Why is it that every oekaki site I've been to requires you to decide how good your drawing is going to be before you draw it? This seriously makes no sense, and tends to cause problems.

The pattern is usually to have one main board, and a sketch/beginners board. This system is probably designed to put a sort of quality control on the main board, so the crappy drawings have somewhere to go. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Many of the best artists are also the most modest, and will always choose to begin their drawings on the sketch board. Conversely, many of the worst artists are also the loudest, and will insist on posting loads of sketches on the higher boards.

And then there's me. I can never decide where my drawings are destined before I draw them, and I don't think many other people can either. Deciding your work's quality before you make it doesn't make any sense. If you've read Clay Shirky's new book about the internet, you might notice we're violating one of its main patterns: publish, then filter.

So the practical change I'm proposing is one that seems small, but is actually quite large. I ask that we be allowed to decide what board to post our drawings on after[i] drawing them, rather than before. I know this probably breaks a lot of code, and doesn't allow the site to premeditatively limit our canvas size. But it's also something I've never seen done, and I am sure it would noticeably improve the quality of our boards. I'd like to see who supports this idea -- go ahead and chime in.

That's the practical part. But since I can't help but be a bit of an idealist, I'll go on! In a perfect world, there would be only one board, and users would be able to filter what they saw just like they do on other highly user-filtered websites like digg, reddit, slashdot, and kuro5hin. I'm not asking for this, as it's quite a significant technical feat that would take some adjusting, but even the first step would set us apart from the oekaki anti-pattern everyone else seems to follow.

Disclaimer: to be honest, I'm a bit of a newbie to 2draw, so I don't know how much this problem affects it yet. That's why I want to hear what you guys think!

Currently regular users can change their work to a higher board but not a lower one. So for example you can start something on the beginner board and after it's done you actually can edit it and move up to intermediate or advanced. It seems that people rarely do though. I'm not sure if people realize they can. Then again, it's not common for something posted on one board here to be high enough quality once finished to even merit being moved up. People normally seem to either hit at or just below the level of quality they were aiming for when they started drawing. Also, when you click submit to post something, as long as your work is not over the pixel dimension limits of a board you can decide right then and there which board to post it on regardless of what you had originally clicked when you started drawing. I'm not entirely certain that you could post to a lower level board at that point, I'd have to test it, but if it's your first submission of a drawing (not a revision of one already posted) you should be able to.

Having only one board would be interesting, but could present some problems. If someone posted something and it was deemed unfit to be there (which a huge amount of sketch drawings would be) then there'd probably be people complaining it needs to be deleted and other people arguing it deserves to be there, etc. The way things are with the beginner, intermediate, and advance boards each one moves at a different pace. Advanced board drawings take a long time to make and they're made less often. So something posted there has longer that it gets to be on page 1 of the advanced board. With a single board that has everything posted there a 5 hour drawing could get swept away 1 hour after being made by a spasm of 10 minute sketches. Whoever made the 5 hour drawing probably wouldn't be happy all their hard work was unnoticed by anyone not online right when it was posted.

All that said, I think that because we can post our drawings in unfinished states it might be interesting to have a works in progress board where every unfinished drawing is automatically posted until its state is changed to finished. Once finished it can be posted to whichever board it belongs on. That would be similar to the idea of deciding a board after making a drawing and would keep the other boards from being cluttered with unfinished drawings, some of which will probably never be finished.

In theory , it's nice to have boards for different standards of work. However I have never seen it work. There are always going to be scribbles on "higher" boards and the reverse. In the end, the quality of the drawing stands on its own merit , regardless of the label that happens to be on the board upon which it is posted. If you make it self-policing, 75% will post on the board they feel is "highest" , and if you make it controlled by admins, some will do it fairly, but there will always be disagreements. In an open site like this one there really isn't an effective way to filter out the crap.
The mods are technically supposed to control the quality by moving things on "higher" boards down if they do not meet the standards, or by removing total crap, but the mods are just volunteers with lives of their own and cannot be expected to sit here doing nothing but enforcing site rules. It seems to me that it would be better to try to offer constructive suggestions and help to the less skilled members to try to get them to improve what they post. I would support the idea of having a WIP board for works that are posted unfinished, so it would keep them from pushing pieces that are finished off to oblivion as they do now. I wish some would discover the "unfinished/hidden" mode, maybe they just don't know it's there?

your points are all valid. I do think the issues affect 2draw less than other boards. but they are there, nonetheless, and we are actually currently working on a system that I think surpasses what you are looking for. (as well as many other cool new things.)

as shanghai mentioned, you can change what board an image is submitted to after the fact...provided you used a canvas size available to that board (which may be why shanghai assumed you could only "upgrade" a drawing). If a drawing is marked as unfinished hidden, you can continue to change what board a drawing is on until you switch it to unfinished or finished.