Character "mini-pages"

[Twile]

Sorry if this has been brought up before, but at 3:30 AM I can't be bothered to read 20 pages of suggestions.

Basically this would be a feature to allow people to make sorts of sub-pages for characters of theirs. This would work to solve several issues which I currently see:

1) Some people, especially artists, have more than one character. Some have dozens. Currently there is no centralized place to describe that, because although appropriate space is allocated on the main user page, that's only good for one primary character.
2) Sometimes art is made without descriptions adequately describing what characters are in it--and even if they are, links to the appropriate user's FA page aren't always included. Currently, at best a name and user icon are provided.
3) Sometimes you find a character that you want to see more of--in whatever situations or by whatever artists there are. Currently the best you can hope for is to track down the creator and look through their favorites/gallery in hopes that they favorite/repost everything containing them.
4) Commissioned art ends up being posted by two people, a lot of the time--the commissioner and the artist. Lazy FA-browsers ignore submission names/descriptions and tell the commissioner that they're an excellent artist, or give tons of comments and favorites to the work when posted by the artist but a tiny fraction to the commissioner. Same goes for fan art.

Anyway, I envision character pages as being like "watered-down" user pages. A user could create one and fill in name, vital stats, back story, links to reference pictures, and so on--like current user pages. Beyond this however, everything else would be automated. What do I mean by this?

If characters could be used in tagging, the process would take care of itself, essentially.

Say you're an artist and you're posting some art that another user commissioned. Or you're doing fan art. Or anything involving a character which is not your own. Or, in fact, any art involving any character which is your own as well. Basically you just add in tags for each character, and when the image is uploaded it adds itself to the character's gallery. Now this could be more fully-featured and allow users to select a region with a rectangle that shows which character is which (Facebook does this with people) if so desired--hovering over a character name would highlight where they are in the picture.

But basically, this would allow anyone to create a small personal space for their character(s), in addition to the user page (which is sorta for the main "Fursona" of the user). These pages would track all art the character was featured in, so if you find some furry/scaly/whatever critter that you'd like to see more of, you just click on their name under the submission where it would list the characters involved, it takes you to that character page, and you can effortlessly see who owns it, just what that character is, and more artwork by any number of artists.

In regards to the original 4 issues I saw, it's pretty easy to see how the first one is dealt with. Instant space for character bios. The second one could be partially dealt with--it would still require the submitter to properly tag the art, but it would be much easier as it would be a more standard task. Clearly it addresses the third problem, of tracking down a character you saw in art and liked. And finally it could address the fourth problem, which was multiple posting and not giving credit where credit is due (or giving it where it's not due). The artist posts the picture, it's added to the character's gallery, and the user chooses a "Featured Character" or "Featured Character Submission", which would either select a random picture from a chosen character, or a chosen picture from a chosen character. Being displayed in a different way than regular submissions it would be less likely for a commissioner to get a comment like "Great shading there, and love the expression" for art they didn't do--but they'd still be able to show it off.

Don't have all the details worked out, of course, but I do like the idea myself and wonder if anyone else thinks it's feasible or worthwhile.

[Rhainor]

IIRC, one of the improvements in the new Ferrox system is that you'll be able to create sub-sections within your Gallery.

You could have one subsection for each of your characters, one for group pics, and one for pictures you drew of other people's characters, or whatever you like.

[ArrowTibbs]

Problem: Multiple characters with the same name. There's probably a dozen Wolfys and Wuffs.

[Twile]

IIRC, one of the improvements in the new Ferrox system is that you'll be able to create sub-sections within your Gallery.

You could have one subsection for each of your characters, one for group pics, and one for pictures you drew of other people's characters, or whatever you like.


This is a step in the right direction, but it's still only a partial fix. Having subsections works best for stories and comics that you want grouped together, or maybe for commissions that you paid for or got, but as I said it's a partial fix. It still doesn't allow for you to track down all the drawings in which a character is featured (as some people do not repost gift art, commissions, or especially things they just happened to be featured in). And unless you can put long descriptions in your sub-folders, you wouldn't have a place to put info about the characters.

