Other Updates…

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Site Rule Updates

Quick reminder that we recently updated our rules as of March. Please take the time to read through them, as a lot of changes were made!

100 Character Limit

Starting with the next site update, we will be reinstating the 100 active character limit. This decision was made because profiles with more characters than this were becoming difficult to moderate, and having no limit on characters uploaded can greatly increase the number of images Art Fight needs to host.

In addition to this change, there will be a new "Character Archiving" feature that will allow you to "keep" characters beyond this limit. Archived characters will not be attackable and will have minimal profiles, but their names and any attacks made on them will still be visible to users. Archived characters may later be restored to an active profile, though they will need to have images and text re-added. More information on archiving will come when the feature releases.

Not to be confused with the user character limit, we have also added a limit to the total amount of characters able to be added to attacks. There is now a hard limit of 100 characters per attack.

Ratings Update

Character Filter Update

We will be releasing updates in regards to Art Fight’s character filter guide in the upcoming weeks! 

Tips and Tricks Page

We have a little treat for art beginners or those who seek some nifty tips for art making! We now have a "Tips and Tricks" page where you will find: 
- Tips for drawing on computers, tablets, phones, or on paper
- Free art software for computers, tablets and phones + free 3D software
- How to set up an ideal character page

The traditional art section will be fleshed out some more over the coming weeks, along with some tips for crafting too! 
We hope you find it useful. ♥

New Moderators

We’d like to welcome some of our new moderators joining us this year! Please give a big welcome to… 

In this update:

Newly released features: username changes and automated donation processing

Volunteer applications are open

Donations FAQ updates

Final thoughts from staff

Automated donations and name changes have been released!

Name Changes

There is no longer a need to contact moderators for username changes! You can change your username in your user settings. You will be able to change your name once every 30 days, as long as you have name changes available.

We’ve automatically given every user their initial 1 name change, regardless of whether you used your free one up. In addition to this, all users will now receive 1 name change every year on January 1st!

If you’re looking to change your username more often than that, extra name changes can still be obtained as a bonus for making donations. 1 extra name change will now come with every $2 USD you donate within a single transaction. If you have donated since July 1st 2019, we are retroactively awarding name changes to your account based on your total donations made within that time. If you have already "used" your name change(s) from those donations, consider this an extra gift from us!


Your account is able to hold up to 12 name changes at a time - if you are currently at that cap, you will not receive additional name changes on January 1st, or when making donations.

Please note that minor name changes (capitalization, number removals, etc) are still available for free by contacting a mod on the contact us page.

Automated Donations

On-site donation rewards are now automated*! This means that once you donate, your (on-site) rewards will automatically go through without any manual work needed. You'll also be able to view your donation history, where you'll find information about donations you’ve made, your current donation tier, and lifetime donation total. Keep in mind that discord rewards are still manually given out and may take longer to receive.

(*The “Custom Symbol” reward in the VIP+ tier still requires communication with an Administrator as symbol choices need to be approved before use.)

We have imported records from PayPal of all donations from July 1st, 2019 to present. At this time, we don’t know whether or not we will be able to add donation records prior to this date, but we may in the future.

Along with this update, we've made the decision to retire the current donation progress bar in the site's footer. All funds earned from donations are currently going towards server and image hosting, site assets, and other expenses directly related to Art Fight.

Should there be a specific goal in the future (for example, running the fight in 2023) that we project needing additional funds for, the donation progress bar will return for that goal.
If the donation progress bar is not present, it means that we're receiving enough donation funding for current operating costs, and will be putting any further donation funds towards future costs.

As always, we're extremely grateful for all of the support we've received- we're able to keep Art Fight running thanks to you!

Rules Update

Quick reminder that we recently updated our rules as of March. Please take the time to read through them, as a lot of changes were made!

Volunteer Applications Open

Our annual volunteer form is now open! Ever wanted to help out Art Fight? We have positions for both Site and Discord moderators. If you think you have what it takes to be a moderator, you can apply below!

If you have already applied in 2020 and have nothing new to add, please do not re-apply. We are still considering and processing those applications.

You must be at least 18 years old to apply

You must have participated in one Art Fight Event (does not include minigames)

We are looking at users who are active on the Art Fight site or Discord server

Being in the Art Fight Discord server is a requirement

Any applications from people that don’t meet the above requirements will be ignored

Click here to be sent to the form. We look forward to seeing your responses!

