Could there be a way to have 'Shouts' on Furry Network too?

It'd be nice to let us upload .gifs as icons. It's one of my favorite things about FA!

It'd be awesome if you could create a group, and for other people with similar interests to join it and share content :D

When users watch you, they can see all of your activity, everything you comment on, everyone you watch, and to be honest this is way too inviting for stalkers.

If you are a content creator with a lot of followers, you probably have experienced at one point or another another user who is stalking you or is harassing you or for one reason or another, you would not feel very comfortable with them being able to instantly go to any comment you make. For some users like myself, I don't want to everyone to see realtime notifications for everyone I watch, everything I comment on, and so on.

My suggestion would be to associate this feature with some kind of mutual "friends" system where only your friends or people you approve can look at all your activity.

Favorites (which are private) and Promotes (which are public) are confusing and non-obvious - leading to a lot of confusion about how to use them, and what they do.

Notifications for favorites always appear to come from "Someone", which is causing a lot of confusion as to who this 'someone' is. There is also no way to view a list of artwork a given user has promoted (in a grid format), which exascerbates the problem.

Better terminology or better site-wide explanation of what Favorites and Promotes are, and how they are typically used, will be needed.

TL;DR:

• I feel there should be an artistic distinction between someone who crafted something and took a photo vs someone who took a photo of something crafted.
• Artwork category is currently only for "flat art" yet the Photography category doesn't properly represent or classify our work either; it turns it into a photo of art instead of art itself.
• And what happens to categorization when you have both concept art and a photo of the final result shown in the same image?

As I was importing my gallery, I realized I became stuck trying to sort my work into the two current categories, "Artwork" and "Photos"... and I realized that I am not alone!

Explanation:
I'll use fursuits primarily for my example to help explain why I feel this is needed and how I arrived at my conclusion. Many fursuit makers I have talked to have mentioned they feel stuck or dismissed when their work doesn't really have a home here- and arguably fursuits are one of the most important artistic aspects of the furry community! So I want to help make our voices and those of other physical multimedia be herd.


Of course the work we create is technically displayed as a photo out of necessity... but it's hardly considered "just photography". I would personally rather see the photos category of the site be reserved for anything from selfies to shots with artistic merit or focus on things like composition/mood/lighting and documentation of events or the natural world. I predict the majority of the photography category will be used for uploading photos taken at conventions, and that naturally means it will be displaying or capturing primarily other people's artwork and not necessarily your own.

And honestly? It just plain feels weird or dismissive to us as artists to call our fursuit work "photos" and not "art". And we would like to have acknowledgement that our hard work is considered such and not just another photo lost in a sea of random photos. As a side note, this also creates no real distinction between fursuit artists, fursuit wearers, and fursuit photographers if everything's simply tagged "fursuit" and found in the Photography category. It makes fursuit makers almost invisible on FN compared to other kinds of artists who create flat art or writers who make stories when they both have categories that focuses on their media. (Alternatively, there is also discussion about creating a better distinction from uploads of original artists work vs uploads of art created by others that was commissioned or photographed by the uploader... and I'd like to see it get more input: https://support.furrynetwork.com/topics/8-having-a-collections-feature/)


But by the same token they are still a kind of photo right? A photo is a photo after all. And therefore it was suggested that "Crafts" could be a sub-category of Photos since all crafts are probably going to have to be photo-based by its very nature. But what about something such as a traditional mural painting? Should those have to be uploaded to "Photos" too simply because that is also the only way to capture the art... yet how is that any different than a traditional painting that is able to be captured by a scanner and now that one is suddenly considered "artwork" instead?

My argument is just because the work has to be documented by a camera and the end result is a photo, it doesn't have to be the end-all of its categorization, as I think the subject and primarily the intention of the work needs to come into consideration as well.

...

Taking another look at my gallery sorting issue, I realized my second problem- I have several works that has concept art, WIP photos, and final photos all in the same image as an evolution or comparison of the before and after. It belongs in both categories by definition... and yet doesn't fit very well in either.

Alrighty, so what if we considered the idea of making crafts a sub-category of Artwork instead? Unfortunately this causes another issue... because Photos can be considered "Artwork" just as well as Multimedia is artwork, you could even make an argument for Stories to fall under there... so why wouldn't everything be a subcategory of artwork? What makes "Artwork" a unique, different category than the other ones already established? Well..

• Multimedia is strictly defined by the file type
• Stories can only be text (which is a media-specific category)
• So the only difference between artwork and photo must be that currently FN uses the idea of "Flat Art" to define its Artwork category because it doesn't require a camera to showcase (but technically it still can, especially if one doesn't have access to a scanner for example)

Guess what? We don't make "flat art"... we make physical 3d art.

