Hello Art Fighters,
As a team, we’ve recently been working on alterations to our Discord server’s rules, the clarification of Art Fight’s financials, and updates/clarifications regarding the site. This post will summarize these clarifications alongside some changes still to come.
NSFW Content On and Off Site
As you may have noticed through the #changelogs channel in our Discord server, we have updated the wording of some of our rules, specifically regarding what kinds of art can be shared. The first of these changes involve Art Rule 5, which has been altered to remove “NSFW content” from the list of topics that are allowed under a spoiler. This wording implied that we allowed explicit 18+ material within the server. This was never intended, despite the rule being badly worded. Sexually themed art is allowed under a filter on site only, and must adhere to our maturity guidelines, which can be found here. The allowance of sexual themed art in the server was a miscommunication on our end, and is not allowed within the server, even with a spoiler. We apologize for our rules being worded in a way that made it seem like it was allowed, however, and apologize once again for any confusion the incorrect wording may have caused. Additionally, we have reiterated our ban on NSFW content in our new Art Rule 6.
Keep in mind that this ban on NSFW content and sexual themes extends to questions related to said themes in the #af-help and #af-help-2 channels. Any inquiries about these topics should be discussed in DMs with moderators, with any NSFW text/images sent in DMs being spoilered and given a warning for. If you see any posts that break our rules on NSFW content and sexual themes, don’t hesitate to send an online moderator a DM so that it may be removed.
Site Updates
In a similar vein, we are diligently working on fixing a bug with filters not working as intended on the site. To avoid bug exploitation, we will update everyone with details after we have ensured the fix is complete. Thank you for your patience in the meantime!
We are also working on updates for “Design a Character” attack rules and clarity regarding who to contact for issues on-site. For design attacks, we will be updating our rules to specify what is necessary for design attacks targeted towards more than one user and the rules regarding ownership of said character designs. This will be updated before the next fight and will be announced when it has been implemented.
Additionally, we have updated our Contact a Mod page to add a section about reporting users. If you are having issues with another user on Art Fight, you should speak to admins or a site lead for help, as regular site mods cannot deal with user-related reports, because of the potential of dealing with private information. We encourage users to contact moderators or admins directly when dealing with reports that could be considered emergencies (example: exploitation of minors).
Regarding the report backlog itself, we will be re-evaluating our process for dealing with reports in the coming months to hopefully relieve some of the delays in report resolution. We apologize again for any lengthy wait times, and encourage you to reach out via site messages if you require immediate help.
Lastly, we want to make a quick update about Cloudflare and some recent concerns about a website they previously supported. Luckily, Cloudflare did the right thing and has since dropped supporting the website in question, so it appears these concerns have now been resolved, but we still wanted to mention that we only use Cloudflare for DDOS / high traffic protection, and nothing else. Art Fight is not hosted on Cloudflare, nor are its images/etc.
Donation & Financial Clarifications
Recently, we’ve noticed there have been some concerns regarding donations and the way Art Fight is categorized. First, we want to clarify that we are not a non-profit organization. We are considered a sole proprietorship - in the past, Art Fight has mistakenly been referred to as a non-profit, but that is not the case, and we apologize for the confusion. We have looked into becoming a non-profit, but it’s not something that’s feasible for us right now.
Art Fight is a passion project that sustains itself via donations from its user base. The majority of these funds go towards maintaining the site. The largest site expenses include: image hosting, web servers, other web services, and commissioned art assets. This is not cheap, especially for a site of our size that approximately doubles its user base every year. After the bills are paid, the leftover money is significantly lower than a fair wage. Therefore we are unable to hire anyone, though Takaia receives a small amount of compensation for work she does as the site owner and coder.
All moderators, designers, and administrators are completely volunteer. This is something they agree to when they sign up to be a moderator, and is a standard practice for small websites. We would love to pay more of our staff, as well as hire an accountant (for proper financial breakdowns, etc.). The reality is that none of that is financially feasible for us at this time, because Art Fight does not earn enough to pay for these services.
