Hello, Weasyl users. My name is Danny, and I hope we can get along swimmingly. I had an account on deviantART some time ago, but I had since grown out of touch with the site. And recent developments regarding the community and management there have sadly deterred me from becoming fully active there again. It was my friend arkenova from both dA and Tumblr that directed me to this site, and it looks very agreeable.

I went through my devART gallery this past week, collecting my descriptions of all my submitted artwork and making note of where each piece is located on my hard drive should I decide to re-upload any of them, which I probably will. It was quite a trip down memory lane, looking through my gallery like that. The problem is, it reminded me how deeply involved a was in a number of micro-communities and the occasional friendship circles within the dA environment. A fair percentage of my gallery is made up of pieces that are big parts of group galleries or personal group projects. Others are also gift art and trades that are very meaningful in their current context but lose that meaning when the context is taken away. I've got a number of pictures drawn for me in my fave collections under the same kind of context.

Naturally, this makes me a little hesitant to just delete my whole account. And yet, at the same time, there's those aforementioned "recent developments"--growing hostile environments here and there in the overall community and rampant art theft. It's recently come to my attention that the staff is of no help on the latter matter, and the official stance on such around that site now is apparently "art theft is just stealing a painting from a museum" or something like that. That makes me scared to leave my old gallery unattended.

So, I'm not sure what to do. If I terminate my dA account, that means a lot of lost meaning in both mine and other's works, lots of major pieces ripped out of group galleries, and plenty of broken links in numerous folks' deviation and journal pages. But if I just leave it all there, that also runs the risk of the site's growing unsavory side abusing my vulnerable works. I dunno, is there a third option I can take or something? Anyone have any suggestions?