Updates to Rules (Update on page 7)

[ophanimera]

The main takeaway is that you should not be creating a sloppy cover…

Being so completely serious, the verbiage on this is disrespectful. Who gets to define “sloppy”? Is there a minimum quality of art required to be an oekaki adoptable artist? What happens when someone’s colored sketch takes them 30 minutes but it’s deemed not good enough? I’m so bewildered. Please explain why and how “sloppy” is appropriate to use in reference to other people’s art.

[lionkinnie]

As an artist Im so happy AI’s been banned❤️
Thank you so much

[Riley ♥]

...What happens when someone’s colored sketch takes them 30 minutes but it’s deemed not good enough?

My understanding is that the minimum requirements for a cover is anything that's more than an uncoloured sketch/just writing. The quality of the art itself doesn't matter because CS welcomes artists of all skill levels. But no matter what someone's skill level is, a rough uncoloured sketch with construction lines is always going to be faster and easier to make than lineart with colour.

I believe the point of this rule is to say that oekaki is to create art on, not to solely advertise something else. The off-oekaki adopt forum is pretty active for people who don't want to spend that extra time making a cover, so I think that's a good option as well.

[rabidcoyote]

I'm so super excited to see the AI update, and thank you so much!! Less excited to see the ban hammer on sketches and doodles on oekaki covers. By all means the 4th panel of the examples tells me more about the character in question than the 3rd ever could. :<

I've thought about my take a little more and I have some reservations - for a clarification of the rules it doesn't clarify a lot to me at all so maybe someone could explain to me where the line lies.

• Not allowed:
  
  • (...) doodles, (...) quick sketches.

• We allow:
  
  • Additional art (...).

This seems to me like a contradiction, I'd very much consider doodles and quick sketches additional art. As long as the character is clearly recognizable, why not allow it? I get that a sketch of a cat would be too generic to count, but if there's enough design-specific detail or stylization to recognize as the adopt, would it still be off limits?

Also - where do closed species fall into this? Would the premade background (for the species that have one) classify as word building?

I'm gonna gently nudge this up cause I'd like the last two paragraphs answered

[bfdi]

is ai only banned to post in oekaki and rp posts or just in general like sigs, avatars? i would hope the latter but just making sure lol

[neapolitan]

---

We have an off-oekaki board where you can sell adopts, you may want to consider using that instead if you don't want to draw additional art for the character on the oekaki. ---

"Oekaki is the only place where art may be sold without the inclusion of a CS payment method, such as CS pets, items, or C$"

This means I can make adoptables on the oekaki board and sell them only for USD, but this is not allowed on the art shops forum, right?

This is correct. We allow USD only sales on oekaki without the need for a CS-based payment. However all discussion of USD/real money sales anywhere on CS must take place offsite.

the cover rules in general are quite worrying to me, but this situation is also a bit odd. if someone doesn't have the skill / time to create a cover, they're meant to post their adopts to what is essentially a completely different market. selling adoptables on oekaki is one of the best places to do so, in my experience, as it goes out to a lot of people. especially because of the USD rule, this *is* a different market. why allow usd only adopts / art shops on oekaki but not in the art shop forums? is it a way to get more people to use oekaki, an oversight, or something else? is oekaki in this case not part of the main site forums / the "game" part? are the art shop forums closer to chicken smoothie than the oekaki?

and if covers with sketches of the character is "sloppy" and "spam", does that mean sketches in other oekaki boards are also sloppy and spammy? staff have worded this rule in various ways several times but not once is it clear what's "good" and what's "bad" in terms of covers. what if someone made a detailed, greyscale, lineart-only art piece? a detailed sketch? a sketch of a scene? what if someone made a very quick, but colored cover? which of these are ok and which ones are not?

i know this post was meant to clarify the rule but to me it still needs more clarification, and skimming over the thread it seems like other people agree. and this is in no means meant to be critiquing / angry, i'm just confused and maybe a little bothered, but i know the rule was not made in bad faith.

[Seasonal]

is ai only banned to post in oekaki and rp posts or just in general like sigs, avatars? i would hope the latter but just making sure lol

AI art should not be posted anywhere.

