Mature Content Filter Revisions

As many of you know, the Mature Content filter was changed pretty drastically to an 18 and older system. This was necessitated by abuse of the system and was put in place as a stop gap measure while we gathered in depth opinion from the community as to what they desired to see in place, and from the artists who post such work.
If you would like to see the course of those events please check out my last several journals as they document this as well as other policy related discussions.

That said, we have made some pretty significant changes to the filtering system to allow for the most flexibility to everyone involved, from viewer to artist. One of the biggest issues we faced was people simply not marking their work if it was mature content or not, and this was mainly due to that option being buried at the bottom of the submission process. To balance that we have now made checking yes or no to Mature Content mandatory to complete your submission. This will greatly reduce the number of unflagged images, and not add too much extra time to the submission process itself.

Flagging Levels

There will now be two levels of flagging available. A strict Mature Content flag, and a Warning content.

Marking an image with the strict warning will make the image non viewable to anyone under the age of 18.

The warning flag is essentially the previous system, which will let a user know that there is Mature Content, but they can make their own judgment call as to whether they are mature enough to view it.

In addition, you will now also be able to add information as to what the image itself contains, so viewers can have an idea of whether or not it is something they wish to see. No longer will the Mature Content thumbnail simply be a door of surprise and mystery!

You will be able to choose from the following options and a brief explanation of them.

• Nudity-Fairly self explanatory. If your image, be it a drawing or a photo or anything in between, contains nudity, penis, testicle, vagina, breast, nipples, or buttocks.

• Sexual Themes-References to sex or overt sexuality, including sexual based humor. This does not mean you may submit sexually explicit or pornographic images.

• Violence/Gore-This refers to overtly bloody or violent images, generally associated with the horror and macabre genres, but could also pertain to photojournalism or written work. This should mainly be applied toward depictions of violence or gore etc, that are portrayed in a "realistic" manner as opposed to the zany cartoon violence of something like Bugs Bunny.

• Strong Language-Profanity, vulgarity, and otherwise coarse or offensive language.

Ideologically Sensitive-This is a new term to enter into the lexicon of terminology applied toward deviations and refers to imagery that may be construed as offensive toward a person or group of peoples religious, social, political ort otherwise ideological beliefs. This does not apply as a means in which to justify hate art. That is a subject we will cover later on. What this should be used for is a warning that you as an artist have created something which very well may piss some people off, as we artists are prone to doing. This will allow you to let people know that they should view it at their own risk.

• Contains Unicorns

This option is entirely fictitious and is only here to see if you are still reading this far.

Any of these indicators that you choose will be displayed on the Mature Content thumbnail, and are all entirely option. You can simply choose to mark your work as Mature, and use none of them, or as many as apply. But it is in your and the communities best interest to let people know what they may be viewing.

Retroactive Changes

Currently any image that is flagged as Mature Content will simply go back to the older method of filtering, aka the warning method. So if you wish to do so, simply go into and edit your deviations to what you wish them t be displayed and, and what level of flagging you want. This also means that those of you who are under 18 who had flagged your own images as Mature will now be able to get back into them. I apologize for that inconvenience.

Community Challenge

First off, I have to thank those of you who provided invaluable insight and opinion on the reshaping of this system to get it to be something that almost everyone in the community and the administration can agree on being a fair and well rounded system that squarely avoids having to actually censor or restrict anybody. Your involvement has been nothing short of amazing.

And now that we have a new and improved flagging system, one way you as a community can help yet again is to help us whittle away at all the things that need to be flagged that haven't been. You can do this by turning ON your Mature Content filter in your settings, and then simply browse through the newest submission, your favorite categories, or wherever you would normally browse, and if you see something that is not filtered and you feel should be, then report the image. We will be taking some extra time to get on top of the backlog in the report desk this coming week as well, so go out there and give us a hand, and chances are you will also find some brand new art and artists to be amazed by!

Stay tuned later this month for more info on overall policy changes!

Where have you been?

It has been a while since I have released a proper Community Development Update, and that is due to a lot of different reasons. The primary one involves lots and lots of work behind the scenes! So read on to get a heaping helping of all things DA!

deviantART…what is it and where is it going?

So, here we all are, on deviantART, submitting work, commenting, making friends, browsing art, and so on. But where are we?

Personally, I feel we are virtual pioneers  at the forefront of something amazing.

I feel that we are just now starting to see what a community like this is capable of doing. A community that has grown on word of mouth in a natural organic way. With no fistfuls of money thrown at it to promote it. No fancy commercials. A community that envelops artistic styles from across the spectrum and deviants from every single inch of the planet.
A community that is without a doubt the sum of its parts. I think deviantART, this community, you...are entirely capable of becoming the most relevant artistic force in the world.

