I'm both surprised and grateful for the response to yesterday's "A concerned bomber" blog. I was expecting it to sit there unnoticed, like all the blogs I've written for other sites. Needless to say, it's nice to read all the good responses, and a definite plus for Giant Bomb.

That said, yesterday's post didn't explore any possible solutions for the image issue, and some of the other problems currently going on with this site. It's only fitting to look into that today.

Currently, screenshots are worth three points (one each for the game, the screenshots gallery, and the system screenshots gallery), and box art is worth two points (for the game and the box art gallery). Using this scoring system, it takes 334 to 500 images to reach 1,000 points.

My initial idea of a solution for the situation of image spamming was to drop all image submissions to a flat one point, regardless of how many galleries they fit in. Certainly such a move would put more emphasis on the writing portion of Giant Bomb, while discouraging image spamming by requiring another 500 to 666 images to reach 1,000. Is this fair for someone who may not be very good at writing, and wants to take screenshots and scan box art of rare and hard-to-find games? For that matter, how important are screenshots in comparison to the text in articles?

Both questions I cannot answer definitively.

Another idea that's run through my head is capping the number of screenshots a single user can submit to one gallery, or reducing the points from two or three down to one after so many images. However, this likely flies in the face of Giant Bomb's intent, and discouraging information overload probably isn't a good idea.

There aren't any easy answers when trying to judge how much effort goes into screenshots. While it's certainly not as difficult to moderate images compared to text (as a few of you pointed out), it's nearly impossible to know what the submitter went through to get an image. Did they fire up a game console and use some form of a TV tuner or capture card to take pictures? Did they scan boxes themselves? Did they use Google to find relevant images from other sites?

Again, no easy answers.

One feature I would like to see is the ability to mark images in the same gallery as duplicates. The submission queue's created this issue, and perhaps in a few rare cases two users might submit the same image to separate pages or categories, unaware of each other's work. I envision a system where a user who finds duplicates clicks to edit one, uses a "Report Duplicate" feature to search the site and grab the other one, and submit the images to mods for review. If indeed the two images are alike, the higher-rez or oldest-submitted image remains and uses the galleries of both images.

There's also talk on other blogs about the possibility of letting users see content in the submission queue for a page, to prevent unnecessary repetition that's plaguing many popular games. I think that would be interesting, but I'd settle for a message telling me someone's already waiting in the submission queue for the overview write-up. Maybe something like, "WARNING! Luchadeer already sees a submission pending for this article. Do you still want to continue?" In addition, I'd enjoy the ability to edit my articles waiting in the submission queue, even if it means sending them to the back of the line. I ended up making a few crucial errors regarding the enemies of AD&D: Cloudy Mountain, and it's bothering me a little. More on that another time.

Finally, I'd like to point out Kowalski's entry about making it to 1,000 without massive image spam. He really put his focus over a lot of pages, which is something I haven't done myself. Then again, I probably won't end up making it to 1,000 for another month, as my work ethic is generally slower than most people. For me, article writing is 33% typing, 50% pacing around in thought, and 17% distraction.

Good luck with the submission queue and the trek to 1k, everyone. I'm hoping today's the day my Astrosmash article is accepted-oh, what do you know, it was accepted as I was writing this. Fancy that.