Ratemydrawings frequently asked questions

Below are common questions and answers that may help you draw better, or learn a little about RateMyDrawings. Our goal is to make drawing online the most enjoyable experience possible and above all, a fun place to hang out and draw online.

Fore help on specific problems, try the HELP section of our forums.

I CREATED A DRAWING BUT IT DOES NOT APPEAR ONLINE
Once you have created a drawing and it has been sucessfully saved, you will be directed to a new page alerting you that your drawing has been saved. An email is then sent to your registered email address with a link that allows you to unlock your drawing so it is viewable by everyone else.

I NEVER RECEIVED AN EMAIL TO UNLOCK MY DRAWING
If you have not received this email be sure to check your junk email filters (especially hotmail, yahoo and gmail users) as these emails are often caught by junk mail filters. It is also possible your activation email is just delayed - please be patient. If you have server-side junk mail filters or custom spam-guard software see if you can add *@ratemydrawings.com to your accepted domains or whitelist. If you have more than one email address, you may also try changing your registered email address via your drawings page. We regularly go through the site and check for drawings that have not been activated, so if you did not get this email for some reason, your drawing may be activated by us anyway. If your drawing has not been unlocked withinin 24 hours it being created, you can log in to the site and will be given instructions on how to unlock it.

MORE INK! I KEEP RUNNING OUT OF INK - HELP!
Yes, we know - why not give you an endless supply of ink? We regularly discuss the pros and cons in giving users more ink and here's why. The main first reason we have an ink limit is that we're trying to keep drawings down to a small file size so browsing the site is fast and drawings load without too much waiting. The more ink we give you, the longer it is going to take for your drawing to load when someone views it. Of course this is less of an issue for those of you with fast internet connections, but we have to find a medium file size limit that makes artists happy and viewers happy also. The other main reason we have an ink limit is that very complex drawings that use lots of ink often have tens of thousands of lines. Rendering these lines on users computers takes memory and computer resources. We have to consider this so that viewing drawings does not cause users computers to slow down and run out of memory. We are constantly finding better ways to optimize our drawing engine to offer artists more ink and keep viewers experiences as smooth as possible.

MY DRAWING IS BY FAR THE BEST. WHY IS MY RATING NOT AS HIGH AS IT SHOULD BE?
One thing we can't contol at RMD is what people rate. That age old saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" runs true for peoples opinions of drawings. Some people would only rate a 10 on a few drawings on the site, others may give ratings of 10 all the time. We have put in place many technical restructions that try and keep the rating system fair. Users that rate many drawings low constantly may be penalized and find their ratings will not be recorded. Other ways we have tried to prevent users from rating unfairly is by disabling low ratings for drawings that have proven to be good by having a high rating with a large number of votes.
The general pattern we have noticed on the site is that when a drawing is first drawn and appears in the "recent drawing" category it will receive mostly high ratings because only people that like the drawing will click on it. Once this drawing then recieves more exposure (and even hits the "top drawings" category, it is voted more harshly because not you are being compared side by side with some of the best drawings on the site. Don't be discouraged - as time passes your score will become more accurate as more people vote.

HOW DO I EDIT MY PROFILES AND UPLOAD MY PHOTO?
Once you log in and are on your drawings page you will see links. "Edit my profile" allows you to enter your personal information. "Upload profile image" will allow you to upload a photo to use for your profile.


HOW DO I CHANGE MY REGISTERED EMAIL ADDRESS OR PASSWORD?
From your drawings page you will see link/tab "Edit your account". Click here and you will be able to change your registered email address or password.

I WANT MORE DRAWING TOOLS
As we continue to find better ways to create a more extensive drawing tool, we try to consider users of all different levels. The more sophisticated we make the drawing tool, the harder it is for novice users to use. We do however plan to regularly test new features and try and make the drawing tool more advanced for the experts out there, so stay tuned and check out the drawing tool regularly to see new features.

AFTER DRAWING FOR A WHILE THE DRAWING TOOL BECOMES VERY SLOW OR PIXELATED
Drawing does begin to slow down once you have drawn a large number of strokes due to the amount of memory required to render the hundreds of lines - this is one reason we have an ink limit. Transparency is the largest cause of slowness so you can try to limit your use of transparency. We've noticed that thicker lines also slow down drawing a little. The best suggestions we can offer is to make sure all other applications are closed to make as much memory available to the drawing tool as possible. We will continue to find ways to increase performance that ensures your drawing experience is optimal.
Pixelation is a known issue and occurs when using the Airbrush tool many times in a drawing. You may slo notice that this pixelation only happens while drawing and is corrected when vieweing your saved drawing on the website. The best way to avoid this is to plan your drawing and use the airbrush tool only when necessary. We continue to find ways around this annoance but are somewhat restricted by the way certain features render in the Flash player.

WHY DO I HAVE TO RATE DRAWINGS TO SEE THE NEXT DRAWING, I WANT TO JUST BROWSE ALL THUMBNAILS?
We've discussed making the site navigation allow users to "browse all drawings" and just view the drawings you want. The major outcome of this would cause one big response - "why is nobody rating my drawings?". We've noticed that if we give users faster ways to view drawings, they will avoid voting and just look at drawings. Just remember the name of this site - RateMyDrawings. We want users to have the highest chance of getting their drawings rated.

WHY ARE SOME RATING BUTTONS DISABLED?
We have implemented an algorithm that determines if a drawing is allowed to recieve low ratings. In basic terms, the more ratings a drawing already has and the higher it's score - the less chance you have of being able to rate it low. This prevents people from rating proven good drawings low. Another cause for rating buttons being disabled is that we have implemented a feature that checks how often a user is rating Low. If a user for example is browsing the site just rating drawing after drawing low, we will disable the Low rating buttons for that user as this type of action is determined as rating spam.