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Has anyone else noticed that any art posted on this site is basically ungoogleable? Seriously, you download any picture from here and plug it into Google's reverse image search dealie and you'll probably get a bunch of DeviantArt results, mostly More Like This pages, but never, ever the source. And I think I figured out why.
See, somewhere along the line, some brain genius decided to rewrite the entire site so that submission pages are generated entirely using AJAX. Why? I'm sure there's some weird technical rationalization like it shaves off 2% off the server load or something. But what it does is ensure that you're never actually visiting username.deviantart.com/art/Insert-Title-Here-1234567; you're visiting the artist's homepage. If it even is the artist, and not some other user entirely who you happened to click on "related images" from about seven pages ago, because the JavaScript hack they use to fake-rewrite the URL bar's contents doesn't even work correctly half the time (and don't even get me started on ever trying to use the Back button with this site).
While this can cause frustration aplenty for us humans, it must wreak utter havoc with Web crawlers trying to access the site. They can't actually read the submission page because from their perspective, there isn't one. That means any text associated with the image — comments, description, even the title — doesn't get indexed. So if someone happened to remember the title of a picture and tried to do an image search, what they'd get 90% of the time isn't DeviantArt, but some repost on iFunny or whatever Cheezburger site has popped up to milk the fandom du jour. Sites whose entire business model is stolen content and which, legally, shouldn't even be allowed to exist. They don't even have to resort to sleazy search-engine manipulation tactics; DeviantArt is losing to them by forfeit.
Anyway, I don't usually resort to this, but if you too are angry about this, favorite this journal and link to it in your own to spread the word, because maybe, maybe, there's still someone on the technical staff who has a clue what they're doing and legitimately doesn't know about this problem, and maybe if we wish really really hard, they'll come across this journal and do something about it.
See, somewhere along the line, some brain genius decided to rewrite the entire site so that submission pages are generated entirely using AJAX. Why? I'm sure there's some weird technical rationalization like it shaves off 2% off the server load or something. But what it does is ensure that you're never actually visiting username.deviantart.com/art/Insert-Title-Here-1234567; you're visiting the artist's homepage. If it even is the artist, and not some other user entirely who you happened to click on "related images" from about seven pages ago, because the JavaScript hack they use to fake-rewrite the URL bar's contents doesn't even work correctly half the time (and don't even get me started on ever trying to use the Back button with this site).
While this can cause frustration aplenty for us humans, it must wreak utter havoc with Web crawlers trying to access the site. They can't actually read the submission page because from their perspective, there isn't one. That means any text associated with the image — comments, description, even the title — doesn't get indexed. So if someone happened to remember the title of a picture and tried to do an image search, what they'd get 90% of the time isn't DeviantArt, but some repost on iFunny or whatever Cheezburger site has popped up to milk the fandom du jour. Sites whose entire business model is stolen content and which, legally, shouldn't even be allowed to exist. They don't even have to resort to sleazy search-engine manipulation tactics; DeviantArt is losing to them by forfeit.
Anyway, I don't usually resort to this, but if you too are angry about this, favorite this journal and link to it in your own to spread the word, because maybe, maybe, there's still someone on the technical staff who has a clue what they're doing and legitimately doesn't know about this problem, and maybe if we wish really really hard, they'll come across this journal and do something about it.
Is there a tool that can do this?
You know how there are programs that you can use to pose CGI people models for reference? Are there any that let you paint onto them? I've been thinking it would be handy for keeping the fur patterns on some of my characters consistent from one shot to the next as the camera angle and pose changes.
PSA: This site no longer cares about you.
So, after concluding after my last journal that the site has, indeed, been retoactively re-compressing all JPEG-formatted images for God knows what reason, I decided to look for ways to get in touch with the staff about it.
There aren't any.
Their entire help desk/support system has been completely wiped, and replaced with some third party garbage that directs all complaints to a "contact us" link that, when clicked, just crashes the tab. I know this site has been going downhill with its support for years now, but the Wix buyout seems to be the point where they just fired everyone and put up a brick wall between the users and the few humans
DA re-compressing files?
Has anyone else had this happen? I was looking at one of my recent pictures, and discovered that the version that shows up on the deviation page is way more artifacted than the copy on my computer. If I click the Download button I get the way it's supposed to look. It's not scaling it down or anything, so why would it be converting it to a smaller file?
Is DA going out of business?
Lately I've noticed that a lot of thumbnails won't load anymore, almost as if the servers they're hosted on have stopped working and never been replaced. It's really weird that a site this big and this... significant? ...would be letting something like that happen, and weirder that I haven't heard anyone else talking about it. But it's been like this for months now, and with the recent news that Twitter is struggling to stay in business and has shut down Vine as a cost-cutting measure, it's a possibility worth considering.
I've long thought that we're in for a second dot-com bubble burst one of these days, with so much of the Internet relyin
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I have long noticed that TinEye is a mess, but I did not know the reason.