Just a quick notice:

If you have any kind of issue, please contact a PJ moderator by PM. Do not use the report/contact feature, this is outdated and these messages will almost never be responded to.

You can find a list of active moderators on the About page, feel free to message anyone on that list except for Sedgemonkey. When in doubt, pick Gecimen.  

You can contact us for just about anything: Changing your PJ name, lost account access, issue with another member or a piece of art, questions, etc.

The current contact function is sadly being abused by spammers, and therefor we moderators can't keep up with all the messages.

We're looking forward to help you!

Apologies for the mystery server issues recently. We've added some logging/tracing to figure out what's going on. We'll keep you posted!

We were overly ambitious with the September deadline for a new PJ. Cutting a deal with current hosting company was really the only option to keep PJ from having to drastically cut essential features like the forum and weekly challenges. 

Progress IS being made on the new PJ. The structure of the system is pretty much finished and we should be at a point where we can start sharing peaks of the new setup by Christmas. Here's hoping!

We're trying to get submissions of pixel art working at the moment. Please bear with us.  

UPDATE: Permissions should allow it now.

We had to rush the server transfer unexpectedly. Please bear with us while we try and get all the issues ironed out. We KNOW we're missing some recent images and will be pushing those over soon.

Please report any issues you notice in this thread.

We finally have a date for the launch of the new Pixel Joint: September 30, 2019. Some features might be stripped down to start, but the site will be actively developed for the first time in years so any limitations should be temporary. 

After much discussion, the pixel art submission rules have officially been updated! You can read them at the top of the submission page. Should you have any questions about the interpretation of any of these rules, please contact one of us on your moderation team!

Anyone who has been a member here at Pixel Joint for some amount of time knows that our pixel art submission rules have not always been very clear. This has caused many misunderstandings over the years as to why certain pieces were admitted into the gallery while some other similar works were not, etc.

In an effort to reduce such problems in the future, your mod team has taken feedback received from the community over the last few months and have written an updated proposed set of rules and guidelines (call it version 2.0). Before these are made official, we wanted to share them with everyone to give you a chance to review and comment.

You can find the new proposed rules here.

We appreciate in advance any input you may have!

Please join us in congratulating our newest addition to the mod team, Irenaart, ISO collab superstar! Wish her luck and thank her for volunteering her time to help with the management of PixelJoint!

Irenaart

Survey will close on Tuesday 28th of November!

Hi all, as you might have already read, Sedgemonkey is working on a brand new PJ build.

Besides fixing all of the bugs and drastically improving uptime, this also gives the opportunity to rethink our values and our features and prepare pixeljoint for the next decade.

What do you think should PJ look like? What kinds of art should be in the gallery, and what kind of functionality should it feature?

To collect your answers on both of these questions we've created a small survey . Please help us and fill it out!

Please join us in congratulating our two latest additions to the mod team! Wish them luck and thank them for volunteering their time to help with the management of PixelJoint! (we really needed the extra hand)

Hapiel

JerryPie

Hey there good pixel artists. I wanted to take a moment to apologize for the lousy performance of the server the last few days. I attempted to switch us over to a new setup, but had to roll back to this clunker server due to our reliance on a long dead tech stack.

On a positive note... we have plans for a BRAND NEW build (the half-hearted work on PJ v3 isn't worth salvaging) starting October 22 when I export a DB schema for Benoit 'pyrometal' Durand to start work on a new forum. I will start work on the main site build weekends starting November 4th. 

Many thanks to Benoit, Daniel 'Hapiel' Simu and Gokce 'Gecimen' Cimen for pushing the new PJ forward!

After roughly 4 years of fiddling we're getting ready for a major site update....

• Fully responsive site...  phone, tablet and desktop should all function properly.
• MSSQL to MySQL conversion. This will have some transition issues with extended character set (characters like ü and ñ and ó might not convert properly). Apologies in advance to our members who will have their names and comments mangled a bit, but we don't want to hold off on this upgrade any longer. This will not be a problem going forward and it will always be possible to fix the rogue characters once the site has transitioned to MySQL.
• Optimizations including caching, script/style consolidation, (some) minification, image compression and web fonts.
• Design touchups. 
• Removal of unused sections. 

Testing should wrap up today or tomorrow and we'll be pushing site up soon after. The site will be fully offline for a couple hours at a time over the next few days and there will almost certainly be a few issues over the next week or so. Please bear with us.

