Been doing a fair bit of work under the hood over the last few weeks. Most of it you will not see directly, which is rather the point, but a few things are worth pointing out.

The site is quicker. Every thumbnail on every grid is now generated and delivered through Cloudflare rather than straight from the site, so it arrives already sized for your screen and in a modern format instead of your browser downloading something far larger and shrinking it. I also cleared out a large amount of unused image data that had built up over the years, which took a good chunk out of the database. The artist listings were quietly running hundreds of database queries per page. They now run two.

There was also a stretch where the site was timing out on people. That is sorted. It turned out to be several unrelated things queueing behind each other, mostly outside requests the site was making on every page load and then sitting there waiting on.

Art style tags. If you visit often you have probably already noticed these appearing. Artwork is being tagged by how it was made rather than just what is in it: digital painting, traditional media, cel shaded, line art, photorealism, stylized characters, plus 3D art and miniature photography where they apply. There are supporting tags for monochrome pieces and for the kind of background, and a set for combat scenes that distinguishes a duel from a skirmish from a full battle.

This is a slow job. There are over fifteen thousand pieces here and each one has to actually be looked at, so I am working through them in batches and will be for a while yet. Around three and a half thousand are done. If a piece you are looking at has no style tag, it has not been reached rather than been skipped.

The Published Only filter actually works now. If you use the Published Artwork setting in Website Settings, it was quietly ignoring parts of the site. Highest Rated, Most Viewed and the Random block on the front page were all showing everything regardless. The tag pages had it worse, where the artwork counts were simply wrong. Those all respect the setting now, and the counts show published totals rather than the total for everything. Artists with no published work drop out of the artist list properly too, so the page numbers line up with what you actually get.

Artist crediting. Every artwork page now carries proper credit data behind the scenes: the artist’s name, a credit line, a copyright notice and a link back to their page here. Search engines read that, which means when a piece turns up in image search the artist gets attributed rather than just the site. That has always been the point of this place. Now the machines know it too.

Image protection. Two changes, both aimed at the same thing.

Other sites can no longer hotlink images from here, meaning embed them directly and serve them as if they were their own. And if someone follows a direct link to an image file, they now land on the artwork page for it, with the artist’s name and links attached, rather than on a bare image floating on its own with no idea who made it.

On the AI side, I have split the crawlers into two groups. The ones that scrape work to train models are told to stay out. The ones that read pages in order to answer a question and cite the source are still welcome, because those send people back to the artist. That distinction matters to me. This is a site built on other people’s work and the whole point is that they get the credit for it.

I will be honest that the training side of this is a request rather than a wall. Well-behaved crawlers respect it and badly behaved ones never have. The hotlinking block is properly enforced.

New Additions no longer repeats the front page. Small one, but it bothered me. That page used to open with the same ten pieces already sitting on the home page. It now picks up where the home page leaves off.

More to come. If something looks wrong, or a page feels slow, or you spot artwork credited to the wrong person, tell me.