The Limitations of Patreon

Hey all.

So, back in 2021 (ish?) Patreon added search to Creator's Pages. I was very excited about this because a super common complaint I get from people who leave is that they had a hard time finding what they need here.

My Patreon was never meant to be a searchable archive; it was from the start a 'tip jar' style system where you give me a few bucks and I give you some pose rewards. As time has gone on though the expectation from artists has been they can and should be able to use the archive to find specific things.

I've tried to address this by making the Master Post which I've heard is helpful (yay) but Search was the other really big component for making Patreon viable as an archived resource.

Unfortunately as you can see from this response from Patreon support, the search here is NOT compoundable. You can search for "wings" and get poses and you can search for "perspective" and get poses but if you search for "perspective wings" you get.... nothing. Nada. Absolutely zilch. Even though this post exists!

This is such a massive flaw in how search should function from a user perspective. In essence it's almost completely useless. I've been sinking a lot of time into properly tagging posts to make them searchable and I never once until now thought to check if the search system actually functioned as it should.

I add TONS of keywords to each post hoping to make the content easier to find and now I can see it's all completely useless. It's incredibly disheartening to think of all the effort I've put into solving this problem only to find I've done nearly nothing.

This is reinforcing that I need to gear up on getting my own site up and running and built out as quickly as possible. Patreon is a really nice place for people to throw support cash at me with little desire or expectations of rewards, but it isn't a functional site for locating useful and needed resources. 

I am not planning on moving or changing anything with Patreon immediately but I will be working with my team to develop monthly support systems on my new site. At some point in the future, I will be converting Patreon into a tip jar only and moving pose reference rewards to my own fully searchable archive site. Until that time I will continue to tag new pose ref posts but probably only with major keywords and not the extensive lists I've been attempting.

Please make note that you can only search for ONE WORD per search. And as always, if you're having trouble finding something always feel free to reach out to me.

Thank you so much for your support!! Happy drawing. ♥