Any update that makes the pedos mad is a good update in my opinion.

I don't disagree that it's good to crack down on pedophilia, but honestly, I feel like this has done more damage just through misinformation and people being skeptical of the vague rules then it will ever do good on cracking down on cub art.

Normally I'd agree, but the problem is that the update is so poorly worded that it effectively puts a blanket ban on countless species, and I think people have the right to be angry that 60+% of pokemon, rabbits, mice, and kobolds (just to name a few) are banned by the staff.

At the cost of hundreds of artists who aren't pedophiles, but who draw Koopas and Yoshi and general Pokemon and Digimon?

...in sexual situations.

Yes? And? Why are Koopas and Yoshi considered children?

This tiny thread perfectly exemplifies why so many artists are leaving en masse.

I'd rather move to a website that had the clear sense of policy and moderation to never have this issue in the first place. Fur Affinity is drawing a line in its own blazing dumpster to the point that moderators feel more like prison guards; treating us all equally to our community's worst members.

Alot of people will come back after the dust settles, it happens every time. It'll just take a bit of time for everyone to process and understand.

FA has done a really bad job at explaining things. They need to do better.

They really needed to state their intentions better, I understand the necessity of the vague rules, cause you cannot set firm hard rules on what defines childlike when it's so damn subjective in art, and setting hard, fast rules just provides more ability for honest actual pedos to skirt around the rules and claim innocence by technicality.

But yet here we are that it has been construed so badly that people think all Pokemon art is banned in its entirely and you can never ever under any circumstances draw a character that might be possible slightly be seen as short or underage, even when the context is entirely SFW, which the policy never targeted in the first place. Just sucks. People may come back, but the wiped accounts won't be refilled.

I know how that feels man, I'm almost high tailed out of this site, but in the end, its was just illusions that this policy update making people do to nuke everything they have and leave. Its sad.

I sticked around because one, I need to make sure if the fires are snuffed out in the end or not before I make my move, and two, I never, not in a nine to ten years in this existence did I made NSFWs in my gallery what so ever, especially is there's a minor involved. Its just wrong of me if I do that.

I wish you the best of luck when ever the time comes.

It also upsets me seeing people act so rashly. FA isn't some huge multi million dollar site, the moderation wouldn't even be automated, either. It's all by volunteers.

It wasn't until you reached out to me I got to calm down and realize this wouldn't actually have the crazy impact I was worried it'd have. It's just not physically possible, even if all the mods were huge puritans and anti-furries who flagged art indiscriminately.

I do hope folks return after seeing things haven't gone under. It always makes me sad to see someone deactivate/delete their account or galleries.

To be fair, a big part of the reason people are acting so rashly is *because the policy update encourages them too*

"Accounts found in violation may receive a 1 week suspension and a final warning. Repeat violations may result in a permanent ban. If you believe that this change may impact your gallery, then you should delete any and all content that may violate our rules before July 1st, 2023."

"you should delete *anything* that *could* violate these rules"
it openly encouraged people wiping their shit , to not get stricken entirely.

I can see some of your points, but people have already gotten some of their art flagged after submitting trouble tickets over art that, from what I can tell, has no cub nsfw work in it. You said it yourself, it's volunteers checking this stuff, meaning what one person thinks isn't cub, maybe cub in another person's eyes. For example, any stage one starter pokemon, cause some think that, unless it's fully evolved, it's a child, when there's clear examples out there for anyone to find of stage one starters hitting old age, treecko being a good example, and as adults in their prime are indistinguishable from children of the same stage. And I know yoshi pics got flagged, not baby yoshi, the adult form, cause we know what baby yoshis look like, but adult ones are getting flagged for being NSFW. Koopas, hell, just because of someone's art style, a Bowser pic got flagged after getting it checked from hearing about this recent policy change, it's since been deleted, and I don't remember the artist who did it. But you get the point right? Everyone's scared to death now to even upload anything here. Hell, I got a bulbasaur pic that I'm worried about getting flagged, as well as a nightfury sona pic of mine that, due to another's art style, looks very young even though I consider it more a chibi pic, because all characters of mine are adults no exceptions. But again, all it takes is ONE bad mod and you're toast. This isn't about cub art anymore, it's about eliminating any nsfw work that doesn't look like this https://www.furaffinity.net/view/52218007/ (this is sfw, but it gets the point across)
Look, I'm not trying to make you worry again, okay? But this it the equivalent of using a shotgun to kill a fly instead of a flyswatter, or buying a new 1,000,000 dollar car just to get you from A to B when a new 30,000 dollar car will work just as well. Doing a big catch all thing like this with the vague definition of "child-like proportions" doesn't work, it just hurts everyone because 100 percent of cartoon based and like... ~80 percent of anime based characters have some if not all those proportions naturally, even as adult characters. This is especially true with feral animal or anime monster characters... like oh, Idk, pokemon, digimon, freaking yoshi, experiments from the Lilo and Stitch series! (Fun fact the Stitch universe continued in Japan after the American series was dropped, and Stitch canonically became 18 in one episode of 'Stitch! The Series' but since he retained his original design, art of him is getting flagged unless it's bara Stitch) and many others.
Now, that's not to say that there shouldn't be limits sure. In pokemon there ARE baby pokemon: Smoochum, elekid, magby and Mime JR come to mind, these are canonically baby pokemon. Digimon, anything below rookie level, easy, 'cause even 'Neer has NSFW work of guilmon, a rookie level. I know that if this policy change does go into effect as is, I'm gonna be spamming trouble tickets on the guilmon pic Neer has, sighting the little known fact about rookie digimon. Because I HATE hypocrites >=3

Agreed.

