SheezyArt

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SheezyArt is an online art archive community, which provides a location for artists to display their creations for feedback and exposure and communicate with each other. It advertises itself as a "free and alternative internet art community". It has basic archive features such as watching favorite users, listing friends, sending private messages, and adding other creators' work in a list of favorite pieces.

The categories for art hosted on SheezyArt include Animation, Digital Art, Flash, Oekaki, Photography, Poetry, Screenshot, Stock, Traditional Art, Tutorial, Wallpaper and Writing.

History and development
SheezyArt opened to users on November 30, 2003, by Channel Cat as an alternative to deviantART. SheezyArt offered features comparable to those enjoyed by deviantART's paid users, but without a subscription fee. More significantly, it had no restrictions against "adult-rated" art. However, in January 2005, SheezyArt moved to new servers and the owners (Channel Cat & Spencer) presented their new Terms of Service. They required the site to be more "family-friendly". Officially, their server's TOS never allowed them to host adult art, even before, but the lax control made it possible for SheezyArt to ignore this. The decision to ban pornographic submissions was perceived as drastic and somewhat treacherous by some users, who left the site soon afterward.

Throughout its history, SheezyArt has remained stable and relatively small, allowing the site's administrative staff to maintain a more personal relationship with its members than is common on most online art archives. For a period until around September 10, 2005, the site was either down or in read-only mode due to problems with the host server. After a spate of problems due to a faulty power source on the new Sheezy server, these downtime problems seem to have abated for the most part. Management proposes to deal with a new series of downtime issues by upgrading to a higher degree of backup from the server company. As yet, this does not seem to have been implemented, but will likely represent a major improvement from the current state--though the site now indicates that Sheezy is moving to a new server. This may be the long-awaited improvement.

On August 15, 2005, SheezyArt announced that unless they were to come up with $700 for their server bills, SheezyArt would have to close down. Although the $700 goal was reached within 24 hours of the announcement, the site still remained in a state of inactivity, with the most recent and frequent message reading that the "Host is down". Then for a while the front page showed a picture saying "SheezyArt Version 2.1, Saturday 10:00 am PST".

On Saturday, September 10, SheezyArt returned, back online, in its new Sheezy 2.1 version. The site claimed to have many new features in the new version, including a new layout, an improved reporting system, and many bugs fixed.

As of Friday, January 13, SheezyArt was successfully updated to its version 3.0, but after the high amount of traffic slowed the server, it was shut off for revamping. It went back online on Monday, January 16. Version 3.0 includes, among other things, the long-awaited Club system.

Also included in the update to version 3 is the ability to upload music files. As a result of this it is becoming increasingly popular as a music community, and a more logical, easy-to-understand and well-laid out alternative to other music communities.

On Tuesday, March 7 of 2006, the site suffered a major downtime (nearly 48 hours long). During this period, the decision of having a hosting service switch was taken and informed on Wednesday, March 8. On Monday, March 9 of 2006, Sheezyart was restored in version 3.

At first, version 3 was notoriously 56k unfriendly, causing many artists to threaten to leave. After some fine tuning by the owners, Sheezyart became much more stable for users on slower connections.

Trolls and their role on SheezyArt
SheezyArt is home to a large and unique collection of troll accounts that interact mostly in the site's forums. Most of them are playful persona accounts. Some of these personas include characters such as an intelligent orc who types poorly because of large fingers, a demon who has annoying neighbors, and a pit bull who writes in capital letters and eats butter. These characters are recognized as harmless and humorous by most users.

"Rival" archives
Users who left SheezyArt after the TOS change, accusing SheezyArt administrators of exerting totalitarian rule over their users' freedom of expression, started and joined new "rival" archives, including:


 * FurAffinity, a furry art archive.
 * y!gallery, an adults-only website for yaoi-genre anime art.

Many members of these archives have negative opinions about SheezyArt, particularly on FurAffinity. The site's slogan, "Where freedom of expression reigns," referenced what was considered to be SheezyArt's oppressive policies banning pornography.