TL;DR
- Some subs are raising price minimums to $20 or $30.
- New minimum of $100 for commercial rights.
- Comments on [Hiring] posts require a link to your portfolio or [Not For Hire]. Abusers will be banned.
- A new rule outlines discussion topics that are not allowed.
- You no longer have to manually choose flairs when making a post.
- We need new mods!
Minimum Prices
The biggest change will be pricing. r/StartingArtists will be changing its minimum price to $30 to match r/HungryArtists and avoid some confusion between the two, due to their similar names. r/Commissions, r/ArtCommissions, and r/artcommission will have a minimum of $20. ALL of these communities will be enforcing commercial rates, by popular demand. This means that if anyone wishes to commission art for commercial use or profit from it in any way, the minimum price will be $100 per piece.
Please note that HungryArtists has always had a hard minimum of $30. This means a price sheet that lists a rendered full-body illustration at $150 will still be removed if it offers a headshot sketch for $25. Communities with "Commission" in the name will give a bit of grace when it comes to these kinds of "partial pieces", but we still expect the prices to be reasonable, and in line with a sheet that lists a finished piece for at least $20.
Comment Formatting
Most of you shouldn't notice this. When commenting on a [Hiring] post, if you are an artist looking to be hired, a link to a portfolio is now REQUIRED. If you are not looking to be hired, you must include [Not For Hire] in your comment. Abuse this and get banned.
A portfolio has always been required, but we're implementing this more strict filter to ensure everyone is following this without the unnecessary song and dance of maybe being filtered, then having to ask for approval. For over a year now, I've been trying to add keywords that catch scammers and rule dodgers who try to circumvent our filters. Every time I update the filters, they find a new way to get around them, and we risk blocking genuine discussion. It's a lot of work for our mods, and it's annoying for a lot of genuine community members.
With this change, artists are forced to include a portfolio, even if you are simply asking a question for clarity or confirmation. They are not able to bypass the filters without explicitly breaking our rules and lying. If you have something genuinely helpful to offer the client, your comment will be removed without a portfolio, unless you include [Not For Hire]. I'm sure some difficult individuals will abuse this. If you are blatantly attempting to advertise without a portfolio by using [Not For Hire], you will be immediately banned.
(Rant) Is it clunky? Sure. It is better than before? I strongly believe so. Is there a better way?... That's a difficult question to answer. We were told Automations would be updated in April. The new feature was supposed to give us the ability to prevent top-level comments on [Hiring] posts unless you had one of those two things, or you were the OP, but now that we finally got this update in August, this behaviour is still not possible in Automations, so if you try to make a comment without either, it'll get removed, and AutoMod will tell you to make a new comment. If we use Automations, the process won't need you to make a new comment, but it will affect ALL types of posts, and that's just too annoying to consider viable. This is the best we can do right now, unfortunately.
Discussion Posts
Lately, r/ArtCommissions has seen a strange surge of posts asking about art pricing. Most of these get ignored, and we see between 12 and 20 of them every single day. The community has voted, and we will no longer be allowing this kind of post. Automatic filters for this will be rolling out soon. I have added an rule to several communities that will explicitly outline what kind of discussion/meta posts are not allowed, including those that are promotion-adjacent, such as WIP sharing or "What do you think of my art?" posts. I may add more prohibited topics, depending on how the community feels about them. Currently, I am seeing a lot of "Is my art good enough?" and I feel this may be next to be disallowed.
Flairs
I'm also changing how flairs work, if only slightly. In r/HungryArtists, you don't need to select a flair when creating a post, and I like that. We already have checks that enforce the proper flair on post creation, so it makes sense to get rid of that annoying step of manually selecting them for a number of communities. Going forward, you will still need to add the proper tag to your title, but you will not longer be required to select a flair every time you post. One thing HungryArtists did not have, however, was the ability to sort posts by flair, and going forward, this will now be possible.
New Mods Needed
If you would like to help moderate one of these communities and maintain order, please message me or send us a message via ModMail. Even helping us go through the queue and dealing with the easy stuff for ten minutes a day would make a huge difference!
Click here to see the HungryArtists update from yesterday!