Policy on Duplicates?

I'm not Tom, obviously, but I'm going to answer anyway with how I personally was taught how to handle these things.

Personally I delete the smaller versions; I don't go by the 968 thing. I actually brought that up one time in the mod forum and Maria said it'd be too hard to try and moderate because people already don't get duplicate deletion as it is and adding another aspect to it would be too difficult. Or something like that; I don't remember the exact wording. So I don't know which mod told you that 968 thing, but as far as myself and at least Maria (brazilfashion) goes, we don't go by that. I too am holding out for a time when Tom will finally let people see full sizes.

Basically, this is how I operate:

Generally, bigger is better
EXCEPTIONS:
-- Bigger is not better when it's only bigger because someone made it bigger manually and it looks all pixelated and blurry.
-- Tags can have an influence. If a picture is slightly smaller but doesn't have a tag whereas the bigger version does, I might be inclined to keep the smaller one. But in cases where the bigger version is drastically better quality in every other way, I might ignore the tag.
-- Cropped versions always get tossed in favor of uncropped, regardless of size difference. Once in awhile I'll make an exception if the only thing being cropped out is a solid or plain background that doesn't add quality to the pic, and the cropped version is bigger/better.
-- I always try to keep the clearer, less blurry versions if I can. So even if two pictures are exactly the same size, I'll pick the clearer one regardless of who posted first. This is part of the aforementioned manually-making-bigger thing too.
-- Obviously we factor in who posted first, assuming both pictures are the same quality.


Another note: when people start carelessly dumping mass quantities of duplicates, I honestly don't bother looking to see which version is better. They're wasting my time by making me clean up the mess, so I'm hardly going to make it even worse for myself by hunting down every single original copy to compare it. This when I start deleting duplicates under the "other" tag because it's faster. We tell people all the time that if they're going to repost, they need to only do it when the older version isn't as good and they need to report the older version. And if they couldn't be bothered to look for the older version than neither can I.

As already noted, I'm not Tom. But Tom is slow to respond sometimes, so I thought I'd jump in anyway. Obviously he can overrule anything I've said if he'd prefer it done differently, but this is how I personally operate when sorting through duplicates, and I'm pretty sure that some of the other mods do it at least similarly (at least the ones I talk to do).

With all that being said, I also wanted to add a thank you, because you have done a really great job of reporting duplicates lately. So thank you. I honestly wish we had more people reporting that much.

I'm the mystery mod. We had a polite disagreement. Hello again, SassyK.

I deleted a few pictures of SassyK. Those pictures were re uploads reported as duplicates.
I personally try to remember that the first image uploaded is supposed to be kept unless the quality is significantly better.
In the cases where I deleted SassyK's pictures, the only difference between the pictures was the higher resolution. But since the pictures uploaded first were already covering the space allowed by the website's layout, I did not judge it fair to delete the picture uploaded a week or a month before SassyK's.
In some cases, the quality was slightly better but in my opinion the difference wasn't significant enough to warrant deletion.

Now, before SassyK mentioned it, I wasn't aware of Tom's encouragement to users to upload the highest resolution available for the future pro version of listal.
Even so, I still think it's one thing to upload the best image you can find, but it's another to replace a whole bunch of high quality pictures that don't break any rules in anticipation of something that I don't think was even officially announced and may not happen for a long time anyway. Because in the meantime, all the other users see their pictures get deleted, apparently for no reason, since they can't see the original size of the image being kept. To me, that's an invitation to more (justified) complaints from confused users.

So, that's my opinion on the subject.

The point of uploading better versions of images and reporting the originals as duplicates is to replace the existing ones with images that are significantly better quality.

Generally I tend to assume that the larger one will show up in better quality. I don't closely examine every image reported as a duplicate. I usually just look at the sizes and keep the larger one, unless I am suspicious of what is being reported. We just don't have the time to do that.

But if uploading a slightly larger image makes no difference, please don't bother. That's not the point of the image reporting system.

- If the old duplicate was atleast 968 pixels wide, then the mod deletes any later submissions even if they are higher res. Reason: you can't see the larger image anyway.

After reading this thread, I am not clear: does such a rule exist?
Everybody brought their good reasons to the table, but what is the final outcome?
Please moderators tell us *one* rule.
If there are some mods who think yes, some who think no, and others who say it depends, please discuss it but then take one decision, and every mod sticks to it. We need all moderators to apply the same rules.
Of course Tom has the last word, so he is entitled to overrule any decision.

No, it does not.

This is all the official rules say regarding the topic

Duplicate images
- No duplicate images unless the quality is significantly better than the old version.

It is up to the discretion of an individual moderator to judge if these rules have been broken.

To The O.P.

The 968 thing is just my personal way of judging if I need to take a closer look at the pictures reported when the only difference is size/quality.
I also tend to check the quality if the size difference is less than 100 px. These are just personal guidelines.
Like Brazilfashion mentioned, it wouldn't be time efficient to look closely at every single duplicate reported. I'm sure every mod has their own method of judging which issue reports they need to be suspicious about.