Entry: 68I saw
Patgroove's journal post about the never ending problem of submissions to the wrong categories by fellow deviant's. He believes that the name of the categories are the issue and suggests the renaming of them. You can see some of the suggested titles for a combined ASCII and ANSI art category
here.
I don't think that the renaming of the categories will do much good to improve on the problem. I just took the time to have a closer look at the current process of selecting the category for your deviation and tried to put myself into the shoes of a newbie, who is not familar with dA very much.
I show my findings in two illustrations with screenshots of the current process and comments added to them. see:
.oOo.

and

.oOo.
I try to illustrate how the category selection for deviations at dA could be improved to make it easier for people to find the right category and avoid the submission to wrong categories.
The current "Gallery Info" button only appears at the final submission category, which can be several levels down the category tree. The user who navigates the tree has no clue, if he already selected the wrong parent or even root category, because there is no information or guidance available to him.
Furthermore, the button at the bottom left on the screen is easy to overlook. I never noticed it myself and only "found it" when I was browing the category selection to see if there is anything more than just the name of the categories available in the process.
My SuggestionThe category browser should show the short description of each category that the user select, right then and on the same page, for example in the lower part of the category selection window (as shown in my illustration)
It is hard to miss and the user is able to see that he already selected the right or wrong top level categories before he navigates further down and there maybe finds a root category that sounds correct again. Also, the "Category Info" page does not reflect the actually hierarchy that the user is browsing. I am illustrate that fact graphically in my first (larger) illustration image.
Tweaking the name might also help, but I think that my suggestion in combination with well formulated short description for each category would help improving on the issue much more.
Here are for example my suggestions for the short description of the categories "Text Art", "ANSI" and "ASCII".
Text ArtCurrent Description: Text art is imagery in which type either stands out on its own or relays a message through its visual appearance.
My Suggestion: Text Art is the creation of visual images made of text characters (such as letters and numbers) where the meaning of the letters is irrelevant and reduced to a tool or method, like the brush-stroke of a painter.
ANSI ArtCurrent Description: ANSI art images created using an extension of ASCII art in which art is created by block and line art.
My Suggestion: ANSI Art is specific ASCII text art created in MS DOS on a PC, making use of the DOS extended character set and control sets of the archaic ANSI.SYS driver, which was depreciated with Windows 2000 and later OS versions.
ASCII ArtCurrent Description: ASCII art images created using the 95 ASCII (out of 128) characters found on standard computer keyboards.
My Suggestion: ASCII art images created using the 95 ASCII (out of 128) characters found on standard computer keyboards and/or the MS DOS extended character set. The characters meaning is irrelevant, they are simply the means to create a visual image of some kind.
Now I will try to figure out how I can send my suggestion to the dA staff via the help desk.

What are your thoughts and oppinions to my recommendation?
Now to another issue, that I just stumbled across because of this news article [link] about the lack of respect and community and the issue of trolls that seems to be increasing more and more. I have a suggestion for that as well 
Trolls and trouble makers are hard to detect by any technical and automated system. Unlike mass spammers are trolls much less active, but more targeted and specific than a blatant spammer who just wants to self-promote himself.
The only weapon against those fellas is the community as a whole. Other social networks have the same problem and deal with it in different ways. One approach that seems to be highly successful is the ability for any member of the community to flag any content created by another member as inappropriate. In the case of dA would it be the deviations, the journal posts, forum posts, news articles and most importantly ANY COMMENTS made by another deviant ANYWHERE on the site.
A troll will become exposed quickly, if his comments (mostly) will be flagged as inappropriate by multiple deviants and not just the deviant the comment was directed to. If somebody writes a bad comment at somebody Else's deviation for example and I see that, I should have the option to "flag" that comment.
dA will need to figure out the threshold of "inappropriate" flags (frequency, from how many deviants, flagged vs. not flagged items ratio etc.) at which point a users behavior should be manually reviewed and decided, if the termination of that user account might be in the interest of the community as a whole. One "flag" or one comment should not be sufficient to trigger a review. This is going to happen to any deviant one day or another, without being a troll.
Enough of this. This post is alreadt way too long hehe.
Roy[SAC]
.oOo. ASCII & ANSI Text Art .oOo.Blog