Seaside

Im very excited to use this. I need to finish another round of editing, but i do plan on advertizing some of my artistic content on there! i cant wait to spend money to target a great demographic!

you can tell this will change the game because it has a dedicated "doing a bit" category

Question: is it acceptable to promote someone else's work? For example, I know a system who does great essays on plural history and mental health - would it be okay for me to make a post promoting their work?

hi fyi i found two issues in case you're not already aware:

• "no category" doesn't show an error/required message, just 400s

• also, not sure if you have some magic on the server to prevent this (at least it didnt complain before the stripe checkout and i am not spending 10$ on an xss attempt) but at least it's a self xss on the button link via javascript: proto URLs lol

(posting here bc it's only a self-xss until it launches publicly, so not security critical)

regarding the additional community guidelines — do things like nsfw art commissions fall under “nude image or video selling” or does that only pertain to IRL pics/vids? since there’s an 18+ toggle i’m assuming nsfw art falls under permissible ads but i just wanna be 100% clear about it and make sure i’m not misinterpreting. good luck with the sales!

I know it’s priority behind a bunch of other stuff but are y'all investigating having alternate more permissive payment providers in the future so that you’re not as restricted by their terms?

bought one >:) i said in my little extra notes bit but you guys gooooootta put in an #adult category

Is there a preview of what the alley page and a post will look like? I'm interested in knowing visually what the space will appear to be composed like and what individual ads will look like

In the preview, text can escape the frame if it uses a word that's too long to fit into the text box. Is that how it's going to be displayed in the artist alley?
(re-added my second sentence so your reply makes sense)

evil staff be like fuck you for using cohost

Oh, as another minor note, the character counter for the button text doesn't work, it always displays a check even when more than 35 characters are entered.

It feels odd to realize I'm looking forward to looking at ads but then I remind myself that they are likely to be a lot more interesting to see than the algorithm driven ads for huge corporations selling me things I just bought last week that I'm used to.

Anyway I look forward to wandering through artist alley to see what cool stuff I can find.

...wait, shit, quick question - will that thing that launches monday allow you to edit a listing? realized the #games tag probably makes more sense for "literally games" and not "someone playing a game" ^^"

Where will the ads show up? The preview shows it in the right-hand sidebar, will it only show up there on the homepage? Is there going to be a dedicated artist alley page to view a bunch of them?

It was super easy to fill everything out and being able to see the preview of what the table would look like was super smart! Great job guys!

I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes! I think it's a great idea. :3

hear me out: running ads for cohost on cohost

question regarding commissions: i do commission work that may or may not be 18+ at the discretion of the client paying me to work. Is it ok to list a link to my commission page as all ages if i don't advertise it with sex/nudity? (ie all example pictures are work safe)

Glad to see this. I hope it's a good revenue source and that people post cool things

Extremely minor thing, but in the additional community guidelines:

solely to ask for cohost followers
i.e. a listing that only contains the text “follow my account!” - “follow my account to see my future woodburning art projects” and including an example of your work is acceptable

I read the hyphen here as a second part of the same listing, not a break in the sentence, so I thought both were unacceptable and "acceptable" was a typo at first. This could probably be clearer.

(also excited to see what people will do with this!)

holy shit it's happening, THANK YOU for making cohost

Is the connection between sex work and sex trafficking phrasing required by the payment processor?

There's already a section barring "illegal activity," so left to my own devices I'd have thought sex trafficking was covered by that, particularly since it has nothing to do with sex work.

If it IS required, I am unsurprised and just... bummed.

i do have some questions!

i don't quite understand how restrictive the restrictions on 18+ content are, and the thing is they would probably affect me and some of what i would be using artist alley for:

i assume i wont be allowed to link directly to a selling nudes website. would i be allowed to mention all of the things i like to do on the internet, if one of them is selling nudes? i assume the answer to that is probably no but im not sure so i'd like to ask.

mainly though: is it okay if i just happen to be a person who sells nudes, and im making a listing which is promoting 18+ things different from my nude selling? im assuming the answer to that is probably yes

also, would it be okay to promote nudes if i have nudes but i dont sell nudes? what about like. if i do sell nudes but i also have freely available nudes and im promoting the freely available stuff but im not telling you "come pay to see my nudes"

thank you thank you thank you for banning medical, mental health, and legal services. i think the guidelines are really well-made to stop like 90% of grift-y bullshit from the jump. cant wait to peruse artists alley!

I'm not too active here, but I'm rooting for y'all.

A big helllll yeah to this coming together.

What about people that make garments that are adult in nature? I'm thinking "garment selling" needs to be clarified with the word "USED".

Looks to be a bit out of my current price range, but I hope the people who can afford it do! This is a pretty neat project and I want it to work out.

Ooh, looking exciting! The limitations on 18+ listings are disappointing, but it's of course out of your hands thanks to how nasty payment processors have been about adult content as of late. Best of luck with the artist alley!

I noticed that the button URL can accept relative urls, e.g. /rc/welcome, which would (usually) resolve to https://cohost.org/rc/welcome. I'm not sure if folks can do anything shady with that, but it might be worth restricting it to full urls just so nobody accidentally does e.g. "website.com", which would resolve to something like https://cohost.org/rc/artist-alley/website.com instead of https://website.com which they'd probably want.

Wow, this looks really intuitive! I miss the old days of Project Wonderful ads so having a new place to play with is gonna be fun.

I also did want clarification for the "no medicine" clause: are items like homemade skincare (lotions, face & body oils, body butters, beauty masks, etc.) okay to list? The only things they would claim to help with is some skin conditions (rashes and the like) so I wanted to make sure before I put up an ad for my friend's business.

oh very cool! i hope this does well

Looking forward to this!

I'm really glad to see that you have additional guidelines for this, it puts my worries at ease. I'm really excited to see this rolled out, I'm going to work extra hard to finish my current picture this weekend so I can submit it for the first artist alley!

One tiny suggestion. You state that you'll refund payment for posts that violate the rules, shich is very generous. I'd recommend adding an addendum that repeat violations will not be refunded.

Obviously this is greatly preferential to selling ads indiscriminately, and if I don't like it I can easily prevent my browser from displaying it and it will stop affecting my life, but the front page does still claim that "cohost will never sell ads". Is that going to be updated when this goes live?

I'm assuming the approval email is a different one to the receipt email. Is that correct?

Would people on cohost plus plan have an option to turn these ads off?

just out of curiosity i checked out the sign up page, but when i choose an image (even one of the recommended resolution) it ends up displaying as a broken image in the preview. i'm using the latest version of firefox on windows 10.

Got a question: are animated gifs accepted for headers? I understand if it's considered obnoxious.
(for the record, this ain't a dealbreaker! Just wanted to check what to prepare)

Will probably reiterate during sign up so this doesn't get lost, but would love to be able to set up different timelines for buying ads. As in like, 1 ad every other week, or every two weeks, or for the first or last week of every month. I'm fine doing it manually but I can't quite justify buying an ad every single week atm, so having more control at some point in the future would be sweet! GLGLGL so excited.

i saw the artist alley for a brief second on my menu thingy ! where it go?