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Why You Should Make an Itaku Account
3 years ago
General
I’ve recently made an Itaku account at https://itaku.ee/profile/ahnik, and I’ve been really excited about the features it has.
If you’re not on Itaku yet, I strongly recommend making an account! From what I’ve seen so far, the site is AWESOME for both artists and commissioners. Here are just a few of the great features it has:
Like FA, DeviantArt, and other gallery sites, Itaku places the main emphasis on art. However, it also has support for short tweet-style text posts, as well as longer text-based content (i.e., stories, journals, etc.).
(However, to my knowledge they don’t support PDFs, .docx files, and other such text filetypes. Any text content you want to post must be typed or copy+pasted into the site directly. I will be reaching out to Itaku support to suggest adding support for these file types.)
The Itaku admin has so far been very quick and open to feedback and has promptly been making upgrades to the server to support the fast growth the site is seeing. They've also been very good about addressing new users' concerns about some of the site's tagging and rating policies and have already pushed updates resolving the main issues.
Despite the fact that Itaku is not a furry site, the admin seems determined to make sure the new influx of furry users find a comfortable home there.
This mindset is reflected in the user culture as well. Non-furry Itaku users on the Discord have been a little surprised but generally chill with all the new furry content creators on there. They just want us to tag our stuff properly so they can blacklist it when needed, which is totally reasonable and something we should be doing anyway. x3 And on that note...
Itaku has the tag infrastructure to support very detailed and easily searchable tagging. I’m a nut for good tagging so I was really happy to see this, ha ha.
The structure of tags largely imitates that of e621, but the golden rule on Itaku is "Tag What You Know" as opposed to e621's "Tag What You See" rule.
Users also have more control over the tags on their uploads than on e621; other users can suggest tag edits for your uploads, but it's up to you whether you accept the edits or not. Tags will only be enforced in extreme cases, such as a user tagging NSFW content SFW, or not tagging commonly blacklisted content. And on THAT note...
Itaku has a functioning blacklist! Nothing much to be said there, but compared to sites that don't have this pretty important feature (cough, cough), it's a great thing to have.
There is also the option for users to add content warnings to their posts. And not just FA- or Twitter-style "writing 'CW' in the title/caption but by then you've already seen the image and it's too late". CWs on Itaku hide the image and display the CW text the artist has written. The image will not be displayed unless you click on the post. This is great both for extreme content as well as spoilers.
I haven't used Itaku on my phone much yet, but from what I can tell the site seems to work just as well on mobile! There isn't an app, but the site layout scales nicely for mobile devices and I didn't run into any issues when I tried it briefly.
Itaku is still a work in progress, but it feels good. It feels thought-out and community-oriented in a way that so many other sites that have tried to do what it does haven't.
The UI is understandable. It doesn't use weird terminology for the sake of being quirky. Things on the site are generally where you expect them to be and work they way you'd expect them to work. It has tons of artist-oriented features that me and other artists usually have to patchwork together by using multiple other sites and applications.
There's a reason so many artists are starting up there right now, and it's not just the current situation with Twitter.
Have you ever had an idea for something you want to commission but had trouble finding which artists are open for commissions, or it’s a really niche kink and it’s hard to find artists willing to draw it if your usual go-to’s aren’t taking commissions? PROBLEM SOLVED.
Itaku has a post type specifically for commissioners looking for artists! You can include a description of your idea, your reference images, the price range you’re interested in, and relevant tags (e.g., “hyper”, “size difference”, “sfw”). Artists can browse these posts and reach out to you if they’re interested in drawing for you!
The reverse of the above feature also exists! Artists can make posts announcing their commission openings, and you can see a list of everyone who’s currently open, or filter the list by tags you’re interested in (e.g., “hyper”, “size difference”, “sfw”).
This makes it super easy to find artists that draw the specific things you want to commission! This feature supports both regular commission openings, as well as auctions, YCHs, adopts, PWYW, OBO/”best offer”, etc. commissions.
If you’re the type of person that doesn’t like planning out commission ideas in advance and waiting for an opening, and instead prefers to come up with an idea on the spot when you see that an artist you like is open, there’s something for you too!
Artist profiles have a field for indicating whether they’re currently open for commissions. When the status is toggled to “Open”, all their followers get a notification! This status is also displayed on their profile, so it’s easy to see whether a cool new artist you’ve just discovered is open.
In short, I really really like Itaku so far.
I could really see it becoming "the one" art site we've all been pining for.
The main downside to Itaku right now is it doesn’t have a huge userbase yet, but YOU GUYS can fix that by hopping on there and making an account!
>>> https://itaku.ee/register <<<
If you decide to, you can follow me there at https://itaku.ee/profile/ahnik.
