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UPDATES CONT. - Warm Winter Project: 2012UPDATE 9 - As of Sunday, November 25, 2012, I WAS ABLE TO MEET AND PURCHASE MY DONATION GOAL OF 50 HOODIES thanks to deviantART's 30% off Black Friday sale as well as my 10% Premium Member Discount. Congratulations to us and thank you to everyone who helped out!
UPDATE 8 - As of Saturday, November 17, 2012, we are at 125,125 points, with only 34,875 points left to go! I was able to purchase 2,000 points a moment ago to put directly into the pool myself. My original intent was to get 8,000, but I ended up working less than I expected this week and was unable to, but as of my next paycheck (in two weeks), I will be able to purchase 8,000! That will leave us with 26,875. And after `TimberClipse's AWESOME point doubler, like the one that helped out and did so amazingly earlier in the year, that will be another 8,000, leaving us with only 18,875! And his doubler is already halfway full with much thanks to *rainylake for immediately putting 2,000 points in

Expose-Lit: Tip Guide on Talking to PeopleHere at #Expose-Lit, we hope to give deviants opportunities to find their way within the Literature community. We all know what it is like to be “new,” to be out of the “loop,” or to wonder where to turn to for help. We also know how daunting it can be at times to feel comfortable talking to other deviants within the community. Below, you will find just a few helpful tips on how to get started.
I’m New To DA Lit: Where Do I Start?
Well, this is easier than you might think!

The first thing you want to do is to get to know your Literature Community Volunteer Directors. ^Beccalicious, $wreckling and `thorns are here to listen and support you, so do not be afraid to ask questions and get to know them!

Browsing the Literature galleries and

Sta.sh Writer HTML ImprovementsHey Folks

As you probably know by now, Sta.sh Writer is a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) writer allowing you to see a live preview of what your journal, blog, poem or story will look like and edit it's appearance by highlighting text and clicking buttons.
What are the Improvements?
One of the more common pieces of feedback we get from deviants about Sta.sh Writer is that it's not as useful for power users; people who want more control over their layout and want to be able to use their own HTML to give what they write that extra bit of flare.
So what has been done about it?
To make Sta.sh Writer the best it possibly can be for anyone who uses it, we have made Sta.sh Writer into a WYSIWYT (What you see is what you type) editor
This means that you can seamlessly use both the WYSIWYG editor and your own custom html at the same time, and without everything being converted back to WYSIWYG every time you edit

Announcing The First Lit-Visual Alliance CONTEST!Announcing the first contest for the
:iconlit-visual-alliance:
What is the Alliance, you ask?
The Alliance is a project group intended to encourage visual and literary artists to work together. I've felt for some time that the dA Literature Community can at times be somewhat insular - to its detriment. We in the Lit Community are also sometimes prone to griping about the lack of exposure our work receives when compared to that of visual artists.
So. In the spirit of `thorns brilliant Complaint Challenge I would try to do something about that. And so :iconlit-visual-alliance: was born.
As often as I hear literary artists complaining about lack of exposure, I hear visual artists complaining of a lack of inspiration and motivation to create art. And that, I must say, is simply nonsense. There is a massive amount of inspiration to be found on dA - and it's called th

Lit Community: To Whom it May ConcernAn Open Letter:
To the Literature Community of deviantART
Dear Lit Community,
My name is Steven Pacheco. I am a writer who has been proud to be a member of the Literature Community here on deviantART for almost four years now. During my time here I have been honored and privileged to get to know many of you, to immerse myself in your work and to share my own work with you. I found deviantART during a time when I was struggling to find my writing again after a long break away from it. It was through this community that I was able not only to find my writing again but, in my opinion, to have sharpened it. I am by no means the greatest, but I am proud to say that I believe it has been my time on this site and as a member of this community which led me to finding my literary voice.
After a short period of time, during which I acclimated myself to this community, I began to make connections. I have discovered amazing friendships, established

Seniority Announcement - December 2011This article marks the latest announcements detailing the latest additions to the dizzy height of Senior members in our community. With just over 800 deviants holding the highly saught after ` -- it's clearly a moment that deserves recognition.
:faq29:
So what does it take to become a Senior? That's a question many have asked and have never really been able to get a straight answer on. Some have gained Seniority as a thank you for their time spent as a Volunteer, or to recognise their contribution to a particular project or collaborative action. Some have gained Seniority because of their community spirit, providing help and assistance to many other deviants and taking time out to promote the work of others in the community.
Some people have received Seniority because of their artistic endevours, having a positive influence on their peers by sharing resources, providing constructive criticism and by being a voice that stands out above the many others who deviate to be recognised

