The Artastic Forum

[web-ed]

Artastic9b.gif (2.99 KiB) Viewed 8568 times

Some of you are no doubt familiar with The Artastic Forum, which has some spanking material and which has been mentioned here occasionally. It was created by Jon (UASketcher) with the idea that Funbun would take over the day-to-day editorial and administrative responsibilities. However, Funbun did not have administrative access, and when Jon disappeared last spring, a number of us realized that Artastic was on autopilot and on borrowed time. New members could not even be activated.

In July, I took it upon myself to investigate what happened to Jon and to see if I could somehow save Artastic. Following his trail in Denver, I found out earlier this month that Jon had been in ill health and had passed away. I kept silent about this until Funbun could make the official announcement on Artastic, which he has now done.

It seemed to me the best way to save Artastic would be to convert it to phpBB (which is what powers this forum) and move it to one of my unused Data Bases at CSR, even though this would be a massive, difficult conversion and there was some material on Artastic that could not be displayed here.

All my efforts have so far been in vain. Right now, it appears that the Artastic gang may move over to Chross's board, but I am still trying to work with Artastic's web host to see if something can be worked out. I'm not even sure why I've labored so hard on this - it's not like I don't have my hands full here at CSR and many other problems besides - but I suppose I didn't want to see all the work and contributions that went into Artastic just disappear forever if there were something that I, as spanko and technophile, could do to save it.

Further notices will appear under this topic. For now, here is the text of the explanation to the members that I posted over on Artastic:

Thanks to Chross for offering to create a new sub-forum over on his board. I was going to suggest the same thing using my forum over on Chicago Spanking Review, but held off because I have been working for the past several months to find a way to save this forum as it is, even if it meant a difficult conversion to phpBB. I have the space and the unused Data Bases, but even though I had some information about what Jon's password was, I haven't been able to crack it.

Without Jon's password, I haven't been able to get to the critical tables (miniature data bases) for this forum, and without them no conversion is possible. I'm still trying to see if I can come to some sort of agreement with the site's host.

I've also been trying to save the artwork posted here. I understand there are some zip files, and if I can, I'll transfer their contents to CSR if I can't save this forum. I also sent a robot-program to probe and image all the files at underground-animations.com, the "parent" site for the Artastic Forum. It took over a day, but I retrieved more than 77,500 files(!), of which over 20,000 appear to be pictures. (I had no idea UA was so large). So far, though, none of them seem to be from the art that is posted here on the forum - I'm still not sure why. But I'll continue to go over about 1000 pictures per day until I get through them all.

In case anyone is wondering, the files (some of which pertain specifically to Artastic Forum) without the data bases are not enough for me to reconstruct Artastic elsewhere, which has been my goal.

Regarding the time factor, I believe we have at least until February 7, 2012, which is when the domain registration expires. However, the host could always yank it down sooner. I've asked them how long we're paid through, but they haven't responded yet.

If all my efforts to save this forum ultimately fail, as they have so far, at the very least I plan to put together a small memorial gallery of some of Jon's work at CSR.

R.I.P. Jon - we'll miss you.

[jimc]

i am glad you are trying to save artistac i wish you well with this extensive project. the trouble with artistac is that it had so many different types of art (animations, manipluations, furry, hentai, anime, etc) and since this is primarily a spanking forum i wonder if you can save it all. and as you have also said there will be many arists that cannot post on csr as their work involved children even though they were spanked by parents, etc. and there work was tastefully done. Anyway i hipe that you are able to find some spankings that you have not ever seen and are able to share them with us,
JIm

[hugob00m]

I was sad to read about the passing of Jion "uasketcher". I did not know him personally, but I exchanged a few email meassages with him and believe that he was a man of great integrity.

There are some spanking art pay-sites that feature only the work of the artist who runs the site, such as the one endart used to have. Most of the rest are just fencing stolen property. I've seen that they use my O.T. Katie cartoons as teasers, but none of them have ever asked me for permission, and I doubt that they've ever asked any of the other pirated artists either. Jon, on the other hand, did ask me if he could post my work on his Underground Animation pay-site. I agreed on the condition that I be given access to the site. He gave me a password that was good for a year, and we corresponded for a few months. Then he stopped responding to my emails... I suppose that must've been about the time he got sick.

