Sketchfu

» see sketchfu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

"Welcome to Sketchfu, where you can draw and share." That line sat at the top of the page for the site's whole life, and underneath it was the feature that made the place worth remembering. Sketchfu did not store your drawing as a picture. It stored the strokes, in order, so that opening somebody's work meant watching it get made, line after line, at the speed they had made it. The warning text when the plugin was missing said it outright: you need Flash 8 or higher to see a replay of this drawing.

Drawing communities in the late 2000s were young and almost entirely American, and this one was no exception. I was in my mid-twenties when Sketchfu launched, finishing university in Ankara, and I have never been able to draw. There is no version of this site where I was the user it wanted.

The engineering underneath was ordinary and competent. Prototype and script.aculo.us for the interface, with asset timestamps dating the build to June 2007, which puts the launch somewhere that year. By February 2008 the drawing permalinks were already running past ID 60,000, each one a slug like /drawing/60434-troll-doll. The first drawing the site ever stored lived at /drawing/1, and the picture new visitors landed on was one made by andrew_null, drawn specifically to show strangers what the replay did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the sketchfu revolution ~

Around 2011 the moderators appeared as a single shared profile called FU_MOD_SQUAD, run by the older artists on the site, and the community loathed them with the specific intensity that only a teenage forum can produce. Then the moderators banned social and roleplay posts from being uploaded as drawings. The stated reason was storage: roleplay images arrived faster than anything else and the disk bill was climbing. The community called the backlash the Sketchfu Revolution, which tells you both how seriously they took it and how old most of them were.

The complaint logged against the mod team afterward was the usual list for a volunteer squad with too much power and no appeals process, bans without warning and attitude in the replies. They turned out to be right about the money, which nobody gave them credit for at the time.

~ the actual end ~

In 2012 the owners switched off new account creation, and the moderators took the blame for a decision they had not made. Their reply to one accusation survives, and it is the clearest signal anyone outside the company ever got: "The creation of new accounts was disabled by the site owners and will remain down until they have resolved some site issues to their satisfaction. We do not know when it will be restored." A site that will not let anyone new in has already decided something, even if nobody has said it yet.

It never was restored. Sketchfu ran closed for roughly fourteen more months, serving a community that could no longer grow, and shut on 30 January 2014.

~ the last word ~

The farewell page went up where the drawing canvas had been, under the heading "Sketchfu has been shut down :(" with an emoticon doing the work a designer would normally be paid for. Below it sat a 600 by 360 image and a short letter in the first person. It thanked the people who had used the site every day for years. It thanked the volunteer moderators, FuModSquad included, which after the Revolution was a generous thing to put in writing. And it mentioned, almost in passing, that the author had talked to many of them over Skype and on the phone.

That detail is the whole size of the thing. Sketchfu was small enough that the person who built it knew his users by voice.

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