Thank you to for the inspiration/template for this masterlist post!

There have been many, many discussions about how to improve the CW submission system and open up the CW community over the years, in various locations around site. I've done my best to compile some of the more constructive ideas here and I'm soliciting more brainstorming for improvement while I'm at it. Many of the active members of the CW community have tried to making the process of commissioning/creating CWs, buying CWs, and selling CWs as straightforward as possible, and we have tried to be engaging/stimulating to the site as a whole, but there is only so much that individual users can do. There has been a lot of feedback about how confusing and difficult to engage with the CW system is, and we are the point of needing staff intervention - so most of these suggestions will be geared toward policy and/or programming changes.

I will do my best to consolidate suggestions and link them in the masterpost! If you have a suggestion that has already been discussed publicly elsewhere on site, you can post a link and I will list it too. You are also welcome to smail me suggestions if you feel too shy to post here. Note: Not all of these are my personal suggestions, but ones I've collected from various threads/users, therefore some may conflict.

[box=#ccccff]Pricing[/box]

⭐ Lower Submission Prices - DONE Either in general, or as part of a re-categorization effort (see Submission Process section below).

⭐ Discounted Skintone-only Recolors - Read More by Encourage inclusivity by reducing the price of body mod recolors when the only change is to the visible skin/base color (hands, etc).

⭐ Lower the Direct-to-Shop Price - Read More by - DONE Encourages users to utilize their Cash Shop shops more.

⭐ Create a coupon item for CW Shops Encourage users to buy from user shops by making a coupon or discount item available, as a rare prize, bathhouse gift, etc. -A Custom Wearable Voucher for use in CW Shops is now included in some tiers of the new Subscription system

⭐ More sales beyond Black Friday Spread the wealth throughout the year by hosting occasional short sales for CW Shops.

⭐ Reduce Recolor Submission Cost Reward returning submitters by discounting recolors somewhat. Could also be a GA perk.

[box=#ccccff]Information & Resources[/box]

⭐ Provide Bases for All Skintones - Read More by Only base 1 avatars are provided for CW artists, currently.

⭐ [S]CW database - In the Works! Read More by [/s] - DONE Similar to the Item Directory, listing useful information such as: Submitter, Artist, Number of Copies Submitted, Number of Recolors, and Retirement Status. All of this information should be available for CWs submitted within the last few years, and earlier CWs at least have Submitter and Number of Copies Submitted.

⭐ Add CWs to the Newbie Tutorial and FAQ - Read More New users should know about the basics of the Cash Shop and CWs from the very beginning, instead of having to muddle around later and possibly be turned off by the confusing entry point.

⭐ Update Official Information & Threads - IN PROGRESS Outdated information here and here is confusing. Having some kind of centralized information hub outside of the forums would be more ideal.

[box=#ccccff]Increase Site-Wide Engagement[/box]

⭐ Refer to CWs on the Home/Sign-Up Page - Read More by & The ability to draw or commission your own custom wardrobe is a huge selling point for the site.

⭐ CW Raffle - Read More by Use a small amount of CSC to buy a raffle ticket for a chance to win a CW of the day (sourced from the Pawn Shop?), similar the Potion Raffle.

⭐ Remove the CSC payment requirement for commissions/creative sales. - Read More by This requirement is outdated and turns talent away from the commission market that might be able to contribute to advancing and diversifying the creative markets, including writers, coders, artists, etc, which in turn would drive more buyers and more CSC sales.

⭐ CW Area on the Map - Read More CWs are currently hidden on the Cash Shop drop down, or in a convoluted set of forums. Create a centralized area for CWs shops, information hubs like the CW database, submission area, etc, the same as any other section of subeta, integrating CWs into the site lore so that users can be exposed to them regularly and early.

⭐ Allow users to submit to a Community CW Shop with unlimited copies. Read More by , Read More by Open Community Shop submissions seasonally, for events, special contests, etc. The community shop would be an easy way for users to become familiar with CWs and the artists that create them, especially if credit is listed for the submitting user for each CW accepted into the community shop. If the community shop is open for submissions outside of special events/contests, lower the cost of submission compared to regular CW submissions in exchange for the the submitter losing control/future profits.

