RobotLadyErin

Wants To Create, Procrastinates

  • She/They

staff
@staff

hi folks! happy friday!

we’re excited to announce that as of now artist alley pre-sales are now live! listings are currently set at $10 per week and you can buy up to four weeks at a time.

if you already know what artist alley is and are ready to get a listing, head on over to the sign up page to get one! if you don’t, read on for a refresher!


artist alley is our initial vision of paid advertising on cohost. we wanted to create something unobtrusive that still served a useful purpose for our users. artist alley is a place to promote your work, commissions, or just a joke you want to pay $10 to make everyone look at. it’s a big part of our path to financial sustainability.

we’re still putting the finishing touches on everything, but we wanted to put pre-sales up ahead of launch so that once the artist alley launches, there will actually be listings there to look at! we’re planning to have the alley launched by end of next week (April 19th) so please look forward to it. we’ll also have a couple small changes launching monday, including a page to view all your listings.

one thing to keep in mind is that artist alley listings are subject to additional community guidelines on top of the existing cohost community guidelines. these exist to keep artist alley safe for everyone, and to keep in line with our payment processor’s requirements.

if you’ve got feedback on artist alley, e-mail us at support@cohost.org! this is a completely new product for us, so we know it’s not gonna be perfect first try. we want to make artist alley as good as it can be, and we appreciate your help in getting there.

thanks, as always, for using cohost! :eggbug:


edit (April 14): we've began approving listings and we're excited to launch the alley next week. if you listing was approved, you'll be sent an email automatically that will contain the date your listing expires. this date is currently incorrect. your listing's time will begin on the launch of the alley, not the date of approval. apologies for the confusion!

edit (April 19): due to a critical visual bug we're in the process of fixing, artist alley will launch on Monday, April 22. thank you for your patience!


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in reply to @staff's post:

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!

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)

also the alt text field doesn't have any error text (just the X), but the body has the alt text error message lol

but other than that it looks fine (especially security-wise, as a web security nerd i had to give this a little pentest but other than the js urls this seems pretty secure (and excuse the funny requests, your backend probably did not like those error messages))

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!

you're interpreting correctly, 18+ art that's allowed under our existing community guidelines is also allowed for artist alley. unfortunately a necessary distinction for legal/regulatory reasons

So good to be able use a platform and it's features like any other user would and not be constantly worried about being obliterated out of nowhere "just because" (‾◡‾ ') the more I use cohost the less I want to use any other place lol

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?

yeah, our reasoning for not having a category for adult content was that you can flip the selector to only see adult content which would just invalidate the tag. much to consider.

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)

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?

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)

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!)

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"

down the line we would like to work with alternative payment processors. we're continuing work on eggbux (our subscription and tipping platform) and want to get more of that work done before we get deep into figuring out alternatives.

ideally we can offer more flexibility in the 18+ space in the future.

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.

things like that homemade soaps and lotions should be fine, but might be subject to some extra scrutiny. id avoid making any particular medical claims, such as something being good for rashes or eczema.

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!

I don't see any world where we don't refund someone after rejecting their listing. If you repeatedly submit rulebreaking listings that are constantly being rejected, we will simply take your ability to create new submissions away.

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?

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.

I also had this problem while entering the information for an ad buy yesterday, but a version of my image that rendered correctly then appeared in the preview I was shown after I had submitted the listing. Today, just to check, I tried to upload an image on the submission page (without following through to another purchase) and it this time it worked, so the problem looks like it has either been fixed or only materializes intermittently.

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.