The update those abslutley nothing but to protect us form pedofiles

There is nothing rong whit it

Bur the idea of your art been taken down and your acount been Ban for any reason is already something scary to think do
Way to scary thay pepole just take a look at there galerys and say: os this even rong?

The thing everyone shoud look forward is to duble check the rules and make sure not to brake them

I've seen far too many people react over the top that you'd think it was some comedy bit everyone was in on.

Its will be a hard time for all of us and its not hard to see why so many people are angry

This whole thing has been a shitshow and for some reason it was the final straw for some people. Maybe it was just twitter doing twitter things, spreading the most sensational version of events faster than they could be corrected but who knows.

I have a feeling that either people will slink back once things have cooled down or they'll decide to become twitter exclusive (the worst idea in the world, rolling heights twitter country.) or open up accounts elsewhere.

This is one hell of a pickle everyone is in.

For me it's not the specifics of the rules that bothers me (though there's plenty to criticize about both their vagueness and the multiple extreme and contradictory clarifications offered by site staff) but more the sense of "what's next?". Because once you open the door to banning art on how it *could* be interpreted, anything is possible.

One of my favourite things about this fandom is its unapologetic weirdness, and I'll be incredibly sad if the site that got me into it was ruined to appease a subset of the community that won't be happy until everything becomes bland and mainstream/corporate friendly.

(Also this site seriously needs a robust tagging and content blocking system. Maybe we wouldn't get dumb rules like this if people could just easily avoid seeing shit they don't like)

The fact that people like immediately wiped their accounts before the effects even took place seems super premature tbh. Like when Elon took over Twitter I waited a month before I was like, yep I don’t wan to do this anymore.

I think people were just looking for an excuse to leave if anything or manifest their frustration at the site and it’s staff for various reasons. The poor wording made it easy to be extremely uncharitable which I mean the staff should have seen coming

Many of the artists that have left were explicitly told in trouble tickets by mods that their art was now a violation, despite clearly not depicting children.

And this all seems like a continuation of Sciggles Puriteen bullshit.

I still maintain that FA is an art hosting site, not a social media site, so what it does to the "community" seems like a weird argument for me. But whenever I bring up this line of reasoning I'm made to feel like I'm the weird one.

I'm not pro cub-art or whatever you want to call it or anything, but the entire reason child porn is morally wrong is because actual real life human children are harmed by it or because of it, and that moral argument shouldn't apply to fictional characters that can't possibly be harmed in any way, because they're not real. I'm a firm believer in freedom of expression, even if it offends someone's personal sensibilities (don't like, don't look), and I'm also a firm believer that where there is no victim, there is no crime.

But site owners have a right to enforce whatever standard they want; this site is privately owned, not the equivalent of a public street corner. People seem to forget that for some reason and think because they post art here they partially own it. Just because a park lets you use their sandbox doesn't mean you own the sandcastles you build in it.

Honestly though the people fleeing aren't defenders of cub porn or anything; most of them are just people in my view overreacting to what they assume the policy means, either taking the worst possible interpretation or just flat out not even reading what it actually says. The policy isn't really new; it's just clarifying what it already was. What wasn't banned before still won't be banned. They just had to clarify it so people couldn't argue sexually explicit depictions of children weren't really children due to a technicality. They're not out to blanket ban every depiction of anything arguably small or short.

In the end I think the people leaving for good were just looking for an excuse already, and when the dust settles and the sky hasn't fallen, probably many will come back.

I mean, it could be worse. Could be they just opted to shut down FA cold turkey and call it quits.

The rule has been in place for over a decade now. People really need to chill out haha

indeed. But with the clarifications, seems like people are more upset than ever with the 2.7 stuff

And people's art was fine, but now that fine art is being claimed by mods to be a violation in trouble tickets.

The mods are the ones that caused this.

Why are you telling people to chill out when they were explicitly told their art was a violation?

I only knew of one person who was told their art was in violation and it was definitely questionable looking in my opinion as well. I've mainly seen people panicking that their gallery *might* be in violation but without anyone actually telling them that it is.

Seeing how they targeted the Digimon and Pokemon community, it doesn't make people feel any better as is. And then having vore able to have minors in it doesn't sit right with people. The rule may have been in place for years, but the new change to said rule is basically a shotgun blast more than anything

Like others have said, most of them will be back. This is a cycle that's gone on since FA first went live. The administration makes a poor or poorly worded decision, a bunch of people raise a fuss and threaten to leave, then the decision gets walked back or reworded, and everyone goes back to business as usual until the next cycle. If you really leave, you leave without a word.

As for this update... honestly the problem with the last couple updates in general is that they are vague and leave the door open for harassment and witch hunts. Which is my real problem with everything really. Can you really trust the community to judge without bias? Or to make informed decisions?

The mods were the ones responding to trouble tickets and telling tons of artists that their work was a violation, when their work very clearly wasn't showing children.

How is it an overreaction when people were being explicitly told what was banned content?

I hope they don't come back. At this point, with Sciggles Puriteen crusade bullshit, I kinda just hope that FA dies.

It's frustrating that it was very vague, then made potentially worse by how vague the "clarification" made it? But, it's never not a bad idea to keep in touch with folks any way you can. Sometimes it just means having to take an extra step here or there. It's annoying and I get the frustration for sure.

Like psion said, this ain't the first time the administration's decision ticked off a bunch of users, but this one certainly seems to be more damaging than usual (I haven't been around that long, only started really using this account back in 2020). Considering their clarification journal didn't seem to solve anything, I'd say it's best if they pull back on this change if they don't want continued damage.