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notaverygoodartist
02-23-2016, 02:22 PM
Dear Hannah et al.,
Although I have not uploaded to the galleries, you may be missing the human dimension in your decision to delete them. They are one of the reasons I bought the program and have an interest in using it. Sometimes, when a company tries to be super-slick, they lose the specialness of their connection with the user community. Some of the displayed artwork doesn't show the potential of the software, but that's not the point. Even I, as a beginner, can tell, and factor it out. Lose that, and you knock out one support leg that keeps a segment of your community energized.

In the U.S., we have a country expression, "down-home", a kind of open accessibility. Calculations of professional marketers and designers won't explain the costs of separating yourselves even a little from the user community.

Notaverygoodartist.

HannahRage
02-23-2016, 11:30 PM
We're absolutely aware of the community aspect of the galleries, and wish we could keep them, but unfortunately, the ArtRage community has grown a lot since they were set up many years ago, and we really need to update the website for ease of use and future security proofing. And the site isn't really set up to support the amount of bandwidth that image hosting uses, especially as that is only going to continue increasing.

We do highly encourage people to continue sharing their work in the forums, and there are many dedicated art and image hosting sites out there that can offer far better features and support when it comes to displaying and promoting your work (for example, RedBubble, DeviantART, to name a couple). We're very happy for people to link to their work elsewhere! The only advantage our galleries offered is that they were specifically 'ArtRage', which benefits us, but doesn't really benefit the users much.

The forum will still exist, and the current galleries aren't that user friendly for casual visitors. We've been actively highlighting an ever increasing variety of artists https://www.artrage.com/featured-artists/ and share art in the contests section https://www.artrage.com/art-contest-winners/ as well as promoting work much more actively on social media. I'm also always interested in other ways to share and promote our artists! Our decision is entirely based on technical realities, not any lack of appreciation for our users.