Now I learn that he is no longer with us. I'm sure he will be missed by the spanking art community, and by the people who knew him.

[jesseray]

Only a few days ago I was enjoying the wealth of drawings on the Underground Artistic Forum...today the site appears to have been taken over by a generic advertising page..
Anyone know what has happened...or is my computer just having a bad day!

[web-ed]

I'm afraid it's not that your computer is having a bad day, Ray. As you can tell from the earlier posts I made (now that I moved your post over here), I knew for a long time that this day was coming, and it was discussed on Artastic itself as well. I even checked Artastic on the 7th, when Underground-Animation's domain registration expired, and then on the 10th, and it was still there. Briefly, what happened is that with Jon's passing, it was impossible to renew the "parent" site UA, and when it went, it took down the forum with it. I had tried to contact the web host, but they're not in the U.S. and may not have understood that I was willing to take over the site (with the financial support of one of Jon's friends).

I expended a great deal of time and effort to try to save Artastic, to be frank probably a lot more than I should have. How many articles and other webpages I could have created during those many hours we'll never know. My hope had been to convert Artastic to phpBB (which powers this forum) and move the whole thing over here to CSR. The technical problems were daunting - I would have had to undertake a massive data base conversion - but in the end what made it impossible was that I couldn't crack Jon's password, despite having some good clues as to what it might be, and without that I couldn't gain the necessary access to the Data Base tables that contained the forum. I'm speaking a little loosely here to avoid going into too many technical details. Another problem would have been some of the more violent and/or underage material at Artastic - some of its subforums would have had to be eliminated here at CSR because of my "no children" policy. That's not to imply that the teen-age spankings were all necessarily bad or encouraged child abuse or something, but I have good reasons for the policy and wasn't about to change it for the sake of keeping those particular subforums.

Chross set up a new forum for the Artastic folks, but I don't have its URL handy and I've never even looked at it. I'll have to now, since I should notify everybody there.

I saved about 100 of Artastic's spanking attachments, and we'll be seeing some of them on CSR eventually. By means of a robot I deployed to scour the site, I also have nearly 25,000 images taken from the parent site, UA. I will make these temporarily available as soon as I work out a few details. I will make another post here under this topic with details of how interested persons may download these images.

[web-ed]

O.K., first of all, here is the link to the special webpage [link deleted] which contains the links to the actual ZIP folders. Once you get there, click on the two hyperlinks to download the ZIP folders. Some points to bear in mind:

• These links are temporary. By March 1 at the latest (sooner if I run into bandwidth problems), I will remove the folders and the special webpage from CSR. I will alter this post to reflect that removal when that occurs.
• I did no "filtering" of these images other than to separate them as JPEG or GIF. There are a lot of non-spanking ones as well as images that were part of UA.com itself (decorations and even CAPTCHAs) that won't be of any interest to anyone. I did, however, browse through all 25,000 images(!) last October, and I have saved quite a few for future use on CSR. Though not yet posted, they have already been incorporated into my CSR source files, so I don't have an exact number nor a separate file available for downloading. Note that I only saved those that met CSR's usual editorial standards, which eliminated a lot of material. In other words, I only saved those drawings that were a) spanking-themed, b) had an adult spankee, c) were not under copyright as far as I could tell, and d) interesting.
• If you don't want to go through all the work of downloading, unpacking, and sorting, you can be patient and wait for me to post the ones I saved. Realistically, that's probably six months or more away because right now I'm occupied posting more important things like Comics and the ongoing Humorama Series.
• Artastic Forum attachments are not included, although of course there could be one or two items that existed in both places. I couldn't get these with my program, but I saved about 100 the hard way, and a few of them will also be posted eventually.

Why I'm only making these available temporarily: basically, I don't want the liabilities of all types involved with keeping this material permanently. Much of it, as noted above, is non-spanking, may be copyrighted, may involve minors, may be something I personally find repugnant, or may just be plain uninteresting. So I don't want it hanging around on my server forever - in fact, I'm even going to delete the files from my personal computer after March 1 (except for the ones I'm going to post on CSR), so get them now while you can.

