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Once again, I post here rarely only for tech support.
Where I share my art, and have discussions......
I make adult art in a few different niches (under different pseudonyms of course), so I share my art on targeted forums. From there, my images get spread by community members to other forums, imageboards, collector sites, and places like reddit, adult tube sites which have image galleries etc. Tons more conversation and reaction to my art form those places than any artist community.
Been doing it that way for the past 7 years, and have made lots of collector friends, fans and clients on those niche forums. I realy love interacting with the collectors of my art and I am so thankful to them for helping me build my pseudonyms, and for giving me work. It very humbling to know that my art is being collected. I never expected that.
Places like Deviantart is unproductive for me and too restrictive. I have to tone down my art to share there and can`t be fully expressive with my art. Although I`ve never had anyone give me crap on there (in fact, I`ve only gotten positive comments) I`ve seen other artist get crap thrown at them which is just wrong. Another thing is, it seems that it`s mostly artists hanging out on Deviantart. I`ve never been paid by an artist LOL
Just my honest and humble take.
Watching mostly from the sidelines, what I see here is people talking quite calmly and nicely about their various takes on the question that OP asked, so why in the world should it be shut down? I don't see any violation of TOS going on.
duh, of course you don't
That's a bummer because your posts always put a huge smile on my face! You have a very rare sense of humor that would shine through in so many of your posts. I understand though that navigating a site that has issues with your preferred devices can be super frustrating, so I don't blame you for not wanting to be on as often. For what it's worth: Thank you for helping to make the forum fun for many years! :D And the same can be said for a few others I've grown fond of over the years. :) The people who support, encourage, uplift, spread smiles, and help each other are what makes the forum special!
Whether a thread gets closed or not is a matter for the Malignant Cabal of Insiduous Darkness (aka the forum team) rather than a matter for the open forum. We have only so many vorpal axes.
I never said anyone broke any rules, so don't put words in my mouth that I never stated.
Since I made that first post comments have only been about my saying the thread should be closed, not one comment about the suggestions I made...interesting.
For me, it's not so much a suggestion that the thread be closed that bothers me, but anything that would suppress discussion. I have had an incident in which I had a fairly significant issue with a product purchased in the store. I was told I was using the product wrong and basically called an idiot, and then the thread was locked. Well I was not using the product wrong. It just had exactly the issue I said it had. And locking the thread not only left the issue unresolved but the last comment in the thread was the part about me not knowing what I'm doing, and there was no way for me to defend myself. So I felt like closing threads was used as a bit of a weapon, and that makes me a bit sensitive to suggestions that a thread should be closed because there is some negative sentiment about DAZ.
I believe that was the moment I switched from DAZ to Poser. This was during the Victoria 4 era. I eventually came back when I learned DAZ had a built-in ray tracer and I didn't have to sort out how to get Luxrender working anymore. But I continue to see other people complaining about things and getting their posts deleted and threads locked.
Threads are not locked nor posts removed for complaining - possibly for complaints that turn into accusations, but not for complaining and certainly not for reporting issues (though if there are multiple threads on the same issue we may lock or consolidate them).
Unfortunately I cannot recall the occasion you meantion, and presumably it was on the old forum and so not available for checking (I certainly can't see any locked threads, other than an iteration of the Complaint thread, in your current history).
Honest question. If there is no rule breaking.... Why should it be closed?
I can't say for everyone. But haven't you thought that while people don't entirely agree with your suggestion may also not fully disagree? What i mean is, you have an opinion just like most people. For me i like this thread because i can read very different takes/opinions in the general subject. Agree or disagree, i considered them all valid (yours included (minus the thread closing)), and several from the oldest users that being here the most i find interesting to learn how it was before i even got here.
yep -- now I'm learning music synthesis, another somewhat pricey hobby, especially if you start buying hardware. As far as here, I felt much more creative early on, more interested in trying and learning different methods. Now I've become a customer, mainly buying cool content that I might use someday. Believe it or not everything I buy here is done with an image in mind, but then its rare I use most of the purchases. I think it was Ultrascenery that rekindled some interest. That forum thread is huge, but over the last few months even that has dwindled to a few posts a week. Our interest seems shorter now than in the past. We have so much stimulating us every day all day. We're bombarded with happenings across the globe. Things are changing fast.
I am also an old fart and have been here since Zygote. The beginnings were so far different than today no one would even think it could have been that way. At the beginning was Poser, and we talked routinely with the developers and power users, many that became vendors. It was a very creative group of people. AOL forums had a lot of people involved with Poser, Vista Pro, then Vue, Bryce, Ray Dream Studio, Infini-D, Painter, Painter 3D, many more. Metacreations was a huge vendor of graphic software. I miss that time and the conversations that sprang forth.
