oh my goodness...

Dang still a shame you have to get rid of such a big chunk of art of Canon characters.. that's crazy..

Figured you were gonna have trouble with that. Even posted my own thoughts about it in a journal a few weeks ago.

I'm already following you on IB, so I'll see ya there

Thank you for mentioning me in your journal. yeah I am updating my inkbunny and sofurry right now with the art in question :)

You're welcome. Like I mentioned in my own journal, I'm not a huge fan of these changes and a lot of creators are likely to get schwacked for basically no reason.

And awesome, looking forward to that ^_^

I think the more frustrating thing with the announcement was the kind of poor communication / PR on the FA staff side of things.

At the end of the day, FA can allow/disallow whatever content they want. But the details of the announcement was rather confusing and their reasons didn't really seem to reflect the actual community's perspective.

Kind of like as you mentioned, they mentioned it only extended to digimon/pokemon, but as we clearly see, it does indeed extend beyond those two categories.

Then there's also other species like Avali/MLP that don't really have an official word on either. Think people just have to play it safe rather than risking going for something that might be construed as too child-like and receive a ban. And like moving forward, does every submission that's on the edge need to be submitted to moderators before a real upload? A

gumon on-canon not allowed but guilmon all good. Rather just confusing communication and vague guidelines for something that results in a bad if the artist accidentially misteps after the policy takes place.

The policy is bogus imo still and completely oversteps the actual problem and protections it intended. *shrugs*

The problem I see is how do you distinguish the difference between someone using the early stage characters to skirt the cub rule by simply not tagging it as such here on FA.

Like, while Narse and others might not see them as "cub," there is that implicit understanding for the lore reasons why that not everyone viewing FA would be aware about. So, being FA is more of General facing website that allows adult content they have to play ball with being accessible to a very broad range of the general public, a decent portion of whom might not be aware of the lore reasons why early stage characters are implicitly 'adults'

Where if you have a website dedicated to Pokemon and Digimon R34 content, it would be fine because you could assume that the viewers who are using the site are their specifically because of the content and are implicitly aware of the lore.

This was pointed out to me by another artist friend, a lot of these crack downs are in part due to complaints and other reasons, but also because many non-dedicated websites need to be broadly approachable to people who may not be aware of all the lore context for the content on the site, regardless of the franchise it comes from. And this is a theory of mind problem. You might be aware of the context, but the person next to you might not be and thus see it differently.

that is very well said. Honestly I figured it was something like that. FA is kinda the mainstream furry porn site, so that explanation makes sense. As I said in the journal, life is all about compromises, so I get it. You cant please everyone all the time. That is why I am trying ot stay positive through all this. I just dont want people to start calling me a cub artist because I draw porn of stitch and agumon.

Yeah, definitely, it is kind of the world we live in, when furry was even more niche than it is now, a lot more could be gotten away with, but now that the community has grown we, as users and community members, should always be cognizant that not everyone is going to have the same awareness and implicit knowledge base that you or I might have.

We are communicators as artists, and it is important for us to make sure we are communicating ourselves as well as possible.

I do feel that a lot of the people who are up in arms about this are forgetting the Theory of Mind problem that comes with stuff like this, they are seeing this very much from their perspective. So I am very happy to see that an artist who is as prolific and almost effectively one of the artists that I found first when getting into Furry myself really embody our need to think more big picture, and less within one's small sphere of perception.

P.S. Between you, DarkNatasha, Athus, and a few others, you were my gateway into furry, and I am forever grateful of that

again, very well said :) I got to thank you for this back and forth, its really good to talk through things like this. I totally get ya, and remember the earlier days of furry. You are right, with the fandom as big as it is there are obviously gonna need to be changes to help ease in a mainstream audience. I dont plan on going anywhere as an artist, I love this fandom and will always be a part of it. I never want my art to offend anyone in the fandom, so I try my best to walk on egg shells sometimes. After athus passed away I quickly realized just how short life can be, how important community and family is. That if you never share the things you create with the world, then what was the point in creating them at all. It means so much to me to share things with the community now a days. I dont want to hold back anything I work on. As I said before you have a great head on your shoulders. And I feel honored to know that I played a role in you discovering furry. Consider me a new watcher on your page :) Thank you again for talking with me on this stuff :)

You are more than welcome. I try to be a scientist first and foremost, my education is actually in biology, and in getting there with the university I attended, I learned very quickly that 1. Communication is important, not just what, but how and 2. Nuance is important. Both things which fall on deaf ears sometimes.