Think about. Where else or at what time has there ever been a thriving community of 4 million people and growing all gathered under such an all encompassing idea as "art". The Renaissance period? Small potatoes. Making comparisons is almost useless since nothing remotely like it has ever happened.

We are constantly watching new styles emerge, new trends, new forms of art that don't even have names yet. I'm sitting here looking at a piece of canvas with isometric pixel art printed on it. Two years ago nobody was thinking about doing that.

This is the ultimate concept of a melting pot. We have photographers being influenced by painters being influenced by vector artists being influenced by anime being influenced by fractal art being influenced by sculpture and on and on.
People are no longer looking outside of DA to see what the next thing will be, they are coming here in droves to see it in the making.
This is not idle bragging by any means.
This is fact. More and more every day deviants are getting plucked from the site to work on comic books, in the fashion industry, as professional photographers, as web designers, doing art for bands, videos, video games, gallery showings, concept art, it goes on and on and on.

I have read the comment "we're looking for people with that deviantART style to their work."
Let that one sink in for a bit. And think about in 10, 20 years when some of these new styles that are being born are fully advanced and recognized. Your name could very easily be referred to as being a pioneer of it in the early days, and for an artist that is the pinnacle of compliments.

Well, now we know we're awesome, but we gotta ask, Where is our Stuff?!?!

This past year we have talked about a lot of different things that are coming out. Like portfolio, the party system, collections, rebuilding the message center, and so on. We are working on all of them and a lot of other projects and during the process we realized that the best possible way to do it is to build them as integrated features as opposed to separate projects.
This causes some delays in when things launch, but will help insure that when they do launch, lots of them will launch all at once and they will all work smoothly right off the bat.
So just hang in there because once you see some of the things we have up our sleeves we think you will be pretty happy you waited.

Okay now we know where that stuff is, but we have some concerns about site policy

Well, glad to hear that, because so do we. Much of the current policy regarding everything from copyright to stock use to how you guys interact, for the most part the foundation is good but the particulars are sort of old and getting somewhat out of date.

When a lot of it was first written actual laws pertaining to digital art and online behaviour didn't even exist and then when they did emerge they almost instantly changed, so it has been a somewhat difficult challenge in keeping with our own site created policy and making sure they adhere to USA laws as that is where we are based out of.
But now that landscape has settled down and we have been giving some long hard looks at how we handle a lot of areas.

The ultimate goal is to rewrite our policies in a way that truly allows the utmost freedom to you, as artists, without bringing any legal issues upon us. To help this along, in June myself, $realitysquared, $damphyr, $Moonbeam13 and a few non staff people for an outside perspective, will be all meeting in person for one week to go over it all from top to bottom. And when I say one week, what this means is, the Director of Community Development, The Director of Copyright and Etiquette and his mina administrator, the Director of Artist Relations and several others will be pretty much locked in a room for 7 days solid and we won't be coming out of it till we have a brand spanking new set of policy guidelines for everybody.

Wow this all sounds great…except for one thing… what's up with the new ads?

As some of you may have noticed there are a few more ads here and there for non subscribers. We all know ads suck but unfortunately they are a necessity to help pay for more servers and just the cost of maintaining a site this big. We are consistently right up there in the top 100 most trafficked sites around and when you reach that range servers and the maintenance and power needed to run them becomes far from cheap. So rather than selling our souls to some faceless nameless corporation we put some new ads in here and there to balance out the costs.
We do keep an open line of communication open for feedback, questions and concerns about ads which you can find here in the Advertising Status Forum.
I think it is also worth mentioning that we are the only site I know of, of this size that  does such a thing.

Now that the site is huuuuuuge will we be seeing bigger and better contests and events?

The answer to that is yes, yes and hell yes! We have some really interesting contest developments going on that you should stay tuned for in the coming months. We are about to jump up quite a few levels of intensity and prizes compared to what some of you may be used to. My advice, whatever your medium is, begin sharpening your skills now.

Well thanks for all the info!

You are very welcome and thank you for helping make something as unique as this site happen in the first place!

Greetings all and welcome to another Community Development Update! This one is going to be focusing on two main items. Missing features and site speed issues and also some of the results of last month's Policy Revision Meeting members of the core staff participated in.
In addition to the items mentioned in the policy section, there are several other major changes we plan on implementing in the future in regards to the blocking system, report system and a few internal aspects to help speed up the process and bring particularly troublesome areas up quicker in the current reporting system.
Those are on hold now and await some IT attention which will be explained in the next section! So read on!

