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DISCUSSION: FurAffinity Improvement (Commissions)
10 years ago
Good day, my subjects.
A few weeks ago, I made a post discussing ways that I believe FurAffinity can be improved. Today I want to go into more detail around commissions.
When FurAffinity started, it originated as an artwork sharing site. It was basically a furry-only DeviantArt (and may have even emerged from the time when DeviantArt had that anti-furry backlash). However, over time, new uses were developed by the community. It ceased to be simply a site for displaying artwork, and artists began to sell their artwork. Then they offered commissions. YCH's. Adoptables. Eggs. Bases. Proprietary species. Streaming services. Classes. Tutorials. The uses of FA have changed, and yet FA has not changed to accommodate these new usecases. Why?
To some degree, I think FA doesn't change much because it doesn't have-to. FurAffinity is by-far the most successful furry website in the world. (So maybe this isn't really a discussion topic for FA, but for all their competitors to come up with new and innovative ways to improve the FA experience and thereby increase their customer base). From the patterns how users use FA's features, we can see there are lots of unmet needs. You see it in the glut of YCHs in your submissions stream, and the number of "Commission Opening" and "CLOSED" journals you get.
Why do you get all of these? Because FA doesn't have an in-model mechanism to deal with them.
Today I want to talk about one in-particular that can be improved and that's COMMISSIONS. Thousands of people now make their livelihoods through FurAffinity, and yet the process is still as arcane and painful as the day when FA launched. Here's how I would improve it, and I'm going to propose it by walking through a transaction.
ARTIST has cleared his/her queue and is ready to take on new work. S/he knows about how much time s/he will have and how many projects s/he wants to get done during that time period.
ARTIST clicks "Open for Commissions" button and is taken to a webpage that stipulates the amount of time that they want to spend, and links to their price page (I would also digitize this and consume it as meta-data). Then this published. Using the price page as meta-data, it can than block out that an artist has time for 2 full colors or 4 flat colors or 1 full and 2 flats (etc).
COMMISSIONER then sees the link OPEN if the artist is open, next to journals in their User Control Panel. As soon as the openings are filled, this link goes away (and therefore reduces spamminess).
COMMISSIONER can also go to a new link up there near "Search" and "Browse" for "Open Commissions" and take a look at everybody who is open at any given time. This allows commissioners easy access to artists, and also gives artists more exposure. Ideally, this could also be expanded to be searchable. "Adult", "Chibi", "Vore", "Sci-Fi" (etc), and find artists easily that will fit the idea that they have in mind.
ARTIST can then see which commissioners are attempting to commission them, and accept or reject. When they accept, it provisions a Commission object in memory (serverside). This is a private object visible only to Commissioner(s) and the Artist(s). It starts out as "Unpaid". And has a required field for commission description and references. Upon Payment, artist marks it "Paid" and can begin to work. Now it flips to a private place to store temporary WIP images. The artist can upload here, and the commissioner can comment on uploads (making suggestions, pointing out fixes).
FINALLY the two can publish, nuclear-submarine style, at which time, it appears in BOTH the artist and commissioner streams, automatically filling the "Artist" and "Character" fields that we normally see. If someone is watching both streams, it only need appear once.
Its just an idea, but I think it will reduce the complexity for everybody. Using this, commissioners would no longer have to keep track of which artists they've commissioned, since listing would be an easy feature. Artists could also stop using external services like Dropbox and Gyazo. Everything could be encapsulated in the FA ecosystem. Artists would not longer have to keep queues on Trello and other places because it could be managed here automatically, and (if they decide to make it public) it would eliminate questions like "How long before you start on mine?" It would easily keep track of payment status, all ALL of the commission details in one place.
It would even cut down on journal spam. In fact... there's really no downside. So, FA...
~ Etheras
(BTW: This is not an endorsement of Shia LeBeouf, who I sincerely believe made the worst TED talk of all time, and was probably high on cocaine during this video. But I think its funny.)
A few weeks ago, I made a post discussing ways that I believe FurAffinity can be improved. Today I want to go into more detail around commissions.
When FurAffinity started, it originated as an artwork sharing site. It was basically a furry-only DeviantArt (and may have even emerged from the time when DeviantArt had that anti-furry backlash). However, over time, new uses were developed by the community. It ceased to be simply a site for displaying artwork, and artists began to sell their artwork. Then they offered commissions. YCH's. Adoptables. Eggs. Bases. Proprietary species. Streaming services. Classes. Tutorials. The uses of FA have changed, and yet FA has not changed to accommodate these new usecases. Why?
To some degree, I think FA doesn't change much because it doesn't have-to. FurAffinity is by-far the most successful furry website in the world. (So maybe this isn't really a discussion topic for FA, but for all their competitors to come up with new and innovative ways to improve the FA experience and thereby increase their customer base). From the patterns how users use FA's features, we can see there are lots of unmet needs. You see it in the glut of YCHs in your submissions stream, and the number of "Commission Opening" and "CLOSED" journals you get.
Why do you get all of these? Because FA doesn't have an in-model mechanism to deal with them.
