Greetings...

As the Director of Community Development I am the person who represents your voice to the rest of the deviantART administration. I'm ultimately in charge of the Help Desk, the Policy Violations Team and our Chat network. Every Wednesday I will be releasing a report; updating you on the internal progress of the team and the projects that interest you most.

What’s For Suppa? Huh?

So, as promised last week I have brought to you a screen shot of some more of that sweet dav5 work. There is a screenshot below and you can play with it a bit by going to dav5 Super Secret Mode!. But the name…this is essentially the Today Page but is currently code named…Suppa. Yes that leaves many of us as well, which is where you come in! What do you feel this page should be called? Is the “Today” page just fine or do you think we should call it something new for the new version? Give us some suggestions for a new name and we will be more than happy to check them out! Who knows, your choice could end up influencing a main part of DA!

And stay tuned next week for some more dav5 info!

Situational Update and Reminders

The CEA violation report backlog which I’ve mentioned over the last two weeks is still slowing us down but it is slowly being eliminated with just over 1000 reports being removed over the last week.

Please bear with us while we continue to eliminate the stack of reports which has accumulated. Helpdesk reports are experiencing minimal delay during their escalation but there is still a longer than normal delay in the response of certain tickets.

Based on the contents of certain Helpdesk tickets which have been escalated to the C&E administration I’d like to issue some gentle reminders concerning our policies;

In cases of art theft or other misrepresentation or unauthorized use please be aware that posting nasty comments and threats on the suspected page is not allowed- we do not tolerate deliberately insulting or threatening comments regardless of the circumstances or justification.

Reporting the problem to the Helpdesk with ample evidence will go much farther to resolving the situation than a campaign of nasty comments on the userpage so save yourself a temporary suspension and let the proper staff members handle things.

I’d like to also make everyone aware that while we tolerate a wide range of subject matter for your journals you should not use them to insult, harass or otherwise complain about a certain identified person or persons.

You can actually use your journal for complaining, but what we are asking is that you do not name, link to, or otherwise identify the subject of your ranting. We consider such journals to be a form of abuse and harassment so save yourself some trouble and don’t make such an entry.

On a related subject please do not reveal emails, note exchanges, or other personal information which involves another user- nobody likes seeing what they thought was a private conversation waved about in public without their consent.

Finally everyone should be aware that using someone else’s artwork cannot be somehow justified by “giving credit”.

Knowing who made the image or where it came from is no substitute for actually having legal permission.

I’ve also become aware of what is being erroneously termed “Rendering” which is the slang term for cutting out portions of somebody else’s artwork, typically anime or video game related.

This so called “rendering” is just another form of copyright infringement and it is not allowed here. Be aware that many websites which offer so called “renders” do not have the proper legal licensing to do so and if you use them as a resource do not be surprised when your work is removed by the C&E staff.

It should go without saying that these “renders” do not belong in the deviantART resource galleries and will be immediately removed as they come to our attention.

This week I would like to focus on a few older things discussed in previous updates, as I feel they need to be readdressed.

Category Refresher

When contacting the Help Desk you are presented with several categories to fit your inquiries needs, many times people often overlook these options and just submit to random categories or several thinking this will get their issue dealt with faster. By submitting to any old random inquiry, especially if you have a Policy related matter can slow your inquiry down when it comes to the weekend cleanup, because we go over and escalate Policy related cases first and if yours is under General Help, it may not be seen for several more hours. The second option some choose by submitting the same inquiry to all categories doesn't help because they all get seen by us (myself and +ewm) before being sent to any other Teams regardless and will just cause a halt since we have to clean up all of your extra inquiries.

The above aside, I am here this week to remind users of all the categories and their proper descriptions so you can get your inquiry handled faster properly. Please read here, for clarification on these Categories.

Bug Report Refreshment

Please if you have not already seen and read 'How to: Submit a Bug Report', do so, as Bug Reports are coming in really messy again, which not only leads to frustration on the user end, but ours as well.

Bug/Issue Updates

With the above out of the way I wanted to make a quick mention that as soon as we have updates on previous mentioned Bugs/Issues we will inform you here, an inquiry to the Help Desk everyday for an update is not needed.

It's good to talk!

Continuing our successful Featured Chat series, we have some more dates for your diary for the month of May.

Sunday 21st May ^serpentinekiss
Friday 26th May `nebu
Saturday 27th May ¢keiross

Watch out for our more details in our forthcoming news articles.

Those of you who missed the chats with ^smashmethod and `blackeri can catch up on the events with the transcripts below.
Transcript from `blackeri's chat.
Transcript from ^smashmethod's chat.

Bots happening?

There has been an increase in the number of bots on the network, which has unfortunately caused some concern. Thankfully the majority of our users take a responsible approach, and have been using bots for logging, trivia scripts or other entertainment capabilities. However, there has unfortunately been an increase in reports of abuse using bots, and a number of accounts are now under investigation, with many more to be reviewed.

Users are free to have bots in their own custom channel(s), however we do not allow bots in our official channels (#devart, #MNAdmin and #help). MN@ also do not provide any support for you to create, set up, or maintain your bot.

We would like to remind users that anyone found to be involved in using bots, or other 3rd party clients with a specific intention of disrupting channels or attacking users, will result in administrative action against the owner of the bots, as well as the bot accounts.