⭐ Add a new Custom Wearables subforum for CW Suggestions. Similar in idea to this thread, this subforum would be specifically for user designs, ideas, and suggestions to potentially be picked up by CW artists.

⭐ Use the above subforum as an idea pool for some Community Shop events. Engage users who can't directly contribute via art by hosting staff-moderated suggestion threads within the CW Suggestions forum and allow CW artists to "claim" ideas to be submitted. If that CW is accepted to the Community Shop/event shop, the item will be credited as "art by User 1," "concept by User 2" and BOTH users will receive a copy of the item.

⭐ Crowdsource items from CW Artists - Read More by Create a call-to-action for user submissions for needed art, similar to the the contest for 2019 Masquerade.

⭐ Allow CI-only custom items - Read More by Basically, these would be TC fodder and while they might resemble food, potions, etc, they would not be usable items.

[box=#ccccff]Item Availability[/box] ⭐ Allow sold out or old CWs to come back after X amount of time. - Read More by Allow items to be un-retired into a CW shop after a set period of time, where it will remain unlimited after that.

⭐ Force newly submitted CWs to have a minimum number of public copies. - Read More by In conjunction with a buying cap to prevent one user from sniping all the public copies.

⭐ Revoke Batch Limits Rule - Read More by If an item is in high demand, allow the releaser to submit additional batches of an item or its recolors beyond what they original advertised.

[box=#ccccff]Submission Process and Slotting[/box]

⭐ Auto-fill Info for Recolors - Read More by If a new submission is indicated as a recolor, autofill the previously used settings like layer and item type into the submission form.

⭐ Make Resubmission Easier After Denials - Read More by - DONE Preserve submission details/slots for submitted CWs, allowing users to simply upload a new overlay and/or CI after a denial.

⭐ Make Skintone-Showing Bodymods Transformable - Read More by Instead of having to slot and pay for ~10 different skintone recolors for body mods that show skin, submit multiple skintone colors at once and receive a final item that is transformable to the skin color of choice.

⭐ Recategorize submissions based on size. For example, a ponytail extension should not cost the same as a floor-length wig to submit.

⭐ Step by Step Guide for Submission Process. - read more by -The submission process has now been greatly simplified! Clarify the submission process itself, how to use user shops, difference between batches/DTS etc.

[box=#ccccff]CW Shops[/box]

⭐ Better "Manage Shop" Organization Filter the way the page is sorted with options like By Name, by Layer, Date Submitted, Category, etc.

⭐ CW Feed Page Organization - Read More by Allow for filtering options like Recently Added (current), Shops You Follow, Random, or Filter by Layer. Random helps promote older shops/items, and Filter By Layer helps promote a Pawn Shop-like method for shopping that users may not realize they can access in the CW Shop search function. Adding pagination would allow users to browse more than just the most recent additions, too.

⭐ Move Browse/Search Options to Main Feed Page - DONE Remove the extra step for browsing to make using the CW shops easier/more transparent.

⭐ Add "or Leave Blank" text in Search Box Right now, it isn't obvious that you can leave the Search Term section blank when searching in order to see all items in a specific layer.

⭐ Remove Locked Items From Shop Search Remove locked items in CW Shops from the regular shop search, or create a search filter for excluding locked items similar to the CW Shop Search function.

⭐ Toggleable Locked Items in Shop Search - Read More by Instead of removing all locked CWs from the user shop search, allow shop owners to toggle whether or not individual locked items show up.

⭐ Add Approval Date to Database Info - Read More by . Make the approval date for a CW accessible information, and allow users to use this info within the database search.

⭐ Filter CWs by Price - Read more by . Add a filter by min/max price option to the CW shops search.

Thanks for the ping buddy! <3

Ooh these are some good ideas! I esp like the CI only one, I hadn't though of something so clever! As a person who is big on TC CWS, I would love this!

Thanks for the ping !

also holy crap can we please not have to only look at shops we follow any more? I used to discover new releasers through the feed and I miss that.