Missing Features

A recurring subject here on deviantART has been that of people asking, and very rightfully so, "Hey guys, you promised us all sorts of stuff, like groups, collections, portfolio, a rebuilt message center and who knows what else now?"
A very fair question which I shall attempt to answer.
One of the reasons for the delay is, site speed and performance. We will come up with concepts and ideas for new things, all of which are largely based on feedback and desire from the community, and begin to work on them.
Then the site's user base grows and the site begins to slow to a crawl and everyone assigned to those projects is pulled off to try and rectify the lag and get the speed back up.
This can sometimes take hours, sometimes days or more. Then they go back to those projects and it happens again and they get delayed further. And I think as artists you can all relate to how it becomes much more difficult to get your rhythm back after multiple interruptions.

So What Are You Going To Do About It?

Well, to fix this we have put all major projects on hold while we rectify the speed issues. Over the next few weeks we are going to be adding massive amounts of hardware to the site, reconfiguring backend code to make best use of the new hardware and then a bit down the line adding to our very overworked development and IT teams.
As recently as last week we added 15 more quad xeon database servers each with 4 hard drives in them which, once fully implemented will make accessing all user related information much much speedier.
We are also soon to be receiving additional web servers within the coming week or so.
This is all just first wave additions.
Historically we have always been able to add "just enough" and have never been able to truly jump ahead of the game, and this is what we are doing now and every drop of our resources are going into it.
The final decision we all came to was, what is the point of working on new features when the site is slow and timing out?

So there it is. Once we have this very vital issue resolved then our teams will all be free and eager to tear into getting the outstanding projects fully built and up for everyone.

And for anyone curious about the whole server installation process, check out my journal here

But What About The Rumor…

One last little teeny addendum that I would like to add some clarification to is the rumor that with the 7th Birthday of deviantART approaching on August 7th we will be rolling out dav6 or dav 5.5 or parties or some other sort of big release.
Well, those are just rumors and as I said, our one and only priority right now is site speed and functionality so if you hear of or are one of those people spreading those rumors, please please help put them to a halt and let people know what the real plan is.

We do have plans for the 7th though But you will just have to keep an eye out for those!

Policy Revisions and Updates!

During the first weeks of June deviantART saw the gathering of lolly, $Moonbeam13, $realitysquared, and $damphyr all in one location, in person, to review and revise official deviantART policy.

During that ten day meeting we took a cold hard look at all areas of policy; we examined how and what we enforce, we looked through the existing FAQ entries for unneeded or complicated FAQs, and we consulted with our attorney about the legal requirements and ramifications of various types of situations in order to determine whether we had the appropriate level of response to them.

We're going to briefly lay out some of the changes here which resulted from this extensive review process.

The first major, and most noticeable change, is evident in the FAQ system.
The changes made to the FAQ system are too numerous to list individually here but the redundant or duplicate FAQ entries have now been removed and all information gathered into single FAQ entries for ease of reference. In addition many of the longer FAQs were edited down to the bare essentials in order for them to be a shorter, easier read. Some FAQ titles were changed to make it more obvious what they explained and in general we hope the Policy area of the FAQ is now easier to browse and understand.

We also looked at our rules for submissions, both in matters of copyright and other subjects. What you'll find below is a brief explanation of the outcome;

i. Our policies governing acceptable nudity, nudity of minor children, pornography and related matters is unchanged.
ii. Our prohibitions against photographs of real self-harm (i.e. "cutting" ) and mutilation is unchanged.
iii. We will now be allowing photographs of deceased animals or corpses (marked properly as Mature Content) providing that the photograph itself is not considered excessively graphic or gory.  
EDIT: In regards to "corpse" photos, rather than misread this as us encouraging faces of death style garbage, which we are not, think of things you see at Museums of Natural Science, or exhumed historic remains ( pharaohs/mummies etc ) or for allowing photojournalism from our global community, many of whom live in some very violent war torn places. Or additionally google the name Joel Peter Witkin who is a world renowned photographer.
iv. We will now allow images made from "doll generators" or "character creators" to be submitted; however these will only be allowed in Scraps due to the fact that they involve no artistic effort at all. In the future a special section may be added to segregate them from the actual artwork on the site.
v. Our prohibition against the use of screenshots of movies or television programs is unchanged.
vi. We will now allow the submission of video game screenshots providing they feature actual in-game play with the associated controls/HUD/lifebar/health/etc displayed. These particular screenshots will only be allowed in Scraps due to the fact that they are not actual artworks. In the future a special screenshots area may be created to house them away from the actual artworks on the site.

