I'm actually fairly happy with the way Paperdemon is right now. It allows you to put diacritics in the titles, which you can't do in DA (but then again, that problem may only be specific to DA, because lots of other sites I'm on right now let you do that).

I guess a possible suggestion would be to streamline the gallery request section where you ask for new categories (eg, what medium your work is in, genre, themes, etc.). Right now, users have to send an e-mail to you if we want to add a new category. I thought it might be more convenient if there's a form that users automatically fill out and send to you. Either on the same submit page or with a link to the form.

I agree with Angelus-Mortis on how Paperdemon is right now. I don't have any complaints about the site, I'm quite happy with it the way it is.

I'm glad you all like it the way it is. I'll try not to change the next design too drastically then. Maybe I could share some things that I think could be improved? It would be helpful if you'd let me know what you think...

Here are some interesting statistics about why people left PaperDemon

• 77% of surveyed users who've closed their account say they didn't use their account much.
• 19% of surveyed users said PaperDemon wasn't active enough.

Based on this information and on my own personal experience with PaperDemon, things are really dead here right now. And that sucks. It used to be way more active and users were far more engaged. And a lot of that is my fault. I haven't been interacting with it much and keeping it going. The moderators who used to be active here, have other things going on in their lives. So the big thing I want to fix is getting people to post, comment, and discuss a lot more. So to sum it up, I need to get users more engaged.

As a start, I'm making an active effort to comment on submissions more and I'm spending some money on advertising to drive in new members. If you have any ideas on how I might improve engagement, that would be super helpful. I would like to start doing contests/collaborations again but I'm not sure the activity is high enough yet to do that. Another coloring book collaboration would be awesome.

Aside from all of that, I'm working on a new code base for PaperDemon. The code is old, colossal, and hard to maintain and improve. It's also suffering from some code rot. So I'm rewriting it and writing tests for it to keep it more stable and less buggy. I'm also making some improvements to make it more secure.

As far as visual design goes, the current design is fairly simple because i wanted something that could scale across browser sizes and is easy to maintain. But in doing so, I feel we lost some of the brand uniqueness and personality of the site. The older designs had a paper demon illustration in them. I'd like to bring that back.

Ja, I guess this site could use more activity. I mean I can understand people not wanting to stay because it feels discouraging when you upload something here and people don't comment on it because it feels like this site is dead. I just stay here though because I like the site itself. On the other hand, I prefer it to be more active without being as active as DA. That would be difficult to manage.

I guess the only thing people can do is spread the word. If people knew you were still maintaining this site, and people still come here, then that's at least a sign it's still active.

Maybe another thing you could do is have a livestream feature where people can post their livestream/picarto status. I kind of just forgot to mention that.

If you're worried contest participation might be too low, you could perhaps try some other events where you don't have to spend money on prizes. It could be a theme month you use to promote users' artworks. Or a comeback event.

I've also noticed some of the affiliates are a bit outdated and haven't updated for years. Maybe you could try and see if you could find affiliates that are more recent? You don't have to get rid of the older ones unless they've moved to another site or something, but affiliation is one method of spreading the word because that's how some people might find your site.

On Dec 21, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

Maybe another thing you could do is have a livestream feature where people can post their livestream/picarto status. I kind of just forgot to mention that.

Can you tell me more about this? I have no idea what picarto is or what you mean by livestream.

On Dec 21, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

If you're worried contest participation might be too low, you could perhaps try some other events where you don't have to spend money on prizes. It could be a theme month you use to promote users' artworks. Or a comeback event.

Oh yeah maybe i could do simple contests like "whoever posts the most comments this week gets their work featured. or something like that.

On Dec 21, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

I've also noticed some of the affiliates are a bit outdated and haven't updated for years. Maybe you could try and see if you could find affiliates that are more recent? You don't have to get rid of the older ones unless they've moved to another site or something, but affiliation is one method of spreading the word because that's how some people might find your site.

Oh yeah. those are ancient. None of them are getting me traffic right now except for a few per month from pixelgoddess closet. I will get new affiliates.

I was talking with my Mom and she had some ideas. Perhaps we could introduce a ranking system. This would encourage members to be more active because they'd gain higher ranks as they posted more. We had a REALLY long discussion about this (11 pages of posts) back in 2007. Perhaps I should just go ahead and implement this because pretty much everyone agreed it was a good idea.

Hi , you requested that I post here , I'm kinda new to this site , I just found it today so I'm still checking things out . 

I like the site so far , it is far better than DA where I have ceased to post due to the overwhelming traffic . I do think you could do with some more visibility though , I just happened to read the name of this site in a post on another web comic hosting site and decided to check it out . Also may be some sort of ranking system like a popular now section or something that would encourage members to not only post , but give them a goal to work towards might be cool . :)

also if you do any collaborations I"m in!

On Dec 22, 2015, BogusRed said:

On Dec 21, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

Maybe another thing you could do is have a livestream feature where people can post their livestream/picarto status. I kind of just forgot to mention that.

Can you tell me more about this? I have no idea what picarto is or what you mean by livestream.

Picarto.tv and Livestream.com offer streaming services where some artists will stream their art in progress live, and people watch them and chat. But it's sometimes difficult to know when people are streaming unless you follow their Tumblr blogs. Newer art galleries like Weasyl have this feature, so if you follow someone in an art gallery, you just view their page and if the artist uses it, it will say they are streaming or not. I guess that's something you could do in your profile easily, but having a separate feature for it makes it easier for people to look for I guess.

On Dec 21, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

If you're worried contest participation might be too low, you could perhaps try some other events where you don't have to spend money on prizes. It could be a theme month you use to promote users' artworks. Or a comeback event.

Oh yeah maybe i could do simple contests like "whoever posts the most comments this week gets their work featured. or something like that.

On Dec 21, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

I've also noticed some of the affiliates are a bit outdated and haven't updated for years. Maybe you could try and see if you could find affiliates that are more recent? You don't have to get rid of the older ones unless they've moved to another site or something, but affiliation is one method of spreading the word because that's how some people might find your site.

Oh yeah. those are ancient. None of them are getting me traffic right now except for a few per month from pixelgoddess closet. I will get new affiliates.

 

I was talking with my Mom and she had some ideas. Perhaps we could introduce a ranking system. This would encourage members to be more active because they'd gain higher ranks as they posted more. We had a REALLY long discussion about this (11 pages of posts) back in 2007. Perhaps I should just go ahead and implement this because pretty much everyone agreed it was a good idea.

Do you mean forum posts or what? I guess that could work, but then I wonder what the ranks do--is it like a video game achievement or is it useful on this site somehow?

Some other ideas--we could also allow animations. They don't have to be flash animations though. You could allow other formats like regular mp4 or those free formats. I find a lot of people are moving towards regular movie formats and away from flash. You might be able to attract a few Krita users this way. Krita is recently experimenting with and will be soon rolling out more stable animation features, and there are already lots of people using it, even though it's a beta feature. I think most people are posting Krita animations as gifs though.

Collabs would be a good idea. I am noticing that the groups feature isn't being used much. I wonder if it can be expanded to include groups for collabs, art trades, etc? Might make it easier for people looking for that stuff. Or even commissions too. Maybe at this point it might not be attractive because people will want to be using features where there are people actively using it. But no harm done in offering it anyways.