@Background Pony #699F
I remember someone once saying “We are using computers for this, so the faster images are uploaded, the sooner they are available for others.”
So, just speaking for myself, floods of images really only become a problem when they start making the site hard to use for others, for example if it makes it impossible for other artists to get their fair share of time on the front page.
Or, worse yet - if the flood causes people to get a bad impression of an artist - not because of their work, but only because it seems like they are being “spammed” or someone is trying to “force a meme”.
In practice, what this kind of means is do a dozen images at a time, and space them out.
For most people, 25 images saturates the front page. So a dozen images per batch leaves some room for other artists on the home page.
And, when those images age to the second page, more images in a group generally seem to be ok.
If you are automating this, an image every 30 minutes to an hour might be the sweet spot. You could also see what the average time on the front page is by watching the statistics. For example, in the last 24 hours there have been approximately 26 “default pages” of images loaded, about one “page” of images an hour.
So - if you wanted to space the uploads so that only one or two of the images were on each page, that would be one image uploaded every half hour. And I don’t think anyone would consider that a “spam”.
If you’re doing it manually, uploads of 10 or 12 images per group twice a day should be no problem at all.
So, for myself at least, it’s less about any hard technological limit, or rule, and more about making sure the works are well received and any drama around the artist being “spammed” can be avoided, and making sure that other artists also get their shot at the front page.
And, from a “We are using computers for this” point of view, all of them in one bunch also works. But that might result in some downvoting and drama against the artist, just because people are annoyed seeing pages of the same artist for as long as the upload lasts, and other artists getting washed away from the front page in a flood.
It’s too bad we don’t have an “Upload it yesterday” API for programmatically dumping stuff into the database on the second or 10th page first, or something like that. Bu every time I’ve ever talked with anyone else about it, we kept thinking of easy ways to exploit that, and no easy ways to prevent those exploits.
So .. go for it, I can’t wait to see what you upload :)
And if I notice people start reporting the uploads as spam or something like that, I’ll let you know so you can tweak how you’re uploading them