About Art Haven
Art Haven is an artistic community and marketplace that provides a platform for artists, crafters, and enthusiasts alike to showcase, buy, or sell creative goods and services. Art Haven grew from a community forum on IMVU (www.imvu.com) called "Graphic Arts Services and Requests", aka "GASR" or "GASR Forum".
Our History Timeline
In 2006, the forum was created within IMVU to allow members to buy, sell, and request artwork and graphics related to the chat website. This forum was monitored by volunteers and website staff.
By 2012, we decided to make a new, secondary community off-site on Forumotion (www.gasrforum.com) that would be controlled by the very members who were involved within the community itself and understood its needs. This was due to years of neglect from staff against the numerous issues the original forum was facing, and rumors that the forum would be shut down instead of these issues being resolved. IMVU was not an art based website, thus handling issues related to our specific community was never a priority.
In June 2012, the original forum was shutdown without warning and our off-site community, named after its predecessor, became the main community. After a strong start, our community was thriving within only a matter of weeks with all of our member base consisting of IMVU users.
In 2014, due to the popularity of our forum and the increase of users from multiple websites, we removed the restriction that all members had to have some connection to the IMVU website. This opened the doors and gave opportunities to all artists, regardless of where they came from, to thrive in our community.
By late 2016, just before the start of our fifth year, the community was at a standstill with zero progression and growth. It slowly became stagnant and faced a new set of issues that were caused by constant staff changes, neglect, and the crippling control Forumotion had over our community as a whole. We could not evolve due to the limitations of their hosting and the lack of a team member with website development knowledge.
In early 2017, the old website team was replaced by a new team with the knowledge, fresh perspectives, and ideas needed to revigorate community progress, marking the beginning of our transition period. We made the decision to break the chains Forumotion held on us and become fully self-hosted, allowing us to have total freedom over the website from the software we used to the management of our server. The transfer from our old forum to our new self-hosted website (gasrforum.net) began in August 2017.
In October 2019, we rebranded to "Art Haven". After just a couple short years, our community had become more than just an "IMVU forum" and blossomed into a feature rich website that continues to grow and evolve to be more inclusive to everyone.