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)
blankstorefront
(general disclaimer that I do not know that much about ads and this subject would definitely be better addressed by someone who does)
Dartwind
Alien-Fruit
Sangtanic
Thank you for committing to fixing your filters. I was shocked and appalled to know that the safeguards didn't function as they should and many of my friends were understandably freaked out when I warned them of the issue. I'm happy it's a priority here, but I really think this should have been addressed back when it was discovered.
piktochat
MiniMilkshake1001
to be completely honest i was hoping a bit more honesty and responsibility was going to be taken, including the issues of mods mishandling situations. especially about the mod that kicked this whole NSFW thing off by very confidently saying sexual content was allowed on the discord and making fun of the person reporting it, then doubling down on their defense and hostility towards the user. i really don't know if you can call all that just a misunderstanding.
i don't really know much on the 'pay your volunteer' stance, but after reading everything i do think it's a little weird that you're talking like if you have to pay them it can ONLY be living wage and not just be a small amount to thank them for the effort they put in. biggest issue is you admitting you're taking money to pay yourself and aren't disclosing that amount, so the actual funds that would be available to at least pay the other coder is a total mystery. i'm not saying you can't pay yourself, but i am going to go ahead and say that using wording that's going to make other people think the ONLY way you can offer something to the rest of the team is by giving you more donations feels a little disingenuous.
thanks for reading my comment!
ferretfacade
BluemioDaFox
blankstorefront
the major issues with organization, six years of a known massive NSFW filter bug, inconsistent rule enforcement... I understand that Art Fight's gotten really big, but... honestly, I kinda think it shouldn't be going on or taking new members until at least the major glaring issues like the NSFW filter are under control? I know things have changed a lot since I was on the team, and I want to have faith that Art Fight can keep running successfully. But as of now, it's just kind of hard to when it seems like the site's struggling under the userbase size. Has the idea of temporarily closing registration been brought up? Given there's a major discrepancy between the scale of the team vs scale of the site.
Zelleya
Unless people wanna start paying a lot just to participate so all staff can be paid, but they would complain for that too lol There's no winning against the general public.
If I could, I would volunteer in a heartbeat, just because I would love to see Artfight last. This site and event brings so much joy that I really wouldn't mind dedicating time for, if I had any time to give ♡
Beefsen
I remember when I first participated in Art Fight - it was such a rush - I was drawing every day, and immediately after the event ended, even though I only participated for two weeks, I saw such a huge improvement to both my art as well as my confidence. People loved seeing what I made for them. I did it all for free. I thrived off the idea that someone else was getting joy about something I did for them. It felt like I was doing a good thing - giving life to characters that other artists might not be able to make or put a new spin on things for experienced creators. I was learning all the way - how to draw these kinds of horns, this sort of hair... I remember receiving comments thanking me, that were so kind they brought me to happy tears. Art Fight is about giving - sure, I have a commissions page, where folks could pay me to make art for them. But Art Fight was never for that - it was just about making things for other people 'cause you liked them, and had fun drawing.
Being a moderator is the same idea. I applied because I wanted to do more. I liked the thought of people being able to ask me for stuff. I wanted to be helpful. I didn't want it as a job - I never thought to be asked to be paid. The interview and application process asks you numerous times- do you know this is an unpaid volunteer position? I signed yes, I did. I do.
Right now... I probably put around 1-3 hours a week into Art Fight. It's not a lot - it really doesn't eat into my time. It's flexible - I check in on breaks and take a week or two off whenever I feel like it... During the on-season, it was more like 3-6 hours per day, excluding doing art for the event. But for me, that's really not a lot of time, I still play in several tabletop games a week, I have a great full-time job, some extra money from commissions now and then, a cat, a spouse... I'm really living the life! (This does, of course, mean that sometimes tickets or messages I get take a bit for me to reply to - I always put my own life before Art Fight, so thanks for your patience while I get to things! And for the users who ever ask me for help - always feel free to remind me if something seems to have been forgotten!)
I appreciate everyone trying to look out for me, but I don't actually want to work here as a paid employee. I think if Art Fight asked to pay me as an employee with hours and stuff (which would be complicated as I'm not American....) I would probably decline. I am a volunteer because I want to be. Because it's fun. Because the spirit of Art Fight was always about doing things for other people, whenever you had the means to do so. I make art during the event for other people because I want to. I volunteer with Art Fight because I want to.
If there ever comes a day when it's no longer feasible for me to spend my time here, or something else changes, I'll bid you all farewell with a sincere thank you. Because I am thankful - I appreciate all of you who care about us and the spirit of Art Fight.
That's all for now - looking forward to seeing you all in Art Fight 2023!
Beef
grimsprout
I'm glad the developer is getting at least a bit of compensation, hopefully the financial situation will get easier
NorthernFire
Anolee
Takaia
Frogluv123 thank you for your hard work as support, you're great
cogcow We don't tolerate harassment of anyone, but we can only act on what we know and if people report it. You can DM me (on Discord, please!) about it if you wish. Former staff like any other user need to report things for current staff to know what is going on so we can act on it. I'm not aware of what harassment you're talking about but if you're in contact with this former staff member that's experiencing harassment, please encourage them to reach out so we can do something about it!
Skelleste I really really appreciate the sentiment! I don't want to pressure you into donating more, because the amount needed to actually be able to have employees would be a lot. I would like to look into hiring some people but that's kind of infeasible right now. I just want to be transparent with you before you decide to donate more. I very much appreciate your support though!
Biscuit I'm going to try. I own a sole-proprietorship but that unfortunately doesn't mean I actually make enough to get an accountant for all of my finances (or even fully support myself financially), but I would like to look into getting one to at least to do my taxes, like we discussed, since I might be able to afford one that does a little bit of work for me once a year (and since that would be tax-deductible). This wasn't included in the announcement, though, since the accountant wouldn't be for anything but taxes. I do really appreciate that you believe in AF! And I'm very grateful you believed in me for so many years, and for being the first admin to advocate for me being paid when I was really nervous to do it 💖