Donations FAQ Updates

In the newspost about transparency we put out a feedback survey where you could ask questions. Here are Takaia’s answers to those questions.

Have you considered having volunteer artists?

Yes, we have considered having volunteer artists! However, we’re still discussing what exactly that entails and will likely bring in volunteers only for the smaller tasks, and not the big tasks. We will be looking into it more next year.

Will Art Fight ever start happening twice a year?

Making Art Fight a semi-annual event is currently not feasible due to the risk of burnout and amount of work / time that needs to be put into each event from the entire staff well in advance of each event. It's a fairly common suggestion, so if it ever does become feasible, we'll let you know!

Why don't you put ads on the site?

Based on the positive responses to people suggesting this, ads are something that we may be bringing to the site in the future! I originally chose to not put ads up because I assumed that people would find ads too annoying to deal with, but you guys have told me that that isn't the case. The end goal is to just have internal ads that any user can pay for and have displayed. If we find ourselves needing to host external ads, we will commit to using non-intrusive ad services.

How long until the money runs out?

The expenses for the site itself have always been fully funded by the amazing people who donate their money! If donations continue as they have, we don’t have to worry about the money running out 💖

Why didn’t I receive my discord role?

Usually, one of the following are the reason why you don't have the Donator role:


If you haven’t received your discord role from a donation, please contact Takaia on Discord: @ Takaia#0135

Going Forward

We love our users, and will be doing our best to make sure you’re satisfied. In the coming months we will be doing various bug fixes and general preparation for this year's fight. You can also expect a revamped maturity guide and ratings guide, as usual. Please check out our Suggestions Trello for more information about the future!

Additionally, if you are waiting on deleting your Art Fight account and have emailed [email protected], we apologize that there has been no reply. We are currently working on improving our deletion system, but the limitations of our current system have caused us to fall behind. If you have emailed [email protected], then we will get back to you. Thanks for your patience!
 

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If you have any feedback regarding these updates, please submit it here.

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Hello Art Fighters! 
The team has been hard at work revising our site rules. We heard your concerns loud and clear, and with your suggestions in mind, we have changed and added a lot. This includes the new category "Spirit of Art Fight", made to ensure a positive and kind environment. We'd like to ask you to read through the entire rules page again to avoid accidentally breaking any rules! 

You can read the rules here.

Asides from that, you should start seeing more updates from the team as we get closer to the fight! We will be announcing changes done to the attack and maturity ratings in the coming months, amongst other exciting things! 

We hope that you are excited for Art Fight 2021, and enjoy these new rules. If you have any questions regarding the rules, please comment below! 

Hello Artfighters! I wrote this over the past few days with a lot of time and careful consideration because, after all this time, I think that’s what I owe you. The consequence of this is that it’s way too long, and I’m sorry about that, but if you’re concerned about donations at all, I’m hoping it will answer most of your questions.

I wanted to apologize for the huge delay in making this announcement. I know a lot of you have been asking for this for a long time, and I regret not taking more initiative to overcome the obstacles in my life, rather than allowing them to inhibit progress on this for so long. 

I know that the delay has caused a lot of feelings of frustration and mistrust, and may have given the impression that I was being intentionally non-transparent. I’ve never hidden this information on purpose, but I know my actions and lack of communication probably made it look that way. I’m truly sorry and embarrassed that it took me this long to do this.

I’m here now to attempt to make things right, as best I can. I’m going to address some common concerns regarding donations below. In the likely event that I failed to address everything today, please see the final section in this announcement to find out how to send me more related questions, concerns, and suggestions.

(Unintended) lack of transparency

The donations page was always meant to be the solution to being transparent about donations, but at some points in time it hasn’t been enough because it was too long between updates, or because some things weren’t clear enough. As contributors to the Art Fight, I know it can be frustrating to see old and confusing information. Again, it was never my intention to hide things from you, but there were times that I did so unintentionally. I’m sorry for my lack of diligence in keeping the page up to date, and for mistakes I’ve made in the clarity of information.

Carefully examining the finances to figure out exactly what our goals should be for the 2021 fight is on my to do list! I will let you guys know when I have the donations page updated with 2021 goals. You may have noticed that I’ve also reset the goal progress bar. Even though I didn’t have an announcement about it ready at the time, I didn’t want to continue leaving it stagnant. I guessed on the base amount for the goal just so we could have a moving progress bar, but this goal is very temporary and is almost certain to change. For future years, I intend to have budget estimations ready before the fight ends so as to avoid confusion with old information being displayed.

