Update: We have Discord! How we're supporting the community and a few other things.

A lot of things have been going on behind the scenes at Stock Images, so we wanted to give you all an update so that you're not left in the dark.

Firstly, we've decided to start a discord. Not something we ever expected to do, but it could be useful for feedback, questions, suggestions and discussion that you can't really have on posts. The invite link to it has now been added to all the footers in our posts and comments and we'll add it here too. We hope we see you there soon, whether you're an image contributor or an image user.

You may or may not know that we are a part of the @ocd incubation program, which means we get support from the OCD curation team. This program has been going well and grown to include a wide range of communities, so they've taken the next step to make sure their votes are being spread well across the Hive community. What this means is that a single author can now only be put forward for one OCD vote per week, no matter which community is putting them forward. At some point this may change to once a month. The goal of OCD, and indeed of all the communities, is to help promote authors and get them to a point where they have their own regular support anyway and don't need to rely on the OCD votes regularly.

This leads me to what goes on behind the scenes here. Our Stock Images voting account, @hive-118554, is still in the very early stages and doesn't have a very big vote (it's puny), so while it votes on your posts, it doesn't reward very well. Therefore our other rewards come in a variety of ways. We've been tipping comments with our available liquid rewards, but will also start to tip quality posts which can't be sent to OCD or @curangel, due to their author limits. @minismallholding may also call tipu out on some of the posts, but again, each curator has a daily limit to how often it can be called to vote.

Our stock images contributors are promoted via inclusion in the indexes which may gain them future earnings from use of their images by other Hivers. Please be aware that low quality images may not be included, but posts in the community are never muted unless they are plagiarised or inappropriate to the community. There is the chance of further promotion in our weekly curation where featured authors also receive a 10% beneficiary from the curation post payout. These will continue to be supported by OCD until we have enough support that it is no longer needed.

Don't forget, if you use any stock images contributed by Hivers and credit them we want to know. Use the tag #stockshares so that we can find your post. You are just as important to this community as those who contribute the images.

On the subject of images, you may have noticed we're getting quite a large selection now. This is being gradually split into smaller indexes under each alphabet letter and also into sub categories. In the indexes, we want to make sure that the account name of the contributors can easily be seen, so that users can start to recognise those images creators and their styles. We originally did this by tagging the contributor, but the HiveMind notifies all those tagged every single time the index is updated. Therefore we have changed it to have the contributor name just in bold; this way our contributors don't get constantly spammed with notifications. It does, however, mean that contributors will not be notified when their post link is added to the indexes, but it has to be better than constant spamming.

I'll conclude with a big thank you to our delegators who are starting to make our account vote visible, @barge, @keuudeip, @ocd-witness and @aquaculture.

Visit the Stock Images community here.

If you're interested in contributing to the Hive Stock Index, please first read About Stock Images and Important Information for more information.

Are you looking for specific stock images to use? Please view the Stock Images Main index where you can search by genre. This will be updated periodically as more images are added.

We also have a discord server for feedback, questions and suggestions.

_{Thank you to @lifeskills-tv for the image, @sitaru for the bee logo we use and @izzydawn for the footer. They, along with our delegators will receive a beneficiary upon payout of this post.}