online art groups or communities

Tell me what you think about online art groups like deviantart.

Here are some questions to get you going.

Are they worth joining? Do you get spammed a lot if you do? How safe are the downloads there? What do you get as a member that you wouldn't get if you were just a guest? If you were a newbie at graphic arts, did it help you to join? What about other groups?

I don't think this is as off-topic as it sounds, because you have to master a graphic arts program in order to make nice clothes or building textures.

Thinking you mean these groups that include a gallery for you to place your art with various other options like messaging and forums. I am a member of Renderosity, Daz and Daz Art Zone.
and except for occasional things in my mail that are mostly non-intrusive and can
be turned off if you wish, I am not spammed at all.

I am not a member of Deviant, however I know sooo many people that are
that I highly doubt that they spam you.

Yes it is a great idea. You get feedback on your techniques and you can usually post your work
in software or type specific galleries where there are usually some resident experts hanging out
who are happy to point out what you may have missed.

Since joining SL I am not on those sites as much.

Thank you so much for responding. I really appreciate it.

I joined DeviantArt about a year ago and have remained a member. The price basically covers the bandwidth of transferring high-resolution images. I like it for the textures, mainly. While the textures often arent seamless, I am able to do that on my own (and prefer it).

Infiniview, have you seen an improvement at Daz regarding the audience? When Daz put SL-related features in Hexagon, I loved it and became a member. However, I noticed the Daz crowd wasn't very supportive of Second Life at the time. This was about a year ago.