My input may not be all that relevant here, since I've only made customs so far and haven't attempted to submit any of them to the site, but here's my two cents anyway...
The policy of
"we won't upload placeholders to the site" and the policy of
"we won't remove old covers from the site that don't meet the current standards until a new cover that does meet the standards is available to replace it" are absolutely, 100%, no ifs ands or buts
counter-intuitive. And more than anything else, that's the source of confusion and annoyance for new cover artists getting their work rejected.
A placeholder is a placeholder
is a placeholder, whether it's new or old. If you're going to hold the site up to certain standards (and you should), it should apply across the board, not just to new uploads.
Statements like "Anything less [than the best] would be a disservice to our cause of the site" don't hold much water when there's covers like
either option for Game & Watch Gallery 4 already on the site.
If there's a technical issue involved where the covers can't be removed from the database once they've been added, only replaced, then along with the new site design we also need some new database software because that's
basics.If it's a time/commitment issue of "we don't want to arse the cover admins to sort through and re-review all the
old covers, when they already don't have much time to review
new covers", then make it more of a
public effort. I've seen no shortage of people on the forums pointing to this cover or that cover on the site that doesn't meet the standards, and it would be no problem to have a single thread or forum for people to post their concerns about existing covers in, that the admins could then look at
just those covers and
just those specific complaints brought against them and decide whether a cover needed to be removed.
But if it's neither issue, and simply a matter of not wanting to remove the old crappy covers because they've "grandfathered in" under the old standards, then they should be labeled as such so that they don't degrade the overall image of quality that is The Cover Project. ... But if you start labeling these old crappy covers as what they are:
placeholders for new higher-quality covers, it'll only confuse the matter more of why new
placeholder covers can't be added as well.
If you want a clean house, it's not enough to simply prevent new dust and dirt from coming in, you gotta clean out what's already there.
