About Me
This account is owned and operated by one male user with the assistance of a bot. I am an Aerospace Engineer residing in California, USA. I will gladly answer any space-related questions you may have, although my experience is mostly limited to the design and construction of satellites.
I have been programming since high school; my programming language of choice is Java.
About the Program
This is an unofficial account and is not affiliated with deviantART.
The program running the day-to-day operations on this account is written in Java. As of July 2012, the program handles all routine operations. All questions and other unique requests are handled by the human operator.
The bot works by automating what a human typically does such as logging on/off, reading/interpreting content, loading/storing data from/into a database, sending replies to comments/notes, updating profile page content areas, etc.
If you would like to create a bot yourself, start with a chat bot
Bot Ownership Guide
FAQ #510: What is a bot, and how can I get one?
Future Bot Features
Development Road Map
Certification
deviantART Terms of Service Compliance
The dAhub network consists of the following accounts:
- dAhub: Primary account
- dAhubPLUS: Official group account
- dAhubBACKUP: Backup account to serve as an official communication channel in an emergency
- GiveALlamaGetALlama: The bot replies to comments listing active llama traders
- AnotherContestGroup: Maintains the Contest Directory, Contest Submission Form and Upcoming Contests journal
- Free-dAvatars: Coming soon
- ProjectComment: Coming soon
Points accounts shall publicly disclose the following:
1) The method of recurring point profit streams
2) The best estimate proportion of the original donation that these streams represent
3) What these profits have been spent on
Profit streams consist of the following mechanisms in the ratios listed:
- 45% of points donated for Standard Feature
- 5% of points donated for Standard Feature if the donor was not following anyone in the Referral Network
- 100% of points donated for Exclusive Feature
- <<1% of points earned by earners who have not placed a Donation Widget on their profile page within 3 months of earning points
- Core membership
- Commissioning artists to produce fan artwork
- Commissioning artists to produce audio and visual assets for a multi-person video game
The services rendered by this account do not affect the statistical or performance based metrics used on deviantART. To alter these metrics would require dummy accounts to be created to watch/fav/llama select users in exchange for payment. This is not done here; user's avatars are listed on the profile page and users are given points, but no action is taken by this account to watch or fav other accounts. Llamas sent to this account may be automatically returned; no action is taken by the accounts in the dAhub network to send more than one llama to each user.
You may not use or offer any script, bot or any other automated 3rd party service in exchange for deviantPOINTS. [...] This policy covers any "POINTS-for" scheme involving a machine-driven attempt to show false results in a member's statistical or performance-based metrics on deviantART. [source]
This rule was added to the dA ToS in response to "points for pageviews" profiles and groups [details]. These accounts would accept points and then run a series of proxy connections to quickly rack up fictitious pageviews on accounts. In this scheme, the points were transferred from the donor to the proxy operator. The pageviews given in exchange for points did not come from legitimate users visiting the site and in fact only drained dA's computing resources in order to alter a single datum on a user's profile page.
Conversely, the services offered by this account are fundamentally used to connect users with one another (these are fully legitimate users giving real activity). The points received by this account are redistributed to other real users. To promptly process all incoming requests, a bot is used to reduce response time. While this bot is used to supervise the interaction between users, the bot does not render any services that alter users' statistical or performance-based metrics in exchange for points. The bot is used to oversee users as they exchange watch/fav/llamas between one another; points are received and donated by the bot in order to motivate this process, but no watch/fav/llamas are given by the bot in exchange for points.
Spamming is the act of using deviantART as a means to commercially advertise using journals, deviations comments, forums or notes and is considered an abuse regardless of how or where the advertisements are presented [source]
This account does not initiate first contact to solicit users through comments or notes. All comments and notes generated by this account are restricted to replies to comments and notes left by users interacting with this account or are custom tailored to each user (such as contest announcements sent to key individuals).
An abuse or exploit of the System is any action which takes advantage of a feature which we offer here on deviantART in a manner which is inappropriate or otherwise not as originally intended [source]
This account relies predominantly on advertising spread through word of mouth, namely by appearing in journals and donation widgets
Some supporting advertising is accomplished by occasionally visiting a list of subscribed users' profiles in order to appear in the "Recent Visitors" widget. Any user that leaves a comment on my profile with the word "visit" or "blacklist" is immediately removed from this list and will not be visited again unless required in the process of fulfilling other services.
Closing Remarks
It may be noted that this account acts somewhat counter-culture to dA's typical operations. However, the primary aim of this profile is to connect real users with one another in the same community-building atmosphere as the rest of the site. Despite allegations to the contrary, the activity generated by this account is completely genuine. No "fake" profiles are used to generate activity for this account and any illegitimate profiles operated by other users discovered posting here are promptly banned.
This account serves as a platform for users to reach a broader audience and to spread their generosity to a greater number of users than ever before.