Honestly I wasn't really expecting much to come of my comment, just me trying to remind people that there is a point of rationality in all of this. I really didn't think much would come of it, so, I am more than humbled for the watch, I don't feel I deserve it, I feel like I am just another normal person trying to make his way through the world.

And trust me, I understand the not wanting to be offensive.

Either way, I don't have enough words to adequately convey my appreciation, and hopefully I can occasionally post stuff you might enjoy content wise. xD

And, you again, you are more than welcome, I am just grateful for this exchange at all.

Ya know, its funny. I went to a friends wedding many years ago and the pastor said something that has stuck with me to this day. He asked us all what was the one thing that every sucessful relationship needs. All of us were calling out the obvious things like " love, trust, etc" but none of us got it. He said the one thing that every relationship needs is communication. All relations start and end with communication, you need that more then anything else. So i always try to approach things from that angle first and formost. Your science approach made me think of that :) Thank you again my friend, you really have helped me a lot with this :)

Funny enough, I went to Jesuit university called Regis. I was very opposed to going, but, I had a scholarship, so that is where I was told I was going. But here is the funny thing, despite being run by Jesuits, about half the staff was atheist or agnostic or just ambivalent, but they taught the importance of integrated knowledge and education, that you shouldn't just specialize the point you don't know much beyond your field, they taught that you should draw knowledge from all many sources.

But yeah, the pastor is completely right, whether coworkers or partners, learning to communicate is going to get someone a lot farther, because people aren't mind readers.

And you are again, so very welcome, I am glad that I could help.

Quite the wholesome exchange! ^w^

Ultimate I kind of agree with everything discussed above. Communication is quite essential and for FA effectively being the "mainstream" furry site, ambiguity and nuanced context that not everyone should expected to understand shouldn't necessarily be where the line gets drawn.

I haven't really heard about the Theory of Mind myself, but I am quite intrigued and i'll have to check it out. ^^

Basically Theory of Mind is the concept in psychology that acknowledges one's ability to recognize that someone else's mind is separate from yours. That they they have their own individual thoughts separate from your own.

"As I said in the journal, life is all about compromises"
But art is not. I can understand the cub policy because it concerns actual laws in some parts of the world (whether it is for good or extremely bad reasons, this is another debate), but THIS is not, apart maybe in some autoritarian place. Which for me, FA just implicitely condoned.

FA just ceased to be an artist haven in my eyes that very moment, to become just one of those mainstream sites as you say. They switched their interest from art to fame. And in the process, gave up on the very essential core of what is art: imagination and free speech, thus SUPPORTING intolerance. FA lost its main purpose, the very reason of its existence in the first place.

If i may tl:dr this for anyone else?
Blame the Normie's/wider audience fallacy. Happens every time something niche but good exists

I don't think that is a fallacy, just a fact of existence and having niche groups of people and interests. Like. I had not idea the Asura from Guild Wars even existed until someone mentioned that they were also going to be getting the hammer for NSFW content containing them. And when I looked them up to get a general idea of their look, I was.....yeah, their adult appearance and depictions were varied and most would fall into your standard child-like proportions and appearance.

e.g.
-Small jaw
-large eyes
-large forehead
-head more than 1/2 their shoulder width
-head to height ratio

And while in proper context they you could tell who and what was adult, out of context it would be more hard.

I tried finding the specific fallacy, the closest I get is "Ad populum" but that specifically relies using somethings popularity to justify it - so I think in this case, people would be trying to using Pokemon's and Digimon's popularityto leverage why they should have exemptions, but not as a fallacy for why it is being more heavily enforced. But also, the fact that there were a number of users who have verifiably pushed the lines and tagged their stuff as cub on IB and not here, claiming it was within policy.

