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Missing feature
4 weeks ago
General
FA should really have a better way to search for artists.
I found that since like 3 years I mostly just do YCH.. Not because I don't have ideas for commissions, I have a buttload, but because finding open artists is such a hassle.
You go to an artist you like.. comms closed. you go to another ten, comms closed. you arrive at 12, asking price is twice or more what you're willing to pay, rinse repeat.
I know there are sites that try to alleviate that, but they most often also do a bad job. Besides, I refuse to use commishes because they screwed me over (by allowing a user to tracelessly delete his bid, therefore highest bid fell back to me, when I already allocated those resources elsewhere because I lost. You should not be allowed to remove bids. You'd think that was item number 1 on such a site's priority list)
Why can't we have a search for artists? "search: artist state: open. Artists price range: single character colored in between x and x. Adult: yes. draws fetishes: <list>"
Yeah I know why. That feature would require quite some work and this website didn't have any positive changes since a decade ago. It's kinda impressive that every change was negative. Yeah, let's add more censorsip and defacto ban most pokeporn, the furries will love that! But anyway, that's another, seperate rant.
But man, I can wish.
Just because of past experiences: No, this is not a place for yourself to advertise yourself. This is for me to rant. Whoever replies to that with an advertisement will land on my "never commish" list.
I found that since like 3 years I mostly just do YCH.. Not because I don't have ideas for commissions, I have a buttload, but because finding open artists is such a hassle.
You go to an artist you like.. comms closed. you go to another ten, comms closed. you arrive at 12, asking price is twice or more what you're willing to pay, rinse repeat.
I know there are sites that try to alleviate that, but they most often also do a bad job. Besides, I refuse to use commishes because they screwed me over (by allowing a user to tracelessly delete his bid, therefore highest bid fell back to me, when I already allocated those resources elsewhere because I lost. You should not be allowed to remove bids. You'd think that was item number 1 on such a site's priority list)
Why can't we have a search for artists? "search: artist state: open. Artists price range: single character colored in between x and x. Adult: yes. draws fetishes: <list>"
Yeah I know why. That feature would require quite some work and this website didn't have any positive changes since a decade ago. It's kinda impressive that every change was negative. Yeah, let's add more censorsip and defacto ban most pokeporn, the furries will love that! But anyway, that's another, seperate rant.
But man, I can wish.
Just because of past experiences: No, this is not a place for yourself to advertise yourself. This is for me to rant. Whoever replies to that with an advertisement will land on my "never commish" list.
The search there is lacking though, its a way better start than any other marketplace. (Commishes is hot ass scraped over burning glass in comparison).
I agree though, its terribly hard to find artists. FA isnt the place for it, Twitter isnt the place for it. But thats where people hang so...
Never heard of VGen tho but it looks like a site for anime artists. Nothing bad with this, I just have reservations about invading such a site with furry stuff, just like I wouldn't like FA to be overtaken by anime stuff. Live and let live. But that's just my personal stance.
You'd really think with how many computer nerds are in the furry fandom, a website just for this would exist. But chances are even if it did it wouldn't be used unless some really big artists started advertising it. (I got some experience with this having made a crossposter nobody used until years later postybirb appears and everyone treats it like christs second coming XD)
I agree that artist discoverability is a major thing we're lacking on FA. We have the commission info page, but you can't search for artists based on criteria on it, so it only helps once you're already on the user's page. 20+ years after the site's inception and your best way to find artists is to get lucky while browsing. I hope this is something we are able to address moving forward as we have been able to start adding more features within the last year.
It's something that came up when we were stuck in File Read-Only mode for a week to do maintenance. The lucky people who ended up on the frontpage got a ton of exposure, and that was great for them. It would be nice if we could feature lesser-known artists in a deliberate way that doesn't involve something breaking for a week. FA has a ton of incredibly talented yet little-known artists. Our community banners are a step in the right direction, but that's just one thing - we need to do more to help promote members of our community.
or what I came to do, as said, search for YCH and order by date. But yeh, not ideal
Until a very short while ago, you could search for an artists name and nothing came up save for maybe other people posting commissions they got, because the search flat out refused to take username into account. That may be a rare good feature FA did introduce, now uploader name is autotagged. For years I put the artists name, and my username, in the tags of every upload. It's just a shame it took that long for such an obvious thing.