Pixel Joint is in the process of converting from MSSQL to MySQL right now and we wanted to warn you that there might be a few hiccups including truncation of messages, comments and descriptions longer than 4000 characters. Fortunately, these long posts account for less than 1/10 of ONE percent of items so the vast majority of all content will be untouched. For those very few items that do get truncated we apologize in advance. 

Apologies for the errors and general slowness of Pixel Joint right now. We're overloaded with traffic (we occassionally get massive traffic spikes from a popular site linking to us) and all we can really do is wait it out.

We'll be upgrading to a much better server in the next couple of weeks so hopefully these spikes will be less of an issue.

Thanks for your patience!

ATTN: The threads for the Open Pixel Platformer have been moved into the brand new OPP subforum. 

~thank u~

So it appears the server is under control right now, but I'm going to check a few things out just in case. I was on a vacation where I was actually offline (can you believe it?) so you can holler at me for the inability to post the last couple of days. Pretty much the worst timing.

On a somewhat related note... PJ has a Facebook page (which feeds Twitter) and there will definitely be PJ mods besides me in there in the future in case this site seems unresponsive again.

Thanks for your patience and sincere apologies for the mess.

I know I said I had the submit pixel art functionality working earlier, but this time it reeeeeally should be working. I tested with a few of your test files (thanks for your help!) and they all come up sparkling now. Thanks for your patience peoples.

The transfer to the new server went smoothly and we're just tying up a few loose ends...  

• Submissions of pixel art are still being worked out right now, but they should be up soon.
• The weekly challenge will not switch over this week so people will have time to get things posted for this Sunday.

If you encounter any other issues please post them in comments here. Thanks for putting up with the hoo-ha!

We're working on figuring out what's causing the up and down issues with PJ right now. It seems to be isolated to this site alone as other sites on this server are still able to function. Please bear with us. 

Well, this is a bit embarassing. New members haven't been able to comment for the last couple weeks due to a CInt overflow bug. Apologies new PJ members. 

Pixel Joint was down from about 7:30AM to the end of the day on Tuesday. I'll set up a better notification system so future outages won't go unattended so long. Sorry about that folks.

Here is the first incremental update pushing towards v3. Please make sure to flush your browser cache since just there are several JS/CSS file changes for this update.

We're having some email issues right now so there might be a few server errors here and there. Hopefully they'll be resolved by tomorrow.

You asked, and PJ has responded: Here's a list of things the Pixel Joint site is going to correct and update, in the first incremental update.

Click the news article for exact details, folks!

So our massive PJ v3 approach was kind of a bust so we've decided to just go ahead and roll out updates incrementally. We've got quite a few nice improvements coming in the next couple of weeks and I'd like to pre-thank a few of the major design contributors ahead of time...

• pixelblink - for the PJ v3 designs that will have elements trickling in.
• [thUg] - for the awesome rank icons based on the icons Ensellitis first made.
• dumbo - for the perfect smiley set (61!) based on iSTVAN's PJ mascot.

Don't go frantically grabbing for your calendar—it's not April 1st. Yes, after a long two-year wait, collabs will be allowed into the PixelJoint gallery again. 

Why the sudden reversal after so long? Read on...

So, it's been talked about off and on for a looooong time now and it's about time to commit... we will be rolling out a new design with new features over the next few months. I want to take the next step and focus in on three things without sacrificing too much of what makes PJ a fun place:

1) Getting pixel artists paid (job postings, project ads, contests, selling shit)
2) Giving featured artists more of the spotlight
3) Helping pixel artists grow (ramp up them tutorials)

I can't make guarantees as to how fast this will happen, but I will definitely be setting aside time on a regular basis to get this done.

Many thanks to pixelblink for keeping the ball rolling.

Finally fixed that nagging Firefox bug with links not working by updating the editor to the latest version. Let me know if you encounter any WYSIWYG editor bugs.

We now officially have 10,000 members who've signed up at ye olde Pixel Joint.  That's gotta be good for something right?

Once again, sedgemonkey f*cked up on the voting for the challenges.  While correcting the voting last week I accidentally set a "spam vote" flag for the majority of all votes tallied.  No votes were lost, but the top 3 positions in the challenge were not correct. 

I've corrected all the voting and the awards and we have new winners for both Love Machine and Chinese New Year (just announced a couple hours ago).  My deepest apologies to all who got the shaft on this:  Setzer, iSTVAN, Krysis, Ensellitis, Skeddles, Tremulant and especially ThereIsNoCure who got robbed twice.

