MaryamAswad

EDIT, 21 May 2019

A Deviant Art admin has responded to the journal, explaining that the issue is technical rather than political. The response is in a comment under Mythiril's 2019 journal. I'll paste it here for reference, but keep this journal up to keep it visible as an open topic.

"Hi Mythiril,
Apologies for delayed response. There are quite a few teams involved in this issue — including outside companies — so the process can take longer than we'd like, given the back-and-forth and timezones involved.
For clarity, this issue is strictly technical and not political as you suggested in your journal. DeviantArt isn't intentionally blocking traffic to Syria and we've put much effort into figuring out why this is happening.
To recap, the reason it initially wasn't working for you was because Google Cloud — one of the services we use to serve some of our images, CSS, and other resources — prohibits serving data to Syria.
After you brought the issue to us, our team built a system to route the traffic from Syria to a different system that didn't require Google. This was no small effort.
But you’re obviously still running into issues even after this was fixed.
Because the diagnostic steps we gave you weren’t working for you, our team has little information to figure out why you’re having trouble viewing the site.
We also haven't received other reports from deviants in Syria, so it's tough to diagnose a problem when we only have one person reporting it. If there were multiple people reporting it, it would help us figure out if there’s a pattern between who it’s working for and who it’s not. If you have any friends or know anyone in Syria that uses DeviantArt, it’d be helpful to know if they’re experiencing the same exact thing or if there’s any differences in the errors they’re running into."

***End of update***

I am writing this journal to echo the sentiments of , a Syrian artist who has been banned from Deviant Art for living in a war zone. 

Ever since the ban started, Mythiril has been emailing Deviant Art staff back and forth to revert and fix the situation. His efforts proved fruitful for some time, but Deviant Art soon bugged out again and staff stopped responding to him.

Read more about Julian's experiences with the war and his journey as a person and artist, as well as the squabble with Deviant art here.

Read more about the second round of issues and his response to it once again here. (journal from May 20th 2019)

Thank you for caring. I pray for a blessed Ramadan for us all   

Hello! 

Presenting this this week's features! Another wonderful set!














Hop on to  to see this week's final feature!!

And have a cool weekend as always!!  

Hello! 

Back with this week's features! All wonderful as always!

All wonderful pieces, don't you think? So vibrant and atmospheric! Head over to the artists' pages if you like them! Leave a comment or a favourite!

Hello!!

This week's features are rocking it as always!

Although a cold environment seems to prevail, all too reminiscent of my windy, windy week ;-;

As always, I encourage you to view the images in their galleries and check out the artists if you like their work!

Hop on to  to see this week's final feature!!

And have an awesome weekend as always!!  

Back at it again with them candidates!

Such wonderful art to see all the time! This week's features were particularly astounding!

All wonderful pieces, don't you think? So vibrant and atmospheric! Head over to the artists' pages if you like them! Leave a comment or a favourite!