Today I want to talk about one in-particular that can be improved and that's COMMISSIONS. Thousands of people now make their livelihoods through FurAffinity, and yet the process is still as arcane and painful as the day when FA launched. Here's how I would improve it, and I'm going to propose it by walking through a transaction.
ARTIST has cleared his/her queue and is ready to take on new work. S/he knows about how much time s/he will have and how many projects s/he wants to get done during that time period.
ARTIST clicks "Open for Commissions" button and is taken to a webpage that stipulates the amount of time that they want to spend, and links to their price page (I would also digitize this and consume it as meta-data). Then this published. Using the price page as meta-data, it can than block out that an artist has time for 2 full colors or 4 flat colors or 1 full and 2 flats (etc).
COMMISSIONER then sees the link OPEN if the artist is open, next to journals in their User Control Panel. As soon as the openings are filled, this link goes away (and therefore reduces spamminess).
COMMISSIONER can also go to a new link up there near "Search" and "Browse" for "Open Commissions" and take a look at everybody who is open at any given time. This allows commissioners easy access to artists, and also gives artists more exposure. Ideally, this could also be expanded to be searchable. "Adult", "Chibi", "Vore", "Sci-Fi" (etc), and find artists easily that will fit the idea that they have in mind.
ARTIST can then see which commissioners are attempting to commission them, and accept or reject. When they accept, it provisions a Commission object in memory (serverside). This is a private object visible only to Commissioner(s) and the Artist(s). It starts out as "Unpaid". And has a required field for commission description and references. Upon Payment, artist marks it "Paid" and can begin to work. Now it flips to a private place to store temporary WIP images. The artist can upload here, and the commissioner can comment on uploads (making suggestions, pointing out fixes).
FINALLY the two can publish, nuclear-submarine style, at which time, it appears in BOTH the artist and commissioner streams, automatically filling the "Artist" and "Character" fields that we normally see. If someone is watching both streams, it only need appear once.
Its just an idea, but I think it will reduce the complexity for everybody. Using this, commissioners would no longer have to keep track of which artists they've commissioned, since listing would be an easy feature. Artists could also stop using external services like Dropbox and Gyazo. Everything could be encapsulated in the FA ecosystem. Artists would not longer have to keep queues on Trello and other places because it could be managed here automatically, and (if they decide to make it public) it would eliminate questions like "How long before you start on mine?" It would easily keep track of payment status, all ALL of the commission details in one place.
It would even cut down on journal spam. In fact... there's really no downside. So, FA...
~ Etheras
(BTW: This is not an endorsement of Shia LeBeouf, who I sincerely believe made the worst TED talk of all time, and was probably high on cocaine during this video. But I think its funny.)
As for Shia... lol
A system like this would absolutely clear up any confusion
as for FA actually DOING it..? My opinion of staff doing anything at this point is extremely low, in the negatives even. I feel FA needs to be reborn, much like FF14 online was, remade from the ground up. That being, the staff the first to go. All staff whom are willing to contribute to change, and actually do things need to be put on a probation to see if they hold their end, all else (and we dare not say any names with all the drama flying around) need to be canned. Fresh blood needs to be brought in, and Im talking level headed professional people. Not whiny girls and boys who get butthurt if their "bestfriend gets in a tustle" with another user. The problem is all the high up admins are extremely biased towards each other and what they feel is A-ok for the site to be doing.
And for all of the programmed and copy-pasted big-vocabulary some of the staff uses, they really fail to do anything of use. Ever. I don't think it's unreasonable what you've asked for here, nor do I think folders or fairness or TT's being answered is unreasonable. Yet, the people who disagree with all logical conjecture happen to be those in charge.
So what do we do?
Well, there's sofurry and weasyl. Neither site is great. SF has the better staff, weasyl has the better coding and layout. Neither of them together or apart have the userbase of FA though. And while they're both growing (and rapidly) it'll be years before they take off like FA due to FA just being the old wooden dock that's already there. Sure they're building fancy concrete docks and eco friendly docks, but the old wooden one is easier to get too, everyone still uses it and it has the market closest to it. And that's the problem.
Yep. Content is King, as they say. And so FA will always have an advantage and not feel any pressure to change until one of those other big sites starts producing a lot of exclusive content. My vote is for SoFurry. Weasyl is a bit of a ghost-town. Its a pretty nice site, but people usually just post stuff there and then go off and do something else. It doesn't have FA's community, where you get a lot of people reading journals and faving stuff and posting responses. SoFurry is better in that it has a real community, but I think their site is bloated, actually. It has too many features that nobody cares about. Like the star system. Why does it exist? Its only purpose is to enable trolling.
Yet these features exist, and unless they remove them, its making the codebase larger and harder to maintain. I'm not blaming the star system specifically, but its indicative of a larger problem. Like... cycling avatars. Is that really providing any benefit? No. They should re-allocate their development efforts towards useful features. Its like obsessing with having really nice hula dancer bobbles in a rusted piece of crap car. Totally irrelevant. Anyway :P
Thanks for the thoughtful response.