Hey everyone,

As mentioned in the last newspost, we are working on a budget update regarding the site’s finances.  This is still in progress as, unfortunately, we are still stuck in the legal closing process. Certain legal costs need to be included in this year’s reported budget, and they cannot be accurately reported before the legal process concludes.

This process has taken substantially longer than we expected, and we’re very sorry for that. We want to be as transparent as we can through this process, and thank everyone for their patience.

Since things have already been delayed due to the legal side of the leadership transition, we don’t want to make any promises on future timelines. However, assuming no additional legal hurdles emerge, we predict the budget news post will be ready before 2024.

In the meantime, we do have some exciting news to share with you all!

Addressing the Annual Site Slowness

Historically, Art Fight has been very slow during the first week of the event. In past years, it has sometimes even gone down completely, leading to many users unable to access Art Fight until days into the fight. This is due to the old site architecture not being able to support the amount of traffic we received. For improved stability, a complete re-architecture of the backend is required. This is a complicated process, requiring a substantial amount of time and resources to be completed.

That’s why we’re happy to announce that we’ve engaged Loka, a team of AWS Cloud Experts and engineers, to make that transition happen! Loka is a service that helps companies restructure their older systems. With Loka, Art Fight will transition off our previous Linode servers, and add traffic auto-balancing too! Once work is completed, the site will hopefully perform fast and remain stable for ALL Art Fights in the future.

The cost for this engagement is $10,000 (and has already been paid for). We expect the migration to be completed by the end of December. The site will be going down for maintenance for this reason, happening on Monday, November 27th at 9:00am UTC for about 12 hours. There will be a notice made on our social medias and Discord server beforehand.

Addressing Leadership Concerns

Due to concerns from the community, we also want to take the time to address Takaia’s role at Art Fight. As of now, they are being kept on a temporary basis for site development (coding), and to facilitate the site transition. They are not involved in any decision making processes, nor are they involved with the site’s finances. They have been working closely with the Loka team to help migrate the site architecture, and they are making many backend/frontend changes to the site in support of the transition.  After the transition, Takaia will leave the Art Fight team.

Originally, Takaia was the sole manager of several critical site operations. Therefore, they must remain involved in some capacity during the leadership transition as a guide and as part of the architecture migration: Amazon Web Services accounts, Linode servers, email service (Mailgun), and many more services that AF needs to function are still in the process of being transferred over. This means their current involvement is integral throughout this process. Once the transfer has been completed and the co-owners are knowledgeable with the backend services, they will depart from the staff team in entirety.

We understand that some of you are concerned about their involvement, so we want to be honest about why this is a necessary process.

A new EIN is also being issued to the company. Plus tax information, registration information, new banking info, and lots of other logistical hurdles need to be overcome before the site transition is complete. Especially to those who have never operated a website before, or dealt with the complexities of running your own business, we ask for your empathy and understanding during this time.

Please also note that Rainy, Turtle, and Axel are all full-time employees/students: Art Fight is still something we do in our free time, so we appreciate everyone’s patience with us.

Art Fight 2024 Theme Poll


We are beginning to prepare for Art Fight 2024, so you all know what that means… It’s Theme Poll time!

We’re trying something a bit different this year. Instead of voting for only one theme, this year you will be able to order the themes based on your personal favorites! This poll will close on the 10th of December at 5pm EST. Since we have implemented a ranking system, this will be the only poll - so make sure to get your vote in before the poll closes!

You can vote for your favorite themes by clicking here!

Volunteer Moderator Applications Open

Ever wanted to help out Art Fight? Now’s your chance!

We have positions for both site and chat moderators open. If you think you have what it takes to be a moderator, please apply below!

• You must be 18 years old or older to apply. You also must have participated in one fight. 
• If you already applied this year, please do not apply again unless you have something significant to add to your application, thank you! 
• Additionally, if you do not hear back within 6 months, then we will unfortunately not be going forward with your application at this time. 

Check out this page for more information!

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Thanks for sticking with us throughout this year. We'll share more details when we can!

- Axel, classicturtle, Rainy