Art Forty-Two Site Updates on the Horizon

Hi Everyone!

We've been reading a few of the suggestions in the forum here and in the new feedback form and wanted to give a few updates on upcoming changes to the site.

1) Karma: Some of you have expressed a desire to easily see how much of which type of Karma users have. We've decided, as a tool for hosts, to split the karma on the project page so you can see the positive/neutral/negative karma each participant has instead of the total number.  This leads to the next request.

2) Kicking participants: Some hosts have requested the ability to remove members from their project if they are non-responsive. Although, we feel there is a chance that this tool could be abused, we will be adding this feature soon. We have to prepare some auto-emails.  Please note hosts will be required to state why they are removing a participant from the project. This will give the participant information and allow us to make sure people are not being removed for the wrong reasons.  We want an open community but also want hosts to have control over their projects.

3) In our feedback form (upper right under "feedback", we've asked you if you think new members should participate in a few projects before being allowed to host one.  Right now, it is inconclusive on how members feel about this so - we will be waiting on whether or not we do this.

4) We've heard that some of you hare having trouble joining projects due to a karma bug. Our resident geek is working on it and will have it fixed soon.

5) Hosts in e-mails.  We've also saw that some of the hosts would also like to get the e-mail when they send a note to all participants. We will be adding that feature too.

So, in the next week or so there should be a few changes to the site (specifically 1, 4, and 5).

In other news: We are going to be doing a major site upgrade in a month or so to upgrade the back end(all geek stuff) and we have a redesign of the site that will happen about that time. We'll be asking for testers once we get it on the test site.  We hope to add a few new features like a site-wide gallery and such to make the site a bit more visual. 

We'd like to thank you all for taking this ride with us over the last two years! We are trying to make this community fun for everyone.

One last note, Aelios (our resident geek) and Empress_Dragon are due to have a baby any day. So things might be a little slower than suggested above if the baby comes in the next few days. (We hope!)  FaithMarie will still be on alert for the site and we'll be here to answer questions. Keep up the awesome participation!

We also have an Art Forty-Two meet-up page (http://www.meetup.com/Art-Forty-Two-Meetup/) going on so if you are in the Washington area we'd love to see you!

That's all for now
Art Forty-Two

The Art of Jazz

The Art of Jazz - Hosted by Maralena Howard (aka: mhoward)

Artist: Sythka

Artist: Sunnyrea

Artist: Strawberry

Artist: Scarlet

Artist: Mhoward

Artist: Lucy

Artist: Katkeeper

Artist: Janelleybean

Artist: Inspirecreatescrap

Artist: Cinabeena

Valentine Shrine Swap 2011

Artist: Sythka

Artist: Slheyer

Artist: scrappydappy

Artist: Purrito

Artist: PepnJo2

Artist: PamB

Artist: Otterblue

Artist: OhYeah

Artist: Lucy

Artist: Lisa Vollrath

Artist: KatKeeper

Artist: Katina

Artist: FaithMarie

Artist: EmrpessDragon

Artist: eClaire70

Artist: Diane Trew

Artist: DesignsByDLR

Artist: Crescentwench

Artist: artsyclara

Carnival Chunky Book Page

Artist: sfasser

Artist:Strawberry

Artist:FaithMarie

Artist: Artizlife

Art Forty-Two Anniversary Book

Hi Everyone! The book is done and ready on www.blurb.com. We hope you are all very happy with how it turned out. We like it, and are already excited to get started on next year's book!

Art Forty-Two:...

2009-2010

By Art Forty-Two

Book Preview

Art Forty-Two Anniversary Show and Swap

Art Forty-Two's first show happened today! We had a lot of fun and enjoyed spending the time staring at art, talking about art and the site, eating snacks, and basically basking in the glow of of a successful first year.

We have loved hosting the site and getting to know our members. We are looking forward to more opportunities to show your work and meet up with members for in-person swaps. Things we hope to start happening regularly as we move in to year two.

Over the next month we are going to work on putting together our Art Forty-Two Anniversary Book: Vol 1. It will include all of the work we received from members through out the year via site-hosted swaps. We've been scanning all the images just in case we decided to do something like this.

There are more pictures from the Anniversary event on Facebook. We hope that as we continue to do events like this they will get bigger and bigger each time.

We want to thank our members from the bottom of our hearts for helping us make this site everything we dreamed it would be. With out you, it would not exist.

All our love!
Sandra (FaithMarie) and Danial (Empress_Dragon)

Site Update - Exciting New Features

We've made many updates to the site this launch. A few things you will find with this new update.

1. Forums - pretty self-explanatory. We hope you like them. We have five main forums at the moment. Art Forty-Two site news - where we will be posting news about the site, events, etc. A Member Help forum, a Trades and Exchanges forum, an art discussion forum and a general discussion forum. We will add more as needed.
   
   
2. Project pages enhancements - we've added a tab to every project page. The tabs say "Participants" and "Discussion". As a participant you can discuss the project, ask questions, check-up etc. This is in addition to any notes you put in by editing/updating your status on the participant tab - or any left panel notes left by the host/ess.
   
   
3. Profile pages got a new tab. Your profile page now has a new Q&A Tab. This area is your own personal "forum" where members can ask you questions, you can make notes about anything going on in your life (vacation, illness etc). and basically allows a place for you to have personal discussions.
   
   
4. Project pages - images. We've added a spot on the project pages for an image. This will allow you to put a little eye candy on the page or to help explain what is expected of your participants. Soon, we hope to also display the images on the project page list but we ran out of time for this launch.

As always, we hope you like the changes. We'd love to hear your feedback. We make all the changes to the site we can to make using it easier for you. We love our members! Sometimes it takes us a little since we all work full-time day jobs, but hopefully, the site is bringing you some arty joy. It's certainly made out lives happier!

Art Forty-Two
Sandra and Danial
FaithMarie and EmpressDragon