As it looks like I won�t be doing much with SS for the time being, I thought I�d tidy up my contributions today.  Their official line is that rejected images are deleted within 7 days and a small thumbnail is left.

Why? What is the point of leaving that thumbnail and why is it so labour intensive to remove?  As far as I can see, rejected images can only be removed individually and each deletion, starting from the Rejected Photos tab requires five mouseclicks (including two confirmations) to delete and return to the Rejected tab again. Deleting all rejected images, or all in one batch, would be logical options and perhaps this is just, as we say in UX design, an anti-pattern, a poor design which happened by accident. SS would not be alone in this: the user experience in most microstock sites leaves much to be desired,

Then I just had a wee thought that it might be a black pattern: a design to force you down a route you may not want to go because it is just so * difficult. (The classic black pattern is getting you to miss that you are auto-renewing a recurring payment on a website.)  But what could the reason be to have you leave rejected images in place? 

The confirmation on removal of the thumbnail does specifically say �deleted from our database�.  Could it be in the claimed figure of 60 million images in the SS database, that among the 59 million which are not Mr Marijuana�s pictures, they are counting rejected images?  I trust someone who has worked with SS over the years will know the answer to this.

I always figured they kept them so that if you were a blatant serial resubmitter they would have evidence of it. It does sound like a lot of work to remove them probably by laziness and poor programming rather than design though.