What are some of your peeves in Toyhouse profiles?

MymulND

I totally see your last point! However, I once got my characters stolen because I didn't have a tile watermark. They cropped around the watermark, or used the thumbnail of the picture,  and I'm very afraid something like that will happen again. I try to make sure the watermark is easy to look around, however. Maybe I'm just terrified of something that will never happen again, but better safe than sorry, right? Aha

Also, when I'm trying to draw a character, it may be just me but clicking through multiple images that look like headshots to not be sure if they are cropped or not just to find a refrence sheet is a little annoying. I get how it may be fun for you, however! I keep cropped thumbnails for Instagram posts, though, not character references, as its just my personal preference! 

Also, ahh I hate it when people change the entire layout of ToyHouse. I get if you have it on your profile you'll get used to it, but to us who don't have it is really annoying! I want to admire your characters, not try to find them! Also, incorrectly used warnings are so annoying. Thats why I turned warnings off lol, best decision I've ever made tbh. 

When they put 76267267276267762 peices of unnecessary info 

I dont care if your pet goldfish was called nemo oml

Lol. They're finding nemo. Jk.

when people say stuff like "dont take inspiration from my ocs!!" as if taking inspiration is the exact same as straight up copying a design or concept.

MymulND RE: The trigger question.

If I'm reading a book, watching TV, listening to the radio, etc, and I unexpectedly run into a trigger? I react badly. Worst one was I was reading a novella and read a specific phrase that triggered me. I had to put the book away and go calm myself down before I could continue on. Like I had full blown flashbacks just from that one phrase, it was that bad for me.

BUT! If I have a warning, I can brace myself. I actually lost one of my triggers by repeatedly exposing myself to it after seeing warnings. Like with the novella I mentioned above, once I calmed down I was able to go back and finish the whole thing, because I wanted to see how it ended. I don't always have the desire to push through - when church hymns came on the radio, another trigger of mine, I just shut it off and played music on my phone's speakers. But if I was otherwise enjoying the thing (or in the case of the novella, wanted to see how terrible the whole thing was) I can brace myself knowing that triggers might come up again.

So if I saw warnings for my triggers on a warning page (unlikely, they're rather unusual triggers and honestly the threats about removing kneecaps and such bother me so much I'm seriously considering turning profile warnings off) I would continue anyways, because I can be prepared for when I see my triggers. Not everyone can prepare themselves like I can though, and I'd love to hear some different views.

Exploder105

I'm sorry to learn that happened to you :/ I completely understand in your case, looking at your watermarks, they're indeed fine in my eyes! I was mostly thinking of colored watermarks that takes the whole piece, as it's not easy to see which colors are from the original piece and which are from the watermark.

I see what you mean, I guess a good compromise would be a way to highlight the ref, like a button, an image pointing to the ref saying it is one (I don't think it's understandable the way I put it...but I remember seeing a few character profiles like this, or with "<-- new design | older design -->", or it appearing somewhere on the profile.

Exactly! It looks cool at first and I kinda want one of these to fit my characters' universes better, but I would never break the whole layout of TH, otherwise I should just make my own site at this point. Now I'm exaggerating, but in a way I prefer to stand on the same ground as most users here. It seems fun but I think that, with such powers, I would always try to change what I did anyway haha. Oh! I still have to turn those warnings off too! I don't know why I never did, it's been a year already and I still didn't-

Hollyfrost

I see, thank you for your answer! I understand a bit better now.

yeah (@ holly) i can see why cropped images can get in the way of looking for refs!
i guess the best solution is adding an image that says "<-- references" or leaving the ref at the front (though i usually just link the ref when i'm commissioning ^^)

and yeah that's an unfortunate situation :/ personally i'm only ever bothered with heavy watermarking when it's on a reference! though i usually ask for an unwatermarked if it's for commission reason, but heavy watermarks on characters that are up for sale is kinda eh since you aren't able to get a good look at what the character looks like sometimes

also re: tws too lol
i like watching shows that tend to be gory (horror/crime/etc) and a few specific things that happen on those types of media bother me
so i usually check to see if the shows/movies i'm about to watch have those types of scenes on sites like doesthedogdie.com!! when those scenes happen i usually close my eyes/go to a different tab/etc. until i think it's over though there are times i do end up seeing them and i do have to take a breather for a bit
(btw i do recommend that site to anyone looking to see if there's anything that might be triggering in a media that you're about to indulge in! it does get a bit spoilery at times which is sad, but i think it'll help! though i'm unsure of triggers that are on the more uncommon side)

