Serkunet
I am leaning towards the 1 artist per post, since you have made good points.
I think with a thread in the test forums for the artists, I wouldn't have to worry about reserving posts, I could just make the posts as we get the submissions.
Is it really that bad to reserve too much posts in advance? You can just post a "nothing here" or something similar on the first post of each pages if there's nothing to see and either leave or delete the rest of unused posts once the store open. People doesn't really need to see every page too -- they start on the first page and if they do take the time to read they will know there's no point to open this or that page. And... by leaving a message in the first post of each empty page, it's clear to them where to go to continue reading on.
Another possibility could be to simply not allow any posting in the "shop" thread until the day of the deadline and all the artists posts are reserved. The shop usually doesn't always open right away, so that would give that small time to ask a mod to move the thread while finishing adding the content to it. To make things easier, filling the rest of the last page you needed for the artists with reserved posts would give enough space to use more if needed and a cleaner start for the pages on which people will post. There's also the fact people looking for the artists images wouldn't ends up with a long page loading filled with "random" comments at the bottom
smile
The only reason I can see why some currently open mini shops needs to use those (ie. test threads) is because they have too much stuff for what they had originally reserved for their store. So to ease the loading time, they simply move them to a test page. However, it's clearly not our case here -- it's a new thread with only one purpose, so we don't need to split things.
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