In the past, we worked very hard to try to be transparent with Art Fight finances. However, because Art Fight does not earn enough to be able to hire an accountant or any other professionals, all estimates were being done by Takaia. Due to the fluctuating nature of Art Fight's costs and donations, many of the reports ultimately ended up being unintentionally inaccurate. Takaia tried as best as she could with the resources she had to make as close to an exact estimate as she could.
Because of the inaccuracy, Art Fight's estimations received backlash, some of which was personally directed at Takaia. After considering the sheer amount of time and effort needed to make these, the resulting backlash, the private nature of the amount people get paid, and looking at similarly run websites who don’t publish this information, we decided it was best to simply stop making estimates/breakdowns. However, to give an idea of how much things can cost, here are some examples of recent bills we’ve paid. Please note that this is a fraction of the total we pay per year, these are individual examples:
Image-hosting alone for the month of July 2022 cost around $7,200 USD. The web server for hosting the site itself costs around $500 USD a month. For 2022, Art Fight needs approximately ($500 x 12 months) $6,000 USD to pay for the web server. Again, these numbers do not take into account future site growth, art/image assets, the rest of the image hosting costs, and other miscellaneous costs, both planned and unplanned, during the year.
---
We would like to extend our gratitude to our users for your understanding and continued patience, alongside your willingness to help in our shared goal of improving the site. As always, we encourage you to come to us with any questions you may have and to share any concerns you feel need addressing. You are welcome to either comment below, DM a moderator, post in our Discord server’s help channels, or send us an email at [email protected]. We appreciate any questions or concerns being brought to us, and thank you in advance for your patience, as potential replies may be slow due to moderators being busy with life commitments outside of Art Fight.
We greatly appreciate your continued support as we all move forward together.
Sincerely,
The Art Fight Team
As a team, we’ve recently been working on alterations to our Discord server’s rules, the clarification of Art Fight’s financials, and updates/clarifications regarding the site. This post will summarize these clarifications alongside some changes still to come.
NSFW Content On and Off Site
As you may have noticed through the #changelogs channel in our Discord server, we have updated the wording of some of our rules, specifically regarding what kinds of art can be shared. The first of these changes involve Art Rule 5, which has been altered to remove “NSFW content” from the list of topics that are allowed under a spoiler. This wording implied that we allowed explicit 18+ material within the server. This was never intended, despite the rule being badly worded. Sexually themed art is allowed under a filter on site only, and must adhere to our maturity guidelines, which can be found here. The allowance of sexual themed art in the server was a miscommunication on our end, and is not allowed within the server, even with a spoiler. We apologize for our rules being worded in a way that made it seem like it was allowed, however, and apologize once again for any confusion the incorrect wording may have caused. Additionally, we have reiterated our ban on NSFW content in our new Art Rule 6.
Keep in mind that this ban on NSFW content and sexual themes extends to questions related to said themes in the #af-help and #af-help-2 channels. Any inquiries about these topics should be discussed in DMs with moderators, with any NSFW text/images sent in DMs being spoilered and given a warning for. If you see any posts that break our rules on NSFW content and sexual themes, don’t hesitate to send an online moderator a DM so that it may be removed.
Site Updates
In a similar vein, we are diligently working on fixing a bug with filters not working as intended on the site. To avoid bug exploitation, we will update everyone with details after we have ensured the fix is complete. Thank you for your patience in the meantime!
We are also working on updates for “Design a Character” attack rules and clarity regarding who to contact for issues on-site. For design attacks, we will be updating our rules to specify what is necessary for design attacks targeted towards more than one user and the rules regarding ownership of said character designs. This will be updated before the next fight and will be announced when it has been implemented.
Additionally, we have updated our Contact a Mod page to add a section about reporting users. If you are having issues with another user on Art Fight, you should speak to admins or a site lead for help, as regular site mods cannot deal with user-related reports, because of the potential of dealing with private information. We encourage users to contact moderators or admins directly when dealing with reports that could be considered emergencies (example: exploitation of minors).
Regarding the report backlog itself, we will be re-evaluating our process for dealing with reports in the coming months to hopefully relieve some of the delays in report resolution. We apologize again for any lengthy wait times, and encourage you to reach out via site messages if you require immediate help.
