In their eighth monthly update to the Requests Platform, first introduced to their popular Japanese art-sharing community in October 2020, the team at Pixiv have highlighted the improvements they’ve made over the past 31 days to the service. In May 2021, they introduced the Fan Letter service and a few other quality-of-life improvements. A full list of new features can be found below.
As its name implies, this functionality allows any artist on the service to begin accepting paid requests from the community (worldwide). Should they like a pitch, they can accept it and produce it within a 60-day deadline. As of writing, more than 25,000 requests have been sent to artists, although it isn’t known exactly how many of these have been accepted or delivered by them.
With this still being a relatively new service implemented into a pre-existing website, features have slowly been added month by month. We to this day await support for some of the more exciting aspects of Pixiv such as VRoid and sensei, to be incorporated into the request system, but continual features and quality-of-life improvements have been made available on a monthly basis.
A complete list of recently added features (translated into English by Pixiv) now available to clients and artists alike include:
- The Fan Letters feature was added to pixiv Requests. Fan letters can be used to express gratitude at seeing the final result of a request, how you were moved by it, or otherwise to convey your passions to the creator. Letters can be sent just once per request, within one week of that request’s completion. Since only the creator will be able to read the content of a fan letter, use it as an opportunity to tell them honestly how their work made you feel.
- On your “Manage requests” page, you can now see when each request was updated.
- The links and displayed text (such as cancel, work’s post, completed, etc) on the Request details page have been improved.
