]}
|- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;"
! Commercial?
| No
|- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;"
! Ownership
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|- style="vertical-align: top;"
! Type of site
| Artistic community
|- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;"
! Registration
| Yes
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! Owner
| Leet Technologies Inc.
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! Created by
| Channel Cat
|- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;"
! Launched
|
|- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;"
! Current status of site
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|}
SheezyArt is an online art archive community that provides a location for artists to display their creations for feedback and exposure and communicate with each other. It advertises itself as a "free and alternative internet art community". It has basic archive features such as watching favorite users, listing friends, sending private messages, and adding other creators' work in a list of favorite pieces.
SheezyArt opened to users on November 30, 2003, by Channel Cat as an alternative to deviantART. SheezyArt offered features comparable to those enjoyed by deviantART's paid users, but without a subscription fee. More significantly, it had no restrictions against "adult-rated" art.
However, in January 2005, SheezyArt moved to new servers and the owners (Channel Cat & Spencer) presented their new Terms of Service. They required the site to be more "family-friendly". Officially, their server's TOS never allowed them to host adult art, even before, but the lax control made it possible for SheezyArt to ignore this. The decision to ban pornographic submissions was perceived as drastic and somewhat treacherous by some users, who left the site soon afterward.
Throughout its history, SheezyArt has remained stable and relatively small, allowing the site's administrative staff to maintain a more personal relationship with its members than is common on most online art archives.
On August 15, 2005, SheezyArt announced that unless they were to come up with $700 for their server bills, SheezyArt would have to close down. Although the $700 goal was reached within 24 hours of the announcement, the site still remained in a state of inactivity, with the most recent and frequent message reading that the "Host is down". Then for a while the front page showed a picture saying "SheezyArt Version 2.1, Saturday 10:00 a.m. PST".
For a period until around September 10, 2005, the site was either down or in read-only mode due to problems with the host server. On Saturday, September 10, SheezyArt returned, back online, in its new Sheezy 2.1 version. The site claimed to have many new features, including a new layout, an improved reporting system, and many bugs fixed.
As of Friday, January 13, SheezyArt was successfully updated to version 3.0, but after the high amount of traffic slowed the server, it was shut off for revamping. It went back online on Monday, January 16. Version 3.0 includes, among other things, the long-awaited Club system.
The Club system allows users to create groups for fellow users with similar interests to join together and interact. The system allows members to take part in polls, chat in forums, and post their art for other members of the group. The most effective of the three was the ability to post art because it grants users with older art to get new light and allows users to find art by their interests without looking through several Galleries.
Along with the feature to the common user, the creator of the club can separate users in to specific groups, appoint moderators, administrators, keep an events calendar, create a FAQ and post bulletins known as "Clublogs".
Also included in the update to version 3 is the ability to upload music files. As a result of this it is becoming increasingly popular as a music community, and a more logical, easy-to-understand and well-laid out alternative to other music communities.
On Tuesday, March 7, 2006, the site suffered major downtime (nearly 48 hours long). During this period, the decision of having a hosting service switch was taken and informed on Wednesday, March 8. The next day, Sheezyart was restored in version 3.
At first, version 3 was notoriously 56k unfriendly, causing many artists to threaten to leave. After some fine tuning by the owners, Sheezyart became much more stable for users on slower connections.
On 3 May2006, another major round of downtime occurred that lasted for more than 1 day.
The "masterpiece" feature was introduced on 31 May, 2006, which dynamically changes the way art is able to be featured on the front page. A masterpiece is like a favorite, however a user can select only one masterpiece at a time, and whichever art piece they choose to use it on gives the submission a higher chance at being featured on the front page. Regardless of how many favorites a submission has, if it has no masterpieces, it cannot reach the front page.
On 27 June2006, the database server crashed again, unexpectedly. It was repaired two days later by Channel Cat, when he took time off from his vacation to access the database and find the problem that occured.
Another crash occurred on 13 July2006, beginning first with the inability to post artwork while commenting and forums remained online. By 14 July2006, the site had been taken completely offline and remained that way for another day. However, when SheezyArt came back online, Channel Cat announced that he was taking steps to optimize the database function, and indeed, for the time being the site runs faster than it did before. He promises further work once his workload lightens.
On July 16, the legendary words "You have been banned" appeared on every users' Internet browser. After an assessment of the situation and a group effort by the mods, Sheezyart returned to normal status in about 10 minutes.
Trolls and their role on SheezyArt
SheezyArt is home to a large and unique collection of troll accounts that interact mostly in the site's forums. Most of them are playful persona accounts. Some of these personas include characters such as an intelligent orc who types poorly because of large fingers, a demon who has annoying neighbors, and a pit bull who writes in capital letters and eats butter. These characters are recognized as harmless and humorous by most users.
\"Rival\" Galleries
DeviantArt has been known as SheezyArt's biggest rival since the day SheezyArt opened its doors to artists. What separated SheezyArt from deviantArt was the features SheezyArt offered were similar to those that were offered by deviantArt's Subscription system, but without a subscription fee. More importantly, it had no restrictions against "adult-rated" art, until the TOS change. Channel Cat started SheezyArt after becoming frustrated that the administrators of deviantART banned him for posting adult images, and ripped artwork
Users who left SheezyArt after the TOS change, accusing SheezyArt administrators of exerting totalitarian rule over their users' freedom of expression, started and joined new "[[wikt:rival|rival]]" archives, including:
y!gallery, an adults-only website for yaoi-genre anime art.
Many members of these archives have negative opinions about SheezyArt, particularly on FurAffinity. The site's slogan, "Where freedom of expression reigns," referenced what was considered to be SheezyArt's [[wikt:oppressive|oppressive]] policies banning pornography and art that is used to deliberately offend members.