- I do think people should be allowed to make some items that are really genuinely private in case they are doing tributes to friends who have passed away, making a special gift to celebrate close friendships, or have other deeply personal reasons for not wanting to sell public copies, but I also think those items should be gifts, not sold through the shops. I respect all agreements that I make, but I also think more people should accept that you can't control what people do with things they paid money for and maybe it's not a great thing for your mental health to keep trying to.

Other than that I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, and while I'm not pinging Kylo because they're on hiatus rn, I think you'd probably like ours just as much.

I agree with I miss not being able to see all the new items in the shops. Only like what? 20 -pouts- and can only see who I follow... it's hard to keep up with them. Ping groups are great but I get flooded with them and still miss things that I want because I don't have time to go look at everything -sighs-

I realize this is a CW specific board, but I'd really appreciate if you at least put a note on the Mandatory CSC payment for artists about how this should be an across the board change. I am 100% not okay with being quoted as this only being made in favor of the CW market. It needs to apply to all creatives. (Artists; CW or not, Coders, and Writers.) If this rule only changed for the CW market, you can bet your behind that the other creatives on the site would not appreciate being excluded and it would just encourage other communities on the site to hate us as well. CWs in no way deserve this change more than anyone else, we're the youngest community here.

Are you two referring to the CW Shops Feed? I just took a look at it, and I see several users whose shops I don't follow. I am under the impression that it only shows the 24 most recent CWs in general.

I'll clarify that section according to your wishes.

I appreciate it, thank you!

well the feed is nice but when the cws were first up.you could go browse everyone's shop. Now its much harder to do so unless you subscribe to a user's shop. You can view the wardrobe but that doesn't tell you who released. Nor if its buyable. I know i am frustrated finding new things in the wardrobe that i like only to discover that what i found isn't for sale. So unless it was up in the last few things in the shop feed teres no way to browse. Plus there are times the item realeased never shows in the feed. I had an item like that. I told them of the glitch but it never was sorted. -shrugs-

Ohh I see. Well, since not everything is put up into CW user shops for sale, then you wouldn't be able to browse all new things there - but hopefully the new CW Database that is working on will make it easier to browse all customs that have been accepted and know who sold it. Until then, you can use the Search feature in the CW Shops to look at some things.

For instance, if you want to look at the Head layer for wigs, you can leave the search term field blank, choose Head under the layer drop box, then hit search, and you can see all wigs that are currently for sale in the CW user shops.

Yes and no.

There are users I do not follow on the "most recent wearables" feed, but there's a lot of stuff wrong with that feed starting with: if you follow that link, you only see the item you clicked on and not the rest of their shop. So that makes it kind of a terrible way to discover new releasers. Also, it makes it a poor way to discover all the cws that might interest you, because not all the stuff I want just came out.

You can get to the rest of their shop from there if you know how, but it's still kind of annoying.

But the old CW feed used to show you a random selection of user shops rather than most recent things approved, SO you could see releasers you didn't already know and get an idea of their shop generally. If the person had more than 4-5 cws in their shop you could see a random selection of what they had on offer, including older things. So you would see CWs you might not know about whether they just came out or not.

This is how I got into CWs and found the kind of releasers that interest me, because I'm not part of the "big sweater+short skirt or shorts+tights or socks+some kind of flat shoes" crowd, or the "put straps and crosses on everything and rip it up a bit, then add some kind of demon feature" crowd. (Which are the two groups of CW releases that seem to be most popular as of this Valentines Day 2020, but this hasn't always been true.)

Now, you just have the most recent releases plus a shops sidebar, and the shops sidebar ONLY contains users that you are already following rather than a wide variety of shops.

If you do not frequent the forums or spend a lot of time running random subeta lodge searches, the feed will not show you a variety of shops and types of items, including items that are not currently "the in thing" and allow you to find the shops you want to patronise--unless you just happen to be into whatever's the current rage, whether that's lolita, sloppy casual style, punk, demons, animal butts, or whatever.

