Terms of Service

The following list contains some ground rules set up to ensure that our services are not abused and everyone enjoys being part of the community. The main purpose of this list is not to impose limitations on your ideas, but rather to ensure that you can express them without offending others and without being offended by others.

1. Age: You must be old enough to view drawn adult content. In most parts of the world, that means you must be 18 years old. Some areas however, require you to be at least 21 years old, while others in turn require you to be 16 years old.

   It is obviously impossible to check whether you are really old enough to visit this website. However, if we find out that you are underage and/or have lied about your date of birth in order to create an account, you will be asked to leave until you are old enough to return.

2. Content: The content you submit as an artist must be your own work. If we find out that you are submitting content that is not your own work, your account will be closed without warning and all your content will be deleted. Colorizations are accepted as long as the artist who created the work you colorized allows you to submit it. If you cannot get the original artist's permission for any reason, you are expected to least credit them in some way.

   You must label submissions containing content that might offend most people (extreme gore, lolicon, etc.). If you don't do it, we will ban you. Read this Helpdesk article for more information.

   If we find out that all of your submissions are simply modified tracings of another artist's work, your artist application will be denied or your artist status will be revoked. Tracings are a great way to learn how to draw, but what you are producing is something anyone with a still hand or skills in digital image manipulation (Photoshop, etc.) could also do.

3. Advertising: Artists are free to advertise their personal websites and any other galleries they may have, provided that the advertising is not overdone. Note that "spamming" — advertising a product or a service in a "bad faith" manner — is forbidden. What constitutes as "bad faith" is decided by our moderators and the community.

4. Interaction: You may not harass other members of this website in any way and your account will be closed immediately if it is properly brought to the attention of a moderator that you are harassing others. Be aware that harassment is not limited to words; submissions created purely to harass other members will also lead to your account being closed. Note that this restriction is limited to members of this website; although it is frowned upon, if you absolutely must, make fun of people on other websites as you please.

   Refer to the helpdesk for information on how to correctly report harassment.

5. Ownership: All submissions belong to the person who created and uploaded them. Likewise, all comments, forum posts, private messages, etc. belong to their original posters. Content submitted may not necessarily represent the opinion of our moderators and administrators. Moderators and administrators shall in no way be held liable for any type of content submitted.

6. Our Services: If we find out that you are abusing our services, we may — depending on the degree of the abuse — close your account without warning. Flooding, distribution of illegal content, exploiting the website software, or gaining unauthorized access to parts that are "off limits" are all examples of abuse. Please use your common sense: Don't do things you wouldn't want others to do if this were your website.

Artist Acceptance and Account Policy

1. You must actually be able to draw. Elementary school drawings, images colored using "MS Paint", poor pencil sketches, etc. do not qualify as being able to draw. We do not require you to be the next Michelangelo, but there is a certain margin you have to meet. If you do not meet our quality standards you are always welcome to reapply once you improve your drawing skills. Continiously trying to apply with the same bad artwork will only annoy us, so please actually improve first before trying again.

2. If you only draw fanart please don't bother applying for an artist account. hArtists is a community for original art. While you might be a great artist, if your creativity is so limited that you can only draw fanart, this is probably not the right community for you.

   If fanart is just something you draw on the side or as an occasional request, you don't need to worry; please go ahead and join.

3. We reserve the right to deny anyone's artist application for any reason or no reason as we see fit. At no time will we enter into any debate about drawing skills. If we say that a decision is final, it is.

4. We will revert artist accounts to "Art Appreciator" accounts (normal user accounts) if we find the account to be abandoned or unused. You can immediately regain your artist status if you decide to become more active again. Your artist status is not reverted to if you have art in your gallery.

This page was last revised on Monday, June 16, 2008.