There are some big changes coming to custom wearables, and if you already have an item approved on-site, these changed may affect you directly! Please read the following information carefully!

We would like to thank you all for the incredible response to our new Custom Items feature. As a staff, we spent a lot of time on the back end of this project trying to decide how it could best suit our site and our users. We wanted to empower our users to contribute their creative energy and ideas to wearables, while still maintaining our high artistic standards that so many people love and appreciate about Subeta.

Therefore, we knew that the first few weeks of Custom Items would be a learning process for everyone. We love the way the Custom Wearables Forum has taken off and the help and advice users are offering each other for getting their items approved and improving their submissions. We love the idea of “shops” for your items and can’t wait to see that continue to develop as time goes on. And, we LOVE the quality and creativity of the vast majority of items that we approve for use on-site.

That being said, this process hasn’t been without its bumps in the road! Over the past few weeks, our staff has been working extremely hard on the back end of this project. We knew almost immediately that we needed to improve our standards for quality and guidelines for submission to make things easier on both the users submitting art, and the support staff who are approving or denying it. We want to make our standards as clear as possible for everyone involved, so that if we deny your item, you know exactly why, and exactly what you need to do to improve it and submit it again, should you choose to do so.

The largest point of discussion on this custom items project has been, by far, the accepting of artwork (items or wearable overlays) that depicts copyrighted material. Upon first launch, we honestly did not know how we wanted to handle “fandom” items or copyrighted artwork. We briefly considered allowing all submissions that met our standards of quality - original material or not - and then dealing with the consequences from copyright owners should they ask us to remove that material from our site. However, we learned pretty quickly that this was completely unfair to the users who paid for these items - how disappointing would it be if you logged in one day, and your fantastic custom item that you paid Cash Shop Credits for had just disappeared, or had been completely redrawn without your knowledge? Yes, it’s fun to accurately depict your favorite characters, movies, books, etc., but as our artists can tell you, it’s no fun seeing your hard work copied, traced, or used without your permission.

So, we decided that accepting copyrighted material is a road that we are going to choose not to go down. And yes, we realize we have not been perfect about this ourselves in the past, but we are going to take the time NOW to make the changes to set ourselves back on the right road for the future - the right road being that of original artwork, high standards for quality, and finding unique ways to pay tribute to our favorite “real life” items as opposed to simply copying them.

Blah, blah, blah, Carol - what does this mean for me? For most of you, it means taking some time to carefully read through the Rules and Guidelines for Custom Wearables. This page has been updated, and will always stay updated with the latest guidelines for your submissions. As of the writing of this announcement, this page has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb in order to give you most well-defined instructions we can offer. As always, you can feel free to ask for rule clarifications or help in the appropriate forum.

For very few of you, this means that the item that you submitted, while it may have been approved in the past, does not meet our newly set standards for quality or originality. We had some very long discussions about how to handle this. We didn’t want to simply delete the items from the site (that would create a giant mess) or refund the original submitter their CSC (as many of the items have changed hands several times by now), so we have come up with a solution that we hope will be acceptable for those of you who will be affected by this change. So, if your existing item is designated by our staff as an item that needs to be edited in order to reflect our newly set standards for quality or originality, the original submitter of the item will be contacted by a Subeta staff artist who will be redrawing the item for you in order to bring it up to standard. You will have the opportunity to give that artist a special request you may have about the redrawing of the item, and at that point, the item will be redrawn and changed in all instances on the site by January 7th, 2012.

This is a one-time only deal, and we’re only doing it because of these very special circumstances. We realized that not having enough definition to our rules and standards is our fault, we apologize for the inconsistencies, and we want to do what we can to make it right to those of you who may be affected. Going forward, our staff is going to be much better educated about what is acceptable, and what is not, and our goal is to be consistent with our approval process to make it easier on everyone.

Please use this thread to ask any questions you might have. If you have an approved custom item on site right now, please DO NOT create a ticket asking if your item is one of those set to be revamped. If it is, you will be contacted in a timely manner by our staff, and everyone else can assume their item is “up to par”. Again, this is a very limited number of items, which is why we are choosing to take these measures now as opposed to letting things get further out of control.

We really think that this solution, while not perfect, is the best thing to do for everyone involved. We sincerely thank you for sticking with us through all the changes (here and otherwise!), and please know that we are always looking to improve the site for you, because you’re what keeps us here!