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Ultimately, what happened in this were severe breakdowns in communication and significantly longer gaps than expected and communicated. Particularly after the February update, I became even more uncomfortable and triggered (have since figured out why and added it to my mental model). And now, I recognize that the February update is what further had thoughts creeping in of the numerous horror stories of artists vanishing and absconding with money (after the ghosting earlier on) or rushing items below their standard of quality for the sake of completion, along with people not willing to speak up due to having anxiety over conflict or not having the spoons. This saga has taken more time, energy, and spoons than hundreds of other commissions combined. It's been an extreme outlier for my ND brain and bad for my health, though also in combination with various other factors IRL. This took so long to report, because I'll typically trust artists to do their thing and stay out of the way. Being able to commission artists is incredibly special to me, as I'd been following a few for a decade or more before being able to fathom commissioning; it also helps me to express things, as I have processing issues. I have a couple remaining around this time-frame with no concerns, as those have all been well-communicated. This one ended up severely festering in concerns due to the history of no replies, so it felt like there was little point in attempting more communication later on, despite being severely anxious. I mostly relied on Trello after February, as I'd not seen discord/twitter updates. I ended up leaving the discord as well due to a regular server cull after not seeing updates - still at around 50 severs between two accounts, so I don't read them all. This would've resulted in no longer being able to DM me (have DMs blocked by default but had opened on Mossling's server), though it's not something I'd thought of at the time; we also have previously established contacts on FA and twitter with email recorded via Google Forms/invoice. After seeing the Trello card progress with no WIPs for fix confirmation sent or indication of awaiting feedback, that further set things off deeper into the spiral with an even further loss in trust. Come January when I checked the card, it vanished from queue with no contact, resulting in the next FA note. While writing the beware, I found it in archives incomplete not awaiting feedback vs at least being marked on hold. That's what set things and confirmed all fears in my mind at the time and complete loss of trust. Regardless, accusations like that won't lead anywhere good, but deep in a spiral that I didn't recognize early enough to be able to pull out of, the logical brain wasn't there like a locomotive engineer not being on a train going max speed; it wasn't going to slow down, which led to absurdity. I think that this has gotten far too rambly, unfortunately, so I'll just move to the screenshots. === This just shows initial contact via FA and moving to Google forms. Early on in commissioning, I'd intentionally wanted to help out low follower count people (super awesome to have watched some grow from 100 to over 10K) but have now mostly stuck to those I'm familiar with vs seeking out new artists. The next four are just the Google form, where email is the preferred method of contact but went unused, and invoice. I should've just corrected this early on, as emails can't be edited. Also worth noting on the invoice is that PayPal doesn't allow for transaction fees to be charged; I found out about that later on, so I'll typically tip to counter it. From there, it moved to discord, where I'd previously sent mentoring opportunities. Maybe that's why it went there. Initial contact and a WIP that was deleted??, along with feedback. At this point, I was new and hadn't thought about saving WIPs, which also made it seem like no progress was made in the later image. (This was just my thought at the time; I don't know.) Shows where I wasn't comfortable with how things were progressing and the start of the text walls x.x : A WIP was sent after followups, not sure why it took as long as it did. At this point, I hadn't seen pings or updates in the server or on twitter and ultimately decided to leave in I'm told March during a cull. With this interaction, I'd also stopped following picarto. Note that I didn't communicate leaving the server or picarto; I was already in a bad space after this. This one just shows the Np!, as I ran out of space but wanted to show the full window for continuity. This was taken on January 12th. Note that this Np! message will have been edited later on... After this, there was nothing communicated. As noted before, I'd left Mossling's server, not thinking much of settings, which ended up resulting in needing to use email (original request), FA note, or twitter DM. I'll link the trello card to explain how things fell from there. I checked the trello once a week and saw it remain with only the two flags labels shown below, never awaiting feedback. I did stop checking at some point, as it seemed like an exercise in futility. In August, I'd checked again and noticed that lines and colors were done with no feedback or WIPs. This plunged things deeper into the spiral and set off a panic (not saying this makes logical sense, but it's what happened). The numbers thing is patterning after the text wall mentioning numbers. Here, the second paragraph was meant to be offering for Wyr to be pulled and background reused elsewhere (e.g. YCH), if the background were refunded, but this makes no actual sense to me reading it now. Going back to the trello card linked above, I checked again in January and noticed that the card was entirely missing without communication. I blew up at this point. Just proof of email copy, but same text as above: Search showing all emails containing mossling (and no email communication), including the email above: Both of FA notes remained unread as I was putting together the beware. It's at this point that I recalled that leaving the server and that it'd most likely mean not being able to DM, though we also had a shared server I could be pinged on, so I toggled settings and sent a final DM. After sending this, FA notes both showed read and a reply was received: This note refers to being blocked on multiple platforms, when discord was retoggling the server privacy setting. I don't know what other platforms are being referred to here that I supposedly blocked on. FA, email, and twitter have all been untouched. Still furious, I was unsympathetic with a shitty reply vs if it'd had been prior to the card being archived with no communication. "IRL's shit, will be back" would've been enough prior to the card vanishing with reasoning behind why it was archived, because at the point of archive, the note hadn't even been read. And then this is the final note: Going back to discord DM today, I see that it's been edited. And that's everything, I think.