I don't know that I would have got as much into CWs as I did without that feed because I started out in CWs literally just trying to find the kind of hairstyles and ears that would match my main OC and the kind of clothes they wear in my RPverse. Which I succeeded in doing, but wouldn't have with the current feed as it is.

I also think the current feed has likely resulted in a drop of sales of older items, because they're not being promoted any more. This is probably why more people are doing shop cleanouts and retiring more of their older items. If that had been the practise in 2017 when I joined I would probably have been much more frustrated than I was initially, because I don't think any of the CWs I bought when I first joined Subeta were new releases. I have gone through the NewCW threads as far back as I could and I own a lot of REALLY old items and I bought a fair number of them through the CW feed.

I hate seeing people retire items because I am so grateful that things up to 5 years old were still in some shops when I joined so I didn't have to wait for the pawnshop to get them. Most of the stuff I want is not actually private, but still hard to find because people don't get rid of it.

Okay, I'm going to update the CW Feed suggestion I have in the first post to reflect a desire to toggle/filter what you see in various ways, including a random function to help promote older items/shops that haven't submitted lately. Is there anything else you want me to add to the suggestions?

I love the idea of a community CW shop that is open for everyone (reminds me of the idea of a community SubQ makeup shop I had suggested). I personally think it should still be a CS shop thing, but at a lower cost to align with other CS items. Maybe a test run of it could be conducted over a couple of months, first can be a free-for-all theme, followed up with the next months theme ?

I feel like some of these wouldn't work though.

-Lowering the price of recolors has been shot down because it still costs money to pay the staff member even if it is a recolor.

-Unretiring items seems like a way to get around the batch limit rule, which brings me to...

-Batch limit rules were put into place because people were taking advantage of them. "There will be 10 copies ! ... Oh, I decided on more... And now more..." in order to gain more csc by making users believe they were getting a limited item. Similar to users selling "limited" items for jacked up prices, when there wasn't an actual limit. Sorry, sometimes we all suffer because others like to ruin things. Don't put a limit, or keep the limit to "this is only unlocked/buyable during x season, y event, randomly when I remember to unlock it, etc etc etc"

Given the degree of freedom of interpretation that staff are given when deciding what does and doesn't 'violate Community Guidelines'...

I see no reason why they should be allowed to warn and freeze people at their discretion, but not given the power to discern the difference between people who are actually scamming and people who just didn't think their item would ever be very popular.

A big tip, for instance, would be people who charge inflated prices for their new releases based on supposed rarity--or did that not actually happen? It would be very easy to make a rule against that sort of behaviour by putting an upward as well as a downward limit on cw prices and adopting a 'buyer beware' attitude toward this issue, exactly like they do by not choosing to try to enforce 'private'.

The batch limit rules hurt the site most of all. Subeta needs money to put into the site so they can fix everything and keep attracting new players. If the site goes under, every cent people have put into buying and releasing CWs, whether for love, 'rarity' or any other motivation, will be down the toilet forever. And by hurting new players, these rules also hurt the site's sustainability as well as its immediate cash flow.

Also I think if someone's primary reason for buying a CW is that they want to have things other people will want but not be able to have, that is not a motivation that the site or releasers should choose to reward.

I can't find it in my heart to feel sorry for anyone who got "stuck" with a great CW that just turned out not to be rare unless they were actually charged extra CSC for it on that basis, or who bought a CW they didn't actually love for *resale value*.

If you want to invest your money, put it in something you'll actually get real money back for.

(Final edit: I've always been very frank about not capping batches. But it stinks that this counts against me with some people, even though I don't believe it hurts releasers as much as some people say that it does, because I think I have done pretty well.)

hi buddy! I’ll reply when I’m home Sunday but thank you for putting up this thread together! ❤️

Oh goodness, I saw a similar argument when users were caught tracing art, one of which was fairly recent and admitted to tracing. But still people argued staff shouldn't have the power to ban them, but go off I guess.

Why force a limitation unless you know that is what you want ? Turning around and claiming "I didn't know this was going to be popular" is easily fixed with "releasing ten now, maybe more later." Literally that easy.

