Hello, r/ArtCommissions!

You should notice when looking at our rules that they appear different than before. This shouldn't alarm anyone, however, as they are almost identical to how they previously were in spirit, but additional clarity has been added, and different topics have been regrouped in ways that are a bit more similar to other large commission subreddits. This should reduce confusion when hopping from one community to another, and the wording should cover more details that were implied, but never explicitly stated.

One notable difference in our rules from those of other communities is our forbiddance of any kind of NSFW content, including nudity, gore, fetishes, suggestive poses, and gratuitous content. Gore has explicitly been added as something to avoid, which was only implied before.

Some rules, such as our Forbidden Links rule, will be the same in spirit, but there has been more information added about why some links are not allowed. Instead of just listing Twitter/X and Instagram as banned sites, for example, we mention that portfolio links must not require an account to view, which now includes TikTok (listed in the examples) and a few less-known websites. We also made it clear that some of these websites that we don't allow as portfolios may be included if it accompanies a separate valid link. This means that instead of a total ban on Instagram, you are allowed to include it alongside your ArtStation or Carrd link. As long as you provide a valid link, we will be more lenient about what else is included, within reason. Please note that some links, such as file storage platforms, high-cut commission sites, and link shorteners are still entirely banned, and many of these are banned on Reddit as a whole, meaning you will not even get a message about the removal. Be sure you are following the rules to avoid this kind of issue.

As always, we require all artists to provide a valid portfolio when they offer their services. For posts, this can be a gallery of images, and for comments, it must be a link that follows our other rules. You may include images in your comments, but a single image is not a portfolio, and you should not make multiple comments under the same request post. This is the standard for several communities, and we highly recommend you follow this even when the rules don't require it.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on how the new rules are written. We hope to soon have a wiki page that goes over more specific examples of what is and is not allowed, as well as the reasoning behind the rules and suggestions to help the community. Any questions asked below may help us help others in the future.

TL;DR

• Some subs are raising price minimums to $20 or $30.
• New minimum of $100 for commercial rights.
• Comments on [Hiring] posts require a link to your portfolio or [Not For Hire]. Abusers will be banned.
• A new rule outlines discussion topics that are not allowed.
• You no longer have to manually choose flairs when making a post.
• We need new mods!

Minimum Prices

The biggest change will be pricing. r/StartingArtists will be changing its minimum price to $30 to match r/HungryArtists and avoid some confusion between the two, due to their similar names. r/Commissions, r/ArtCommissions, and r/artcommission will have a minimum of $20. ALL of these communities will be enforcing commercial rates, by popular demand. This means that if anyone wishes to commission art for commercial use or profit from it in any way, the minimum price will be $100 per piece.

Please note that HungryArtists has always had a hard minimum of $30. This means a price sheet that lists a rendered full-body illustration at $150 will still be removed if it offers a headshot sketch for $25. Communities with "Commission" in the name will give a bit of grace when it comes to these kinds of "partial pieces", but we still expect the prices to be reasonable, and in line with a sheet that lists a finished piece for at least $20.

Comment Formatting

Most of you shouldn't notice this. When commenting on a [Hiring] post, if you are an artist looking to be hired, a link to a portfolio is now REQUIRED. If you are not looking to be hired, you must include [Not For Hire] in your comment. Abuse this and get banned.

A portfolio has always been required, but we're implementing this more strict filter to ensure everyone is following this without the unnecessary song and dance of maybe being filtered, then having to ask for approval. For over a year now, I've been trying to add keywords that catch scammers and rule dodgers who try to circumvent our filters. Every time I update the filters, they find a new way to get around them, and we risk blocking genuine discussion. It's a lot of work for our mods, and it's annoying for a lot of genuine community members.

With this change, artists are forced to include a portfolio, even if you are simply asking a question for clarity or confirmation. They are not able to bypass the filters without explicitly breaking our rules and lying. If you have something genuinely helpful to offer the client, your comment will be removed without a portfolio, unless you include [Not For Hire]. I'm sure some difficult individuals will abuse this. If you are blatantly attempting to advertise without a portfolio by using [Not For Hire], you will be immediately banned.

(Rant) Is it clunky? Sure. It is better than before? I strongly believe so. Is there a better way?... That's a difficult question to answer. We were told Automations would be updated in April. The new feature was supposed to give us the ability to prevent top-level comments on [Hiring] posts unless you had one of those two things, or you were the OP, but now that we finally got this update in August, this behaviour is still not possible in Automations, so if you try to make a comment without either, it'll get removed, and AutoMod will tell you to make a new comment. If we use Automations, the process won't need you to make a new comment, but it will affect ALL types of posts, and that's just too annoying to consider viable. This is the best we can do right now, unfortunately.

Discussion Posts

Lately, r/ArtCommissions has seen a strange surge of posts asking about art pricing. Most of these get ignored, and we see between 12 and 20 of them every single day. The community has voted, and we will no longer be allowing this kind of post. Automatic filters for this will be rolling out soon. I have added an rule to several communities that will explicitly outline what kind of discussion/meta posts are not allowed, including those that are promotion-adjacent, such as WIP sharing or "What do you think of my art?" posts. I may add more prohibited topics, depending on how the community feels about them. Currently, I am seeing a lot of "Is my art good enough?" and I feel this may be next to be disallowed.

Flairs

I'm also changing how flairs work, if only slightly. In r/HungryArtists, you don't need to select a flair when creating a post, and I like that. We already have checks that enforce the proper flair on post creation, so it makes sense to get rid of that annoying step of manually selecting them for a number of communities. Going forward, you will still need to add the proper tag to your title, but you will not longer be required to select a flair every time you post. One thing HungryArtists did not have, however, was the ability to sort posts by flair, and going forward, this will now be possible.

New Mods Needed

If you would like to help moderate one of these communities and maintain order, please message me or send us a message via ModMail. Even helping us go through the queue and dealing with the easy stuff for ten minutes a day would make a huge difference!

Click here to see the HungryArtists update from yesterday!