[touyieparkes]

Very pleased to hear about the AI art rule never been a supporter of AI art and i hate that some sites actually support it when it takes from other hard working artists
the new cover rule is great too because it'll hopefully help users catch more eyes with more colorful previews rather than just a black and white "oh hey click me i've got a adopt below"

[elf_of_the_hollow]

hm. okay, so. I have some thoughts on covers & this rule clarification in specific that I didn't want to go unexpressed, and this seems the best place for those concerns to go. I want to make clear I am genuinely curious about the answers to my questions and the thought process behind these rules. I am about to write a lot, and I sincerely apologize if it comes off like an attack. it's not meant to be. I'm just a little confused.

first and foremost, I should clarify, I am not altogether heavily affected by these rules; I like to use oekaki for closed species adopts and usually find working on oekaki with the on oekaki lineset to be easier than working with it off oekaki. as such, I don't really post covers, and I don't really plan to much in the future either. however, I am in closed species communities with many artists who much prefer working off oekaki. I would not say I am speaking on their behalf - these are my own thoughts on the matter - but I am thinking of them the most when I say it.

number one on my mind is the example covers provided, specifically number 4 (and a little bit of number 3). while I fully understand that a super messy sketch that is unreadable would not be an acceptable cover.. the sketch example provided is incredibly clean. in fact, I think the line quality of it is about on par with the first 'good' example.. which confuses me. why would a sketch of the character not be considered extra art, assuming that the sketch is clean and readable? is it just the fact that it's uncolored that's the problem? what about people who don't line their art, or who's lines are just have a sketchier quality? are they out of luck in this case?

I find myself agreeing with rabidcoyote on this case. the 4th panel feels like a better and more relevant cover to me than the 3rd, even if the 3rd has more apparent 'effort'. certainly, even if someone painted a beautifully rendered landscape as an adopt cover, I would still prefer to receive an actual sketch of the character as additional art. while it might subjectively 'look better' from the thumbnail view, I don't think a drawing of a landscape/accessories/etc. would necessarily lead me to think what I'm about to click on is an adopt either. the headshot sketch reads better to me, if I'm considering which I would click on expecting to see an off oekaki adopt.

I also do not love sketches being referred to as 'sloppy'. I think a sketch has just as good a chance at being a beautiful art piece as a fully lined piece does. if someone makes a gorgeous fullbody sketch of an adopt, I don't think that should be considered 'not good enough' as a cover just because it's a sketch. why is something that would be alright to post somewhere else on oekaki suddenly considered spam once there's more art hosted underneath it?


now, second, I understand why for standalone adopts, the adopts forum would be better than the oekaki to host off-oekaki adopts. I think it's probably still not ideal for many artists, but I can't really speak to that as I don't really use adopts 1 or the off oekaki adopts forums. what I do not think it makes as much sense for is closed species.

there are several points I want to make about this, so for ease, I will make this into a list. these concerns are not necessarily about this specific rule clarification, but more about covers in general, and an argument for why they are a good thing that I do not mind seeing more of.


1. closed species communities are expansive. while many artists attracted to them can work on oekaki, just as many cannot, or find they prefer to work off oekaki for ease. I find it unfair that a community may have to exclude artists who prefer working off oekaki from applying for staff positions. I find that this only pushes closed species communities away from CS as a whole, as they find it more and more difficult to work with a program that only suits some of their community's needs

2. sort of a sub point to 1, having artists have to make a fully finished art piece on oekaki when posting an off oekaki adopt seems counter to even making the adopt off oekaki in the first place. when you've just spent hours on an adopt off oekaki, you don't always want to lovingly render it on a less preferred program afterwards. personally I would rather see a really nicely made adopt with a less-than-stellar cover than not see it at all because the artist lost motivation for the cover

3. closed species adopts are often numbered sequentially. posting under a cover is the best way to not cause confusion for numbering, as posting on another board may be missed by any number of people. it also looks and feels better, in my opinion, to not skip numbers that have been posted elsewhere. it's also more accessible for newer community members if all open adopts are easily found in one place instead of spread out across different forums. I think this is a huge part of why you'll find most people turn to covers instead of a dedicated off oekaki adopts thread for their closed species

and as a final talking point. while I can understand to some extent the want to moderate spam in the oekaki forums, I will admit.. for the adoptables forums, and specifically in this case adopts: 2 pets, I.. honestly find it less than necessary to moderate it in this way? although certainly, people do check or browse these forums to find things like open adopts, it has never been particularly efficient at finding them. things like event covers, personal character refs, MYOs, growth refs, edit refs, nursery batches, etc. are always going to end up there. and, certainly, I wouldn't consider any of those things spam - but I also wouldn't consider an adopt under a cover to be spam either, no matter the cover's relevance to the adopt or it's quality.

personally, I wouldn't particularly care if all off oekaki adopt covers for closed species just became an adopt number on a blank background. I may be an outlier in this case, but I don't particularly care what a cover is as long as I like the actual adopt. sure, it might be nice to receive additional art in the form of a cover, but it's not a standard I would hold anyone making an on oekaki adopt to. I can understand wanting to keep oekaki for on oekaki art, but for communities that grow beyond oekaki like closed species do, it mostly just feels unnecessarily restrictive. and I assume the worry with being more open with covers is that it will create more incentives not to work on oekaki, but, well.. frankly, I think there are always going to be people - like myself - who prefer not to use covers and just to work on oekaki. I think there's more of us than you would think.