I get that you're newer and weren't here for a fuckton of drama or didn't fully pay attention to some of it, but yeah, there were enough users (and users complaining) pulling the "this is limited" only to sell more later for the rules to be put in place. Rules that the CW community wanted at the time because of said people. Hell, there's still drama about people selling CWs at a markup.

And another point that can easily be turned around: If someones concern is now "the site getting more money" and they're putting batch limits: That wasn't an actual concern to them. No one forces people to put batch limits. So why was it put there and who is actually at fault ? "The site is losing money" maybe, but blaming the site for something someone else did is... Manipulative. It's a misdirect. If the actual concern was there, they wouldn't have put the limit. Period.

There will always be users that only want things that are limited in some way, and the more limited the better. Blaming the site because users are putting limitations on their items, which is something that fuels the users wanting limited items only, is another misdirect. It is not the sites fault and blaming the site ignores the actual issue. Zero percent of me feels sorry for users that get "stuck" with items that aren't actually rare/limited. But the site is not at fault when a users makes a personal decision about their item to be limited down to a small amount in which the other "rare items only" buyer inevitably buys.

If it's a concern to someone that more might sell, don't say only x amount will be released. It's not hard.

Tracing art is plagiarism; I think that's a completely different issue. It's illegal. The person whose art you stole has a legitimate claim against the site if that's permitted. You're making money off someone else's art who wasn't consented about it.

I get that I wasn't here for the big drama, but I don't think my opinion would be any different if I had been, unless the releasers in question were actually charging higher prices for the items that they said were going to be "only X number of copies".

If someone paid 1000 CSC for an item that would normally cost 700 CSC because there were only going to be X number of copies released, then I would consider that scamming, because the releaser used a lie to steal 300 CSC from the buyers. Is that what happened?

Unless that happened, I don't care. If people paid 700 CSC for a CW that would normally cost 700 CSC and they got a CW that costs 700 CSC, they have nothing to complain about unless they were speculating.

When Angelic Pretty re-released the Cat's Tea Party dress, which was a very expensive limited edition, nobody was allowed to sue them for that. A lot of speculators boo-hoo-hooed. But I own that dress and I was relieved, because I bought it out of love for the art on it, and people finally stopped trying to buy it right off my back at events for insane prices. (I told one girl that I planned to be buried in it when she wouldn't shut up.) The people who bought the dress because they wanted the dress were not unhappy, only the people who bought it to make other people pay twice what they paid.

I know that the site made the rule based on requests from users. I just happen to think that it was a really terrible business decision. They should've said 'caveat emptor' and maybe simply disallowed announcing batch limits period rather than requiring people to live with bad decisions forever.

A lot of people who are new release items and cap them because they think that's what everyone does so they should do it too and they don't expect the items to sell well. Plus, people tell you all the time that nobody will slot on your items if you don't announce a cap and I'm here to say that's not true because I never have.

I was really glad that Kylo told me that there is no extra charge to submit unlimited and that there is no requirement to cap. People frequently think that they have to do what everyone else does. I know that there are several items and several series of items on the site that are limited numbers only because the releaser did not know they were not required to do these things when they started and that at least one of these releasers feels badly about people wanting their items and not being able to get them.

I understand that you don't care about this aspect of the situation, and that's your opinion, which you totally have the right to have. But you're not changing my mind about it by comparing it to plagiarism.

Plagiarism and art theft are not even remotely on the same level as disappointing speculators.

I probably do have other ideas but I need to see if anyone else has suggested them. :)

I would personally love if there was an easier way to browse the newer items. I don't buy CWs much, but it's the only I can 'keep up' with them since I don't go the near the CW forum. As it stands, I see the newest items on the feed since I don't follow any shops, but I have an itch to browse pages and pages of that and we just have the one page.

