The Drawabox Community Platform has released!
TL;DR:
New community platform is out
Your pledge now gives you 'credits' within the new system
You can login to the new system with Patreon as well as a few other options if you don't want to create yet another account
Credits can be carried over by a month and expire after 2 months
Different tiers have a different maximum number of credits that can be held at any given time
Your current progress through the lessons can be imported from Reddit to get your due achievement badges
January's homework critiques, by necessity, basically became freebies
Credits are cookies. You're feeding me cookies and getting critiques in return.
And... admittedly, it's been a rocky release. I launched it early this morning after pulling an all nighter (ended up getting to bed at about 10:30am), and there were a lot of immediate issues that needed to be resolved. Throwing a bunch of users at the system definitely brought a lot of bugs to the surface, and the amazing, supportive, understanding nature of our community (especially those on Discord) really helped to get those issues resolved quickly.
I don't doubt that there are still a lot more issues lurking - both minor and more significant - and I will continue to pin them down and fix them in the coming days and weeks.
For now, let's talk about what this new community platform entails, specifically for my supporters here on Patreon.
First off, homework critiques will no longer be done on reddit - meaning a reddit account is no longer necessary. In fact, you don't need to make any new accounts if you don't want to, as you can log into the Drawabox website with your Patreon account!
For those of you who use Patreon as a way to get me and my teaching assistants to review your work, the way your support here translates into the feedback has changed. Instead of being pledged during a particular month making you eligible for critiques during that month, your pledge now generates "credits" that can be spent on critiques.
The number of credits you receive per month depends on your tier, as does the maximum number of credits you can hold onto at any given time. Credits carry over from one month to the next, but expire after 2 months. This is to ensure that we can still keep the prices as low as they are and avoid being overwhelmed.
Lessons 1, 2, the box challenge, cylinder challenge and wheel challenge cost 1 credit each, while all other lessons cost 2 credits. This means that a $5 tier supporter can now make it through the whole course without ever increasing their pledge, as long as they are willing to wait longer than others in between submissions.
Pledging at the higher tiers awards one or two bonus credits if the supporter pledges at that tier from the start.
There is still going to be a 14 day gap between submission of lessons.
In the process of transitioning to this new system of handling critiques, there are a couple of bonuses you guys are getting - partially in celebration of the change, and partially because it simplifies things for the community as a whole.
First and foremost, up until now we've generally worked under the assumption that one would pledge, receive their critique, then pay on the first of the following month. With this new system, I've finally been able to enable Patreon's charge-up-front feature. What this means however is that every time you get charged, you get your credits - so while those of you who received homework critiques during January are technically being charged now, you're going to be receiving credits for that payment. To put it simply, January's homework critiques ended up being freebies. It's definitely a bit of a pain for me to relinquish a month's worth of labour, but all in all it would be much more troublesome to try and balance those ledgers.
Secondly, I mentioned above that those who pledge at a higher tier when first becoming patreon supporters get bonus credit(s) when doing so. In celebration of this big change, your first patreon charge within this new system will include the bonus credit(s) if that is a feature of your tier. So for $7-$15, you get one extra credit, and for the $20 tier you get two, on top of the monthly credits you're supposed to be receiving.
Now this whole explanation is getting pretty long in the tooth. There's a lot more to say (the biggest features are really built around the free, non-patreon community and trying to improve conditions for them), but for now the last thing I want to explain is this:
I completed lessons within the Reddit system - how do I transfer my progress over?
Once you've logged in, you'll be able to go into your account settings (through the user menu in the top right), a little ways down the page you'll come across a spot where you can link to certain. If you've logged in with Patreon, then that'll already be connected there (if not, you'll need to connect that in order to get access to your credits).
When you connect to your Reddit account, it will identify your username and find your progress, then load it into the new system. You'll get all the appropriate achievement badges and will have the lessons marked as complete so you can submit homework for the next one without issue.
That should about cover all the things pertinent to you guys. Like I said at the beginning, the system is still bound to have a lot of bugs, so if you feel anything is out of place, or that you haven't received credits to which you are entitled, feel free to message me on Patreon and I'll get it sorted out.
At the end of the day, this is a super ambitious project, and I'm just one concept-artist-turned-drawing-instructor playing as though he's a web developer. The issues will be ironed out before long, and once they are, I think we'll have a pretty great platform on our hands.