We also examined interaction on site; what is reported as misbehavior, why and whether or not it really needs administrative attention.
These are the changes in policy governing user interactions;

i. Our policy prohibiting hate speech, racism, libel, and other similar serious behaviors remains one of Zero Tolerance.
ii. Our policies regarding spamming, flooding and other similar behavior is unchanged.
iii. We will only intervene in cases of extremely aggressive commenting; we will no longer attempt to mediate arguments or other debates as most can be resolved between the users, by using the block system or by simply walking away from it. Artists by nature argue and we simply do not have time to intervene nor is it always healthy for us to intervene in some of the more spirited debates. We will only intervene in cases of extremely insulting commentary; we will no longer address comments which are considered to be 'merely' rude or coarse and a certain level of swearing and rough language will be tolerated without penalty.
iv. We will no longer address issues involving personal journals; deviants are free to discuss other deviants in their personal journals (commonly termed "calling out" ). We will continue to address hate speech, etc in personal journals.
EDIT: We will be upping the maximum amount of users one may block from 20 to 100 sometime in the next few days to help ease concern in this area as many felt 20 was too low


Another change is that we will be reshuffling our priorities slightly in dealing with violations of our copyright policy. As most users are aware we rely upon reported violations to assist us in focusing our attention on "trouble spots" when dealing with cases of unauthorized use, theft and infringement on deviantART. When we become aware of a 'trouble spot' we typically focus more attention there and often embark on a larger scale clean up as time allows.
In order to increase our efficiency in dealing with reported violations we will now be prioritizing certain "trouble spots" at a lower level than others; all reports will still be handled as before but we will be distributing our "extra attention" a little bit differently.

This new approach of De Minimus Prioritizing will place those trouble areas where the violation can be considered insubstantial or minor and we will place these trouble areas at a lower priority than others. This prioritizing is not based on a fair use defense; it is based solely upon the inconsequential amount of infringing material when compared overall with our total workload.

The purpose of this de minimis prioritizing is to remove any pressure to constantly review certain galleries, such as avatars, which are prone to numerous and constant small violations of the deviantART copyright policies. By having this kind of prioritizing in place we are able to concentrate on violations involving large scale infringement until our attention is deliberately drawn to the more minor infringements. In simple terms this means we'll worry about Wallpapers first and Avatars later if they haven't been specifically reported.

Today we launched a quick little addition to your message center. You will now be notified of news articles people on your watch list have submitted if you are already on their journal watch list!
This will help you keep what you want in journals as journals and allow your watchers to see your news items as well!
Enjoy!

Hey Everybody,

We accepted a small investment last week in deviantART that will help us facilitate expansion in several key areas.

So there's some exciting news!

The first thing that we're going to do is build out an additional co-location site, which is to say we're building a religious monument of nerd perfection. It will serve as our second co-location facility and bring a metric ton of additional hardware resources to the community.

The major positive side effects of this investment in equipment will be a resolution to the sluggishness of the site at peak times. We're also going to be making some much needed additions to the engineering horsepower at deviantART in order to complete various open projects.

Lastly, because I'm sure it will generate some questions, I'd like to correct some erroneous reports about deviantART traffic. MediaMetrics reports wildly conflicting audience metrics to what we see internally. According to Google Analytics, deviantART sees 15 million absolute unique visitors per month. This is closely verified by QuantCast which reports 14 million unique visitors to deviantART per month. We work closely with both of the groups, and do not work closely with MediaMetrics, so trust our answers, not theirs.

Peace,
-- Angelo

New popularity metric on deviantART

[http://mccann.deviantart.com/journal/16785417/]

Currently we are experiencing issues where new accounts cannot upload avatars. We are aware of the situation and are working on a fix for it. Please be patient and if you see people all sad and without their avatar let them know it will be fixed as soon as possible.

This is also affecting older accounts as you cannot currently change your avatar.

Also affected are web site buttons and lit tags. We are working on fixing this as soon as possible.

Scheduled Downtime

On Sunday, June 24th at 2 AM PST we will be experiencing 10-30 minutes ( roughly ) of site downtime. We will be in the process of increasing our bandwidth which means faster site speed for all of us!
In the process we will be switching some IP's around so if you have a DNS cache that ignores TTLs the site may appear to be down for much longer, so in that event you may wish to try flushing your DNS cache. If this makes no sense to you, it probably is nothing to worry about.

And if you wish to flush your DNS anyway ( and who wouldn't ) here  is how as explained very concisely by `dancewiththesky ( good advice! )

To flush DNS cache,

- For people using Windows, go Start > Run. Type cmd and press Enter. Then in the black box that will appear, type ipconfig /flushdns and press Enter. Close the box.

- For people using dnsmasq on Ubuntu or any other GNU/Linux distro, restart the daemon. In a terminal, type sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart .

- People using OS X (I never tried this, I just looked it up,) open a terminal and type lookupd -flushcache .

- For people who are using Firefox DNS (as explained in [link] ), simply restart the browser.

This will not interrupt or otherwise damage your browser in any way.

deviantART upgrades to PHP5

[http://mccann.deviantart.com/journal/16618146/]