Cover Art and Image Guidelines

Cover Art is a grand experiment - meaning it may not stay if it gets abused. When someone puts the address www.digitalverse.org into their browser they come to what is called the site's cover page. It features the top nine favorite poems of the month (or last month if not enough poetry has yet to be submitted) as well as a piece of artwork randomly chosen from the cover art subscribed members have uploaded to the site. Clicking the refresh button picks a new piece of art. Clicking the art itself takes you to the profile of the person who uploaded it.

This last bit is important because, like the poetry and the journals, no one looks at the cover art and gives it an okay before allowing it to be seen by the public at large. As with everything on the site, it's innocent until proven guilty. Which means it's up to you - as a reader of DigitalVerse.org - to be vigilant and contact us about art which breaks the guidelines we provide. Here are the guidelines, and these stand for all images uploaded to the site, even including the little icons....

• Ownership: it must be your own.
• Nudity: Artistic Nudes are allowed, but by American Standards - meaning women's nipples must be covered and everyone must have their genitalia either covered or obscured - this goes for people of all ages.
• Advertising: absolutely none.
• Hate: see advertising above.
• Celebrities: see hate above.
• Porn: see celebrities above.
• Politics: ehhhh. It rides the line. Messages asking people to vote one way or another or for a certain candidate are advertising and forbidden, and mud-slinging is truly asking for trouble.
• Sex and Violence: These two are hard to put a finger on. Generally, if it exists for the sake of itself then it probably doesn't belong (think of a picture of a butt, posted just so everyone gets to see a butt plastered on the site - and Beavis and Butthead can giggle their heads off). Corpses? Blood and Guts? Grotesque Ugliness? Zombies may be in vogue but gore really has no place on the site. Yes, outright ugliness is frowned upon.
• People you do not have permission to show: technically you should have a signed model contract with everyone in the picture. We can't check this out, but if heat falls on us, we will gladly pass it on to you.
• A Polar Bear in a Snow Storm: only if you can see the polar bear.

What will happen if you go ahead and post it anyway? Probably nothing, until someone complains about it. In most cases the picture will be pulled without warning. In more extreme cases of abuse the user may be banned from contributing art. Repeated abuse will cause account termination.

While the ability to contribute art is a part of having an advanced membership, it is still considered a privilege and not a right.

To keep the site looking fresh, coverart only stays on display for four months, after which it can still be viewed from ones profile, but it will not be seen on the front of the site.