Some of these I've been guilty of at one point lmao but I was still figuring TH out

• Characters with an avatar, name and nothing else. Not a single word in their bio or image in their gallery. Seriously what's even the point of this?? If you have nothing to show yet for the character, just simply hide them until they have something to read or look at. A bunch of times I've clicked on characters thinking that their head shot was neat but got zip
• Too many/pointless tags. This is definitely a peeve as it's not actually a big deal. I just don't like looking through 15+ tags
• Folders labelled as "mains," "1." or similar. I'm not going to click on every single folder on a users profile. If I have no idea where anything might be, I won't even bother most of the time. Characters belonging to the same story or being all humanoid or whatever is totally fine, just group them based on something please
• Bios with HTML that hasn't been filled out at all. I'm ok with seeing a few unused links or some blank bits but if half or more of the bio has nothing, maybe you should just hide it until it's done
• Avatars that are different sizes. Really dumb but it's also a peeve of mine, I don't like seeing some avatars be smaller than others in folders because the image was too small
• Coloured text in warnings. I use the bee theme, purple looks real bad against that orange and my eyes hate me every time I see it

Hey hey! People who hate excessive folders or whatever else, could yall take a look at my profile and see if anything bugs ya? :0 I'm curious a I'm open to criticism/rants! Like how my character thumbnails work! :0 I'll give my context on how I sort my characters!

My Folders:

My Galleries:

My Content warnings:

My Thumbnails:

-Probably posted this somewhere else before but when refsheets have mostly opaque watermarks that make it hard to see the characters. Especially in forum games like if you want your character to get drawn please leave something we can reference (or a link to a clean ref). Plus, if it's because of the TH watermarking system it takes 2 seconds to slap it on in an art program and lower the opacity.

-Profiles with custom coding that hasn't changed the 'placeholder' images yet. I just find it confusing af to see one picture of a character, then scroll down only to find it's a completely different design like wat-

-Broken links. But then again that's usually out of people's control (thanks youtube) and it's tedious af to go through and check everything.

-Adding to what people said in the last pages yeah 'do not steal' warnings that are basically death threats are a major off-put for me & the person who wrote it. The warnings were ment to WARN people of triggering content not shove triggering content in people's faces. It's a misuse in bad taste. I think it's mostly younger people that use them though so I hope they learn using warnings like that isn't cool

(also feel like throwing this in about cropped thumbnails. I personally do it because I think it looks neater than having everything look like a jumbled mess of rectangles. Esp. for pics that have multiple characters and/or sketches)

MymulND Since people respond to triggers very differently I thought I'd share my own two cents! I used to have a few very specific longterm trauma related triggers, and when I was still recovering from them I either intentionally avoided/pushed the kind of media for later where I knew they would go over topics that give me a violent physical reaction. If I wanted to consume new content I'd either check their content warnings beforehand from their site OR google around with title + triggers I have for potential discussion. I don't mind spoilers at all so that worked for me. If I encountered a triggering topic without being prepared I would either continue after I'm calm OR drop the piece of media entirely depending on how the topic itself was handled, because as a theme it's very sensitive. 

Nowadays I'm doing much better now that I have been able to recover from it, and the few things I need content warnings for are relatively rare in media! But I try to check for them beforehand anyway to mentally prepare myself for it, because it was always the surprise factor that set me off the worst and can still get under my skin in a way that can be prevented with some beforehand googling.  

In my experience the best of both worlds is to give a comprehensive list of things that may need a content warning in your work (there are many lists available that list the most common ones) but make it so that you have to click it open or in some other ways engage with it to make it visible, so people who want ZERO spoilers whatsoever can gloss over the content warning list easily. If the creator has chosen not to give out any warnings I think as a consumer it's then up to me to do my googling beforehand and mentally prepare myself for what lies ahead, or simply not engage if I can't do so without the fear of compromising my health. But as a whole I think it's just generally nice and considerate of creators to add that cw list!