The more I'm gone.

I am torn, I do not know how best to act but the more closely I am involved with the community the more I think that perhaps treachery is the best course.

deviantArt has been an ever shifting, evolving website since it's inception - started for skinners and now it's much more, it's for artists of almost every kind. Yet, even as it has become more, it has become less; there are more and more art thefts going on and the management handles it worse every time.

The community website about art is losing it's grip on the community and I think that the end is nigh.

Call me a doomsday seer if you will, but I believe that the worst is yet to come with deviantArt's mismanagement.

I think it is time to start looking for a new home, a site which from the start has been made to deal with policy violations in a community-based manner. Peer review, I think that items should be flagable for peer review based on copyright violation or miscategorization or whatever other reason someone may come up with. At that point, it's the community's job to police itself.

The best site of course would be made so that it isn't so focused on the visual of course, sound and text would be something worth really supporting in a good arts site.

Things like wiki-like story writing areas would be needed as well, where writers could gather together to make a story and edit it together, selecting if they are an editor or writer (with peer review so people do not claim more than they've actually done). The story would then be held under copyright by all writers, with them all having the right to us it equally for any reason as long as they maintained the list of writers and editors and did not sell the work without the permission of all other writers.

And built-in oekakis too, the site should have one so that artists can do them on the site and then with the click of a button send it to their gallery.

And clear copyright flags, each work should have one. Each work should have listed what licence it's under - with a link to an on-site copy of said licence and what it means.

It'd need to conform to standards as well, but not just standards, it'd need to be a site that works well under all the freely available web-browsers; from lynx to Opera.

A site like this would need to have a council system, rather than management. Actual in-site elections of people that the people want to help lead the site. Council members would hold votes of more power when a work is called for Peer review and would help to represent the sub-communities's point of view in discussions about policy and further site development. Of course, the site would have a dictator or two - they're the people hosting it, but they'd be benevolent dictators for life, not business men out to increase profitability.

Perhaps after a while, or maybe even from the start, the site could be based in a non-profit foundation that's goal is only to promote art. The site would then be protected, it's copyright, trademark, domain and servers all held by a organisation that's sole goal is to keep the site going and helping artists through mutual support within the community.

Things like the shoutbox shouldn't be on a site, that's what comments are for, that and IRC.

Yes, the more I think about how deviantArt has been in the past, the more I think I don't really want to stay here but instead want to go to this imaginary site somewhere in my head.

Maybe it's just venting from seeing too many miscarriages of justice on this site or I've finally said my peice about how the site's sucked without Jark, I just don't know really - but I felt the need to say this.