On Dec 25, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

It's great that you are trying so hard to revive the site and so many of these ideas sound really good - but ultimately if people want a community they need to do their part to create it. It's not all on you.  If people are only submitting their own work and not looking at anyone else's then there's nothing YOU can do about that.  It's on us as well.  It doesn't feel much like a community because the community isn't acting like one.

Agreed that it's not all on me. I can't make people comment. People have to put in an effort but I'm hoping I can at least nudge people in the right direction by reaching out more :D

So far it looks like it's working! Yay!

On Dec 25, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

Along those lines, the only real complaint/rant I have at this point is the comment to upload ratio of fellow users.  A few of us are commenting (three!) - but so many others come to simply upload all of their work and then we hear nothing else from them.  Pages and pages of uploads and no comments.  I was commenting a lot at first but it started to feel like work.  I began picking only one or two pics per user based on the thumbnail and then even that was getting old because no one else was commenting and these users weren't paying it forward. You could do all the work on the site in the world and I'd still feel this way if the actual community interaction remained so minimal and felt so one-sided.

I've also noticed the comment to upload ratio has been pretty bad. This is why I decided not to grant points for posting submissions. Most are willing to post something but even less are willing to comment on other people's work. So we should incentivise people for doing what we need more of to make this a community (commenting).

On Dec 25, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

The ranking system is a good start (I hope) since even though it doesn't unlock anything I myself (and probably others) tend to respond well to the feeling of achievement regardless of whether or not the achievement actually gives me anything   Again - there is only so much that you can do though.  Once you do what you can to draw new members and keep those here engaged, we all need to get our butts into gear as well if we actually WANT that kind of community.

Yes exactly. Many social games are successful just because people like the feeling of their number increasing (Farmville anyone?). So I hope it will have a similar effect.

Originally when I launched the rank feature, your points and rank didn't update until you logged out and back in again. I just launched a fix to this so that each time you visit another page on the site it updates. So it's much more up to date. This way you can see your number increasing more easily

On Dec 26, 2015, StarKnights said:

one thing i just thought of that might help attract some comics in would be some way to know when the comic has updated - i plan to update my comic here 3 or 4 times a month , if there was a most recent update showing on the comic people would know when a new page was up . just an idea... 

There is a "Follow this comic" button on every page of the comic. If you follow the comic, you'll be notified of updates. It optionally supports emailing you when the comic has updated. Maybe this feature is too buried? Let me know what you think I could do to make this feature more obvious.

This post is getting long. I'll post another reply with my thoughts on the rest of your messages.

On Dec 26, 2015, arkillian said:

The amount of comments I got I noticed dropped significantly after groups were introduced to DA, I assume cause of spam. People would submit a picture to 20 groups to get noticed, but what ends up happening is that the average user actually shuts off cause their inbox is getting 1000 deviations in an hour. Many groups only allow a submission a week or day, and it still gets slammed. I know if a group has over 1000 deviations in it, I don't even bother looking through it.

I wonder if we suffer from this problem here too. I have 188 unread notifications for PaperDemon art. Some of this is because i like having the notices there for testing purposes but also as that number increases it stresses me out. Like i have work to do to look at everything. Maybe we should take an approach more like tumblr and facebook where you have an activity feed that lists everything. I'm hesitant to do this for certain legal reasons that I can't discuss here. But maybe it's become such a standard stable user interface device that my concerns about it aren't an issue anymore.

I'm hesitant to push the groups feature on PaperDemon in part because I think it will fragment the community. If our community was super active with so much going on that it's hard to keep up, then I'd see why groups would make sense.

On Dec 26, 2015, arkillian said:

With Tumblr, I can't explain why people moved to there of all places. I think they'd move to Pixv is it were in English? I think that the interface makes the user feel like they have more control over how they browse though. Specially with the Xkit extension. You can make a side blog of a single thing you have interest in and people that are interested can follow and interact with 1 to 1 just that and it remains separate to your other stuff and not associated to your main blog unless you want it to be, blacklist words that trigger bad memories, or ignore blogs that post content that doesn't interest you, liking things is a very easy to find button, you can show people that follow you stuff that you like and you can spread the word super fast of cool things. I don't know how that feel can be applied to an art community.... I think though that the freedom that Tumblr has is a big appeal to it's following. People feel free to talk about relevant topics and feel free to post what ever they want cause the people following you theoretically want to see it, and if they don't, they just unfollow, and finding new blogs is organic, cause you find them by having a popular post that gets shared. 

The viral sharing is definitely harder on PaperDemon. We don't have any sort of sharing feature here other than to share to social networks like facebook, pinterest, tumblr. Things spread easily on tumblr because with the click of a button something you like can then be spread to all of your followers. I don't have an interest in going that direction with PaperDemon at the moment. Also it doesn't make sense for us to become a Tumblr copy cat. We have to figure out what value PaperDemon provides that other sites can't. And I'm hoping that is in part the community and the features. I also have ideas around tying PaperDemon more to raising money for charity. We've done events like this in the past and I hope it would make users feel good about helping to raise money for good causes. This is something other sites don't do much of.

On Dec 26, 2015, arkillian said:

I wonder too sometimes if art communities aren't entirely what people want anymore. I mean, it's efficient for art, but people are commenting less on art now, and sharing it more, interacting with the artist outside of the art via chat. They want others to see art/ists they love, but they don't nessecarily have the words to convey thier love on each piece of art.