>It would be nice if we could feature lesser-known artists in a deliberate way that doesn't involve something breaking for a week
It would be rather easy. The start site has "recent submissions", "recent writings" etc. Add a "recent randomized" where art is randomly chosen from the past 24 hours. "select * from submissions order by random() where upload_date >= now() - interval 1 day limit 20" or something.
Then let users decide in their profile settings which boxes they want to see on the main page, because personally I don't care about "Recent Writing & Poetry" and would hide that, but other people do so it shouldn't be removed. And make recent randomized the default, because honestly I don't think many people really want to see what was just posted a second ago, they just want to see things they haven't seen before.
With such a system in place, it would be rather easy to later add more to it, like "recent random by unknown people" or once a is-open-for-commis flag is there, if that ever comes, a "recent random by artistts open for commission" or something.
But yeah, neither of these things is likely to come. One can dream.
But hey, I somehow never noticed, or forgot again, that you're a site mod. Don't take things to heart, I just get frustrated with FA from time to time
Yes. By default a search checks the title, filename, description, and keywords. You can search for usernames with "@lower {username}" but this is a Little-Known Feature even after it got documented on the help page: https://www.furaffinity.net/help/#search So I really don't blame anyone for not knowing about it.
As for a random selection of things from the last 24 hours, I like the idea, though I'm not a database person so I have no idea how much of a load that puts on the database. Maybe something that can be cached and refreshed once per minute? Again, this isn't an "official" response, mostly me sharing concerns about artist discoverability on FA (or the lack thereof).
Really, we do need some way to help users curate what they can see on the frontpage. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has some favorite searches they do regularly to see what's new - providing a way to streamline this would be nice. There's a lot of things are 'nice to have' with FA, and hopefully some day we'll get them, but only time will tell.
Don't take things to heart, I just get frustrated with FA from time to time
I only became a mod in February so it's quite possible you just didn't notice. And you're fine, I don't take it personally! I became a mod because I want to help FA improve. It has problems, and I won't claim otherwise. There's lots of ways FA can be made better. And I wanted to do what I could to accomplish that.
The first step to fixing issues is to acknowledge them. Knowing what it is that is annoying users the most will help us know where to focus our efforts when we're in a position to do so. So I, personally, am never going to get upset at people for voicing their complaints - especially in this case where "finding an artist on FA is far harder than it should be" is a 100% legitimate issue we have.
But I don't know the DB designs and with some things I have seen on FA (wasn't a recent, if not the most recent, outage something about DB lagging?) I have doubts it actually is properly set up..
As for your "favorite searches they do regularly", that too could be nicely integrated in my idea from above, once the general frame is there. Let the user do a search and then "save this search" and on your setting, you can display that search in one of the main page boxes.
I'm probably explaining it badly, but I know software systems that are set up exactly like this.
Kinda like this: https://files.catbox.moe/jumgyq.png
What I think is good is if the popular feature isn't sorted, instead of having the most popular post first, it's a list of the top 100 of the day, for example and the order is randomised so that faves/views are distributed more evenly across them instead of #1 getting all the views. Again increases the chance of an unknown artist getting a one hit wonder sorta deal.
The other issue is a lack of a marketplace, it's not just finding artists, but as a customer there's no way to specifically find open artists, there's no filtering of type (ych, adopt, custom art, physical art like plushies or suits) and there's no streamlined ordering interface you just have to hope the artist has an ordering template and send them a note, which easily gets lost in our clunky notes system or... Worse, contact them offsite. (I'm sure as a mod you love hearing about offsite disputes)
I do kinda hate when artists do that spam with YCH, reposting it every second day, but I do understand why they do it.