Hey there!

Some of our members have rightfully pointed out that the Blog has gone unused for almost a full year - and that's no good! We're also well aware that a lot of you don't use the Discord server, and so may well be in the dark regarding some of the exciting new stuff that's happening.

So, without further ado, here's a big ol' juicy update post for ya! Enjoy!

Sheezy.Art 3.1.0 (aka. "The Rebuild")

You may have seen talk about a "rebuild" going around. It has become something of a meme - every time we get asked about a new feature or an important fix that needs doing, Ry tells us "it'll be in the rebuild";

It's no secret that the current version of Sheezy is a little barebones, and in some places, slightly broken. To be frank, the codebase is spaghetti and the data structure is cumbersome to deal with from a development standpoint. There are a million and one reasons for why a rebuild was necessary, but my primary driver is that I do eventually want to hire additional developers to work on this with me (as currently it's just me, Ry, building this thing by myself) and I would feel awful dumping such a laundry basket onto someone's desk and expecting them to understand any of it.

So let's talk about some of the exciting opportunities that a complete rebuild offers up;

Technical Improvements

• I've been ripping out most of the old code and rewriting it from scratch to comply better with modern standards and take advantage of our server's resources better. So there should be noticeable performance improvements across the board.
• We'll be running on the most up-to-date versions of the third-party libraries and frameworks we rely on - so you should also notice better stability and less browser crashes.
• The data structure is getting an overhaul, so pages will load faster and we will be able to do cool stuff that we couldn't do before (which I'll delve into shortly).
• Third party integrations will be completely rewritten, which will hopefully solve the missing subscriptions issues, especially with services like Patreon and Ko-Fi.
• Accessibility will be a huge focus, with the goal of becoming fully ARIA-compliant, and progressive enhancement will mean even if you're using a super old browser on a super old PC (you know who you are) the site should still work just fine, albeit with fewer bells and whistles.

New Features

A full rebuild is the perfect opportunity to add some cool new stuff, and I've been going ham. Here are just a few of the incoming features that you'll be able to enjoy once the rebuild is complete;

• Collections (aka. Artwork Folders) - a neat way to organise your artworks and favourites.
• Persona Categories will let you organise your Personas into groups and change their nomenclature to reflect how you use them - you'll even be able to rename the default 'Personas' category to whatever you want!
• Journal Categories will deepen journal organisation and search and allow you to connect journals together.
• Improved Privacy Settings - you'll be able to specify exactly who can or can't view your content, either on a per-item basis or for your entire persona or profile.
• Bulk Editing will let you make wide changes across all of your artworks at once, or as many as you need - you'll be able to quickly update almost any aspect of your artworks en-masse quickly and easily.
• Multiple Profile Photos means you'll finally be able to customise which profile photo displays for users whose maturity settings don't necessarily match your own.
• Polls - you'll finally be able to quiz your followers! Polls will be attachable to journals, comments, artwork descriptions and news posts, as well as a new poll profile block - and you'll be able to configure exactly who can see them, respond to them, and view the results. You'll get a site notification when your poll closes with a quick summary of the results.
• Account Switching will provide a quick and easy interface for switching between Sheezy accounts in just a couple of clicks or taps.
• Account Levelling - an incentive system to help nudge the community toward taking that extra step to engage and communicate (again, all opt-in). You'll gain experience points when something positive happens - perhaps a comment you left on someone's artwork gets a "Like" from the artist, or a journal you wrote gets featured in one of our news posts, or perhaps you won one of our monthly challenges - we want to help bring some magic and fun into the art sharing experience!
• Silly Buttons - fun little buttons that you'll enable on your profile that will cause all manner of mischief. From the classic 'Nudge' button that shakes your browser when a friend clicks it, to the legendary 'Pipe Bomb' that chars your theme and leaves your profile photo looking a little worse for wear until you come back to clean it up. We'll add more and more over time!
• Trading Cards will help gamify your art sharing experience - allowing you to collect your favourite artists' artwork (opt-in of course) to trade with and battle against others. There'll be card levelling, configurable moves and attributes, randomised rarity and even special effects for the rarest drops! An innovative and extremely fun way to discover and celebrate new artists.