For now, I’ve edited the donations page in an attempt to improve transparency with the following:
 - added info to reflect that the provided information is old and applies to the 2020 fight
 - indicated which tier we reached for the 2020 fight
 - added a statement to let people know to expect 2021 goals when I’m able to figure those out
 - corrected a mistake in the code where the date was off in the sponsor box on the right
 - changed the “2019 - 2020” wording that the bottom of each page to say “2020 - 2021” because I hadn’t realized until now I’d forgotten to do that
 - gave numbers to the FAQ questions and updated questions 2 and 4 to be more clear on requirements for banner rewards

Where did the money go?

Given that I'm not an accountant, the numbers have admittedly always been approximations. The short answer to this question is: Taxes and PayPal fees, keeping up with all the bills for servers and other things to help keep the site up and running, and each year I pay for the official site artwork.

The exception to this is the funds that went unused from the extended period of time that I had unexpectedly developed a severe health condition (not related to the pandemic). I regret not being able to properly work on Art Fight past the symptoms, and I’m sorry for allowing that to contribute to all of this. 

During the time I was not working on Art Fight, due to my illness, I didn’t do anything with the money, besides paying Art Fight bills. It remained either in PayPal or in the Art Fight bank account, and it will be carried over for future use for expenses listed on the donations page. If anyone was worried about me taking the money and running, I promise you that never did and never will happen. I care far too deeply about you, the community, and Art Fight itself to do that, but I know that that is something that may have occurred to some of you, so hopefully this will be of some reassurance.

I’ve realized that Art Fight is becoming so big that it’s growing beyond the scope of a part-time, purely volunteer passion project. I’m absolutely still very passionate about it, but Art Fight’s growth has begun to require a lot more attention and time than a passion project meant for spare time. The wording from the donations page, “dedicated Art Fight site development” from 2019 I believe, which then changed to “x hours of paid site development”, were a couple first attempts at a response to the situation. Looking back, I think that the language I used was a mistake: I still very much have to rely on volunteers to help with the site, and there’s nowhere near enough revenue to pay them, however much I’d love to do so. The way I worded things may have falsely implied that I was paying all of the other coders, and that the amount of money received by Art Fight would be directly proportional to new (visible) features on the site that directly benefited users.

I believe the biggest contributing factors to this was that I’ve never been even close to being in charge of something this big before, as well as the fear of backlash for potentially using extra donations to allow myself to give even more of my time to Art Fight than I was previously able to. My inexperience at being stuck in the weird in-between spot of a passion project becoming something bigger, and not really knowing how to handle that, made things difficult. I recognize that I made a lot of mistakes due to this. I’m sure I’m going to make a lot more as I continue to learn and grow alongside Art Fight, but I will at least be working on getting better at owning up to such mistakes and being faster at making them right as best I can.

As Art Fight grows, I really do want to look into possibly having employees so that I can pay some of the wonderful people on staff for their hard work. I’ve learned that having employees is something that is far more complicated than I had imagined, but I do plan on looking into it. I do think, however, that we will always need to rely on the lovely moderators, as most sites do, to help out in the community and make things an enjoyable experience for users. And for now, I will also be relying on the talented volunteer coders, designer, etc. for a lot of the progress.

Making donation rewards happen more quickly

I’m really sorry for the delays when it comes to receiving donation rewards. The plan is to make donations fully automated in the future so that this won’t be a problem! We’ll be connecting the site database with PayPal transactions (or switch to a different service if PayPal decides to not play nice) as well as have a bot for discord rewards. Without the need to manually give out rewards, this should ensure that they are given out by the system promptly!

One suggestion was to allow more than one person handle donations. I agree with this completely that it would be better for user experience to do this. However, now that I am more consistently able to work on Art Fight again, I think that time would be better spent researching and implementing automated donation rewards. Automation of this process is already the end goal, and prevents putting even more work on admins when I could be working to make the system better instead.

Currently, the system allowing you to change your username without contacting a mod is almost ready to go! This will give everyone one username change chance that can be used at any time. Extra chances will be given out when you donate. For now these extras will be given manually, like the rest of the donations rewards, but this will be integrated into the automated system when that becomes ready to go.

