On Apr 7, 2014, BogusRed said:

Stuff like this makes me sad and also motivates me to take action to make PD better. But I'm over committed at the moment. I'm so busy working on Dragon Mall Quest. But by the end of this year I should have more time to work on PD.

I feel like we should inform people about the crimes that site is committing against artists. That's way more important. But, how to do it...

Eh, I came here from dA, and so far I'm starting to like it here better... More discussions about political issues, a seperate 18+ section so it's extremely clear where and if you get to post that kind of thing, but I feel like the social traffic could be better. However, I believe that with what dA is pulling lately, that problem might fix itself. :lol: I like what I see here, and I can't wait to move all my work into my gallery.

Ah, it's been a while. College plus moving items to a new home doesn't really give time for practicing digital art coloring. As far as DA is concerned. I used to have an art theft report account. I made a copy paste guide so people don't make blind reports that get ignored by staff. Then, I figured I step down and focus on improving on my hobbies, including making some art in form of visual or writing. 

I feel like we should inform people about the crimes that site is committing against artists. That's way more important. But, how to do it...

You also have to consider other sites like TUMBLR also being guilty of these thefts (granted most don't go up to DA's level though but the usual "I'm too lazy to source" shouldn't be pushed aside either) around. I do agree though they should focus on catching thefts instead of the current slow internet dilemma to rob more money from people new going on today. 

As far as submissions, I'm just making DA as my practice ground in this case and save sites like PaperDemon (for art) and someday Shadowness (for manips) for the future. Can't wait to turn 18 though. Not because of red curtain. Though being able to bounce between two different locations to acknowlege both sides in the site isn't a bad thing to consider. *shrugs* I have a quick question on that. If a user can access to here and red curtain, is it two separate galleries or are the works still under one artist profile with some having some 18+ as a preview or something like that?

Hello sls-scifiandart. Welcome to PaperDemon!

To answer your questions, your adult artwork will not be mixed with your non-adult artwork. You will have two separate profiles. One for the regular PaperDemon side and another for the Red Curtain side. Your "about" and general profile info will be the same. However, your gallery in the Red Curtain will only show your adult images and your PaperDemon gallery will show your non-adult images.

The reason we did it this way was for a couple reasons. One is because advertisers don't want their ads appearing on sites with adult content. So we pretty much made the two sites as separate as possible. Additionally, users may want to have fair warning before they start seeing adult content so it makes sense to have it on a completely separate site so  you can still browse the regular non-adult side while at school or work.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Oh boy, DA, where to start...

Apparently, it's the only art gallery I know of where you're not allowed to put umlauts in your titles. Why ever, I have no idea. There was one other site I was on that had this problem, but that was due to an encoding issue, and not simply being prevented from having a title with umlauts at all. I think it's been fixed by now. And other people have been complaining about this issue since 2009, and it still hasn't been addressed.

They handled the beta testing of the new submit page rather poorly and made regular members beta test it. I was unable to submit anything for a long time because my Internet connection was too slow for it. Like, what's the point of having a glorified beta tester position if you're not going to use it?

I'm not a premium member, and the premium features have never really interested me enough to buy a subscription, and I know what beta testing entails, and don't want that role on DA. But still, I get to put up with this: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/180/4/d/profile_picture_by_angelus_tenebrae-d55eezi.jpg

Because apparently, everyone who doesn't have a premium membership wants one.

Most of the artwork on DA is unimpressive. Of course there are some good artwork you can find with the help of some elite groups and so on, but in general, the search is horrible, so don't be surprised if you end up with mediocre Sonic fanart or Disney stuff when searching for more classical subjects. As a thought experiment, I changed the settings on DA to show the latest works rather than the best ones, and the great majority of artwork that shows up are cheap copies/traces of official artwork from various cartoons, manga/anime or video games, poorly taken mobile phone selfies (sometimes nude) with bad lighting and poor contrast/sharpness, ugly, half-assed sketches that would go better under scraps, or other works that look to me like no care or effort was put into them. It may just be me, because I'm a hard person to impress, but I have better luck on sites like HF, Pixiv and even Tumblr.

DA is one of the worst places to get critique from. Almost no one leaves you constructive critique; they just like to leave one liner comments. The premium critique feature is stupid and redundant. There are critique groups, but they're either poorly managed, don't have enough people offering the critique, or done on an exchange basis, which is almost never a good enough incentive for good critique. There is only one place on DA that is even remotely worth getting constructive critique from, and it's a chat group, but probably won't offer critique for NSFW stuff, being that it's DA's rules. 

The only reason I'm still there is primarily for advertising. I have had a few people ask me if I would let them use some of my Gauss pictures for their groups, or the mathematicians picture for some math related event. I once got an interview from a Brazillian Nintendo fan site because I was on DA. And I do have a few friends who only know me through DA. But I guess that's not really surprising; DA feels more to me like a social network than an art community.

*whimper*

I don't actively hate DA, yet? I like getting frequent comments on my work, of any kind - and some of the groups have been delightful. But I haven't had the opportunity to run into the mixed standards on nudity at this point, and I had no idea about them sending out artists' work to third-party sellers without giving the original artist a cut... knew they printed stuff on merch sometimes, assumed that some kind of payback would go to the artist when that happened. >.<