Lastly, we want to make a quick update about Cloudflare and some recent concerns about a website they previously supported. Luckily, Cloudflare did the right thing and has since dropped supporting the website in question, so it appears these concerns have now been resolved, but we still wanted to mention that we only use Cloudflare for DDOS / high traffic protection, and nothing else. Art Fight is not hosted on Cloudflare, nor are its images/etc.
Donation & Financial Clarifications
Recently, we’ve noticed there have been some concerns regarding donations and the way Art Fight is categorized. First, we want to clarify that we are not a non-profit organization. We are considered a sole proprietorship - in the past, Art Fight has mistakenly been referred to as a non-profit, but that is not the case, and we apologize for the confusion. We have looked into becoming a non-profit, but it’s not something that’s feasible for us right now.
Art Fight is a passion project that sustains itself via donations from its user base. The majority of these funds go towards maintaining the site. The largest site expenses include: image hosting, web servers, other web services, and commissioned art assets. This is not cheap, especially for a site of our size that approximately doubles its user base every year. After the bills are paid, the leftover money is significantly lower than a fair wage. Therefore we are unable to hire anyone, though Takaia receives a small amount of compensation for work she does as the site owner and coder.
All moderators, designers, and administrators are completely volunteer. This is something they agree to when they sign up to be a moderator, and is a standard practice for small websites. We would love to pay more of our staff, as well as hire an accountant (for proper financial breakdowns, etc.). The reality is that none of that is financially feasible for us at this time, because Art Fight does not earn enough to pay for these services.
In the past, we worked very hard to try to be transparent with Art Fight finances. However, because Art Fight does not earn enough to be able to hire an accountant or any other professionals, all estimates were being done by Takaia. Due to the fluctuating nature of Art Fight's costs and donations, many of the reports ultimately ended up being unintentionally inaccurate. Takaia tried as best as she could with the resources she had to make as close to an exact estimate as she could.
Because of the inaccuracy, Art Fight's estimations received backlash, some of which was personally directed at Takaia. After considering the sheer amount of time and effort needed to make these, the resulting backlash, the private nature of the amount people get paid, and looking at similarly run websites who don’t publish this information, we decided it was best to simply stop making estimates/breakdowns. However, to give an idea of how much things can cost, here are some examples of recent bills we’ve paid. Please note that this is a fraction of the total we pay per year, these are individual examples:
Image-hosting alone for the month of July 2022 cost around $7,200 USD. The web server for hosting the site itself costs around $500 USD a month. For 2022, Art Fight needs approximately ($500 x 12 months) $6,000 USD to pay for the web server. Again, these numbers do not take into account future site growth, art/image assets, the rest of the image hosting costs, and other miscellaneous costs, both planned and unplanned, during the year.
---
We would like to extend our gratitude to our users for your understanding and continued patience, alongside your willingness to help in our shared goal of improving the site. As always, we encourage you to come to us with any questions you may have and to share any concerns you feel need addressing. You are welcome to either comment below, DM a moderator, post in our Discord server’s help channels, or send us an email at [email protected]. We appreciate any questions or concerns being brought to us, and thank you in advance for your patience, as potential replies may be slow due to moderators being busy with life commitments outside of Art Fight.
We greatly appreciate your continued support as we all move forward together.
Sincerely,
The Art Fight Team
Comments (383)
Rainissance
Hyrule
A lot of people lost trust in artfight because of the blatant favoritism towards UnknownSpy. Trying to sweep the issue under the rug only invites it to happen again. Spy shouldn't be allowed to post attacks until the issue is resolved, or who says they won't do it again?
I have no ill will towards any of the staff, but I'm not sure I can return to artfight next year until rules are being enforced consistently
I don't have much to say about where money is going because it's not something I have much experience in, but the strengthing of filters is nice, but honestly at this point it would be less of a hassle to just ban sexual themes outright, especially with the amount of minor and adult interaction that tends to happen during the actual fight
ChibiCorporation
All moderators, designers, and administrators are completely volunteer. This is something they agree to when they sign up to be a moderator, and is a standard practice for small websites."