Cheers all, thanks to anyone who read all the way through! Have a wonderful day. :3
Twitter | Itaku | Commission Me | Support Me With a Tip | My Website
If you’re not on Itaku yet, I strongly recommend making an account! From what I’ve seen so far, the site is AWESOME for both artists and commissioners. Here are just a few of the great features it has:
General Features
Social/Gallery Hybrid
Like FA, DeviantArt, and other gallery sites, Itaku places the main emphasis on art. However, it also has support for short tweet-style text posts, as well as longer text-based content (i.e., stories, journals, etc.).
(However, to my knowledge they don’t support PDFs, .docx files, and other such text filetypes. Any text content you want to post must be typed or copy+pasted into the site directly. I will be reaching out to Itaku support to suggest adding support for these file types.)
Responsive Administration
The Itaku admin has so far been very quick and open to feedback and has promptly been making upgrades to the server to support the fast growth the site is seeing. They've also been very good about addressing new users' concerns about some of the site's tagging and rating policies and have already pushed updates resolving the main issues.
Furry-Friendly
Despite the fact that Itaku is not a furry site, the admin seems determined to make sure the new influx of furry users find a comfortable home there.
This mindset is reflected in the user culture as well. Non-furry Itaku users on the Discord have been a little surprised but generally chill with all the new furry content creators on there. They just want us to tag our stuff properly so they can blacklist it when needed, which is totally reasonable and something we should be doing anyway. x3 And on that note...
Robust Tagging
Itaku has the tag infrastructure to support very detailed and easily searchable tagging. I’m a nut for good tagging so I was really happy to see this, ha ha.
The structure of tags largely imitates that of e621, but the golden rule on Itaku is "Tag What You Know" as opposed to e621's "Tag What You See" rule.
Users also have more control over the tags on their uploads than on e621; other users can suggest tag edits for your uploads, but it's up to you whether you accept the edits or not. Tags will only be enforced in extreme cases, such as a user tagging NSFW content SFW, or not tagging commonly blacklisted content. And on THAT note...
Blacklisting and Functional Content Warnings!
Itaku has a functioning blacklist! Nothing much to be said there, but compared to sites that don't have this pretty important feature (cough, cough), it's a great thing to have.
There is also the option for users to add content warnings to their posts. And not just FA- or Twitter-style "writing 'CW' in the title/caption but by then you've already seen the image and it's too late". CWs on Itaku hide the image and display the CW text the artist has written. The image will not be displayed unless you click on the post. This is great both for extreme content as well as spoilers.
Mobile-Accessible
I haven't used Itaku on my phone much yet, but from what I can tell the site seems to work just as well on mobile! There isn't an app, but the site layout scales nicely for mobile devices and I didn't run into any issues when I tried it briefly.
It Just Feels Good
Itaku is still a work in progress, but it feels good. It feels thought-out and community-oriented in a way that so many other sites that have tried to do what it does haven't.
The UI is understandable. It doesn't use weird terminology for the sake of being quirky. Things on the site are generally where you expect them to be and work they way you'd expect them to work. It has tons of artist-oriented features that me and other artists usually have to patchwork together by using multiple other sites and applications.
There's a reason so many artists are starting up there right now, and it's not just the current situation with Twitter.
Commissioning-Related Features
“Looking to Commission” Posts
Have you ever had an idea for something you want to commission but had trouble finding which artists are open for commissions, or it’s a really niche kink and it’s hard to find artists willing to draw it if your usual go-to’s aren’t taking commissions? PROBLEM SOLVED.
Itaku has a post type specifically for commissioners looking for artists! You can include a description of your idea, your reference images, the price range you’re interested in, and relevant tags (e.g., “hyper”, “size difference”, “sfw”). Artists can browse these posts and reach out to you if they’re interested in drawing for you!
“Commissions Open” Posts and Notifications
The reverse of the above feature also exists! Artists can make posts announcing their commission openings, and you can see a list of everyone who’s currently open, or filter the list by tags you’re interested in (e.g., “hyper”, “size difference”, “sfw”).
This makes it super easy to find artists that draw the specific things you want to commission! This feature supports both regular commission openings, as well as auctions, YCHs, adopts, PWYW, OBO/”best offer”, etc. commissions.
“Commissions Open” Status
If you’re the type of person that doesn’t like planning out commission ideas in advance and waiting for an opening, and instead prefers to come up with an idea on the spot when you see that an artist you like is open, there’s something for you too!
Artist profiles have a field for indicating whether they’re currently open for commissions. When the status is toggled to “Open”, all their followers get a notification! This status is also displayed on their profile, so it’s easy to see whether a cool new artist you’ve just discovered is open.
In short, I really really like Itaku so far.
I could really see it becoming "the one" art site we've all been pining for.
