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)
KiRAWRa
I've participated in Art Fight for the last 6 consecutive years, and while improvements come slowly, the site is certainly miles better than it was when I joined years ago. There are tons of QOL features and improvements I've been eagerly waiting for, but changes don't come overnight. I have always had the impression that Art Fight has everyone's best interests in mind and is doing the best it can with what it has.
It seems as though this update comes as a response to some accusations and backlash of which I am not entirely aware. I am too old and busy for this kind of drama, but it seems like another case of overblown reactions, wild speculation, entitlement, and harassment.
Not to say there aren't valid concerns and criticisms being brought up, but this kind of rampant dogpiling is just as unprofessional as is being claimed against the Art Fight staff. People may claim they're after "accountability", but they just want to make a bunch of noise, they want instant answers and instant fixes - none of which is actually helpful or feasible.
If you want Art Fight to be better: volunteer. It certainly sounds like staff is struggling to keep up with the ever-expanding community. Hell, I think I'll put in an application myself.
Dartwind
butcher
It's not an "small site" at all (not anymore), that's now more than clear, and some of you have to stop treating it as such. still with all of this, it IS POSSIBLE for things to get out of control unconsciously (we all make errors, we all are human), especially considering that not all staff see the rules in the same way (which I feel is an issue that should be worked out between you guys... kee), not all the mods have the same lifestyles n not all are 24/7 moderating the site or discord...
don't get me wrong, I still don't think that a site as big as this should be as terribly unmoderated as it is now (in my opinion), and hopefully in some future, listen to people's opinions n deal with serious topics such as what they are.
Some people may not have found bugs, or found nsfw themselves, but others DO have by accident and they DO felt uncomfortable by it. And that's the point there. ( ;;)7
...I still took the trouble to read some of the comments, and while I agree that this site needs urgently changes to its moderation, rules, and especially, HONESTITY WITH THE USERS, some other comments were just.... mean. (srs thats not the way to solve anything of this...)
(anyways sorry for the poor wording english not my first language (ಥ﹏ಥ)
I would have treated other topics in the same way cuz I feel that this announcement has explained little or nothing regarding the greatest doubts about this whole problem... but that would be a lot of text n i dont rlly wanna be harsh with people who doesnt deserve it.
i still love artfight... but some of the staff should be more honest with the community, really.
thankiu
smol edit: i wanted to clarify i don't mean "urgent change" by "right now"... i'm just saying that there's something that needs to be done after a lot of years, but of course i'm aware it's not something that can be "fixed" from day to night!
onirico
i can also speak as a minor that's been on the site lurking and then participating for ~3 years that i've never accidentally seen porn (not even something mildly risqué) but the way people are acting you'd think that if you turned to the left you'd see 30 pieces of nsfw art while having a minor account. i didn't even know that the nsfw filter had a bug in the first place but maybe that's just a me thing
edit becuase i think i coudlve worded a bunch of stuff properly: is there stuff that needs to be changed? yes, yes there is & i will not deny it (namely the NSFW thing/filter and probably getting more money for the sake of the site and etc.). but the way people are bringing it up (especially here, in this comment section) is counterproductive and it makes seem more like they're using them as excuses to verbally harass (But It's Fine Because It's Morally(tm) Justified, I Swear) not only the current mod team but the owner too because theyare holding personal grudges agaisnt a member... i dont know much about running a site, but i do know that it's unthinkably expensive, especially for a website like artfight that revolves around social media & image hosting and whose active userbase doubles every year :/
Kayfabe
ferroussulfayt
yesile
I third the advertisement thing. It wouldn't even necessarily have to be obtrusive, if it's a donator perk and you just put the ads on a specific 'donator' page for it. "Support our Donators" or something. I think a decent number of people would peruse a page of ads made by their fellow creators: stuff like advertising their comics or books or commissions (I am aware that normally advertising commissions is against the 'Spirit of Art Fight,' though, so this perk would potentially have to be the exception, which I could see a small, but loud minority complain about).
Otherwise, I guess future funding is mainly up to how many donate $800 for the banner. I wonder if funds next year will go up or down, due to that change. People are definitely dropping out—which was kind of the intent anyway—but just how many will stay? I'm intrigued.
PETRIGROF
goats-teeth
It’s actually been broken for the whole 6 years apparently… so. Yeah. Pretty huge yikes.
Harbeyyy
This was my first ArtFight, and I would really love to do it next year, but if these problems don't eventually become resolved, I don't think I'll be able to continue the event.
(Accidentally submitted my comment before I was done; Edit:)
I'm not in the discord, so I don't know if you have this in place, but maybe you could open a small server for those who are genuinely interested in volunteering to help out with filtering and moderation in general. I think it would definitely improve the situation, and you wouldn't have to pay them. The real prize is knowing that minors (including myself) wouldn't have to regret clicking on something they never wanted to see, and that this amazing event could stay up and running for years to come.
I also saw some issues with reports being sent and never being resolved. I don't remember who mentioned this, but I think it's a great idea if reports could be grouped by severity of the problem. It would definitely help bring notice to urgent problems to the moderators.
I really hope you guys take into consideration the ideas that are being posted in the comments, a lot of people are depending on these issues to be solved so ArtFight can remain a safe and fun environment for everyone :)
(Another small edit)
I did want to add how I feel for you, Moderators. I get how things like these can be very overwhelming. I beleive all of this can and will be resolved eventually with time and patience. Hoping things get better on your end!
(Wanted to add that none of my comment was supposed to be set up in a rude or disrespectful tone, sorry if it was interpreted as such ;;’ I mean not that anyone did, but like just saying-)
PETRIGROF
Also for those wondering, they’ve been aware the nsfw filter has been broken on-site for over a year, lmao. This isn’t the first time it’s ever been brought up.
frillious
Plumello
Also, I'm gonna refrain from talking about this issue right now unless there are something that need to be said.
Also tagging swiss, sorry about that but just wanna let you know in case you still want to
HannahBug
It seems like this is more for people in-the-know, but like...? Idk, I don't like just dropping this randomly on users who don't keep up with the Discord. It feels both like intense drama (/gen, not meant in a mean way) and something... too personal for a site announcement? Hard to describe...
Dartwind
(To anyone else with urgent reports or emergencies, please DM us directly! Our contact us page has links to multiple moderators and a contact an admin page for user-related reports - I can also help with user reports as a site lead.)