While we’ve been making some small updates in the background over the last few weeks, something else has been brewing too. To kick off the month, we’re bringing you a big new feature that’s sure to be useful for event hosts, streamers, and those participating in our Artspace contest.

Introducing Scheduled Art Jams!

Scheduled Jams

You can now plan ahead with your Art Jams and let followers and Artspace members know when you are planning your next drawing hangout. There’s a dedicated section on the Art Jams page too for discovering public upcoming hangouts.

When you publish your Art Jam, you’ll have the option to go live immediately or schedule it for later. When someone is marked as interested in your event, they will be notified and invited to the canvas when it starts.

You can read more about setting up scheduled Art Jams in our user guide.

New Art Jam creation flow

Part of adding scheduled events was also updating the flow for creating new Art Jams. You’ll notice the Create modal has a new look, making it easier to choose between single canvas or multiboard Jams.

The biggest change, however, is that your newly created Art Jam will not be live right away.

When you create a new Jam and arrive on the canvas, it will be be private until you publish it. This give you time to set up you canvas with a custom background or permissions before anyone can join. When you’re ready, hit the blue Publish button in the upper right corner.

You also now have the option to stop an Art Jam once or event is done or when there will be no admins to manage the canvas.

A few other updates

You may have noticed a few other new things recently…

Art Jam Sort and Search

We recently tested a randomized order for listing live Art Jams. The idea was to see if smaller and newer Art Jams could get a bit more attention this way and reduce them being abandoned before even getting started. We saw good results but also noted that users still wanted to be able to sort by the most popular Art Jams.

So, we’ve added different sorting options and even a search bar to the Live Art Jams page to help you find the drawing boards that you’re most interested in.

Automatic Moderation

To help Art Jam hosts and Artspace owners keep their chat channels clean, we’ve released automatic moderation in beta. Enabling this for your channels gives you the option to automatically hide offensive language and swearing.

Using this can be a good way to limit trolls spamming the chat with offensive comments. You can enable and disable it as you need to in your Art Jam or Artspace channel settings.

Read more about it in the Automatic Moderation guide

Bux fixes and improvements

Adblocker issues - there have been numerous cases of the adblocker removal screen appearing unexpectedly. We’re working with our ads provider to understand and fix the issue.

As always, let us know what you think. feel free to send us your Feature Requests, reach out to us on Discord or send us a message.

Stay well and happy drawing.