Ask AW Staff a Question

25 May, 2007

ArtWanted.com Staff
10,710 Views
151 Comments

In order to improve communication with our members, answer general questions about our site and clarify our policies, we have created this new topic where you can ask our staff a question.

Simply reply to this thread and type your direct question to our staff. There is no need to write a page of philosophy or history on an issue, just a simple one sentence question will do. We will do our best to answer your specific question for all members to read.

Understand that there may be certain questions that we will not be able to answer, because of business reasons, but we will try to give you the answer you are looking for. Please be patient if we don't instantly respond to your question. We have many things we do on a daily basis to run the site, but we will be checking this thread several times a day and we will respond to each post that is made (usually within 12 hours).

Please follow these three simple guidelines:

Only post one question per reply. If you have multiple questions, post each question in a different post. This will help keep the questions and answers clean and easy to read for everyone.

Avoid personal issues or questions about specific members, as it's our policy not to discuss personal issues or individual members on our public boards.

Keep this thread to only questions & answers. Do not reply to answered questions to give your opinion on the response. Those replies will be removed, so please use another topic for discussions. Just like Jeopardy, phrase everything in the form of a question. :-)

NOTE: If you have a personal question, please use the CONTACT US link at the bottom of any page to contact our staff personally, instead of posting it here.

We hope that this topic will allow our members to get clear, concise answers to the questions that they have and communication between our staff and members can be improved. Let's get the ball rolling with a few common questions we have seen...

151 Comments

ArtWanted.com Staff 25 May 2007

Q: Why was the General Discussion board closed?

A: This board was closed for several reasons, but the biggest was the fights between members that were always erupting. For years we have warned/banned members that start these fights, but it's only a temporary fix. New members join, old members come back under different names, and the fights continue. Because of this, we decided to get right to the root of the problem, which we feel was the very nature of the general discussion board. Due to the freedom of topics, many posts were offensive and started fights between members.

Many members left our site and avoided the boards, because of what they have seen in the past. We felt that this was the best way to help resolve the problem. By limiting the board topics to art related subjects, there has big a big drop in the number of fights on the boards, which was our goal.

Q: Will the General Discussion board be back?

A: At this point we don't have a decision on this, nor do we have a time frame when we will have an answer. We want what is best for our site and it's members. We saw a problem area and made decisions to try and fix those issues. At this time, the boards are limited to art related topics. If we decide to open the boards back up to general topics, we will be sure to let all of our members know.

Q: Why are some members banned and others are not?

A: In general, we have a '3 strikes you're out' policy. We give warnings to members before any actions are taken, because some people do not know all our rules and we have also seen many people change their attitude after a warning has been issued. If the problems continue, then we will ban their account from posting on the boards. If the problem is very serious, then we will delete their account, but this is a last resort and we have only done this a few times in our history.

Sometimes is hard for our staff to tell 'who started it'. Most members that we warn about their actions claim that it's someone else's fault. It's impossible for our staff and mods to read every single post, because we are greatly outnumbered. However, we do our best to research each issue on a case by case basis and do what we feel is best.

Q: How many sales a day does AW get?

A: We currently get between 10-100 sales a day. Most of these are through our print program and these numbers do not include artists buying artwork for themselves. Sales continue to increase each month on our site and we are always looking for ways to increase sales to those that want to sell their art on our site.

Q: How many hits does the ArtWanted.com website get?

A: Last month (April) we had just under a million unique visitors, 11 million page views and 40 million hits to ArtWanted.com.

bianca 25 May 2007

Q: AW...can u bring general discussion board and have hidden moderators who will delete inflammatory posts and have moderator have option to lock that user in question out of that topic....?

A: As we mentioned above, we do not have a final decision on the state of the General Discussion board at this time. For now, it is closed and we don't see that changing in the near future, but it's unknown at this point if this will be a permanent change to our site or not.