Lack of (visible) coding progress

There has been some concern about not seeing coding progress. The answer comes in two parts, both of which are pretty boring: I fell ill for a long amount of time starting in 2019, which hindered a lot of progress during that time. The second part is that there’s a lot of work that has to be done behind the scenes. A lot of coding (and other tech stuff) has to do with version updates and optimizations for the code base and server software, among other things that you shouldn’t actually notice (if we do it right) but also unfortunately takes up coder resources. 

In order to keep you updated on the latest coding progress, we’re planning on implementing a simple on-site changelog that you can check. You may remember the site had a changelog in the past, but it was not used beyond 2016. The new on-site changelog, when implemented, will be easier to read and regularly updated by staff. When the update is mostly behind the scenes, we may be less detailed about changes, but we do intend to inform you when things are being worked on to help keep the site running.

Additional FAQ

I hope this has finally cleared some things up for you all! I’m expecting to have not remembered to include everything that you wanted to know, so I’m planning on doing a follow-up announcement with some FAQ that results from this announcement. Please fill out this form if you have feedback. I’ll be giving you all a week (until December 3rd) to ask questions. Give me a few days to compile and answer them, and then I’ll post another announcement with the answers to the most frequent (and donations-relevant) questions.

Note: this doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions after that, it just means your questions wouldn’t have a chance to appear in the follow-up announcement.

Reports on attack ratings will be temporarily disabled after 4PM MDT. If you wish to report attacks for reasons not involving ratings, (i.e. Harassment, tracing, etc.) please report the User’s profile and describe the problem accurately in the report. Once again thank you all for your help!



I apologize about the sudden site slowness yesterday and today. Due to this, the event will be ending August 11th at 7pm MDT (Art Fight time). Here's a countdown timer if you need it
After the event ends, the moderators will spend a few days responding to attacks and double checking things. The official newspost will be posted after that with the winning team. 

We appreciate the patience this last month. We hope you've all had a great fight!

 

Art Fight 2020 Extension
You may have noticed that the site was slow for a few days after the event started. We apologize about the inconvenience it may have caused you all. 
Due to the site being inaccessible for a few days, we've made the decision to extend the fight until August 10th, 2020 12:00PM MDT.  The site wasn't down for that long, but we wanted to surprise you all with a longer extension this year. We hope you all enjoy the extra time! 

Known Site Issues
Art Fight should be running pretty smooth now, with the exception of an error you may get on the front page, and the statistics page being temporarily inaccurate. There may be some slow patches, but it should be generally stable!

Rating Update - Animation Balancing, Simple Characters & Minimal Form
Our rating system isn't perfect, so we've made some important changes to it for the rest of the fight that we think you'll like!
Animation

On July 4th, we recently balanced animation points, since animation was giving a bit more points than intended. All attacks uploaded after that have the intended amount.

Simple Characters & Minimal Form

There has been some controversy surrounding the Simple Shaped Character size rating. We've heard your concerns, and are implementing a new size rating called Minimal Form. 

Sometimes referred to as 'blobs', these doodle-like characters are drawn with minimum effort. They generally feature singular simple shapes or silhouettes. Characters that can be drawn in only a few strokes or lines can fall into this category.

The team will be updating existing attacks we deem fit with this rating. We'll also be doing some point recalculations too, so you may notice some point changes! 
We urge you to all check out the new rating description by clicking here.

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How do I get sorted?

Now that the event has officially started, you can click “Current Event” in the upper right hand corner to check it out. Once there, you can go ahead and get sorted into a team. Team sorting is done manually to help prevent teams from being flooded with abandoned and inactive accounts. Which team you get sorted is mostly based on how many users are on the teams already, to help make sure that the user count is balanced and each team has an equal chance based on member count.

How do I attack?
Once you’ve been sorted into one of the two teams, you are then able to click the Submit button in the navbar and there should now be “Attack!”.

What is rating?
You may notice a Rate Attacks option under Browse. Here, you can rate attacks that have been submitted, giving them a small addition to their points if you upvote them. This is not a required part of gameplay! It’s just if you want to take part in it.

You also do not need to be on a team to rate! Spectators, if you want to have a little part in the game too, now’s your chance!

Is friendly fire a thing? What is it?
Friendly fire in Art Fight means to attack someone on the same team as opposed to attacking someone on the opposite team, and it most definitely is a thing! You’d attack them just like you would anybody else. However, since the goal is to attack people on the other team, friendly fire will not count for points.

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Hello Art Fighters! Welcome to Art Fight 2020. We’re all excited for you to participate!



