Here at deviantART we have always taken pride in the fact that we have remained one of the easiest and most responsive, if not the easiest and most responsive, artist community when it comes to helping you to assert your rights when someone uses your work without your permission.

In an effort to stay at the leading edge of this issue we at the Copyright & Etiquette Administration and at Devious Technologies have spend the last several weeks crafting a new deviation reporting feature which we hope you will find even more clear and easy to use than the one many of you already know and love.

The new system which you will find in place is accessed very much like the old system, through a Report Deviation link found down in the artists details and description area, but this is where the similarities end.

The first change is that we have made the report link easier to locate placing it higher in the listing and awarding it its own symbol to help it stand out. These changes were made because the old location of the link caused it to blend in and pass unnoticed by some people.

If you have cause to use this link to report either art theft or something which you feel shouldn’t be posted to our galleries you will find that the new system features a lot of tips which helps you to properly file your report according to your concerns. Currently you will find four broad categories which represent the most common reasons for why a deviation is reported.
Some of the broad categories will also seek to collect additional information from you about your report and we have tried to craft a system which will enable you to give us the most information with the least amount of time and effort on your part and we have designed everything to be easily updatable so that we can correct shortcomings or introduce new features and means of collecting information based on the concerns of the community and what you feel you should be able to tell us.

One of the best features of this reporting system is that we have corrected a rather large failing on the part of the old system; the fact that formerly you received no feedback about your report. In the old system you essentially filed a report and that report shot off into the CEA machinery behind the scenes and typically you never heard from it again; you wouldn’t know if you had failed to provide enough information or if what you reported was actually not a violation of policy and nobody actually told you when somebody handled your report or what was done about it.

We have designed this new system to correct this shortcoming; now you have the option be notified when your report was handled and be told what was done. We have also enabled the system to give you feedback to tell you if you’ve omitted some crucial information or if you’re actually reporting something which is not actually considered a problem.

The place where Devious Technologies has worked some of the best magic is in the staff tools which we use behind the scenes. In the old system which was designed way back in 2002 every report was simply filed in the order in which it came in to us and there was little we could do to identify or search for the things which you thought needed the most attention or which you thought were the most serious.

With this new Moderation System we are able to search quickly and nimbly through all of the information which you’ve given us to identify the things which you think are the biggest problems so that they can be given the quick attention which you think they need. It is an amazingly flexible system which we hope will help improve every aspect of the way that CEA serves you and the community.

Related links;
FAQ #155: How do I report a submission which I think breaks the rules?