Please take some time to rate all the spectacular pixel work that came out of October.  There's quite a few Pixelween participants currently represented in the top 10 right now and rightly so.

I've always enjoyed collecting quotes from different sources (TV, Movies, Books, etc) over the last decade or so and I finally got around to organizing them and putting them into a little system.  Any PJ member can now add quotes to the system, rate quotes and post comments about a quote. 

Development will continue so the system will have some value for you guys... you'll soon be able to save quotes, search quotes, browse by subject and order quotes by rating, date, most commented on, etc.

Important Note:  No need to point out that quotes have nothing to do with pixel art you negative SOBs. It's just for "fun".

Over the last few weeks we've made several changes to Pixel Joint and the Pixel Joint Forum...

• Forum was upgraded to version 8 and with it some additional gallery/forum integration (still some minor bugs to fix, but working for the most part).
• Themes will now work in the forum.
• "Total Favorites Received" are now being stored in member's table for easy access.
• Upgraded database software which will increase performance.
• Added serverside caching to a lot of commonly accessed data which will increase performance.
• Added an issue log so all admins can view "contact" inquiries. 
• Added other miscellaneous admin tools for the gallery site including tools to quickly and easily remove spammers and other deviants.
• Added tools for multiple specific "link backs" (digg, reddit, del.ico.us, etc) for anyone interested in writing a newsworthy post on Pixel Joint.

We're updating the forum to version 8 tonight.  Functionally it's very much the same -- it's just a newer version which will hopefully perform better.  If there are enhancements you'd like to see on the forum now is a good time to let me know while I still have the project fresh in my mind.

There's been zero testing beyond my lazy ass so there might be a few bugs.  Hit me up if you run into one and I'll get it fixed.

The community just keeps growing, and let's all congratulate MrColeman for being lucky! Good job keeping this place alive, guys! 

(Ed note:  There are 70 disabled/banned accounts included in that figure.  We actually have only 5934 active members, but close enough! )

I finally checked web stats for the first time since August 2005 (yeah, I know I'm a slacker).  From August 2005 to April 2006 our traffic has gone up 308% and our traffic is up 781% since April 2005.  Yay! 

According to my astute calculations we should have more traffic than the rest of the internet combined sometime next month. 

Just a reminder that creating dummy accounts to spam ratings will get you a perma-ban.  While we don't exactly have the NSA monitoring the usage at PJ we're not total freaking idiots either.  

Having 5000 members register at Pixel Joint seems like an important milestone even thought the vast majority of members don't do anything once they sign up. It's nice to see that so many people are interested in a dedicated pixel art gallery. Hopefully with the help of other pixel communities like Pixelopolis/Pixelation and deviantArt (specifically halfliquid) we can keep interest in pixel art going strong for years to come. 

I might have introduced a browser specific bug or two to the text editor used for commenting on PJ recently.  If you are using Safari or Opera I apologize for the inconvenience and I will be fixing the bugs tonight.

Edit: If you are using Safari or Opera you should be able to post comments now.

We've got the awards system semi-working now.  Currently monthly pixel art is the only award working, but it won't be long before other awards are available.  If you've had a piece in the top 10 in any given month check your profile to see your spiffy trophy. Also, if you happen to run across any glitches please contact me and I'll get em fixed.

Many thanks to iSTVAN for quickly putting together trophy graphics.

Howdy peoples, sedgemonkey here.

To help recognize the extraordinary work that comes rolling into Pixel Joint on a daily basis we will soon be putting an awards system into place.  You'll get a spiffy trophy/medal/ribbon graphic for your profile, bonus points and the admiration of your fellow pixel homies.

With any luck the awards system will be up very soon. Stay tuned. 

We're having some issues with email not going out for the forum notifications, the password reset and possibly other places.  If you get an error after posting a message in the forum it's probably related to the email notifications failing.

Not sure what's causing things to selectively bomb right now so it might take some time to get fixed.  I'll do my best to get it figured out soon.

Private messages will now notify via email assuming the recipient has the option to allow email notifications checked. Adding notification is one of those things that just took forever to get around to even though there wasn't that much work involved.  Hopefully all of you who asked for the notification feature will make good use of it. 

We've also added a beta of the Pixel Joint member map using Google maps.  It's still a bit buggy, but the major features are working for the most part.

We are upgrading our database server tonight so there is going to be some downtime -- hopefully not more than 15 minutes or so.

Edit: We didn't get to it on Tuesday night so the delay might be tonight (Wednesday).