So, is it a big site that doubles its user base every year or a small site that needs volunteers to function? The previous post is the results to this year's fight, there it's written that the active members were 212,017 for a total of 534,352 members. You can't possibly believe that a handful of volunteering moderators that work 1-3 hours a week (as stated by one of the moderators in the comments to this post) are enough.
I'm really sorry to say this, I really am, I love ArtFight and it helped me through some of the worst years of my life and it really pains me to see all these problems and unhappy users, but you need to find solutions. If the site is too big to sustain itself then you need to stop it from growing for a while, at least in users terms or find a way to earn enough to pay real full-time moderators, maybe with ads as others suggested in the comments. I don't know, it's not my job to run a big site, I just wanted clarifications on the big-but-small site contradiction.
Also sorry for my english, not my first laguage.
Fefe
PETRIGROF
frillious
also, transparency about where your donations are going is a MUST. if all we know is that "all" the donation funds are going towards the website servers and one or two artists, that makes yall look like your hoarding your thousands that you get a month. it actually doesnt matter that volunteers don't want to get paid. unpaid labor on something this large of a scale is simply a selfish unprofessional look. and yes, you guys need to start treating this as your profession. if this is a for-profit company, if youre getting money from your consumer base all year, you're running a business and you need to act like it.
finally, the UnknownSpy problem has not been addressed whatsoever, which is alarming. UnknownSpy is a sponsor / premium member of Artfight, so the fact that you all remain completely silent on their blatant art theft of over 50 of your users is really telling. Do they make too much money for you to remove from your platform? :/ or even say anything bad about at all? lmao
JCorrachComics
The fact that the filters are so easy to get around for underage users, and that this has been a known issue for years is disheartening to say the least. It's easy for kids to lie about their age of course (hell I did that all the time when I was underage) but the fact that they don't even have to do that and can just toggle the mature filter on and off is bizarre...
I am glad to hear there's a crackdown on the discord server now, that's definitely a good step in the right direction if there can't be an opt-in adults-only area
I really like this site, it gives me a reason to look forward to summer again, I want to see it continue to succeed, and to be a safe place for kids and adults alike
rawberra
JacobToonz
However, I do think some things need to be addressed.
1. I think it is time to retire the idea that this is a small group. ArtFight has grown so much over the last half-decade and with it, so has the mod team. It’s clear there’s a lot of people who put the time and energy into making this site and community the best it can be. Let’s embrace it, encourage people to help out in any way, shape or form. Bring more hands into the server to help this community continue to prosper.
2. Some of the things I’ve heard and read, to be honest, are quite concerning. Mainly the ones about UnknownSpy, but there are others. I would like to see that be addressed at some point, preferably in the near future, but I can see why if you wouldn’t. That’s something that puts some of your own in an awful light. However, I also think it would paint them in a bad light if it wasn’t touched on, cause it would show that the mods are willing to bend the rules to protect certain people and that, to be blunt, would be a slap in the face to the community and the integrity of ArtFight as a whole. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation, but me, personally, I would address the matter so a constructive discussion on how to prevent something like this from happening again can begin.
With all things said, I do still plan to compete next year as I do love the community and the game. However, I will be keeping a close eye on further development and hope those involved in the UnknownSpy incident have learned an important lesson from this.
Dartwind
Byinkko Hi! Can you DM me the details of this glitch?
MiniMilkshake1001 We open up volunteer applications every year, and they're usually posted both on-site in the news section, and on our Discord. The most recent news post regarding volunteering for the site can be found linked here!
DarkArtsAnna
Zebirbofhellsgate
Jesteryoz
molochka-koshka
MiniMilkshake1001
KiRAWRa
Do you mind me asking where these applications are? I don't think ive ever seen them actively seeking new volunteers, but I'd personally love to
Also think it's a little hasty to say people want instant fixes when the issues like the filter not working have been known about for 6 years and is only being worked on now because people 'made noise'
Agreed that some people are being far too aggressive in the comments
dang mobile I messed up the ping