Freesound Forums

I am a bit wary about starting a thread on this but here goes . . .

To everybody who keeps posting "where are my sounds?" Please stop. There are no bugs. This a free and moderated resource site, which comes at the cost of other people's time. The moderators are volunteers.

Sometimes my sounds take 1-2 days, sometimes 2 weeks. This is perfectly reasonable. Remixes can cause questions of copyright which can cause delays. Loops of "questionable" length may possibly raise questions (freesound is for sounds not songs) If a sound gets rejected you will receive an email. Sometimes there are just a lot of sounds in the queue, or there is a lot of work happening behind the scenes to keep improving this site.

There are some really interesting threads (production techniques, articles, requests) which drop off the front page because people continue threads pestering the moderators about their sounds. It's just not necessary people, be patient.

Once moderated your sound is up here forever and ever, so does it really matter if it takes two weeks to get here?

Now I have been grumpy I would like to say thanks again to eveybody involved in this site, the technicians, moderators and sound contributors.

Wonderful!

Somewhat I disagree. Sometimes there is no other way to point, that something in moderation is missing. Freesound is an ecosystem, and like each ecosystem - for proper balance it needs all kind of activities. Also - questions like "where are my sounds". Because these questions, their amount, and rate per amount of time, intensity - are indicators of something; they also help to develop new, more effective procedures, and they help to keep healthy balance between "cells" within the ecosystem. Or not?

Somtimes things go wrong. Sometimes a user things they uploaded sounds and those are pending moderation but they were never received. These errors happen very rarely (maybe once for every 10,000 sounds uploaded), but sometimes they happen. - So, if something seems wrong, please check.

Most of the time, it is simply the case that there are no moderators available to moderate files fast enough. - All mods are volunteers. We don't moderate files for 8 hours a day like you would in a normal job. We do it in our spare time, between work, family, the weekly shopping and walking the dog...
Sometimes people are away or they have pressing schedules at work or in their private life, and they can't moderate at all. Because we are a team and there are a few of us, usually there is always someone around. But sometimes, just not enough to keep up with uploads.

More moderations less dogs
I've always been misunderstood `cos I have never complained on moderators.
But will be always against `whitelist` and special treatment.

zagi2 wrote:
More moderations less dogs
I've always been misunderstood `cos I have never complained on moderators.
But will be always against `whitelist` and special treatment.

If my memory serves me right, you have complained many times, quite brutally in fact.

Do you find the whitelist discriminating?

I would like to know your reasoning behind this notion.

Thanks

zagi2 wrote:
More moderations less dogs
I've always been misunderstood `cos I have never complained on moderators.
But will be always against `whitelist` and special treatment.

There is no special treatment: sounds are pulled by moderators in the order they arrive to the general moderation queue. Sometimes a moderator will pull 100 sounds from 10 different users, so it might take him a while to go through all of those.
Another moderator could come to the general queue in the meantime and pull another 10 sounds and moderate all of those quickly - so some of those sounds would technically have been moderated ahead of other sounds in the general queue. But there is no way we can control this. The current system allows sevarl moderators to pull sounds and work on them in parallel, so allows for the fastest moderation.

People who have contributed enough sounds and who have shown they consistently respect copyright and site rules and use good tags and descriptions don't really require their sounds to be moderated - moderation is there to assure (as much as possible) that no copyrighted material enters the Freesound database, and that descriptions and tags are of an acceptable standard to allow the sounds to be found by searches. LAtely, the mods have also been rejecting an incredible amount of sound SPAM (you would not believe it!)
These people then get whitelisted, which benefits everyone:
- Their sounds get into the database quicker
- More sounds on the databse for everyone to use
- Moderators can spend their time reviewing the sounds that actually need to be moderated.

Headphaze wrote:

zagi2 wrote:
More moderations less dogs
I've always been misunderstood `cos I have never complained on moderators.
But will be always against `whitelist` and special treatment.

If my memory serves me right, you have complained many times, quite brutally in fact.

Do you find the whitelist discriminating?

I would like to know your reasoning behind this notion.

Thanks

It is simply out of technical reason. Their sounds are always on the front page:
http://www.freesound.org/browse/
And you have to go to the 7th page to find my sounds, and they are always old `cos they have been in moderation process for some days.
Hope you see my point.

zagi2 wrote:
It is simply out of technical reason. Their sounds are always on the front page:
http://www.freesound.org/browse/
And you have to go to the 7th page to find my sounds, and they are always old `cos they have been in moderation process for some days.
Hope you see my point.

Agree.
I mean, you have that posibility, to choose sound by rating. But on the front page, where most people go first, there are the new uploaded sounds. No matter that I uploaded my sound long, long before.

copyc4t wrote:
This particular issue would be solved if those sound lists were sorted by approval/public availability date rather than upload date.

I have made this request to the technical team.
Not sure how easy/difficult it is, but now should be on their to-do list in terms of site improvements.

@zagi2
Please understand this is not intentional.
The algorhythm that puts those sounds onto the queue is probably older than the function to whitelist users.
Most of the improvements in the last couple of years in relation to moderation have been with the intention of making moderation faster and to assure that sounds get moderated in order of arrival.
The page displaying "new sounds" has not been changed for a longtime (as far as I know). - although I am not on the admin/technical team.

A feature to mark clips as "played" and "downloaded" (with date of last use) would be nice. Registered user plays a clip, or downloads it, and in their next searches - they can see what clips they found earlier (and optionally when). It is difficult to navigate among hundersts and thousands of clips.

It should also help to navigate among new stuff, because you always know what is new for you.

ayamahambho wrote:
It is difficult to navigate among hundersts and thousands of clips.

I can relate to that