As for moderators, we already have a handful of moderators that police the site and the boards for topics that get out of line, but sometimes they are unable to keep up with all the posts we have. Because of this, we have the 'report to staff' options on every post, so that every member is potentially a moderator to our site to help us police the content.

Gary Glass 25 May 2007

Q: Does it bother or concern you that you are being maligned or flamed on another board by two of your dear members who you should have banned a long time ago.. We will name them Frick and Fran and their dog spot...they have done nothing but caused problems.

A: Naturally we don't like people talking bad about AW. As everyone knows, we can't control any content that is outside of our site and we have actually seen far worse things written directly on our message boards by many active members of our site. Our staff is reviewing this situation to determine the best action to take. Nothing has been done at this point, but this does not mean that nothing will happen. Sometimes these things just take time to resolve and determine the best action for our site and it's members.

Dawn Schmidt-Ventimiglia 25 May 2007

Q: If you have a concern about a banned member coming back under another name, have you ever considered banning their IP address?

A: When an account is banned or deleted, we do also block the IP address from coming back to our site. However, many people do not have a static IP address and so the IP address changes from time to time. When this happens, the IP address block has no effect.

Patricia McCarty 25 May 2007

My question is why do you alow some members ot slander others, spit vemom, make fun of, post slander out side this site and then slander AW as a site as well, WHY do you alow these idots to stay over good artist with real art filled in their portfolios AND They are PAYING artist at athat. Thes other jerks are NOT. yet you alow them to stay and watch the others walk away and take their money with them. AND on top of that, If anyone mentions them by NAME they are going to be in trouble for breaking a rule??? Yet theses 3 stoogest call people by name and they are ok???This baffles me.

A: This goes back to some of the same questions that have been asked above. Our staff is reviewing all of the details with the accounts in question and what should be done about them.

Greg Summers 25 May 2007

I put a message on the AW board concerning what i considered spam email from within AW and the thread was removed - may I ask why? At any rate - is there a rule about solicitating from within AW?

A: When this original message was reviewed, it appeared to be a general note about spam and not ArtWanted.com specific, so it was removed. If this was not the case, we apologize. As for your second question, spam mail is not allowed on our boards or through our e-mail system. We have filters to catch a lot of spam and we have blacklists of known spammers we check for. If you get an e-mail or see a message board post that you feel is spam, please report it to us. Thanks.

ZAZ 25 May 2007

AW , could you mabe delete the bad threads from the GD area and just leave the good ones and then lock the board, leaving it where we can just read them not make any new post?
There are wonderful threads like Shar's and otheres in there that are just good to read, kinda like a history of the boards,but make it a good history to read.
This would also be good to have done in advance in case you do decide to open the boards backup,the house would already be cleaned so to speak.
Just thought i would ask.

Thanks

A: Yes, this is something that we could do. The problem is that it would take a very large amount of time to read through all the posts and determine if it should go or not. This also does not change the new topics that would need to be monitored. Resources are limited, so we want to concentrate on the things that are most important. At this time, we feel that most of our efforts should be going towards fixing bugs and improving our website performance, so this is where we are spending our time.

Gayla Drummond 25 May 2007

The ability to create private subgalleries...when is that going to be operational?

A: We are very excited about this new feature and our developers are currently working on the code to complete the private gallery feature. We don't have an exact release time for this yet, we will release it the second that we feel it's ready to go. If we were to guess, we would say sometime this summer, perhaps mid July, but this is just a guess. :-)

Renate Dartois 25 May 2007

Aw is this going to be another 15 page thread without getting any answers?

A: We are not sure if this really qualifies as a question, but we will answer it anyway. :-)

We ARE posting direct answers to each question that is being asked. It may not be the answer some are wanting to read, but it is still our answer to the question at the current time. As you can guess, we are not going to come out and say who is getting banned and who's accounts are being deleted. This would be against our own policies. If accounts are banned/deleted in the near future, this will be done privately between our staff and that member and will not be a public announcement. If you are here to find out who is getting the axe, then please don't hold your breath. :-)

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25 May, 2007