Publishing Resources ListMake sure you

the news article!
So you've written something freaking awesome. You've edited a million times (and if you haven't, turn around and go do that. Right now). You think you maybe want to take the leap and try publishing something. But you have no idea where to start.
Well, this is a good place to be.
This the journal where I'll be keeping a running list of all the publishing resources I find, both on and off dA. Most of it will probably be related to literary journals, since that's the stage where I'm at in my literary career, but I'll add things about book publishing as I find them.
If you ever find a great resource, or if you'd like to request something specific, please leave me a note in the comments.
Also this journal is probably going to be super-messy and slightly badly-categorized for the first few weeks, so if anything looks out of place and/or you can think of a better way for me to organize this, please

Weekly Roundup and Community NewsEach week, the #WritersInk admins scour the galleries to pick out the outstanding submissions. Read on for poetry and prose featuring heartbreaking romance, cultural nostalgia and societal decay.
If that all sounds a little bleak, well, we've had a very successful week in the new chatroom: full details are below! And as always, we've got a collection of news from around the community to help you keep up-to-date.
This Week's Highlights!

be ashamed be ashamed be ashamed by *0hgravity
A girl sits on the cracked pavement in the underbelly of society, singing her song of innocence.
Since joining the group a few months back, *0hgravity has been one of our community's stars, leaving insightful feedback right across the gallery. It's a pleasure, then, to be able to feature this unique and powerful poem.

The Life Before by ~Clevina
"Revolut

Writer of the Month - February"
Life
doesn't have
backspace
"
This month's featured writer:
:iconDisrhythmic:
~disrhythmic
We conducted a small interview with ~disrhythmic, which you can read here!
Picking the Writer of the Month is never an easy task. But as January's feature took a different approach, we've basically had to pick this month's featured writer from two month's worth of community activity: a daunting task. While those months have seen a quiet patch around Christmas, they represent some of the highest activity that the group has seen. Several members have stood out as wonderful contributors.
Throughout arguably our busiest period, ~disrhythmic has always been at the forefront of our minds. She's a consistently active deviant who not only tunes into our regular roundups, but also gets through a lot of word-miles in the gallery, too. The #WritersInk admins can rest a little easier knowing that there are

Love dA Lit: Issue 81Welcome to the eighty-first issue of my weekly news article, Love dA Lit!

Every Sunday this article will aim to promote volunteer opportunities, various resources, prompts, challenges, and workshops, as well as highlighting various contests, and spotlighting a specific group every week. This is by no means a complete list of all the literature going-ons, merely a tool to help you get involved and stay informed.

This week's group spotlight is #Lit-WIP!

Name Your Droppings vol. 2

Welcome to the second issue of Name Your Droppings, which comes in very late due to all kinds of technical misfortunes on all ends of the line.

Nonetheless, I hereby present you an in-depth interview with the 2012 power alliance: `GrimFace242&`thorns
(note: this interview was taken before mrs. `thorns became a LIT CV, therefor her promotion is not mentioned)

wyldhoney: How is it that two long-time archrivals come to be allies?
Grim: It's all `thorns' fault.
thorns: You're mistaken, Grim. I blame ^Beccalicious for eavesdropping on our twitter conversation. If we didn't have someone else to plot against we wouldn't have to work together.
Grim: At least it's not my fault that our silly joking and ^Beccalicious' paranoid nature turned us into

Weekly Roundup & New Chat EventGreetings, Inkhearts! This week, #WritersInk brings you intrigue and superheros, as well as some wonderful news!
Stay tuned after the features for information regarding a future Critique Chat as well as a little change to the group features.
This Week's Highlights!

Dust Devil by *TheTerrorOfTheDeep
"After I broke, I spent time wrapped in my bed sheets on the floor.... I did two things during that time."
A rivetting tale about a controversial relationship, *TheTerrorOfTheDeep reminds us that love is a dangerous thing.

