ArtSpots to close January 2; Yerf archive preserved
All-ages furry art community ArtSpots is to close January 2, as efforts to create a new site could not be reconciled with the existing one. The move was announced by the official staff persona of Seurat:
These last few weeks planning the future of ArtSpots has been full of great ideas. However, we have wrestled with many roadblocks as well. This site has been around for over five years now, and with that has come a lot of expectations. We have come to the conclusion, sad as it may be, that given ArtSpots original goals and its history, it would be impossible to move forward with these new ideas.
The Yerf historical archive, currently hosted at ArtSpots, is to move to a new site built by WikiFur custodian GreenReaper and hosted by Timduru.
The closure will leave a vacuum in the market for all-ages furry art hosting. Many artists are expected to move to deviantART, where a group has been created for trading-post art.
In its five-year history, ArtSpots attracted almost 5000 users and 50,000 works. However, the site never fully achieved its founder's vision of a community focused on artistic development, with many artists using it merely as a secondary portfolio for their best, clean art.
ArtSpots was initially quality-moderated, with sister site JaxPad containing work from all artists. The sites merged in June 2008. Further changes followed, including a controversial redesign. The site offered Giclée prints from 2007, but the service was halted after fulfilment stalled in 2009.
One of ArtSpots' more popular features was a sketch tool, and the site has continued to encourage sketchbook posts.
Work is to continue on a new site; users can login and request a one-time notification of news. Members are also leaving forwarding addresses.
About the author
GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) — read stories — contact (login required)a developer, editor and Kai Norn from London, United Kingdom, interested in wikis and computers
Small fuzzy creature who likes cheese & carrots. Founder of WikiFur, lead admin of Inkbunny, and Editor-in-Chief of Flayrah.
Comments
Aww, I really liked ArtSpots. :( I enjoyed being able to find a number of nice pieces without any smut. Oh well, all good things must come to an end.
That's sad news; I hope something else emerges to fill the niche. Even if it wasn't the most visited site, it was nice to have a relatively benign selection of art to show to curious newcomers without having to worry about the random squick factor. My hats off to the admins for running the site for so many years!
The review process was intimidating and big turn of for me as a beginning artist, I wonder others had the same feeling. I never realize they done away with the peer review process, but by that time I already moved to deviant art.
Wow, it would have been nice if they had sent out an email saying that they were closing :\
I am of the opinion that the integration with Jaxpad confused the community, and no one really had a clear goal of where they wanted it to go. I was discouraged by the inclusion of beginning artists and the lack of quality control. I wanted to produce, and look at, quality art ans wasn't a big fan of "community building" to each their own I guess.
Sad. I liked clean art.
i was there only to contact a doll maker there, i was told by some one it was the lack of porn and the lack of what you cal fursuits, that made it unfamous, i guess he was right, anon Visitor, clean art when it comes to furry is better than all that porn crap, reason i liked this site too
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