Sorry for the awful formatting, Pyrometal is on holidays

Thank you to the artists who made the pieces above, and to all of you for submitting your beautiful work. The gallery remains the most important part of PJ, and in 2017, about 5200 new pieces were uploaded to it! That's around 100 a week!

A lot happened at PJ - for example, we've brought on three new moderators; Pyrometal, Jerrypie, and myself, Hapiel! Did you know that you can always find an up to date list of your moderators on the About page?

News about PJv4 was finally posted in November by Sedgemonkey (the creator and administrator of PJ). Progress is still slow, but our plans and dreams are big. The whole site has to be rewritten, as the technology it relies on is old and weary. A big change to look forward to is better integration of the forums with the main site, something we've received complaints about ever since the forum started breaking down. Also, we're looking for ways to make sure we can build and expand PixelJoint collaboratively and with more ease for the future!
Speaking of those expansions, we're still discussing the survey held about what PJv4 should be like (with commentary from 133 of you!).

We've held new activities this year, such as the Pirates of the ISObbean collaboration (which is approaching it's end date after starting back in March), and the current News Icon Competition. However, both of these pale in comparison to the monumental 51 weekly challenges we've consistently held over the year!

These challenges were, in previous years, ran by Skamocore (who Mandrill has taken over for this year). I want to use this opportunity to say a BIG THANK YOU to Skamo for all of the challenges you've done - they were amazing!

Of the challenges, the three largest were the Greenery challenge (30 entries), Mushroom challenge (31 entries), and the absolutely gargantuan Mega Man 2 Boss (a staggering 60 entries!).

For all the good news, there is also some sad; PJ moderator extraordinare Jalonso has disappeared from the site without a trace. He posted a message last in November 2016, after some months of reduced activity. Cure, myself, and some others have tried to track him down, but we haven't been able to find any information about his wellbeing. Thankfully, we haven't seen any obituary notices either.
Thank you Jal for all you've done for this site, I hope you're out there somewhere, and perhaps we'll meet some time again!

Pixels were a hot topic in 2017 when r/place took, well, place. A Reddit event (held on April 1st) wherein tens of thousands of people collaborated to create a large image, at the rate of one pixel per 5 minutes each. You can view the full image here. Remarkable, isn't it?

But what was your favorite pixel art event or piece of 2017? Let us know below! 

Happy 2018!