The main downside to Itaku right now is it doesn’t have a huge userbase yet, but YOU GUYS can fix that by hopping on there and making an account!
>>> https://itaku.ee/register <<<
If you decide to, you can follow me there at https://itaku.ee/profile/ahnik.
Cheers all, thanks to anyone who read all the way through! Have a wonderful day. :3
Twitter | Itaku | Commission Me | Support Me With a Tip | My Website
But so far, the site is a boon that should be promoted around more, though it may be difficult if the whole furry fandom is rushing it. Growing pain is commonly used on the discord due to how, suddenly, a large amount of bara artists rushed to the site and produced a constant stream of bara that slowed the site along with spurning the old timers.
Hopefully, the staff (from admin to moderation) will grow and with it the infrastructure to make it the perfect fusion of Twitter/E621 and FA
Since this person is well, "one person" and the site is having bugs up the whaazoo right now. Yeah, I'll for sure wait and see if it gets better.
The site was unresponsive for a bit last week, but that was due to a spike in activity which has now been resolved by upgrading the server, not software bugs.
Pros:
- Quality of life features. Implementation of oft-requested FA features, such as username changes and multi-image uploads (for alternate versions, sequences, etc.).
- Improved content browsing. Thoughtful SFW/NSFW toggling, blacklist, and content warning implementation. Though of course, it remains to be seen how thoroughly users will tag and apply CWs to their work; no matter how thoughtful the system, it won't work if a majority of users aren't applying basic tags to their content.
Cons:
- Creative written media. Somehow, their creative writing/story support is even worse than FA's, at the time of this comment. On Itaku, the most you can do is... submit plaintext as a post -- without even BBCode functionality, mind. No italics, no bold, no underlines. The way to do this is via the New Post page (https://itaku.ee/new/post), which notes that tagging posts is not mandatory. I haven't yet explored it thoroughly, but I highly suspect posts get buried over time like on a social media site and do not remain robustly searchable, unlike images. Essentially, Itaku has zero functionality for creative written media at the time of writing.
- Poor mobile functionality. Ironically, while you write that the site layout scales nicely for mobile devices, I've found the exact opposite. On my mobile device, when I view your profile, Nik is cut off in your header image, the profile picture is slapped in the middle of the header image, and three of the four buttons below your profile picture overlap with the non-header space, while the fourth is entirely within the header space: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme.....949_Chrome.jpg . It just looks kind of bad, imo. Though to be fair, I'm no bigger fan of the scaling for headers on desktop: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme.....4055/image.png . Poor Nik lost the top of his head.
- No concern for accessibility. If you go to your browser's "Inspect Element" tool, you will find that literally nothing on Itaku has alt text. Any website in 2022 should have these kinds of basic quality-of-life access features for users who use screen-readers and similar. FA is old, but at least it uses alt text.
I thought I'd share it here, so anyone who was interested by my earlier comment can see that these issues have now been raised to Itaku's team.
Hi there! First, thank you for all of the work you've done in building this site. I hope Itaku will continue to grow and find success.
I just wanted to express two issues that concern me regarding the site's usability and current features:
1) Accessibility. I've found while exploring Itaku that seemingly none of the image elements on the website use alt text. This is a major access issue for people who use screen readers and similar assistive technologies. Basic site elements, like the navigation buttons, need alt text to assist users who make use of screen readers.
I can understand why people with visual impairments might be easily forgotten on a primarily visual image gallery site, but it is important to remember that there are many people who can enjoy visual media yet also benefit from the use of screen readers, especially for smaller elements like the navigation buttons on the top of the page.
2) Creative writing. I saw on the website's "About" page that better creative writing support is already on the docket, so I won't belabour the point, but I just wanted to chime in that the writing community is very keen to begin exploring Itaku more. I hope this is a high priority!
Thank you for your time, and again, thank you for the work you've done to build Itaku. I hope this feedback should prove useful, as I would love to see the site flourish.
Though I'm not sure if it's something that will be improved in the future or whether it's a deliberate decision not to flesh that out much, to keep the site's focus on visual art. Hopefully the former, since I'd personally like to see stories on there as well. I'll be suggesting adding better support for that kind of stuff as well. :3
Regarding mobile stuff, the UI could certainly be improved in terms of aesthetics. x3
When I said everything scales okay, I meant more in terms of functionality. :3 i.e., UI elements don't go offscreen, buttons are sized appropriately to be easily clickable, and it overall feels easy to use the site's various features while holding my phone in one hand. Some sites become clunky or even practically unusable on mobile, or have certain features unavailable when browsing on a mobile device.
As far as missing alt text, this I wasn't aware of at all and it's definitely a good thing you sent in a suggestion for that. :3