°arc

Just a quick question; what do you guys believe are some of the most critical features missing from DA that they should add?

I hopped on dAmn tonight for the first time in a while to see if any old friends were online. As can be seen from the attached image, my status has been demoted from founder to former staff.

I'm somewhat puzzled why this is the case; in terms of dAmn some of the other former admins such as Attila, Tack and myself were also given founder status, I assume to recognise the contributions we made in the first year or so. Spyed's user page seems to back this line of thinking up. Considering I joined up on staff before Attila and left after him (I think), I'm struggling to understand what the logic is behind changing my status but not that of the other admins at the time.

I wouldn't want to see Attila have his status changed down either, I just wonder who took it upon themselves to start fiddling with things for no apparent reason.

I figure something's horribly broken when the past 4 comments on my user page have been automated spam.

Anil Dash (VP at Six Apart) recently posted an interesting blog entry that you can find here: [link]

The concept is - with sites that are based around user generated content, companies are profiting from artwork that they have had no involvement in the creation of. The blog uses Flickr/Yahoo as an example, but it could easily be applied to deviantART as well.

Also in Flickr news, they're starting up a printing service (see here: [link]). Only available in the US initially, but it will be interesting to see the costs compared to devianART prints.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on with deviantART; it seems stagnant. There has been a lot of innovation to go along with the Web 2.0 hype, but I'm not seeing much change on deviantART. As far as I can see, groups are being released soon. That's cute, haven't they been in the works for over a year? Is it that hard? What about tagging, RSS feeds, deviation sets (like Flickr) customizable journals (ie. the design), a bit of AJAX? Or some other completely innovative idea that hadn't been developed before? deviantART chat is excellent, for example.

I'd like to think that some of these features aren't just fluff.

In the past few days I've been taking a look around for nice prints since I've just moved out of home and my walls are bare. Plenty of great stuff on deviantprints, so I added a few to my wishlist and popped an artist or two on to my deviantwatch in case they added any other prints I was interested in.

When I hopped on deviantART today, I had a note from kil1k telling me he'd used some of his deviantcash to buy me a print of his that I'd put on my wishlist. This is from someone I've had zero contact with before, so his generosity completely blew me away.

Thanks a lot for the gift kil1c, it's put a real smile on my face. I suggest anyone else reading this stop by and take a look through his gallery, very impressive.