XD

`jblask` Oh sheesh now you tell me! You scared the fairy dust outta me! (luckily not all of it!) X3

`Peyo` That sounds great! Keeping new users sandboxed and having it where you personally checked them out and approved them would pretty much settle it. Vandals thrive on exploitable automatic systems, so anything with hard limits and a need for personal approval from a site owner shuts down almost all vandalous efforts. It would also stop them from playing nice to get one account approved so they can use that approved account to approve other accounts of theirs. Like I said, one thing that was impressive about the setup here is that when the spammer attacked yesterday, unless you were LOOKING for it you wouldn't necessarily even see it. That's good! I think anything else that adds more stumbling blocks for vandals will only make it better.

`Peyo` I think you're doing a great job so I want to say that up front so I don't come across as constantly just nitpicking, but one thing I would caution is make sure that system doesn't give new members (let's say for the sake of argument vandals who are trying to get an "in" in order to vandalize) a motivation to bombard existing users with notices, beg, or bully them to validate them with a friend acceptance. One of the big problems, and you can see this on PanelJam's forum where there have been a lot of discussions between vandals and normal users, is that a lot of people love the idea of vandals turning around and becoming good users or dropping the routine, and they'll constantly give in, giving multiple chances to hope to make that happen. It's a very naive approach. There are a lot of people out there who have no motivation beyond just whipping it out and pissing on everyone. If that seems nasty, I am actually CENSORING myself from what I really mean. But as long as those people get charitable treatment they're going to just piss an endless stream on any given situation, and will not quit. I've seen this a lot. People will isolate others behind the scenes and bully them into being on their side, and will do everything they can to try and get into a position where they can cut loose with another bladder full of piss right on the whole proceedings, and during this, they're thinking forward to the NEXT time they're going to do it. There is no end. Like in the mind of these people there is no "when I stop vandalizing" it's only looking for the next opportunity. So if you're serious about blocking out vandals the approach has to be to give the ordinary user the tools to clamp off that stream of piss. I fully understand wanting to stop them from a site standpoint, but working backwards to that from giving the individual the ability to shield themselves from the endless rain of piss these people produce is a must.

Just to clarify, I didn't mean I think people should be SENT to Panel Jam as a trial I meant we should keep an eye on Panel Jam and invite people from there who would be a good fit. I'm pretty sure sending someone to Panel Jam would qualify as a war crime for about 10 different reasons.

`Peyo` I like the idea of using PJ as a proving ground too!

I say if someone is going to submit a decent 4 panel strip for every account they make, let 'em make as many as they want, I love looking at strips! Also the more someone draws and writes the more identifiers there are for spotting them. So what you want to do is get people posting as much info such as handwriting and graphic style that makes them as easy to spot as possible. I get what you're saying tho, you don't want people making loads of accounts. I think having to do some actual work of a quality that would get you accepted would solve a lot of it, too. These freakshows don't even have the work ethic it takes to spam the old fashioned way and have to be script kiddies, so they're pretty creativity-averse.

I say, verification should consist of a new user doing a 4 panel comic on their own and submitting it for approval, and until it get approved they don't get access. You don't want someone who can't swing 4 panels on here anyway. They'd be a liability! They might walk into a door frame and hurt themselves.

`Peyo` What I was thinking of is they'd end up in the message archive, thus somewhat defeating the usefulness of a message archive. Also there may be cases where people want to save messages, and having someone able to come in and load it up with spam wouldn't be that great.

`Painovoima` It was you but I didn't want to mention it unless it was okay with you! Apparently it is.

`Peyo` Oh I didn't know that was implemented, wonderful! I thought comments were open and had to be removed on a comment by comment basis. I think concentrating on stopping people from making extraneous accounts is a good thing of course, but, if you can put in tools so that effectively someone using the average entry-level account simply can't be seen by a user who doesn't want to see them, that's getting ahead of it. If you can do that primarily, then it makes the stopping of extraneous accounts an important, but not immediate, issue. For example I noticed the vandal was doing @ to another user in a burst of the messages. Does that mean that user will have to manually look at and delete hundreds of messages, or else choose to delete all messages? That could be an issue possibly.