And many more! I don't want to spoil all the surprises...

New Subscription Offerings

We're revamping the subscriptions system so that you won't need a Ko-Fi, Patreon or PayPal account to support us. You'll subscribe directly via the site, and there will be more pricing options too.

New pricing options will include annual subscriptions as well as multi-buy one-offs so you can treat all your friends to a sub if you're so inclined!

Important Changes

Moderation will be undergoing a radical change. As the site grows, the sheer amount of art we have to moderate also grows - exponentially. While the community was young, our wonderful, generous team of volunteers was just about handling things. But the reality is that persistent growth makes manual moderation unsustainable.

We want to keep growing, and we want to keep you all safe. We won't be leaning on any patchwork solutions like "AI" - rather, we're going to try shifting to a more community-based approach to content moderation.

Our mods will still do what they're best at - browse the site, make changes to artworks where necessary, create reports etc. - but we will also be introducing a new role; "Community Moderator".

Anyone can apply to be a Community Moderator, providing they are 18+, have been active on the site for at least 6 months and do not have any flags or warnings on their account. Once you're approved to be a community mod, you'll gain an extra set of controls underneath artworks, comments and journals - a kind of souped-up "report station".

Your role, as a community mod, will be to find artworks that breach our rules or terms, or that might need some attention to maintain the safety of the community, and report them to us using this new station. Reports that are then processed successfully by our staff will yield you a large number of account experience points, and build our trust in you.

When you reach a certain level as a community mod, you'll be featured on our staff page, and we'll even write something nice about you! We'll have 'Employee of the Month' competitions, you'll be invited to some of our staff-only activities, and who knows, maybe you'll get a promotion!

Also - we are very much aware that a lot of the community stuff happens exclusively in our Discord server. While this was a good solution for us early on, it has become apparent that the community is now too large for us to keep relying on Discord for information delivery.

As part of the rebuild, a brand new "Help Portal" will be populated with FAQs, guides, tutorials, resources, anything you need to know about Sheezy, we'll pack it full of useful info. We'll also be revamping the news page with a search bar, thumbnails and more to try to make it easier for you to stay in the Sheezy loop, if that's something you want to do.

Casual reminder, too, that we post regularly on BlueSky.

I Have a Feature Request/Bug Report!

That's great! We're extremely lucky to have such an enthusiastic and creative community - and we want to hear your ideas.

As part of the big rebuild, we'll be adding a new "Surveys" feature to the site, alongside the "Polls" feature that we talked about earlier. Surveys will be published regularly and will be a direct way for you to give us feedback, request new features, vote on rules or terms changes, or express your feelings regarding your experience using the site.

We'll also be moving bug reports site-side so you won't need a GitHub account to report issues to us.

So When Will It Be Ready?

This all sounds wonderful, doesn't it?

"But Ry," I hear you cry, "when will this masterpiece finally come to fruition? When can I escape my woes and upload art online for imaginary points so I can feel better about my insecurities? WHEN?!?"

Firstly, let's get you to therapy, you poor soul, you. Secondly, I'm afraid I don't currently have a concrete answer for you.

As it turns out, developing large websites by oneself is in fact a rather taxing endeavour. I'm taking a short break for the winter holidays and will be back in action in the new year - and should have something ready for the Staffy Waffies to start alpha testing by the end of April. Testing and bug fixing can take a good couple months, especially if something big comes up. So realistically we're looking at June/July time before you can expect any of these wonderful new features.

I can only apologise for taking so long with it - I consider myself unbelievably lucky to be able to work on Sheezy as my full-time job, and the team and I are unendingly appreciative for all of your support, wonderful comments and feedback, and for being honest with us.

Thanks so much for reading,
Much love,

Ry