News

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Here's what to expect for the end of the fight:



And a few housekeeping notes from me:

Updates...

Team Badges

To show your team pride, use the badges made by Sangtanic and leafjelly on your Art Fight profile! You can add them to your profile by clicking the little emoji on the text editor.

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Theme Reveal

If you haven't already seen the 2023 theme reveal video, you can watch it here.

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New filtering system!

We have made some changes to our filtering system. The filter categories are the same, but your personal filter settings are now easier to use and understand. Go to your settings to have a look and adjust the filters to your preferences.

Changes for filters include:

• New design for your personal filter settings
• Characters and attacks in filter categories you have set to hide can no longer be accessed. To see them, change the filter to censor or show instead.
• Extreme nudity and sexual themes are hidden for minors, they will be accessible when a user turns 18
• With the update to the system, all user filters have been set to "hide" by default. Go to your settings to set your preferences.

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Changes to the attack guide

• The “Drawings” category has changed name to “Drawn / Painted”
• Clean Color and Painting under the Coloring subcategory has been merged into Clean Color.
• Added that painting a 3D printed version of a 3D model counts as a self produced texture. (In the 3D section.)
• Clarified that question 8 under Crafts in the attack FAQ relates to crafts only.

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New additions to the team

Please give a warm welcome this year's new additions to the team! banannie mintberry amongus SOCKY and rejoining us is Virixin !  Thank you for your hard work thus far!

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Art Fight 2023 Banners

The 2023 Banners are here!  A big thank you to Axel for all his hard work!  Thank you for your patience.

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Upcoming Attack Guide Update

As always, we are hard at work editing and tweaking the attack guide for this year’s fight.  It is advised to check the guide the closer we get to the fight as final touches and tweaks are made.  Of course, if you ever have a question, never hesitate to reach out to a site moderator!
We will detail all the changes at the beginning of the fight.

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Upcoming Site Maintenance

As July approaches, the site will undergo its usual down times to perform maintenance.  These will be announced on our Discord when possible, as the site will be inaccessible.  We appreciate your patience during these times!

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Art Fight 2023 MAP Applications Opening

As mentioned in the last news post, cyxxie and scribedhearts are once again hosting an official Art Fight MAP (multiple animator project)!  Please refer to the last news post for some basic information regarding the MAPs and rules concerning them.

The applications for the MAP will go live on this newspost on June 24th at 3:00pm UTC - that’s tomorrow!  Parts will be assigned on a first come first serve basis – after 30 participants have joined, users may apply as a back up.  The MAP will be utilizing a form of this song.  You must also have or be willing to use a Discord to communicate with the hosts of the MAP.

Apply here! - >>https://forms.gle/1Qvw9QFacprpKvCr6<<

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Art Fight 2023 Prompts

The sunset of June marks our annual Art Fight Prep Prompts!  What better way to prepare for Art Fight than with some thought provoking questions about your OCs and their Art Fight pages?  These are for YOU - you can do as many or as little as you’d like to prepare.  Feel free to share your prompts in the #prompts channel on our Discord!  Take a look at the prompts below, and please thank the lovely mori and scribedhearts for putting this together for everyone!

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Other updates and news

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On Coming Site Updates

We will be implementing a few new changes to the site. During this time, please be patient with us during scheduled maintenance, and downtimes. More info will be shared when it's ready!

2022 Achievements

Rest assured, our artist is working away and they will be finished and released in time for the fight. Check back for the July 1st news post!

AI Art

As a reminder, using pre-made, uncredited art (like AI art) in characters and attacks goes against the spirit and rules of Art Fight; Character rule #26 & Spirit of Art Fight rule #1. This method actively hurts artists by stealing their work and Art Fight stands strongly against it. Characters and attacks that contain pre-made & uncredited art will be removed.

Character, attack, and profile pages are only available to those who are logged in. Still, we strongly encourage the user of watermarking images posted onto the site to further protect yourself against theft. And as always, you can report rule breaks using the report feature or get in contact with a moderator.

Here are some helpful resources about the negative impact of AI art and how it hurts artists: https://hyperallergic.com/806026/digital-artists-are-pushing-back-against-ai/

Discord Server

Trying to find targets? Join our Discord Server where you can partake in our channel Target Hunting - a channel designed to find users to attack. Check the server for more updates regarding the theme reveal!