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• Name changes are no longer accepted for the duration of the fight, with the exception of donators!
• We have heavily updated our attack categorization.  Please check them out as they have a lot of changes!
• You may have noticed that we implemented a dark mode! You're able to switch to it in settings.

Other
Here’s a few helpful links to get you started:

• http://artfight.net/info/rules
• http://artfight.net/info/faq
• http://artfight.net/info/about

Team Badges
To show your team pride, use the badges made by Sangtanic on your Art Fight profile and DeviantART! 

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Art Fight 2020 Theme Reveal and Early Bird Registration

Hello everyone, are you excited for Art Fight yet? You should be, because we have some nice surprises coming up!

Theme Reveal
It’s become a tradition to animate a short video revealing the theme. This year, we revealed the 2020 Art Fight theme on stream. If you missed the stream, find the video here! We chose to spice things up this year and also incorporated a summer/autumn kind of feeling to the themes. We hope you like them! 

Early Bird Registration - Pick your team!
Yes, as we stated before, you will be able to pick your team early by clicking on this google form and following the instructions. Please be aware that you won’t get on your team immediately, it will take some time to process. The form will close before July 1st. 

If you want to get further updates, make sure you join our Discord Server to get fast announcements. As well, check out our Twitter! 

Maturity Filters Update
Upon feedback from you, we’ll be slightly revamping the maturity filters and their rules. You’ll see an announcement for that later on! 

Ratings Update 
We’re proud to announce that the rating system got a big update! You’ll see a variety of new options when rating an attack. Please be sure to look over the Attack Guide before making an attack to see where your art may fall!

Here are some of the changes made for this year:

• There is a new overarching Attack Type section, which includes "Drawing", "3D Modeling" and "Crafts!"  These will offer different options in the drop down menu, and will have relevant scorings.


• The new Craft category allows you to chose from: Textile, Clay, Heavy-Metal Work, Food Art, Bead Work, and Paper Craft. 


• The new 3D Modeling category lets you choose from Model or Sculpt, Texture types, and Lighting types.


• Animation now has two parts for scoring. The length, and technique. Technique allows you to choose between Frame-By-Frame, Tweening/Stop-Motion, and 3D animation. 


• There is a new Polish check-mark. This allows you to give your attack bonus points for any extra effort you may have put into your piece! 


• Single-Tone Shading and Multi-Tone Shading have been combined into one Fully-Shaded category. 


• Simple Scene and Complex Scene have been combined into one Scene category. 


• Painting has been moved from the Finish category to the Coloring category.

• Point numbers have been rebalanced all around!

Dark Mode
As you may have noticed, we now have a dark theme available! We did switch everyone to this theme temporarily, but you're more than welcome to change back to light theme here. 



We hope you are as excited as we are for Art Fight 2020! Let’s make this a good year. 

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New Moderators
We’d like to welcome some of our new moderators joining us this year! Please give a big welcome to leafjelly, luphorics, spacenerdy, sabletide, @moesoup, bearlissa, Chalk, cyxxie, coldpressedhoney, and @spottedfang! We will be having more faces join us throughout the fight as well. 

Filters Update
The maturity filters were updated for 2020! There were some small changes to the rules, but gore, body horror, sensitive content have all received art examples. We hope this will help users better understand how our filters work with the provided examples! 
You can look through each section here.

Rules Update
We’ve made some changes to the rules for Art Fight 2020! We recommend you all read through them as there were some big changes made. 
Please take a moment to read them!

Username Changes Reminder
Please note that we will not be taking username change requests during the event (July 1st - August 1st) to prevent strain on moderators. If you would like to change your username, you still have about a month to do so. See the contact page for more information on how to change your name. 

Supporters (contributing donations of $5+) are exempt from this rule.

Discord Server Changes
As of June 15th, the minigames on the Art Fight Discord will be closing down due to Art Fight. Just like last year, you will still be able to edit your finished claims, so don’t worry about rushing to finish. Users will continue to receive the timeout role if they do not complete their claims within two weeks. 

The Discord voice-chats will also be closing for the duration of Art Fight due to moderation being shifted primarily to the event. They will open some time after the fight. VIP voice-chats will remain up during the event.  We have also removed the Dream vs Nightmare team roles to prepare for the new roles, and you’ll notice a new icon in celebration of Pride Month, also! 

If you haven’t already, you can join the Discord server here! Discord is one of the fastest ways to get contact with moderators and the latest information regarding the site.

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