Another year winds down at deviantART and what a year it has been. The growth of the site has been nothing short of phenomenal. With 6 million deviants and nearly 50 million deviations, itís safe to say the title for World's Largest Art Community is in all of our hands.

This year also saw some great upgrades and additions to the site ... deviantART Film, Gallery Folders, Collections, massive server upgrades, increased site stability, policy changes to better serve artists, and dozens of other things that just kept rolling out one after the other.

Yes, there are still some loose ends, but 2008 is going to be an entirely different deviantART. Mind blowing new releases and finishing up all those things that were promised a while back (Portfolio pages, Groups, dAmn upgrades, and an overall simplification of the user interface itself). Expect to hear more on all of that in early 2008.

Now, I know it is New Yearís Eve and I'm sure the last thing you want to be doing is sitting around reading a news article so I will keep this brief and just take a minute to share the overall plans for Community Development in 2008.

One of the biggest ongoing issues we have are complaints about keeping the galleries clean, right things in the right place, copyright violations removed quickly, nastiness removed right away and so on. Along with those complaints also comes the question of "Hey, I want to help, what can I do?" Without getting into specifics, 2008 will see systems put in place that give the power to moderate such things directly to the community (instead of our outdated report desk system).

It will also see a focus on rebuilding and upgrading the social centers of the site -- the forums (which have needed some love for a long, long time) and dAmn.

We will be shining some light on the ever growing staff aspect of dA and doing interviews and features with some of the unknown faces who contribute massively to this site to help you get a better idea of what goes into the day to day. All too often places achieve our size and the administration seemingly vanishes behind the curtain. Well, we plan on doing the opposite and helping you get to know even more of us.

Subscribers can look forward to some seriously cool upgrades to the subscription package.

And by yearís end, we hope to have brought as many artists out into the world as humanly possible ... into galleries, magazines, everywhere we can get you exposure. And perhaps bring back some of that world to join the site in the process.

On the whole, 2008 is going to be our biggest, loudest, most kick ass year yet and we couldn't have done it without all of you fine deviants!

Now, go grab a Guinness or 5 and shout happy New Year for all of us!