As 2008 comes to a close, join me in taking a walk down memory lane as we recall the deviantART community highlights from the past 12 months.

2008 was a whirlwind of a year with many new features and milestones in the community. We celebrated our 8th, birthday, saw the site move into v6, and embraced the long awaited new message centre. Moderation reporting got a whole lot sexier and we’ve automated the handling of trusted reports. Plus, dAmn got some much needed love, Search was updated with balanced exposure—and let’s not forget the great dArama over the temporary color change! Fun times.

During 2008, a total number of 39,819,949 new deviations were submitted and 2,886,913 new deviant accounts were added to our wonderful community.

Help Desk

Our Help Desk team handled a total of 82,404 tickets. In November, the team merged with Retail Customer Service in order to begin providing a more streamlined approach to providing help within the community. This will continue into 2009 as we aim to provide an enhanced level of customer service and support.

CEA Team

This year, CEA saw positive changes toward bringing more transparency to the deviation reporting process. The reporting tools themselves were redesigned to be more versatile and easy to use by the community, as well as having the ability to provide reporters with a follow up memo concerning the outcome when their report is reviewed and handled by staff.

Overall, the new system provides the staff with better tools and information with which to respond to the community. Since launching the new system (around springtime), the community has submitted 368,870 reports.

In addition to the new reporting system, we began clarifying various guidelines involving mature content, the things we do and do not allow to be submitted into galleries, and advising what sort of behaviors we discourage from our member artists.

Some of the best and most fun highlights from our dAmn network over the past year.

Featured Chats

Notable featured chats with Stuart Immonen, Susan McKivergan, and of course, the chat highlight of the year with Louis Markoya, who apprenticed with Salvador Dali! Many more featured chats are to come in 2009.

10,000 chat quotes!

The Chat Network’s very own quote database dAmnIt became quite popular in 2008 and tallied up more than 10,000 quotes! You can always read the best of the best in the latest edition of LOL Corner!

There are so many things I think about when I reflect on the past year, but there are three specific things that resonate and wrap up the overall feeling of 2008 for me.

The first was $chix0r coming on board as Director of Community Operations. She stepped into a highly public and difficult role almost seamlessly, as though it were custom-fit for her, and she’s worked tirelessly to increase communication and transparency within the community. It’s a pleasure and an honor to work alongside her on a daily basis and I know the community is benefiting from her presence.

The second was $spyed publishing dARama ISSUE ONE - Love. I’ve been lucky enough to witness this side of $spyed on a daily basis and having him share his passion so openly, honestly, and with so much love, served to inspire a community to do the same. The wave created was epic and I look forward to Issue Two.

The third was Groups development. For just over a week, I was living with an incredibly talented and brilliant group of people and together we created something I’m proud to be associated with. The Gruser team became family that week.

It’s also a pleasure to work with an extremely dedicated and talented group of volunteers, who amaze me daily and I look forward to everything 2009 is going to bring!

The one thing that makes deviantART such an inspirational place is our unique community. Millions of deviants from across the globe come together everyday to share art, forge friendships, and build networks with other artists and art enthusiasts. We’d like to give thanks and show appreciation to those that shine, and over the past year we’ve awarded seniority to a number of individuals in recognition of their community excellence.

You can read more about these individuals in the September and December Announcements.

We also granted the following people with the Deviousness Award.

`adonhis

`larafairie

`Nico1

`kuschelirmel

`blackeri

`edwheeler

`Artgerm

^snowmask

`arcipello

`spyroteknik

`Beccalicious

`karemelancholia

A word from $spyed on his personal highlight of 2008.

“Definitely watching Danie throw Fellas at a crowd of people at Anime Expo, who were so excited they were nearly trampling each other over a plushie, in front of our brand new deviantART booth that everyone was loving. Great times.”