Hello everyone! We're back with a bit of an overdue update!

Achievements and Titles

Some features we've been excited to have on site are the ability to create and grant both achievements and titles! We'll be starting off slow with these but we wanted to let everyone know our first two achievements relate to the seasonal prompt currently going on!

1. By completing the seasonal prompt this year you can earn a single elnin the "Lantern Crafter" achievement which will allow your elnin to acquire the title "Lightbringer". If you wish to earn this achievement for a different elnin you'll have to complete the prompt again next year!
2. Completing multiple eligible prompts based on this seasonal tradition  will allow users to earn the "Returning Light" achievement and its associated title "Luminous"! This achievement has some past eligible prompts that count towards the unlocking requirements so if you've done some lantern crafting in years past, be sure those legacy prompts have been submitted to the WoE site!

For full details see their respective encyclopedia entries! The seasonal prompt will be returning every year during the months of January through March. If you cannot complete a prompt this year you'll have a chance to participate and earn these achievements in future years.

You'll notice that currently neither achievement has art. Since these features are relatively new and things have been busy we're aiming to have achievement art completed by April! If you're wondering how to claim an achievement we'll be following up with how that process will work after the seasonal prompt is over.

Please do not attempt to claim any achievements until we have been able to release guidelines on how this will work in early April! We appreciate the patience as we explore this aspect of our website!

Group Staffing Changes

In the past month or two you may have noticed some changes to our staff on the website! A few things have happened. We've officially hired 4 new Prompt Moderators, 3 new Design Approval Moderators, and 2 new Discord Moderators.

Please welcome these individuals to our staff!

• Angelos, LeechiPeachy, Picnyx, and woodlanduni have joined our Prompt team!
• LizzyJun, StarryDoe, and wintry-chan are the new members of our Design Approvals team!
• Last but not least BlackSapphire and kaethus will be our new Discord team staff!

We're very excited to have them on board and we hope the community will be, too. There were a lot of good applicants to review and it took us quite a great deal of time reviewing everything and getting our new staff settled in!

Having dedicated discord moderators will be a pretty new endeavor for us. Their job will not overlap with any sort of website moderation, so they will not be expected to help with tasks that are not directly related to our discord. We'll be requesting everyone to adhere to the rules and guidelines provided in our discord #rules_and_info channel, as always. If you've not looked at them in a while you're welcome to! In the coming weeks we'll be slowly clarifying  with the community what our discord moderators role will be and our expectations on what interacting with them should look like! Their role will likely differ in some ways from the rest of our moderator staff simply due to the space they're assisting in.

In addition to acquiring some wonderful new staff, we're also announcing that our website developer (and maintainer) has stepped down to pursue personal projects and we sincerely wish Cy the best! We would not be where we are as a community today without Cy's hard work these past few years and the contributions of many other dedicated developers expanding on what Lorekeeper can do, so a big thank you to these wonderful developers!

Regional Guide Updates

Headed up by our resident Sharky, regional pages have been updated!

With some of the updates to our website's features and code we thought it would be good to make sure some of our pages were keeping up too. There have been a ton of art prompts submitted since the site's launch and the moderator team worked to pull together some great examples for our regional pages. We'll revisit these pages periodically to improve on them, but they're looking better already!

Adoptable TOS Update

On the "Adoptables Terms of Service" page we've adjusted some wording to try to clarify our stance on design similarities and expectations relative to referencing other original designs. We understand accidental similarities may occur between designs, as there are many designs out there, but in this group we're expecting such occurrences to be wholly accidental.

If we encounter situations where our moderator team has to ask for designs to be distanced during approvals it helps to be clear with everyone that intentionally referencing someone else's design is not condoned. Not everyone is comfortable with their characters being referenced and we want to respect that within our community. We recognize breedings events are a bit of an outlier from this stance but during those events permission to reference parent designs is explicitly granted.

Under the General section wording has been revised to read:

Do not directly copy or heavily reference characters from existing franchises or original works/designs that are not your own. While you may use character names or hairstyles for inspiration, please make sure they are not a 1:1 copy, and should not be treated as that specific character itself. For non-humanoid designs, this includes distancing colour palettes, markings and/or traits from the original design. Any outfits or props used should not be based on the specific character themselves and exact replicas may not be used (ex. Do not use the tri-force as a crown, pokemon cards as a prop, etc.). If we feel a design is too similar to a specific character/another design, we reserve the right to ask for changes to distance them further. *

*UPDATE: If you have a concern about a design similarity seen in any group space please submit a support ticket on site so the moderator team can be made aware, do not approach other group members directly about this concern.

Editing Elnin Art

This has come up a few times so we just wanted to throw out a general reminder!

If you have art done by another artist that you want to edit, always check with the original artist that they allow their art to be edited. This goes for mocking up edits as well even if you intend to have another artist redraw the mocked up image as final art!

We recommend checking their TOS first, if one is available, to see if it specifies they allow edits to their works. If a TOS is not available to cross check, we recommend directly contacting them to ask. We require users to provide some form of proof in the comments tab of their design update submission that they had permission to edit art that is not their own, or that they hired the original artist or another artist to edit the art knowingly and with permission from the original artist!

If we ask you to provide proof of the original artist’s permission please do not be offended. We ask this of everyone who submits edited artwork! It is simply our aim to help protect all artists’ work.

Past and Future Sheninigans

It's been a busy start to our year but we're ambitious as ever!

These past few months have involved a lot of time sunk primarily into a lot of the wonderful things we've mentioned above.

We've been:

• Testing the website extensively for bugs
• Sorting out aforementioned new features
• Updating guides (Mostly regional though this is often a constant task)
• Reviewing potential moderator applications
• Preparing for staff additions and departures (site role setup, reorganizing and updating a lot of internal tools and documentation we use, etc.)
• Training new staff
• Keeping up with day to day tasks  as much as possible (Prompts, Design Approvals/Updates, Claims, Tickets, Questions, etc.)

Needless to say all of these items have had quite a bit of depth to them. As we wrap up some tasks we're looking forward to having some bandwidth to get back to other facets of the group.

Looking forward we're hoping to get back into:

• Events / Activities! Currently there is nothing we're planning for specifically, but we're hoping to get back into this space.
• Discussion about longer term projects the team wants to pursue
• A little bit of mischief (maybe even some elnin jokes)
• Pestering any sleep deprived mods to take a vacation

And with that we've covered just about everything for now! Thank you again everyone for the continued support!