I like Demiglenn. I think he's totally adorable and I want every picture he's in. With the idea I'm proposing, it would be as simple as searching for the character name, or if I know who created him, I go to Glenn's page and look up Demiglenn under characters he owns. With the current or subdirectory methods, the best you can hope for is that Glenn will post, in a special directory, everything he finds which Demiglenn appears in.

So you see my approach works not just for making sure proper people get credit for what art they did (or didn't do) and what characters they own (or don't own), but also to allow for character listings and auto-forming mini-galleries.


Problem: Multiple characters with the same name. There's probably a dozen Wolfys and Wuffs.


This is a very good point, actually. However, when you think about it, the same thing can be said for user names on FA, the forums, email addresses, websites, anything like that. You have to pick something unique. For a lot of people I don't think this will be a problem--between first and last names there is plenty of room for making your own name, even if your first name is "fox" or "wolf" (Fox Amoore, for example). If we do run into cases where characters have the exact same name it'd have to have a Wikipedia-style disambiguation page. So you'd have a page reading "Wolfy (7 characters)" with a list of 7 characters and links to each character's sub-page (www.furaffinity.net/user/username/charactername) . If each character page had a thumbnail or icon for that character, then those could be placed there as well for disambiguation purposes.

Either way it's no worse than the current system in which a submission has something like "Wolfy (c) his owner". That's useless for tracking down that person. "Wolfy (c) [user icon]" is a step up from that, but still doesn't solve the stuff I talked about above.

On top of the good stuff you could get from this system and ignoring the (ever frustrating) practice of using common character names like "wolf" and "fox" without a last name, it just might encourage people to get a bit more creative. Maybe they'll give their character a last name or something. If not, then as I said, you'd just have a disambiguation page. And even with that you would still have a sub-page for each of those characters, maintained by their owners, which could help clarify which Wuffy is which ;)

Glad for the criticism though. Keeps everyone on their toes and brings important stuff to our attention.

[Alchera]

The main striking thing that I have to voice about here is the person that is the commissioner getting more comments than the artist who did the work for them. This is why I absolutely forbid anyone to load my work on their galleries. For a person to whom I do a commission to get more responses than what I do for doing it is very insulting.

[Twile]

The main striking thing that I have to voice about here is the person that is the commissioner getting more comments than the artist who did the work for them. This is why I absolutely forbid anyone to load my work on their galleries. For a person to whom I do a commission to get more responses than what I do for doing it is very insulting.


I didn't even really address the issue of diffusing views or favorites or whatever between the artist and the commissioner, though. I think that, if this system were implemented (a big if, but I can dream), any favorite or view on a picture would give full credit to an artist (1 fave, 1 view of the picture => 1 fave, 1 view credited to artist). Whether the character owner gets the same amount or less really depends on your view; some people would argue that the characters and ideas are more important than the art, most would probably say that the artist themself deserves more credit.

Either way it's an improvement over what we have now. If you're a moderately well-known artist, unless you're being commissioned to draw an incredibly popular character, you'll probably get a lot more attention for having done it than the original artist. There will of course be people who won't read titles or descriptions and assume the posting person did the art, or not bother to view the artist's page to check out their other art. Then again, that's something my system would help with--it would give credit to artists and still allow commissioners to show off drawings containing their "intellectual property". The other solution, of course, is to just say your commissioners can't re-post artwork of yours. Some people would say that's ok if it's a term of the artist, others would argue that it's like getting a paint job for your car and being told you can't park it in your driveway where others can see it.

Either way this system would in no way favor the commissioner over the artist--at best it would give equal credit to them, and quite possibly it would give more credit to the artist. Either way it would have the added benefit of allowing for a good character database with links to art in which the character appears, descriptions, and so on. In this particular art community where everyone usually has at least one character of their own, sometimes more, I'd think this would be an unconventional but useful addition.

[N3X15]

Sorry if this has been brought up before, but at 3:30 AM I can't be bothered to read 20 pages of suggestions.