ArtFight 2023 MAP

If you remember last year, scribedhearts and cyxxie hosted ArtFight’s first official Multiple Animators Project, aka MAP. With the hard work of 60 participants split across two MAP videos, we were able to produce THIS and THIS!

Seeing the success of the last project has led to the return of the MAP this year. Cyxxie and Scribedhearts hope to debut the MAP song before the team reveal video on June 23rd, with sign-ups going out shortly after. After taking in feedback from last year, participants will be notified before the event begins as well!

As a reminder, all MAP parts and participants must follow ArtFight rules. While the entire part must be created during the duration of the event, parts may be of any finish level, and we are accepting and welcoming people of ALL animation levels. Participants will be required to join an ArtFight MAP-specific Discord server so the hosts can keep in contact easier, as well as seamlessly do check-ins throughout the month.

We will only be able to accept a certain number of people. After that number is reached, anyone after may sign-up as a backup. This year, parts will be divided in order to hit the music beats, which means part lengths will vary. In order to keep things fair, parts will still be assigned on a FCFS basis, so apply QUICK!

Reporting Guide

As more and more users become active, that means more eyes are on the site and more reports are on the way in! In order to help make your lives (and ours) a bit easier when it comes to helping us keep the site safe, we are currently developing a Guide to Reporting. Please keep an eye out for the release!

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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.

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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

Here's what to expect for the end of the fight:

Updates...

Team Badges

To show your team pride, use the badges made by Sangtanic on your Art Fight profile! You can add them to your profile by clicking the little emoji on the text editor. 

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Theme Reveal

If you haven't already seen the 2022 theme reveal video, you can watch it here. 

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Lead Moderators are here!

We have been working on our staff structure recently, and have made the decision to introduce two new roles: Chat and Site Lead Moderators! These are the folks that have final say over important decisions, guide moderators, and help out behind the scenes. 

Give a warm welcome to our Site Lead Dartwind, and our Chat Lead cyxxie!

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New Contact Page

We've added a new contact page that should make it easier for you to access help on the site! It lists all the moderators, what languages they speak, and what they can help with. Check it out here. The footer will be edited to reflect this.

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Collaboration with HelloPaint

As you may have seen us announce in our previous newspost, we are collaborating with HelloPaint, the successor of iScribble!

We invite you to join us on July 15th at 7:00pm UTC on a board exclusively for Art Fight, where you will be greeted by a special Art Fight 2022 background for the respective teams. Your job is to draw your character on top of the background, interacting with background elements. We will feature the finished drawing on our Discord and the 2022 winner newspost! Come join the fun~

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Another note to 3D artists

We would also like to address what we announced about bases in our last newspost. We've gotten some feedback and now have a better understanding of how important bases can be to a 3D artist's work process. This is why we are reversing our decision and are allowing base usage (with limitations) and vroid models this year! You can read about the changes in the section beneath! We want to apologise if we hurt anyone with our previous post or made it seem like we don't care about the 3D community. That was never our intentions!

We would also like to remind you that we are made up of volunteer efforts. We make art fight what it is on our free time, whether its development or moderating. We are just a group of people who want to bring you the best possible event, and on our way we may make a mistake or two!

We hope the 3D community will be happy with these changes. We worked very hard to bring you something that would let your creativity run free AND guards the game against any loopholes like spray painting a sims 4 cat as an attack (this would NOT be allowed under our current guidelines). And remember to give feedback in the forms at the end of the fight!

Art Fight aims to create a welcoming space for artist diversity and we hope these changes reflect that. Happy fighting from the team!

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Rating updates

Apart from some minor text changes, point tweaks, and some new examples, here are the bigger changes in the guide this year:

3D Modeling

- Vroids, digital doll paintovers and base usage is now allowed and have their own subcategory.
- Rigging has been added as a subcategory.
- Finish and light subcategories have been removed as they were redundant or confusing to define.

Crafts

- Clarified that painting figurines (fully) is okay for craft paintovers.
- Added brick builds to the bead category.

Animations

- Renamed "type" to "amount of movement" for clarity.
- Added "mixed movement" as a way to categorise attacks with both partial and full animation.
- Added PMV to the animatic subcategory
- 3D animation have been moved to tweening, as rigging is covered under the 3D category now.
- 2D vtuber models now have their own category to make up for any rigging work.

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Reminders

Some reminders of changes we made last year:

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Art Fight 2022 Banners

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