Subscriber Features and Version 6

First off, everyone here at deviantART would like to say THANK YOU!!!
We have received an overwhelming amount of enthusiasm for the launch of version 6 and believe that this has been our best-received launch to date.
As of today, we have over 7200+ hearts on the launch article, and we’re closing in on 14,000 comments! It’s nice to see that our blood, sweat and tears have been recognized and appreciated by you, our cherished community. Big shout-outs to you all!

Fanfare aside, I am writing to also address a new feature of our v6 site that has concerned a few of our subscribers. For those of you who don’t know what the hoopla is about, in our latest version of the site, we allow everyone, subscriber or not, to have thumbnails appear in the deviantWatch section of the message center, as well as a few other perks of a subscribed message center.

We apologize to all those subscribers that feel that they have been cheated, but this decision was made with the wholehearted spirit of the community in mind.

Like many of our features in the past, we thought that our entire user base, not a small minority of it, should benefit from having access to a tool that allows a quick and easy method of sharing your work. It’s useful, it’s cool. We thought it would strengthen our community, plain and simple.

To all of the subscribers out there, your time will soon come. We are currently taking a good hard look at our subscriber and premium print packages and promise to be making some new additions in the next few months. Now that we completed the launch, this area will now get our undivided attention.

To get this new project rolling we’ve been tossing around ideas in HQ that include things like new job classifieds section, CSS templates for enhancing profile journals, and instant messaging, just to name a few. We have a few dozen ideas, but we want to hear from you. Let us know what you think the next subscriber-only features should be. And tell us soon so we can start tinkering away.

Lastly, to collect your ideas in a more organized way we will be sending out a detailed survey, at random, to a group of users and subscribers via Notes, so please keep an eye out for those in case your name is one of the people on the list! We’re frantically searching for golden tickets to share with the lucky few….

We look forward to being absolutely bombarded with ideas so that we can continue to bring our community exactly what it wants. Thanks again!