Secrets - A Dark Flame Story by `mirz-alt
In a world where super heroes work in offices and schools by day and walk the mean streets of Gale City by night, a young boy finds himself habouring secret aspirations.
Billy idolizes the superhero crime fighters in his city. When he was kidnapped by the Masher, he f

Be A Hero, Report a Miscat!
Miscats: What are they? Why do they matter? How do they happen?
A "miscat" is a deviation that has been submitted to the wrong gallery, or mis-categorized, on deviantART. For example, literature does not belong in the photography gallery, even if there is a photograph supplied as a preview picture for the writing.
They matter for several reasons. Miscats make searching for specific types of deviations tedious, particularly if you are looking for newer submissions. A search of the Writing Tutorials gallery for popular deviations in the last 24 hours brought up four deviations, all miscats. Miscats also make the site disorganized and even harder to navigate for new comers. Lastly, they make your work harder to reach by taking up space in the wrong gallery.
I'm sure others can think of reasons why miscats are annoying, and I invite you to leave comments here discussing it!
The number one reason that I think miscats happen is simple ignorance. There a

League of Lit Groups: Vol. 1Welcome to the first volume of League of Lit Groups!
This article will be posted every fourth Tuesday of the month and will revisit one past group spotlight from Love dA Lit and one literature group who is in need of admin(s) to help with their various group activities. If I can, I will also try to re-interview the past spotlight group.
Note: As this is the first issue and I absolutely wanted to get this posted for May I only managed to get one group. Lucky for me they just announced that they had some open administrator positions! The next issue will follow my original plan and layout much better, hopefully.

This month we will be taking a look at =DailyLitDeviations!

DailyLitDeviations
:iconDailyLitDeviations: / :iconDaily-Lit-Deviations:
Original Love dA Lit Feature: Issue 8
=DailyLitDeviations is a "group dedicated to promoting the work of Li

Love dA Lit: Issue 78Welcome to the seventy-eigth issue of my weekly news article, Love dA Lit!

This week's group spotlight is #Poets-Refuge!

#LITplease's Community Portal

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AnotherContestGroup News Gone Issues!

Journal Entry: Thu Nov 3, 2011, 11:16 AM

As most of my watchers will know I am the founder of super group #AnotherContestGroup and we have massive problems with journal entries due to data size limits. There is a maximum data allowance per journal and this is covers the allowance of characters, text, thumbs, emoticons and all coding etc. The maximum data limit of a journal is 64kb eg:

_{The following image is an example of all the script including links, icons, emoticons, thumbnails and all relevant listings from all October journals merged together in a 'test' journal including skin just to show what happens when you try and save an image:}

Which has caused lots of problems for us as a contest group! We have tried to work around these problems by splitting up monthly journals into 2 monthly journals but we went from listing around 200-300 to listing around 800 meaning we needed 3 monthly and even 4 monthly we're now having to create a silly amount of journals each month (in October there were 5 journals just for contests ending on 31st October and there was 7 journals for contests ending any other date in October!) this causes spamming problems as we have to notify our watchers of these updates which is causing us problems. Many watchers are unwatching and 99% say it's due to spamming of journal updates.

So we tried to compromise this situation by every month (sometimes bi-weekly) creating news articles containing all contests (the last one contained 1365+ contests)!!! Now that News Articles have been disabled and replaced with journals we have come to face 3 major problems:

Group journals are seeming to be unnoticed by the new method of journals.

We are no longer able to post mass content as we still have journal limits and news articles have been disabled.

  We can no longer post news articles as they show up as journals…  This has caused a lot of upset as founder of the group I don't want my latest journal to be group related as I do try and keep the two separate.  I was a bit cross that news articles had to be published by myself and not by my group and so it didn't notify group watchers unless they were also my watchers so we had to try and direct group watchers towards the news articles.  But now I have to post stuff (such as this) in my journal which I really don't want to do but I am trying to appeal for something to be done.

I have asked dA staff time and time again for journal extensions so that we can do massive features and/or include a lot more content.  Even if it was just a premium member/super group privilege and not all dA members.  But still I remain ignored or get abusive comments from haters and trolls.

I feel that while the new upgrades are great in that journals are now having the chance to be seen.  I really don't feel that removing news was really the best way to go about things!  I don't see why we can't have both!!!

So while yes this is a complaint, it is also a plea for staff to up the journal allowance.  We would seriously apprechiate this more than anything else but if you could we would also like you to bring back news articles and/or make it so groups are able to publish journals.  This would be a fantastic aid I am sure not just to #AnotherContestGroup but also to other groups.  Futher more we would apprechiate if we were able to change the order of journals in the journal navigation box and to not have restrictions on the amount of journals we can show at once.  But as said we'd apperchiate a much higher journal allowance and/or unlimited especially now you've removed news.  People are still wanting to do huge features but because of this situation you as dA staff have put us in it is causing many problems and concerns.

