Community-curated collections (in progress)

Published by Vlasta about 12 hours ago.

There is a new feature available for testing: community-curated collections. The idea is to let members organize existing content in ways that are not possible with ordinary icon or cursor sets.

Collections can contain individual icons, individual cursors, icon sets, cursor sets, and icon assemblers. Think of them as custom galleries built from content already available on the website.

The feature is currently in a testing phase, so changes are to be expected. Feedback is welcome, especially if you find something that does not work quite right or have ideas on how the system should behave. During testing, collections are limited to members with at least 100 karma. Once the rough edges have been identified and fixed, the feature will be opened to everyone.

Collections are available from the Gallery tab. Look for the new Collections entry underneath it. While rearranging the menus, I also moved the Graphic Design forum section to the Learn tab, it fits there more naturally. The Requests forum remains under Gallery.

Every collection starts as private, meaning only its creator can see it. Once it contains at least three items, it can be published. Publishing is an irreversible step. After that, the collection becomes a collaborative project rather than a personal one. Other members will be able to add items to it and vote items up or down, including items you originally added. As the creator, you keep additional voting power, but exactly how much influence creators should have is one of the things that will likely be adjusted before collections leave the testing phase.

When creating a collection, you also decide what kinds of items it will accept. For example, you may allow only individual icons, only cursor sets, or any combination of supported item types. Once the collection is published, these rules cannot be changed, so it is worth thinking about where you want the collection to go before making it public.

Once you create or join a collection, you will be able to add items to it: visit the page with the item you want to add and there under its description, you will see a Collections: list and a Modify button - use it similarly are you would when adding/removing tags (Tags were moved up, closer to the set description).

Depending on how they are used, collections can serve different purposes. If you only allow individual icons or cursors, they behave somewhat like personal sets, except you can include artwork created by other people and you can include the same item in multiple collections without uploading it repeatedly. They can also function as community-maintained tags or themed galleries that bring together related work from many different authors.

We'll see what people end up doing with them. Some members enjoy creating artwork, others enjoy organizing it. Collections are mostly intended for the latter group, and I'm curious to see what kinds of libraries they build.

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