This is an interesting observation. Perhaps we could encourage viewers to take a variety of actions when they see something they like. Such as:

"Do you like this art? Consider supporting this artist by doing one of the following:"

• Make a donation to them
• Commission them to make a custom artwork
• Add this art as a favorite
• Post a comment
• Share this work with others

On Dec 26, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

I really love that the rules for submission are quite clear (none of the fuzzy DA haze or confusion over why some things are removed and others not) and I also love that there aren't such strict limitations on what we can upload. (I can't upload to Elfwood because my fantasy drawings aren't fantasy enough O_o).

I'm glad the rules are clear. We tried hard to make them easy to follow. We've had plenty of revisions to them over the years.

On Dec 26, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

I know that I managed to make a couple of really good friends on DA that way, and when one of the more skilled artists spent some time with me in a chat room in DA they helped me a lot with both my technique and my confidence.  It's that sort of thing I am personally looking for, and I know there will be some other like-minded people out there who want something similar.  My fingers are crossed ^_^ But I'm also linking this site to those who share my point of view as well. 

 

This passage really spoke to me. That is one of the key values I'd like PaperDemon to provide is helping artists become better artists. Thank you for sharing PaperDemon. If you have ideas on how we can make this more of a reality let me know. I've had thoughts about inviting professional artists to come and provide constructive critique work (only those that wanted it). I know a lot of professional artists so I think I might be able to get a few of them to do it. Is that something we'd want? The only problem with that is they might sign up and do the critiques then not come back again. I don't know if the pros would stick around long term.

On Dec 26, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

Well ja, a more focused chat could be a good idea. Not sure how much effort it requires to make more chat options to allow that, but I find on DA that chats like Artgerm are much more useful for critique than any number of critique groups there. I tend to find one of the problems with critique groups is that people just post there because that's what the group is for, but there are far fewer people that show up there just to offer constructive critique. If there are one or two people doing the critique because the group belongs to them, they don't have time to go over everything that gets submitted there. This kind of imbalance makes it difficult for critique exchange type groups to do well. I find in a chat setting, people just naturally gravitate there and help if they can just for being there.

Do you mean like a real time chat room? We could add a section for that. We do have a special gallery for art requesting critique. But we could update that page to also include a chatroom and try and promote it through the site better.

Well there appears to be this chatbox that is a part of the forums, but it doesn't have "channels" like a proper chat does. So it's difficult to use it for anything specific. Not sure what other people think about that, but if you want a place for critique, I find that format works better. Not sure if it works better than having a forums board dedicated to that like they do on HF. The only difference being HF is strictly moderated for quality control, so it makes sense to have some way of offering critique.

Generally, I think of Paperdemon as a general gallery like DA, only with fewer people on it and the possibility to upload NSFW stuff. I'm not sure if it's so general like DA that abstract artwork is allowed, because it looks to me like Paperdemon caters to fantasy anime/cartoon work, and maybe some form of realism. Or perhaps that's what the people who have chosen to post here think about it. I guess that's what makes it special. Other than that, it could use a bit more activity, but not so much it becomes another DA.

The chatroom does support multiple channels but it's not exposed publicly. I can add a channel for critique. Where would be a good place for it? The chatroom rarely gets used so I want to make sure it's in an exposed area. Perhaps we could put it on the main art page set to the art-critique channel?

Well I was thinking more of having some sort of listing where people can see various channels for the chat room because that chat box in the forums + chat link doesn't obviously look like it has multiple channels. It doesn't just have to be for critique, it could also just be for help or support requests, tutorials for specific painting software, certain fandoms, etc.

But then if it was that detailed, it might deserve a link and page of its own. Not sure if people would be up for using the chat like this. What do other people think?

I think that the different chat channels is a great idea - I'm just not certain we really have the numbers for a different channel for too many different and specific things at this point.

Maybe just two different and rather broad channels?  One dedicated to art talk and one for random irl nonsense/general conversation?

If there are too many channels then it increases the likelihood of people spreading out too much and not really interacting so much.  (I'm picturing my lonely self sitting in a critique channel when everyone else is talking about something else in another channel.) With just two options we can at least get like-minded people together.  Just art related and everything else ^_^ Once there you can ask for critique or help/support or discuss different painting software etc etc.  

That way we aren't spreading our population too thin and if you are specifically looking for art discussion, then the random nonsense that always pops up in chat rooms won't be dominating that room :)

That's a good start. If we get to the point where people demand a separate chat room for XYZ, then people can request it I guess. Wonder if we should have a process for that?

I can update the chat to say if you want a new room added, you'll need to have 4 others also state they want it and it can just involve sending me an email or private message.

I'm working on adding a newsletter feature at the moment. I'll take a look at adding the other channels to the chat room within the next week.

On Dec 27, 2015, Angelus-Mortis said:

Well I was thinking more of having some sort of listing where people can see various channels for the chat room because that chat box in the forums + chat link doesn't obviously look like it has multiple channels. It doesn't just have to be for critique, it could also just be for help or support requests, tutorials for specific painting software, certain fandoms, etc.

But then if it was that detailed, it might deserve a link and page of its own. Not sure if people would be up for using the chat like this. What do other people think?

Per your request, I've updated the chat to display a list of available rooms. I've added Art as a public chat room. Would you be willing to write a little welcome message to be displayed at the top so users know what that channel is for?