Basically this would be a feature to allow people to make sorts of sub-pages for characters of theirs. This would work to solve several issues which I currently see:

1) Some people, especially artists, have more than one character. Some have dozens. Currently there is no centralized place to describe that, because although appropriate space is allocated on the main user page, that's only good for one primary character.
2) Sometimes art is made without descriptions adequately describing what characters are in it--and even if they are, links to the appropriate user's FA page aren't always included. Currently, at best a name and user icon are provided.
3) Sometimes you find a character that you want to see more of--in whatever situations or by whatever artists there are. Currently the best you can hope for is to track down the creator and look through their favorites/gallery in hopes that they favorite/repost everything containing them.
4) Commissioned art ends up being posted by two people, a lot of the time--the commissioner and the artist. Lazy FA-browsers ignore submission names/descriptions and tell the commissioner that they're an excellent artist, or give tons of comments and favorites to the work when posted by the artist but a tiny fraction to the commissioner. Same goes for fan art.

Anyway, I envision character pages as being like "watered-down" user pages. A user could create one and fill in name, vital stats, back story, links to reference pictures, and so on--like current user pages. Beyond this however, everything else would be automated. What do I mean by this?

If characters could be used in tagging, the process would take care of itself, essentially.

Say you're an artist and you're posting some art that another user commissioned. Or you're doing fan art. Or anything involving a character which is not your own. Or, in fact, any art involving any character which is your own as well. Basically you just add in tags for each character, and when the image is uploaded it adds itself to the character's gallery. Now this could be more fully-featured and allow users to select a region with a rectangle that shows which character is which (Facebook does this with people) if so desired--hovering over a character name would highlight where they are in the picture.

But basically, this would allow anyone to create a small personal space for their character(s), in addition to the user page (which is sorta for the main "Fursona" of the user). These pages would track all art the character was featured in, so if you find some furry/scaly/whatever critter that you'd like to see more of, you just click on their name under the submission where it would list the characters involved, it takes you to that character page, and you can effortlessly see who owns it, just what that character is, and more artwork by any number of artists.

In regards to the original 4 issues I saw, it's pretty easy to see how the first one is dealt with. Instant space for character bios. The second one could be partially dealt with--it would still require the submitter to properly tag the art, but it would be much easier as it would be a more standard task. Clearly it addresses the third problem, of tracking down a character you saw in art and liked. And finally it could address the fourth problem, which was multiple posting and not giving credit where credit is due (or giving it where it's not due). The artist posts the picture, it's added to the character's gallery, and the user chooses a "Featured Character" or "Featured Character Submission", which would either select a random picture from a chosen character, or a chosen picture from a chosen character. Being displayed in a different way than regular submissions it would be less likely for a commissioner to get a comment like "Great shading there, and love the expression" for art they didn't do--but they'd still be able to show it off.

Don't have all the details worked out, of course, but I do like the idea myself and wonder if anyone else thinks it's feasible or worthwhile.


You could use An offsite Profile Storage Wiki (http://rprofiles.nexisonline.net/) for storing character profiles, or submit it as a text submission. :P

[Twile]

You could use An offsite Profile Storage Wiki (http://rprofiles.nexisonline.net/) for storing character profiles, or submit it as a text submission. :P


Yeah, that's possible. But again it's a solution for just one thing.

If you were to do a text submission, chances are most people would skip over it, especially if you're not an artist and not many people watch you. Or you could link to an off-site profile with images or links to FurAffinity submissions of your character. But really, if you take it this far, is it really any better than everyone having their own loosely connected websites with galleries and stuff? The point of FA is a standard interface on a single site with (eventually) searchable, hence well-tagged, furry art images. Just as some people consider species or related fetishes or content to be important to the content of an image, I would argue that the characters contained are also very important. This would add them as a searchable component while also allowing for a more centralized location with info about them, on-site, in the familiar FA style.

[Twile]

Eh heh. A month has passed since anyone wrote here. Anyone have any new input? Maybe some new people will read this...