And if we're sculptors, we don't call ourselves photographers.

Not to mention, adding any kind of "sub-category" simply changes the entire structure that FN is centered around for its upload categories. It would feel rather out of place with the existing layout and very likely that the category would be completely overlooked... unless we just started adding subcategories left and right. But it seems the idea was to use tags to replace subcategories, or any pre-defined categories for that matter, like other art sites have. Sure there's less universal tags/formatting, but there is no issue of not being properly represented by a category either. And there's always community tags to fix any classification issues too. However in the case of Crafts, I think it's going to become necessary to have this additional sort of artistic representation for a site that revolves entirely around showcasing all types of artwork... else there will be way too much inconsistency with uploads like fursuits going to both categories chaotically.

---

And lastly my suggestion for helping uploaders understand the distinction between when to upload to crafts vs photos: If you crafted something yourself, it should be showcased in Crafts- concept art, WIP, and final production shots for documentation of your work as a whole presentation. Photos you took of your work in a non-documentation purpose, such as a photo of your work at a con, could be artist discretion for the category; it simply depends on the purpose of the image and if the artist wants to use it to supplement their craft project's documentation or just show a photo. Any crafts that were not created by the artist themselves that showcases the work should always be considered a photo, because the uploader is showcasing an image of the work and not representing the art for documentation of its... artistic essence?... as it were. It was not crafted by them, it was photographed by them. I feel there should be an artistic distinction between someone who crafted something and took a photo vs someone who took a photo of something crafted. (And same goes for everything uploaded in general honestly. People are usually decent about saying so, but there are ways to improve this.)

So simply put, if you crafted something it goes into Crafts.

If you took a photo of a work someone crafted, it goes in Photos.

In conclusion, I would like to propose that a new category named "Crafts" should be created to ensure that every kind of artwork the fandom creates can be properly represented on FN, while being easier for users to classify and browse/search through work they're interested in: fursuits, scluptures, plushies, clothing... they can all have a home that treats it separate from flat art yet does not risk degrading its artistic value simply because it's forced to be visually represented as a photo. Thanks for your consideration!

So you don't have to reload something just because a simple edit was made?

Add the ability for the uploader of a submission (eg a drawing) to tag users in or involved with it. For example, "Drawn By", "Commissioned By", "Lineart by", "Colors by", "Features character", etc.

I've merged in discussion from another thread about "Collab Submissions", where the permissions required were getting pretty complicated to allow joint control. This way, it's just a tag that's applied to a submission.

Additional features needed would include the ability to stop people from being able to tag you on submissions, and an administrative tool to allow for abusive tagging to be flagged and reported to the moderation team. Also the ability for moderators to add/remove people tagged on an image -and rules against harassment/abuse of tagging people (see Facebook for more details :P).

Taking a cue from Pixiv: The ability to have two or more images/pages within a single submission. This gives artists the ability to control the flood of their own submissions without limiting the volume of work uploaded, and help keep sequential/related works in a single place.

Some usage examples:

• Comics and image packs are an easy example. While some artists maintain ongoing comics with weekly updates, others will opt for sharing shorter complete stories, or new chapters/issues all at once. The same goes for image packs, usually featuring a series of related works. This can also be used as a promotional tool, offering a sample of pages/images for viewers to preview before they buy the complete comic/pack.
• Showing off the work process for a finished piece. It's reasonably common on Pixiv to see submissions with the finished work as the first page, and then subsequent pages show the original sketch, inks, flats, etc.
• Some artists produce a ton of sketches and like to share as much of it as possible. Others go out to events, and then upload all the sketches they produced upon return. Having the ability to collect all those sketches in a single submission can be a godsend — Not just for artists, but for followers as well. (Everyone has experienced flooded notifications at least once. It gets messy fast, and it is not fun to sort through.)

It should be noted that this is different to collecting several submissions in a folder. While a folder does keep everything in one place, followers still have to put up with submission flooding, and the artist goes through the submission process a large number of times just to share complete multi-page works. Adding multi-page support to submissions could offer a solution to both issues.

I was wondering if it would be possible to get more formatting tools for stories. Having something like the toolbar here in these forums would be a god send to us writers. It would be much friendlier if we didn't have to use markdown code to add things like bold text or to alter font or text size but rather have a toolbar to simply click on to apply such changes and additions.

Also this will parrot what a few others have brought up but adding the ability to transfer text from other sites or programs without losing formatting would also be nice.