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 Copyright & Ettiquete 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.

Major Changes Imminent

So, August 7th is fast approaching! With this comes the 6th Birthday of deviantART as well as the launch of version 5. This means many many things for you, a new look, new browsing methods, smoother interaction and more customizing than before.

This also means you should keep an eye out on the news for info about these changes as well because we will be keeping you as informed and updated as humanly possible. Inhumanly if that is what it takes.

In addition, if you encounter any new changes before the launch, don’t be alarmed. Such as the Category Restructuring.
We are in the phase of house moving so to speak right now so things may get shuffled around a bit. So just be a little patient and await the full launch and all will be made clear!

And be absolutely sure to be here on August 7th for some more Birthday Festivities!

Restructure II

Since the beginning of the year CEA has suffered from an extensive backlog of cases leading to long delays in proper response times.

Over the last couple of weeks the backlog of Helpdesk cases has been eliminated and response times are down to an acceptable 24-48 hours or less. The reports dealing with deviation remains badly backlogged with several thousand reports still awaiting attention. These backlogs and other factors have lead to some administrative discussions behind the scenes over the last several weeks and we have come to a decision to once again restructure the department.

Rather than expand the department with more volunteers devoting spare time we have decided to adopt a format similar to that which keeps the Helpdesk running as a well-oiled machine.
To that end CEA will be staffed by two full time administrators who will be free of any other outside distractions and who will focus solely on keeping the department up to date and responsive.
These changes were initiated on August 1^st and in that time we are already making strides towards eliminating the violation report backlog while maintaining swift response times to Helpdesk escalations.

I would like to express my gratitude to all of the CEA volunteers who have invested so much effort in their staff positions. Due to their efforts deviantART has benefited greatly as a community.

Help Desk Delays -

There will be be some minor delays in the desk Thursday and Sunday night when the HD reopens from the weekend closure, as myself $hexentanz will be away for my Birthday those days.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

Who's the daddy!

@Ghouldaddy is! I'm sure you'd all like to join me in welcoming Frank as he transfers to MN@ from CEA. With a wealth of experience behind him on dAmn as an operator and helper, he positively oozes with confidence, and he's definitely a monster asset.

Featured Channels

We are delighted to announce that the following channels have been chosen to be Featured Channels for the month of August. We've specifically chosen channels which are some of our more long standing on dAmn and would like to thank them for all their hard work over the past year.

#dAPensioners
#ClownTown
#hell
#photographers
#caffeinelounge

dAmn Birthday Bonanza

With only a few days to go now until the 6th Birthday of deviantART, we hope that you too are getting excited. If you've never been on dAmn before then Monday would be the perfect opportunity for you to do so, as you may find that you win yourself some dA goodies! The MN@ Team will be running various contests and spot prize giveaways during the celebrations, but we are delighted to see that many of our unofficial channels are also holding a variety of events. Keep your eyes peeled for a news article with times and places very soon!

If you haven't already, then go check out *Caption-Contest where you can find some of the lovely admins have put themselves at your mercy! Comments are turned off until August the 7th, when we'll be giving you the opportunity to win some prizes if you can come up with one of the best captions.