Sta.sh
As 2008 comes to a close, join me in taking a walk down memory lane as we recall the deviantART community highlights from the past 12 months.
2008 was a whirlwind of a year with many new features and milestones in the community. We celebrated our 8th, birthday, saw the site move into v6, and embraced the long awaited new message centre. Moderation reporting got a whole lot sexier and we've automated the handling of trusted reports. Plus, dAmn got some much needed love, Search was updated with balanced exposure—and let's not forget the great dArama over the temporary color change! Fun times.
We also released SitBack, Collections, the Wallpaper App, dA iPhone interface, Mobile Message Centre, and are currently in the process of Beta Testing new profile pages. All this coinciding with the ongoing development of our hotly anticipated Groups system and Emoticon Dictionary. Phew!
We've held more contests than you can shake a mudkip at, including: Square Enix, Whirled, PiNKiTUDE, Mountain Dew, The Witcher, and The World Ends With You.
April saw our very first Earth Day event, which raised over $700 for charity. We also raised over $500 during our Art for AIDS Orphans event, which ran through our 8th birthday celebrations.
In September, we wiped away tears and bid lolly a fond farewell, as he moved on to new pastures. We also welcomed new faces, including $Qulastro and $hwetzler, Artist Relations was revamped and redefined into Community Relations with $Moonbeam13 taking up the Director role, and I, too, said goodbye to the Prints team and moved into the newly created Community Operations Department.
During 2008, a total number of 39,819,949 new deviations were submitted and 2,886,913 new deviant accounts were added to our wonderful community.
Help Desk
Our Help Desk team handled a total of 82,404 tickets. In November, the team merged with Retail Customer Service in order to begin providing a more streamlined approach to providing help within the community. This will continue into 2009 as we aim to provide an enhanced level of customer service and support.
CEA Team
This year, CEA saw positive changes toward bringing more transparency to the deviation reporting process. The reporting tools themselves were redesigned to be more versatile and easy to use by the community, as well as having the ability to provide reporters with a follow up memo concerning the outcome when their report is reviewed and handled by staff.
Overall, the new system provides the staff with better tools and information with which to respond to the community. Since launching the new system (around springtime), the community has submitted 368,870 reports.
In addition to the new reporting system, we began clarifying various guidelines involving mature content, the things we do and do not allow to be submitted into galleries, and advising what sort of behaviors we discourage from our member artists.
Late this year we saw the addition of $ShadowOrexia, a new staff member to the CEA department who will assist in improving our response times in the coming year.
All in all, 2008 was a year focused on improving transparency between the community and the CEA department of deviantART, allowing for a better flow of information between the two.
#devart, #help, and #MNAdmin
The MN@ team, HD staff, and regular #helpers were busy assisting people in #help this year: 12,618 deviants joined #help at least once for assistance!
The MN@ team assisted 5,038 deviants at least once in #MNAdmin. 61,762 deviants joined our official chatroom, #devart, at least once this year! And an astounding 6,968,553 lines of text were spoken in #devart!
Some of the best and most fun highlights from our dAmn network over the past year.
Featured Chats
Notable featured chats with Stuart Immonen, Susan McKivergan, and of course, the chat highlight of the year with Louis Markoya, who apprenticed with Salvador Dali! Many more featured chats are to come in 2009.
10,000 chat quotes!
The Chat Network's very own quote database dAmnIt became quite popular in 2008 and tallied up more than 10,000 quotes! You can always read the best of the best in the latest edition of LOL Corner!
Everyone had tons of fun trying to appease the Fella God by luring and trapping new deviants into the great village of dAmn as part of the #dATribes Contest. Over 4000 deviants were a part of the game and I know the MN@ team was extremely proud to be able to bring this event to you. In the end, the Bakongo Tribe was the largest tribe and hundreds of deviantDOLLARS were given out in prizes!
The #dATribes Contest quickly became viral and spread through the site like wildfire. Deviants were creating their own Tribal Chatrooms to discuss strategy and stamps and emoticons were created to show tribe loyality! (And who can forget the Ashanti Tribal Bible! LOL.)
Halloween brought similar fun with #dAMonsters. This time the contest was to bite as many people as you could and turn them into monsters!
There are so many things I think about when I reflect on the past year, but there are three specific things that resonate and wrap up the overall feeling of 2008 for me.
The first was $chix0r coming on board as Director of Community Operations. She stepped into a highly public and difficult role almost seamlessly, as though it were custom-fit for her, and she's worked tirelessly to increase communication and transparency within the community. It's a pleasure and an honor to work alongside her on a daily basis and I know the community is benefiting from her presence.
The second was $spyed publishing dARama ISSUE ONE - Love. I've been lucky enough to witness this side of $spyed on a daily basis and having him share his passion so openly, honestly, and with so much love, served to inspire a community to do the same. The wave created was epic and I look forward to Issue Two.
The third was Groups development. For just over a week, I was living with an incredibly talented and brilliant group of people and together we created something I'm proud to be associated with. The Gruser team became family that week.
It's also a pleasure to work with an extremely dedicated and talented group of volunteers, who amaze me daily and I look forward to everything 2009 is going to bring! 
This year saw Film's 1st birthday and $FallenRox moving into the Managers chair. We also saw the the addition of the video tutorial category, which is already proving to be THE way to learn artistic technique.
The latest news on video resources! Browse video resources!Some interesting film facts for 2008!:
- July 28th, 2008 there were 2,593 deviations in film.
- Our total number of film privileged deviants in July 2008 was 1509, with over 400 new applicants in the month of July alone.
- In 8 months (from November to July), there was an 80% increase in film submissions.
- Today, December 28th 2008, there are 4413 deviations in film and this number doesn't include the newly launched video tutorial resources!
- Today, we are proud to say that by word of mouth on dA alone, we now stand at 2148 deviants submitting film.
The one thing that makes deviantART such an inspirational place is our unique community. Millions of deviants from across the globe come together everyday to share art, forge friendships, and build networks with other artists and art enthusiasts. We'd like to give thanks and show appreciation to those that shine, and over the past year we've awarded seniority to a number of individuals in recognition of their community excellence.
You can read more about these individuals in the September and December Announcements.
We also granted the following people with the Deviousness Award.
A huge community cheer to the following for astounding achievement in 2008!
Everyone in the devious Technology department!
$trowlandson for his hard work in bringing the Fine Art Prints to our Shop. (Bonus points for giving it such a deviant acronym. FAP, FAP, FAP!)
$Heidi for being the recipient of the Bolt Award and making us all squeeze our balls. (Zing!)
`insaneone for always being a role model within the community, in particular with his efforts at producing the =deviantarttimes newsletters.
The Volunteer MN@ and Gallery Moderators who raise the standards of community spirits to epic heights.
A word from $spyed on his personal highlight of 2008.
"Definitely watching Danie throw Fellas at a crowd of people at Anime Expo, who were so excited they were nearly trampling each other over a plushie, in front of our brand new deviantART booth that everyone was loving. Great times."
A massive THANK YOU to you—the deviantART community—for making 2008 a great success. On behalf of everyone here at deviantART, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all the very best for 2009.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!! 
i love it