Wider audience fallacy isnt quite a real documented one yet, but given how often it pops up it might end up becoming a thing. The idea being when something fairly niche gets a fanbase of a certain size the owners of said property will begin censoring or drastically changing it in the name of reaching a wider audience that doesnt care/exist while simultaneously stabbing their existing userbase in the back to do it. See blizzard entertainment, Marvel Comics, warhammer, anheiser-bushe, sony-funimation and tumblr. A small but dedicated community built them up, then they changed everything in the name of a wider audience and global standards, now they are dying/dead in terms of popularity as everyone they had left and there was no real wider appeal to normie's to begin with.

Ergo, it isnt being niche that makes it so, its changing everything that appeals to people for an audience that has yet to really show interest or might not even exist because maybe.

I think you are missing a fundamental here, starting as a small community that built them up is fine, but FA is no longer a small community,,at it is not nearly as small as it was. Looking at the numbers below, at the moment I am leaving this comment there are over 13k registered users online. I don't know what the "other" number indicates for active users and for guests, the number is almost 3000. I am fairly certain about a decade ago, the number of guests hovered closer to 2000. So that number is going up.

So I think we are going through a similar turn over as Anime did where it was really niche in the Western World 2 decades ago and has gradually grown over time. But like I started in this community a little over a decade ago, and i have seen so many new users, artists, etc join over the years, there are a lot of artists in the community now who are in their early to late 20's who may or may not have been part of the community a decade ago.

I think as communities grow, things have to change to balance a lot of various factors. 2 decades is a long time to try and keep things the same and not expect new people to join. So I think it is more an inevitability that certain content will change, especially the more....controversial topics where context is important but not everyone will have the same implicit knowledge or understanding of context, especially if stuff is being posted without the context.

and im not so sure your right on that one, comparing this site to anime has a major flaw in that anime is a much different arena with many more sources. this comparison is like comparing FA to Oda when the real comparison needs to be FA to Funimation/Toei, FA themselves are not the content creators they are just a platform for independent content creators. they don't have the ability to just say "fuck off" to 90%+ of their content creators and expect it to be taken well. 13k is also still niche given the active people on the internet register in the millions at any given time. backstabbing the reason people come here, the creators and their work, to try and bring people in who aren't interested in the first place is a silly venture that leads only to nobody being around. again, see tumblr or patreon who are both financially bankrupt at this point and are only held aloft through blackrock/vanguard/statestreet ESG loans.

now lets look at anime where its remained largely unchanged the entire time and the few studios that do change to suit modern audiences tend to go broke rather quick because they lose their identity and value to the existing fanbase for a fanbase that doesn't watch anime to begin with. see 4kids/funimation/crunchyroll and whatever sony changes their name to next week as they keep censoring what people want and pushing their own modern audience crap that nobody asks for. most independent localizers do better then them these days simply because they wont change lines to fit an agenda or change entire scenes to remove certain aspects. hell look at redo of healer, interspecies review or goblin slayer for my exact point as they are doing incredibly well everywhere while sony california keeps trying to censor and bury them (in some cases through full on cancelation, just to then lose the IP to another studio who makes bank off their loss) to suit "modern global audiences/standards." sony has lost billions pushing garbage like High Guardian Spice. meanwhile the studios and distributors who don't censor things and let freedom of expression be free (within legal limits) allowing things people actually want like the aforementioned are eating their lunch. i wont even get into sony california's playstation division censoring japanese video games leading to many game developers refusing to work with sony as a whole ever again. thats a full rant in-and-of itself.