`Peyo` Also an option needs to exist to limit comments on friend games only to friends. While the current ability to flick out offending panels and comments is good, if someone uses a script to spam hundreds of comments at a time it will render those options useless, and flood the game owner's message box to a terminal level.

If someone wasn't actively looking for comments, that attack actually wouldn't have been visible to users unless they were viewing those specific threads or checking the feed. So you're just a couple measures away from shutting out vandalism from the view of the average user who is willing to put measures to use themselves.

`Peyo` Don't forget this one: https://pchutney.com/user/72

Maybe consider that friends-only feed or being able to block a user from your own personal feed! If that was in place someone like this would be trivial for any user to never see.

`Peyo` Thanks!!! Right where it should have been, I just flaked on remembering what was where on the site. Problem existed between trashcan and keyboard! (PEBTAK)

`Peyo` This might just be me missing the obvious, and it's just a test so isn't a serious matter but I wanted to report what was happening. Wanting to test some methods with the animation engine, I created a new animation with 9 panels and set it secret. I edited each panel one after the other minimally and saved them until it reached completion, at which point it was posted to the site. (this chain of events was intentional for a test) I then edited it, and bumped the frame count up to 12 I think, and saved the edit. When I checked the main site my icon was replaced with a question mark and the strip was simply represented by the title "secret." So far so good. Now comes the question: How do I find this strip again to edit it? I was able to find it since I knew if I hacked the number of it in I could view it, so practically, I can edit the project no problem. But is there another way for me to access it or is hacking the panel number in manually the only way?

`Dobby` Dobby click the show frames button, then once all the frames are shown in your browser, right click off to the side in the dead space of the page and select "Save As..." and in the options change it to "Webpage Complete" and choose a spot on your comp, and save. It will create an HTML document and a folder containing assets. You can delete the HTML document if you want, because it's the folder you're interested in. Pop it open and inside it you'll find all your animation frames saved as sequentially numbered images! There will also be a bunch of other assets saved you can delete if you wish. Super Easy! Also, great animation you have made!

I stole the friend feed idea from Barococopper!!! It is (t) and (c) Barococopper donut steel. And yes that's right about the feed everything I suggested I meant as a local effect that doesn't impact anyone but the client.

`Peyo` something I was thinking about is that one of the few routes anyone has to try and dominate/vandalize this site is to simply attempt to clog the feed with massive amounts of submissions. A good way to render this useless without hindering anyone's free expression would be the ability to block a user from appearing in your personal feed. That way if someone started to get out of control it would be easy for users to just block their feed submissions and only see what everyone else is doing. Another good option in addition might be a friends only feed where you only see the feed from people on your friend list. This would be handy if you just wanted to check what others you follow are up to.

`DeadRat` Also check out the protection for friend games! You can switch a game to friend mode at any time and kick out panels and delete comments so it turns the creator of a strip into its moderator if they so choose.

`DeadRat` Yeah really! There are some good tools here for protecting games if it ever got necessary which is a nice improvement over PJ.

The sad truth is, other sites (not just PJ but generally all of them) have set such a low standard for quality of life and useful features that on a site like this where the creator is actually trying to improve the feature set and make it useful, it seems almost beyond belief. When things get dumbed down sufficiently, competence seems like sorcery and ambition seems miraculous.

Oh he's a battery so we were just trying to get the whole - and + terminals thing sorted out! Just got to keep testing.

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That's one of the things that always has to be considered when running any site (or even just an effort such as an art room) is "What will happen if someone who wants to make a career of camping this site comes along?" There are millions of people who will literally grind day in and day out on tasks in MMO's and pay for the privilege, so it's natural there will be people who would love nothing more than to do the dumbest stuff imaginable on an art site, forum, or anything, and simply not let up. Those are the people who must be guarded against when setting an activity up. "What if someone comes along and decides to do the absolutely stupid to try and dominate the scene?" That's why it's great when users have the tools needed to fence off their efforts. Taking inspiration from the novel 1984, "If you want a picture of the future of the internet, imagine someone posting the same crudely made unfunny idea, forever."