Like, I could waste hours just looking items purely from newest to oldest, just going from one page to the next. If I have to search with keywords or by layer, I lose interest and steam.

yeah i agree with avel. can we have more than one page of cws pls

People generally don't like being told to stop doing something they shouldn't be doing no matter what the situation is, so. Shrugs

The ones I am mainly thinking of were from a time where 600 was standard, and the worst ones were users that would sell/auction off "batch extras" from their "one batch only" that would always get them 1k+ per auction; when it turned out to be a full second batch. But even if I were just thinking of the users that sold for slot price (600/700) after claiming only 1-2 batches, that's still a scam. Stating there will only ever be X amount and deciding to produce and sell off more, in the instance of CWs, has been used to scam people out of money and the site took measures to stop it. It's cute you think something else. Doesn't change it.

I have not seen many people be confused (two, I've seen two) and assumed they have to place a cap. And even still, the amount of users placing caps to cause that confusion... Is not staffs fault. Once again, the site saying to not take advantage of people by misrepresenting your batch limits does not mean people have to put a cap. Meaning, users are deciding to put a limit on or retiring an item because they can and then get upset that they'd be in trouble for lying in order to make more coin.

Good solution: Don't put a cap. Make sure it's clear, again, that limitations aren't required. Bad solution: Abolish rules that were put into effect in order to stop users from taking advantage of and scamming other users.

Or maybe it should be changed so that all CW items are unlimited and public.

:

You might want to just consider the 'agree to disagree' option if you cannot address my points without calling me 'cute' for disagreeing with you about an ethical question.

As I said before (more than once), I have not set any batch limits regarding any of my items. I'm not proposing this because I want to fix any mistakes of my own.

You're talking down to me and very nearly implying there's something dishonest about my proposal because you dislike it. I'd like you to stop doing that.

I specifically said that if people were charging other players extra for items they were saying were rare, that was not okay. The auctions count. They should have been shut down and the csc returned to the players who were lied to. The people who held the auctions should have been penalised.

I still don't think that "enforce batch limits on everyone at all times, no exceptions" was a good way to solve that problem. I understand that this was a decision made in a crisis situation when people were demanding a specific solution, but I think that it was not well thought out. Sometimes people come up with bad solutions to real problems that need to be revisited. It's not good for the future of the site, in terms of cash flow and in terms of the satisfaction of people who join the site 5 years from now.

There is a tremendous amount of peer pressure regarding batch capping. People constantly say things like, "well, if you don't cap your batches, you won't get slotters". It's become a norm that people get really toxic about in discussions about how people should release CWs.

If people were out there actively combatting the misinformation I might feel differently, but I have been in so many conversations about "how to release things" where people do not even question the 'necessity' for batch limits and are quick to tell you how badly your slotting will go if you don't conform to the expectation.

Also you said,

"Or maybe it should be changed so that all CW items are unlimited and public."

You know.... :)

People on Subeta think of private releases as a right, but it's not that way on other sites, and people still make usermades.

I came here from Gaia, where all usermade items go straight to the cash shop. You get 10 copies to distribute as you will, and the other 100 or so are sold to whoever wants to buy them or placed as prizes in chance items. (You can make an item that is not put into the cash shop with only your creator copies...if you are willing to pay through the nose for that privilege. I think it's the equivalent of like $500-1000. I left Gaia because making regular usermades was costing me too much. My first thylacine was $350 and was put in a chance item.)

The people who run Gaia are moneygrubbing jerks. I do not want anything on this site to cost $350.

It is nice that you can affordably make private gifts and tributes on Subeta. I accept the existence of private items because people make tributes to their dead friends (human and/or animal), make stuff that belongs to their OCs or their private universes, and want to be able to give people special gifts on holidays.

But I also think that it's a privilege people often abuse here. If there's no good reason for an item to be private, why would you do that? And I don't think privates should be sold through slotting/DTS. Gift or trade only is how I would set that up if I made the rules.

I do think the owners of Subeta should put more emphasis on CWs as a potential source of profit and much less emphasis on CWs as a way for people to make cool stuff that's just for their friends. Maybe it started out that way, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way forever, especially not when the site seems to be falling apart right under us, active users are half what they once were, hosting costs money, and the fastest way for the site to raise money is open the CW pawnshop.

I absolutely am relatively new to all this, but in some respects I consider that a feature, not a bug.