TLDR; Jumping from a bigger ship to a more specialised one may be the best way to go.

It’s been a few months since I announced to the handful of my DA watchers that I’d be quitting the platform.

The “why?”

This decision was not taken lightly as I have paid the costs of learning the platform and was starting to see some promising results. As I’ve outlined however, I felt betrayed by the company and could not proceed with the previous level of trust and confidence.

Initially I wanted to move within a month or so, although I didn’t had a strict deadline. The situation seemed too fresh. When I finally decided to move, other things kept cropping up.

Today however, I’ve managed to finish the job. It took about a week and required a bunch of work, that was far from creative.

The “how”?

Goldilocks zone of drudgery

The amount of work I had to do fell smack dab in the middle between “little annoyance” and “big enough to automate” (couple dozens of submissions). So, no brilliant scripting this time, sorry.

What do you do, when you can’t/should not automate, but still have a chunk of work to do? You use templates.

I’d copy the contents of my submission to a text file and put it next to the image file. Both would sit in a folder. Every folder would be named after the submission date on deviantart with the image’s filename appended. I use dashes - universally instead of spaces everywhere on my system.

It looked like this:

. 
├── 2020-01-01-piece-1 
│   ├── piece-1.png
│   └── description
├── 2020-02-02-piece-2 
│   ├── piece-2.png
│   └── description

I would then take the batch of files and copy-paste to Furaffinity and Weasyl in chronological order. First piece-1 to both sites, then piece-2 to both and so on. Every now and then I’d post an update to my Twitter.

Things noted

• Furaffinity needs to do away with that multi-stage upload¹;
• Furaffinity would benefit from an open API;
• Fighting reCAPTCHA on Furaffinity took way more time than I anticipated²;
• Weasyl has an API, but where’s the documentation?³;

The results

According to my stats on deviantart, I’ve been with the site for 2 years. The last half of the year was dormant. Also the quality of my submissions was initially even worse than it is now.

Even with those things in mind, it’s interesting to see how much traction I’ve noticed on FA and Weasyl versus what was going on at DA.

Better numbers are just one thing, not the most important. I’m seeing some great conversations and interactions with users who enjoy my uploads. Best of all, I’m getting constructive criticism and feedback on Caesar ❤️. Oh, and on Weasyl and Furaffinity I have my username the way I wanted. On DA it was already taken, hence devious-td instead of tangodelta.

And this leads me to my new project that I’m working on right now. I can’t wait for it to be completed 😁 so I can share more details.

Stay fluffy!