April 19th, 2020: Due to fallout from COVID-19 I'm doing a lot of overtime at work. However, @spyed did post a journal recently regarding spamming and scripts on dA. I left my thoughts in a comment and he replied saying he'd consider some of my suggestions. Given the history of dA, I'm not expecting much, if anything, to change, but at least the concept of third party programmers is on his mind. https://www.deviantart.com/spyed/journal/Being-Genuine-is-the-right-way-to-win-836784365
August 13th, 2020: Finally wrapped up the overtime from earlier this year and am taking a breather, including returning to the report. Currently half-way through 2013 annotations. Looking ahead, I made about 2000 annotations per year but starting in 2015 that started tapering off down to under a hundred this year. There's a certain completeness about writing this report only now: much of the dArama has not only been lost slowly lost to the sands of time, but more explicitly when users deactivate or otherwise close their accounts. For example, one of the copy-cat accounts that mimicked my operations, @dA-Dub, deactivated their account, making it impossible to access the discussion on their page unless you have a direct link. It's not only point accounts that deactivate, but the people who used their services who have closed their accounts as well https://www.deviantart.com/comments/4/27509112/3144980014
August 27th, 2020: I'm going through all my annotations to organize the content into sections, but I believe I'll need to make a full pass through my outline later just to cut out superfluous content. I saved a little bit of everything over time, but some things occurred much more frequently. I undoubtedly saved the profile pages of hundreds of defunct point accounts, but only 2-3 are needed as a representative sample for the purposes of the report. For simplicity I'm tossing almost everything into the appropriate sections of the outline for now but will need to trim it down later.
This project ran for over a half decade. While sifting through this much old content it's hard to ignore the comparison to writing a PhD dissertation.
I plan to write up dedicated sections about noteworthy accounts in this space. I've just now gotten up to my first records on @dATrade.
September 7th, 2020: Continuing to churn through my records; I'm up to November 2013. 2013 saw the introduction of some notable personalities in the point account and bot space. I've reached out to some for follow-up thoughts (and gotten a few replies surprisingly enough), but several have moved on in the intervening years. Somehow I always felt something like that was going to happen, so I did many interviews at the time and will be relying on those records for the report. @dATrade is a good example of that.
I'd like to wrap up this report before starting any new hobby projects in earnest. I am dabbling in some FPGA programming on the side though since it's an area I need to become more familiar in for work. It's a rather niche field so there isn't a whole lot of community support out there. Every time I hit a problem I have no idea how to resolve it really makes me long for the Arduino IDE where everything is at your fingertips...