#AnotherContestGroup members/watchers/followers/fans/staff etc ACG Mass Features, Features, News Articles etc… Are being suspended until further notice.  We will keep compiling everything into our journals and lots of journals but we're sorry for all inconvenience caused.

Regards #AnotherContestGroup & founder =missimoinsane

Thank You

Please don't forget to send in your contests by comment or note to the group!!!

Please join us and tell fellow deviants to aid in the support of this group!!!

Please donate any spare points to ~ACG-PointsDonations!!!

Skin by =kuma-x

74 Comments

AnotherContestGroup News Gone Issues!by =missimoinsane

Journals / Culture / Contests

=wondering-souls Apr 12, 2012

Sorry for a reply on an old journal/issue, but while I'm here, I figured I'd post my two cents.

Why not add on a third option? Instead of posting a multitude of journals for each month (or popular dates), why not just post everything on a separate website? Purchase a domain and post the contests there. Programmers can make it easy to submit a new contest (either by staff or user. If user then it can be moderated) such as a place to include a link to the information, the end date, have the selection of emoticons to choose from to add to it, and possibly add keywords. Keywords would be for a possible search engine on the site where visitors could enter in, say, "traditional fanart" and all contests that have that keyword would show up. Maybe have options to the side where they can choose what month/end date and narrow down their choices until they find their perfect match. Contests that are past their end date could be set to automatically delete themselves. The website could almost run itself leaving you and your staff team relatively stress free.

You could keep updating, advertising, featuring and doing all the normal things the group does while also hosting a website. This keeps watchers free from spam and you can keep all the same months in one place with no worry about taking up too much space. For users who want to stay notified, you could do a weekly (or something similar) journal post about new contests added or offer a newsletter automated by the website to email out subscribers.

Obviously coding this would be a lot of work, but I think it could be worth it all in the end.

Regardless if you use/like the idea, I do support the desire for larger journal space. As it is right now, I don't see news articles ever returning, but I think increasing the space available for journals could still open for debate

=missimoinsane Apr 12, 2012 Hobbyist Digital Artist

We had this proposed to us before and we decided we wanted to keep things on dA thus why we don't promote contests from outside of dA such as YouTube contests or BlogSpot or Facebook etc... We only promote contests which are hosted on dA. So having our members leave to go elsewhere defeats the point of a deviantART group ~ to be honest. But thank you for your time

=wondering-souls Apr 12, 2012

That's fine, completely understandable. I had that thought at the back of my mind as well, about defeating the purpose of the group, but I decided to suggest it nevertheless. Best of luck with the group, I very much appreciate all your and the staffs hard work

=missimoinsane Apr 13, 2012 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Thank you

=Sabbelbina Dec 16, 2011 Hobbyist Photographer

I absolutely agree with you, I don't want to advertise everything I want to publish to more people than our group members in my journal! I never looked at the journal site, where all the journals can be seen, and I think I'm not the only person. It's just to complicated to search for a journal the same way we have to do it with pictures. I want the news back! Isn't there a possibility to tell dA, many people want the news back? A petition or something like this? It's great to have the possibility to fav the journals or even search for them, but news have been much easier...

=missimoinsane Dec 17, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

I read somewhere that apparently the stats were low something like only 9% of deviants used news each month where as 99% of deviants used journals and multiple times each month. They decided to make cut backs as they were paying for a hardly used feature. Apparently.

Anyway. I am quite annoyed about the whole situation, but seems my only choices are to just 'deal with it' or 'leave dA'.

...I'd rather stay on dA! But that doesn't mean I am happy about it!

_{I love your use of the brick wall emoticon also!}

=Sabbelbina Dec 17, 2011 Hobbyist Photographer

But I think, it's like with newspapers and something like that, only 10% of the people in the world write it, but many more read it. I guess it's the same with the news. anyway hopefully they will rechange it...
I don't want to leave dA but I think that's a bad change...

(I searched about ten minutes for the best emoticon to show my feelings about this, and this was the best.

Your emoticon is very cool, too )

=missimoinsane Dec 25, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Thank you

and I agree with you, it's such a shame!!

Hope you had a wonderful Christmas inspite of terrible dA changes!!

=Sabbelbina Dec 26, 2011 Hobbyist Photographer

Yes I had wondeful Chrsitmas, I hope, you too.

=missimoinsane Dec 26, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Yes I did thank you xx

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