I've been thinking about this of late, and I think one thing that hasn't helped is the overhaul of the gallery here broke a lot of the features. For examples, there's now no search feature and no notifications about comments or replies.
And for an art community to have its main gallery missing major functionality like that really isn't a good thing for community engagement.
It's been said for a long time that Daz has other priorities over sorting all the gallery's features, but said long time really is now really quite a long time, and I think getting them going again would be quite a boon for the community being able to be more community like again.
...Indeed, when you can't even manually enter your tags, and the products used in a scene (as both categories pen drop down menus with a very limited number selections).it becomes a "why bother" situation.
The Gallery needs some serious maintenance and updating.
When was the gallery here ever worth bothering about? I don't recall such a time. Whatever else is wrong with DA, the Daz community there seems to be alive and well. I still won't post there for my own reasons, but I enjoy seeing what other people are doing.
A previous generation of the gallery was why I got into Daz in the first place. There was some really fine work in it (this was in the Millennium 4-early Genesis days). And that's what got me interested enough to start. ... Then, after I did, someone ripped the galleries down altogether for a while, so I can't point anybody at the images that inspired me.
@Valiska that explains it. That was a long time ago, long before I took an interest in being here. Thanks
I've heard the whole forum was also deleted once, along with all its posts.
^^This^^
As primarily a lurker on the forums, and having been a member for almost 20 years, IMHO I don't think the atmosphere has been ruined. It does seem to have changed, and it's gotten a lot quieter. In general I think participation in forums is waning as younger users seem to, in general, not participate/use forums as much as us older folk. I also get the impression that with every difficulty encountered (changes in policy/direction of DAZ, implementation of features that are unpopular for some participants/users, forum glitches, what seems to be constant sales errors, etc.) there seems to be a corresponding drop in participation. IMHO fewer forum participants also means that there will be a corresponding drop off in how fast requests for help are answered.
Over the years, from my perspective, the forums have definitely changed. Back in the early days, everything was new and exciting. We were able to generate 3D images on computer hardware that most people could purchase. WOW!! There was the corresponding great interest in how to get more out of the software/hardware/models. New things were happening all the time. Hardware and software were making huge technological gains, as well as users that were contributing a great deal to the push the envelope and move the community forward. I consider myself very lucky to have been involved in these technological advancements and their associated communities (both here and in my real world career).
Things in the 3D world, and especially in the DAZ (and Poser?) world have changed a lot. Seldom do we get lengthy discussions on how to improve a shader, how to improve lioghting, how to make bends better, how to tweak our computers to render faster, how to hack a model to do something it isn't designed to do, etc. Our hobby (career for a few) has turned primarily into a commercial market. Now it seems to be more about what script/tool will magically improve G9's skin, which light sets are best, etc. (i.e. what can I buy to make things better, not what can I do to improve this or that).
As mentioned above, we also get a lot of "What model is this." threads (I'm not saying these are bad, I actually like to check on them because sometimes it points out something I totally missed). Twenty years ago, it would be "How can I make V3/V4 look like this." Even though DAZ provides a rich morph tool set for making your own character at a very reasonable cost, it seems that very few users ever take advantage of these. We've gone from the "roll your own" model to the "I only use pre-made assets and don't want to spend time making anything myself". Again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It does however change the interactions on the forums, and draws a different personality types compared to the "old days". As a result, yes the forums are different. But I think there are still a lot of very kind and helpful people here. Sure, people get upset from time to time, and often get tired of the same question that they have answered several times (or that could be easily found with a Google search, but we have to remember that not everyone has good computer skills, and good internet research skills for websites with dysfunctional search engines).
But in general, I think things here are still pretty good. Yes, it can upset you if you get moderated for something you thought was OK, but on the upside (or looking at the big picture) the moderation does keep things pretty civil here compared to other places on the internet. I sometimes wish I could make a post (or twenty) about things that really bother me. But the forums are owned and operated by DAZ3D, and they get to make the rules. Having been through all of the major changes since V3, I can honestly say that things have gotten pretty ugly at times in the forums (like when Genesis was introduced, and when DS Pro went from paid to free)). If you took a snap shot from either of those two events, and compared them to today (or even the introduction of G9), the atmosphere here is A LOT better!!!