I really hope these things will be put into consideration. although personally I would be fine with it, I'm not actually advocating for covers to become just adopt numbers. I just think a slightly more open policy would be nice. I appreciate the clarification nonetheless! sorry for typing so much. I honestly didn't think I even had this much to say.

[ophanimera]

...What happens when someone’s colored sketch takes them 30 minutes but it’s deemed not good enough?

My understanding is that the minimum requirements for a cover is anything that's more than an uncoloured sketch/just writing. The quality of the art itself doesn't matter because CS welcomes artists of all skill levels. But no matter what someone's skill level is, a rough uncoloured sketch with construction lines is always going to be faster and easier to make than lineart with colour.

I believe the point of this rule is to say that oekaki is to create art on, not to solely advertise something else. The off-oekaki adopt forum is pretty active for people who don't want to spend that extra time making a cover, so I think that's a good option as well.

I'll refer back here to the context of my entire post, as the last sentence was the most important. In this conversation, high-level site staff are allowed to call their userbase's artwork sloppy, which is wholly an insult. There's no other way to interpret that verbiage. If staff can't be respectful to the artists they're trying to moderate and engage in respectful discussion, it paints the whole notion in bad faith. It feels like a betrayal of trust that Admin Assistants can't have or aren't required to have the same respect towards their userbase that the users are expected to provide in return. I don't expect an acknowledgement or apology, but I don't feel right letting that be swept under the rug.

In any case, on the topic of what you quoted, "quick sketch" is vague, and I think the wording should be rephrased to be "uncolored sketches" versus "quick sketches". This distinction would greatly help the userbase in knowing what to do, in order to obey the rules.

Skill level is important to the time it takes to produce art, as those who are more practiced will likely find it easier to produce a more refined product in less time. In this case, the end result would still be "quick" and perhaps even "sketchy" but might be colored and more neatly rendered. In this instance, even though the quickly made cover meets other criteria to be allowable, it would still be technically rule-breaking on the virtue of it not taking very much time. I can see there being a grey area of moderation, where some people could make a defense for their own art and get a pass, where others do not with the basis of judgement being one moderator's opinion over another.

I'm not saying that there's not people who want to just advertise adopts made in other programs, but I am thinking of the people who are making an honest attempt to follow the rules and are struck down over technicalities.

---

We have an off-oekaki board where you can sell adopts, you may want to consider using that instead if you don't want to draw additional art for the character on the oekaki. ---

"Oekaki is the only place where art may be sold without the inclusion of a CS payment method, such as CS pets, items, or C$"

This means I can make adoptables on the oekaki board and sell them only for USD, but this is not allowed on the art shops forum, right?

This is correct. We allow USD only sales on oekaki without the need for a CS-based payment. However all discussion of USD/real money sales anywhere on CS must take place offsite.

the cover rules in general are quite worrying to me, but this situation is also a bit odd. if someone doesn't have the skill / time to create a cover, they're meant to post their adopts to what is essentially a completely different market. selling adoptables on oekaki is one of the best places to do so, in my experience, as it goes out to a lot of people. especially because of the USD rule, this *is* a different market. why allow usd only adopts / art shops on oekaki but not in the art shop forums? is it a way to get more people to use oekaki, an oversight, or something else? is oekaki in this case not part of the main site forums / the "game" part? are the art shop forums closer to chicken smoothie than the oekaki?

and if covers with sketches of the character is "sloppy" and "spam", does that mean sketches in other oekaki boards are also sloppy and spammy? staff have worded this rule in various ways several times but not once is it clear what's "good" and what's "bad" in terms of covers. what if someone made a detailed, greyscale, lineart-only art piece? a detailed sketch? a sketch of a scene? what if someone made a very quick, but colored cover? which of these are ok and which ones are not?

i know this post was meant to clarify the rule but to me it still needs more clarification, and skimming over the thread it seems like other people agree. and this is in no means meant to be critiquing / angry, i'm just confused and maybe a little bothered, but i know the rule was not made in bad faith.

Also chiming in on the USD-only-allowed-on-Oekaki rule, creating a more restrictive market for the Oekaki while not lessening sale restrictions for the proposed alternative (UMA forum) seems counterintuitive to me. In doing this, you push people away from bringing their activity to a market that's already much less active than it was 6 years ago. If we want the site to thrive, it may be worth considering lifting some restrictions on the UMA adoptable forum in terms of USD sales. It's already a requirement to negotiate all USD sales based on Oekaki offsite, so I don't understand why it's any different to redirect people to your Discord, etc. from the UMA forums than the Oekaki forums.