Changes to tutorial pages, moderation

thats very cool with the staff section,

yeah wicked idea

Thats some cool updates there!

Just wondering if you intend on implementing some sort of filtering resluts on tutorials submitted by a certain user (e.g. so it only shows the ones that have been accepted, or only shows those that didn't get accepted, that kind of thing)? IMO it'd be a pretty good idea.

@tsdesigns - absolutely. That was part of the "filters and searches" I was hinting to in the blog post. We'll get there soon enough; I wanted to get this first step out the door first so authors could get a little better handle on the process.

Nice additions, Zach.

great job, looking good.

Is there a reason why in the recent months good-tutorials has become a joke of it's former self? I mean something these tutorials are base at best. Rethinking the filter or have a set of admins that do not submit their own tutorials in would be great. Other wise rebrand the site to tutorials.com or eh-tutorials.com

Scaling a website like Good-Tutorials is hard. A few years ago I could suitably handle the amount of submissions myself, which tended to keep the average level of tutorials fairly high. At this point, however, we need to rely more on getting more eyeballs in the upcoming queue to help moderate tutorials.

More generally, the moderation process is something that I'm always looking to constantly tweak and improve upon. We've already changed the process a lot from its initial launch, so I think we're heading in the right direction. I do have some ideas to help improve things substantially as well, but as always it's tough to find the time to actually sit down and implement them. Along those same lines, I've been incredibly busy the last month in particular, which means I don't spend as much time in the moderation queue myself, which in turn does harm the overall process a bit.

Overall, though, if you have any specific comments or questions or feedback about how it might be improved, I'm always all ears. And if you or anyone else is interested in help moderating tutorials, just drop me a line and we'll see if you're a good fit.

Will do. Just frustrating to see ones that took some real time and skill to create get beat out by "How to make a solid curving line".

Oh, and that specific problem of "tutorial x got in but y didn't" is a problem I've literally had to deal with for seven years, even when I manually approved each and every one. It'll never get solved, really; just have to do our best to minimize it as much as possible.

I don't think anywhere near enough emphasis is placed upon the quality of the actual step-by-step instruction in the tutorial, or its value simply as a way of learning about Photoshop. The verdict all seems to be based on the end result.

Beginner tutorials also don't seem to get a look-in. I write mostly tutorials that show very new users do some fairly snazzy stuff for their skill level, but have had two of my three recent tutorials rejected (when all my previous 25 or so had been accepted.)

Also, tutorials that are based on a specific photo, and whose instruction cannot be applied to other photos, should be rejected, in my opinion.

The mention regarding beginner tutorials is a good one, Pegaweb. Again, it's also something I've had to "battle" for years. If you make things too beginner-focused, the advanced users cry foul and say that the quality of accepted tutorials goes down since, from their perspective, they're seeing less and less tutorials directly applicable to them. Same goes for beginners: a walkthrough that deals with broader, more advanced topics rather than mundane step-by-step basic instructions is way over their head and it can become a point of frustration. Trying to maintain a fine balance between those two extremes is difficult, and nearly exclusively means making someone unhappy: either the advanced visitors, the basic visitors, or the tutorial authors themselves.

Hi Zach

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

While most people reviewing tutorials are likely to be advanced users, my estimation is that the overwheming majority of Photoshop users are novices. I write tutorials specifically catering to this group, and my site has made it to #9 on Google for "photoshop tutorials" (this site is #1).

I'm not sure what your thoughts are, on the skill-level breakdown of your audience. Maybe it would make a good poll. :)

Haven't looked into it specifically or anything, but I'd suspect your inclination is correct: the majority are novices. What's more than that, there's probably a decent amount who have no real plan to substantially learn about a topic; they might be the type who come to learn about a specific effect, for example. So it's definitely a varied audience who come to the site.

Hi Zach, I am in the same boat as Pegaweb. I create a array of tutorials that range from beginner to advance and for the first time I had one of my tutorials rejected. I don't know why cause it was titled and aimed for a intermediate CSS level.

It was a part two of a three series tutorial and my first one one "the basics of CSS" went off with out a hitch. Now I have this second one two meet this fine line you speak of and it got rejected.

Have you thought about the fact that people can have multiple accounts with good-tutorials through different emails. The individuals are coming back under each account to rate specific tutorials lower in order to a) get a leg up on the rating system in their own tutorials and b)get the tutorial out of the que and never to be being posted.

Any ideas how to prevent this?

Yes; I do monitor tutorials to check that there's nothing funky going on in the ratings. (You'd be surprised; there's a lot less "I'm going to rate down everybody" compared to the whole "I'm going to make a lot of accounts and rate mine up". Besides, rating down other people has no bearing on whether your own tutorial will be rated up). The only thing I noticed about your last tutorial submitted was that you seem to have given it a number of 5's.

But yes, overall it is something that I look out for, and I've been adding to those lines of defense more and more to hopefully move closer to a more robust system.

cool beans man - thanks zachholman

If a tutorial is rejected, is there any way of finding out why, so you can change it to get it accepted?