I've been working on creating a map for all the members similar to Frappr, but a little more focused on accomodating 4000 member locations. The PJ world view map will have around 150 locations -- one for each country in the world.  When you click on a country on the map you'll have a detail view with all the map points for just that country. 

I'm slowly, but surely going to transfer every member (who has posted their location) to the new PJ location system.  This will calculate Longitude and Latitude based on country and/or city.  I've written a script to parse out recognizable cities, states, countries for members, but most people entered their locations in a casual format so it's going to take a long time before everyone is in the system. If you are interested in helping simply go to "Edit Profile" and update your location (Country/City).

Although it is nice to have a map for PJ members, the main reason I'm doing this is so I can get a good handle on how to integrate Google Maps and a geocoder system into a site. 

Hopefully you'll see a full map with all 3800+ PJ members sometime in the next few weeks.  Suggestions welcome!

I sent a personal message to all of the people who volunteered for the chat beta (16 people). Check your inbox when you get a chance and report bugs to sedgemonkey. 

Please DO NOT share the URL with other members yet!!!

Edit:  If the chat window won't come up please try disabling popup blockers for this site.

Thats right! The perfect christmas treat. Sort of. This is the second part of the 'Black Comedy' story and fourth episode in the series.
READ/LOOK AT IT!

Also check out the official website, if you havent already, here!

In other Black Hole news, I've updated the gallery with some more BH graphics for the still yet to be coded Black Hole Game. Do contact me if you think you can help me here, I'm happy to make it a community project!

/End Self Promotion

We plan on rolling out a web chat tool sometime soon where everyone can hang out and chit chat (similar to IRC except through your web browser) and we need some beta testers. All you have to do is play around with it for a bit and report any bugs/performance issues.

If you are interested please PM sedgemonkey or post your interest in the comments section of this news item. Please indicate what internet browser and operating system you use.  Thanks!

Yep, it took a while, but for anyone who cares I've completed the third episode in my Black Hole series -featuring a new style of art! Although I havent figured out how to update the old flash website, so bare with me.

Click here

And for previous episodes and stuff the old BH site has a new address here

Added the fun frappr pixeljoint map as a permanent link under "Community" in the navigation. Also added a font customization box on the front page so you can adjust the font size and font family.

Started heavy work on reworking the rating system so members can gain additional available points for rating based on their seniority and activity.  Also started work on making the highest rated pieces based on date/average rating rather than just rating. Who knows how long this will take, but I think it's definitely a positive step.

The Pixelween 2005 website is all finished.  Take a look at the rules and the gallery and don't forget to submit your own horror masterpiece!  There's only 18 days left!

Added a dropdown menu for member links and for your own profile (at the top of the page under your user name) to make it easier to get to certain tools.   Added a personal message count at the top of the page so you can quickly see if you have new messages.  

Created a script to clean up favorites count and keep it accurate from now on. When people would remove a piece from their favorites there was the potential to screw up the count with numerous page refreshes.  Not to worry... all data was secure -- it was just messing up the cached favorites count for a piece.

Added the following link in the upper right corner of pixel art detail pages so you can keep rating/commenting from piece to piece quickly.  Thanks to Helm for the suggestion!

Random Unrated Pixel Art

Added a couple new filters to the gallery search so you can find which pieces in the gallery are available for PixelTees purchase and Pixel Joint avatar. Thanks to Ripped Monkey for the suggestions!

Also added birthday field to the gallery site (instead of just the forum) and modified the members page so you can search for members by birth month.  Kind of fun to see if other members have the same birthday as you.

Added seven new themes to the Pixel Joint theme gallery including one by neota. To change your theme you need to be logged in...

My Profile >> Edit Profile >> Change Site Theme field >> Submit

If you have a theme you would like to submit simply download the template CSS file, edit the colors and send sedgemonkey your new code.  Altering graphics and borders is optional.

As some of you may have noticed there's a new Pixel Joint layout up today. If everything looks totally out of whack you might need to flush your cache or use the ultra-handy Ctrl+F5 for a quick remedy.

We've added some links to community resources right into the design (Pixelation, Pixelation IRC and Pixel-Arts.org) and we've added a fun little chatterbox page where we can yak away about this and that. One of the other major additions to this new design is a "lighter" feel and a more accessible (hopefully) front page.  We're still working on improving the design (including skinning support and member submitted header graphics), but you probably won't notice any other design changes for at least another few weeks.

Oh yeah, many thanks to Peppermint Pig for his awesome colors, design tips and Pixel Joint header text and iSTVAN for the first PJ header graphic!