[web-ed]

The Artastic Forum is gone . Because it dealt with adult art of all kinds and not just spanking, It had a lot of members and will be missed by many. Of course, being set up by Jon and presided over by Funbun, it had a lot of spanking art and I personally found many interesting items there, a few of which have made or will someday make their appearance here on CSR.

Here is the link to the subforum Chross created for former Artastic folks.

As I say, Artastic featured a very wide variety of content, and some people loved it for its "no rules" attitude. Of course tastes differ, but for me, even tolerance has its limits, and there were a lot of things on Artastic (none of them Funbun's fault, it should be noted) that I found truly repugnant. A lot of the items posted there simply wouldn't have made the cut here at CSR, and when I was in the middle of trying to save Artastic, sometimes I wondered where I was going to have to draw the line if I succeeded in moving it over here. I also wondered how I was going to draw the line, since there was so much material and it was so difficult to find without running down entire threads. (This, of course, is the big disadvantage of bulletin-board based images, the advantage being anyone can post so you wind up with a huge number of images, much more than one person could do by himself). I would probably have had to delete one or more subforums and remove some attachments from others. I would certainly have needed some more moderators (I had a couple of people volunteer for this) and Funbun to help with administration. Then there would have been all the administrative headaches of backing up, updating, and policing (if possible) a second board - sometimes I wondered what I was letting myself in for!

However, it was not to be. The Artastic Forum is gone forever, and while it will be missed, I think it's time to move on.

Farewell!

[daneldorado]

.
Web-ed, I want to thank you for all the effort you put into "saving" the Artastic files. While I do not possess even one-third of the tech savvy that you do, I understand enough about computers to know that what you attempted was a daunting task. Thanks again for trying.

You also wrote:

Of course tastes differ, but for me, even tolerance has its limits, and there were a lot of things on Artastic... that I found truly repugnant. A lot of the items posted there simply wouldn't have made the cut here at CSR, and when I was in the middle of trying to save Artastic, sometimes I wondered where I was going to have to draw the line if I succeeded in moving it over here.

I think you and I are on the same page with this. My own computer files contain hundreds of spanking pictures that I have downloaded from various sites on the Internet, but there would be THREE TIMES that many, if I didn't draw the line at pics that I found repulsive, and therefore did not download. In fact, there is even a popular artist whose art I have often lauded, but who is now in the midst of posting some truly offensive images; and of course I will not download these, nor even correspond with him while he continues to wallow in the gutter.

You said it yourself: "Tastes differ." Yes, they do. I was startled when a website I used to know and love began its move from inoffensive "naughty girl" images where we see a pretty girl being spanked over someone's knee... to pictures that are so vile and offensive, they belong in a triple XXX-rated movie. The owners of that site apparently feel that if you're into spanking, then you must necessarily also be into enemas, dildos, and "sixty-nine" sex positions. They are wrong, of course. But I guess there really ARE some folks into that stuff, for this site has changed its original model from innocuous spanking pictures to explicitly sexual ones.

Here at the Chicago Spanking Review, you say that one of your aims is to "present stimulating photos and drawings (including comic-book spankings, a special interest of ours), placing them in social/historical context where possible"... and THAT, sir, is one of your website's main attractions for me. I reason that if you concentrate on comic book spankings, you can avoid the more disgusting pictures that are out there. Yes, I know you sometimes post images that are gamier than comic book fare, but fortunately those are few and far between, on CSR.

Keep up the good work, Web-ed!

Cheers,
Dan

[web-ed]

Thanks, Dan - good to know you're with me! And I'm sure you'll be happy to hear I'm not planning any changes to CSR's standards. As was discussed in another topic, there may be some incidental "exposure" here, but there won't be any explicit sexual intercourse, enemas, dildos, "sixty-nine" sex positions, brutal violence, or other stuff so disgusting I don't even want to name it specifically. There are plenty of places for people to get that stuff if they want it, so I don't feel I'm depriving anyone by not providing it here.