I wasn't suppressing discussion, if taken that way then for that part I appoligize. As for you having a complaint and how it was dealt with, I've seen similar over the years, even now. These days they advise going to the product forum where one can find answers. That actually seems smart to me. As for what Richard said about closing threads due to accusations or multiple threads of the same thing, I agree with him. Accusations don't speed up the help and in fact delay it. Multiple threads just clutters up the forum. One thing not mentioned by Richard is when threads get taken over with other topics not related to the original post,
I've had my own problems with Daz (and Richard) for deleted posts and threads that I didn't agree with, in most cases you will get an email when that happens. I've been on the forums a long time, seen the different moods based on what was being posted. My worst experience with Daz was when I first started with the program, I needed help as I was learning, problem was some were more into accussing me of being an idiot, I have no business being here and I should give up on 3D. Fortunately I'm stubborn and very outspoken, then found a different place not on Daz to get help. When I came back, the mood had changed, people were actually helping others new to the program. That's one thing you can count on with the forums, no matter what the mood it, wait 6 months to a year and it'll change.
I don't expect people to agree with my opinions, it's nice when they do, though in most cases they don't for one very simple reason. I'm very outspoken and with no filters, my words end up putting people off, or in the case of the forums, get my post deleted (looks at Richard). I don't watch my words, I just say what's on my mind. It's also difficult due to this being text, people can't hear the inflections of my voice and I can't see the reactions of their face to know if they understand what I'm trying to say.
For the user? Or for Daz?
Because while the gallery has never been a great way of sharing my art with the people frequenting it (if you don't get strong initial traction, you never get the engagement to get you on the carousel to be shown to more people - so I mostly use it as somewhere to upload my art for posting to the forums, as having one gallery is more useful for me in the long run than uploading to specific posts), I really do think Daz should try to turn it into a stronger community hub.
Please drop the "should this thread be closed" discussion now.
@Matt_Castle : Glad you found a use for the gallery. We agree on the core issue - Not a great way to share work. And you suggested a broad-stroke solution. That would be great, though I'm not expecting anything to change.
great overlook. Not wanting to take time to roll your own. I think its a prevailing thing in general. Thus AI art, music, and so forth. Say a few words, viola. Forums were our roots. Prior to that it wasn't all that easy to communicate on the net, using the unix commands, etc. Now everything seems to want to be quick. Instant feedback. Not totally a bad thing but why wait here for days to get an answer when you can get near instant on other platforms... like Discord, which is way too fast for me.
Fostering a community has no immediate bottomline results. Those take time, but they are long-lasting because they are deep-rooted. Indeed, the old-timers from the former community which was fostered by a functioning forum, gallery, and store are the residual support keeping this going. They have weathered numerous upheavals without folding. Ignoring your roots manifests slowly to the upper branches, but by the time it does, it's too late to save the plant.
I see them helping as well. And I also hear the same people expressing their frustration repeatedly on this forum.
To get back to the basics - to me, the most important part of the forum have always been filling the often huge gaps in information on sales, the software, and new products that DAZ and/or the PAs involved haven't bothered to document properly, and warnings about issues that affect the actual use of said products. (Because, it cannot be denied, there's an awful lot of that here.) It is not the fault of the users of this forum that so much of that conversation takes on a negative tone, as when there IS something new and great to talk about, the conversation gets far more upbeat. Where the fundamental disconnect occurs is when there are repeated posts concerning issues that seem to never be resolved, lingering forever in the background like a chronic malaise. I mean, there's only so long that people can keep bringing up the same issues repeatedly without any kind of sign of those issues being addressed before it begins to feel like DAZ doesn't even care about those problems. To be clear, that may not be true at all, and I'm not saying it is... but when the lack of any regular "official" input here has gotten to the point where even the Mods have to wait multiple hours or even days to get an answer to parse the meaning of the latest bit of unclear sales-talk gobbletygook, it's not an atmosphere that's inclined to engender a lot of warm fuzzies. Certainly, all of the recent kerfunkle about the introduction of DAZ Premier could have been radically reduced by at least 60% if there'd been someone who actually had real, concrete answers standing by during the launch rather than everyone trying to parse the particulars of the DAZ-ese marketing promotions on their own and then cross-posting interpretations.
I can pinpoint when the atmosphere was ruined
there is a whole popular much visited /s, subforum that was created at the time
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/categories/non-fungible-token-%28nft%29-art
I am still a total sucker for 3D content so still actively shop here but I think the active NFT marketing era was when I started disliking DAZ itself not just some of the forum shenanigans
I hope it's OK to talk about this now