About
About Fanart Central
Fanart Central is an online art community which allows artists to exhibit their works, as well as discuss the works of other artists through comments and forums. Commonly abbreviated by its members as FAC, the site is designed to accommodate fanart; however, original art by its members is also welcome.
Fanart Central was originally conceived as a fanart site for a South Park fan community in the year 2001, and was initially named "SP Fanart", founded by "Cstdenis", the actual webmaster of the site. Shortly later, as the particular fan community dispersed, the site's theme was changed to general fanart, and its name changed to "Fanart Central". Fanart Central registered its domain name on January 18, 2004 and has been running since then.
On March 25th 2006, the site registered one million page views, 5.4 million hits and 25,000 visits, a record for the site's activity. Not long after also got its 50,000th member.
Intended as a public fanart gallery, Fanart Central has several categories, each organized by the source or series on which its fanart is based, including sections for anime, manga, cartoons, movies, video games, and many others. For original art, there are additional categories for themes such as fantasy art and furries. There is also a section for miscellaneous original art, as well as original art tutorials created by FAC members.
Approval Panel
Because of problems with users uploading copyrighted content (such as official artwork or screenshots), as well as adult content not appropriately labelled and warned as such, starting in February, 2004, Fanart Central required that all user submissions to the site be prescreened by site staff before being made available for public viewing. This task was assigned to a group of members and labelled as the "Approval Panel" , or AP. This prescreening process caused a delay between when a picture is submitted and when it is made available for viewing (estimated at an average of eight hours). More recently, this has been laxed allowing members who consistantly submit approprate content to bypass this per-approval system.
Quality Control
In addition to its prescreening process by the site AP, Fanart Central also institutes a limit of three submissions per day, as a measure to encourage users to voluntarily decide which of their art they wish to select for exhibition in their FAC user gallery. Some minimal quality limits were also put in place banning lined paper drawings and things like scribbles
Forums
Online forums have been a part of Fanart Central's design from its inception, as a channel for open discussion among its members. The forums encompass a variety of themes including suggestions for site improvement and bug reports, artistic discussion, current events, and entertainment; as well as community events such as user-run art contests, requests for drawings by other artists, and also role-playing.
Financial Support
FAC is financially supported by advertising through the ad views and clicks of visitors. In some cases, such as Amazon, FAC receives a percentage of sales generated through it.
If you are interested in advertising on FAC email advertising@fanart-central.net.
As a general public gallery, Fanart Central accepts a wide variety of content, provided that the artwork is an original creation by the artist submitting it. This also includes artwork expressing some adult themes. Such content is allowed only under the condition that the user appropriately rates and labels it as being potentially offensive to the viewer. Registered users can choose in their profile setting the level at which content is blocked (doesn't appear listed at all) or is hidden behind a special "Offensive Image" thumbnail. The rating system is a level (none, low, moderate, high) assigned to each of the rating categories (violence, nudity, sexual content, spoiler, racism, profanity). In addition, the ratings of yaoi/shounen ai, or yuri/shoujo ai exist to warn people who may be offended that there is gay or lesbien content. It is the submitter's responsibility to assign appropriate content advisories to each submission; neglecting to do so constitutes a violation of FAC's content policy, and will result in the submission being removed by site staff.
As of July 18th 2006, FAC no longer excepts material that is of a sexually explicit nature (sexual content rating of high). This is defined in the rules as including, but not limited to "depictions of erections, foreplay, orgasms, intercourse, also objects or fluids involved with either"