as for the factor of trying to say context is important, i agree, which is why moderators should have very little right to tell a creator what is or isn't. everyone who makes art on this site in any serious capacity is leaving for Itaku, IB or e6 because they are so heavily affected by subjective thought crime rules or cant trust they wont be next in the crosshairs given past events. saying that this rule protects people is also a falsehood, that last sentence just proved that. not only are you simply having this type of art and artist move off platform for places that aren't openly censorious (keyword openly), but the streisand effect says they just exposed more people to it then they would have otherwise. this goes without even mentioning the fact that getting rid of drawings, carbon on paper, does not stop real pedophiles in any capacity and in fact may do more harm then good by removing their public presence where they can be brought into the light and dragged for causing actual harm instead of deeper into the dark where they can continue to hide and commit such atrocities. its illogical to assume making something illegal will get rid of it, prohibition policies fail through all of history and even today do not work. in my eyes the site already promotes itself as 18+, already has a dedicated sfw mode, already has rules around minors abusing the system. why make everyone else police themselves for someone else's kid? we are not, i dare say, their babysitter. we are not their parents. and if its the parents that are mad, tell them to be a parent and take care of their own children, stop letting big brother apple/google do it for them.

the very last point i have to make is what most would consider the slippery slope fallacy, but given how in most cases its not a fallacy at all and comes true almost every time... you be the judge on that one. that is what is next, where does the censorship end, when is enough simply enough? they banned depictions that might be misconstrued as minors if you don't read into it, turn your head sideways, slant your eyes to the point of near blindness and its a tuesday in the rain according to the mods. is feral depictions next to stop people from railing their pets? how about depictions of gore to stop murders? is it going to be the depictions of abuse as people tell their own stories because it promotes harmful stereotypes? the censorship wont stop, it never does, but when is it enough to say "yeah, the kids are pretty safe now." the whole thing reeks of a typical psyop from the crazies wanting control over everything more then protecting anyone. it becomes a double slap to the face when you consider they chose to do this over a functional blacklist so people can just not see things they don't like and tell people who demand censorship to use it and stop pestering the staff about things that fall under the 1st amendment's free expression/speech rulings. they chose to burn their own userbase at the altar of fake virtue instead of doing something that might take a bit of work. given the community backlash i know im not alone in thinking that.

this has been a long one, hopefully this clarifies some thoughts. i thank you for being more cordial then most on this front, its a rarity these days it seems. if i come off a little hostile, my apologies, i was never very good on the whole personal communication thing and oft use brutal honesty and harsh or crass tones which might come off that way. sorry for the small essay as well

I mean, that is fair comparison, but I meant morec in the sense that Anime as a general fandom started off really small in the West, and that for a while it had its own general public backlash and people were wary about it. Much like people have historically have been regarding Furry as a fandom. It's taken a lot for the more general public to not see Furry as this weird group of....sadly all the words don't quite cover it or seem harsher than necessary. But like it has taken a good deal of work for us to show we are genuinely good people who want to do good in the world through charity and activism.

As for certain localizations, I do think some are better than others. And yes the level of censorship in some cases are absurd, that I will happily agree with. I don't really know much about those Anime in particular, but ones I have watched are Sword Art Online, Tokyo Ghoul (all 3 seasons),

I hate trying to move my cursor on phone sometimes

Anyway....Also Fairy Tale, Digimon Adv 01, 02, Tamers, and Frontier, Currently working on OG Pokemon plus Journeys, and a lot of the editing and changes in the OG are super weird. So yeah. I kind of get that in terms of localization and edits.

I think the problem is more that a lot of stuff is getting posted without context. It is partly why they changed the minors and pregnancy rule. If you read carefully why they changed it back to not allowing minors to be depicted as pregnant is largely because people started fetishizing it. They opened the door to allow a few years ago as a way of giving people to express some rather important aspects of life provided that it was done with proper situational context and awareness and it seems like people really just ran with it heedless of context. Like...regardless of how popular Pokemon, Digimon, and etc are, or lack there of in some cases. If it can be mistaken for child, it is both problematic and can lead to serious legal liability on top of just generally being off putting as is for a vast majority of people

Like one of my other friends pointed that part of why we find bestiality and pedophilia just generally kind of gross is because neither animals or children are able to adequately consent. But when it comes to aliens, monsters, and etc, there is a bit more of a disconnect because it is much easier to assume those categories can and give consent. Example would be some vaguely humanoid alien that otherwise looks completely different generally doesn't give pause, but if it had all the features of a child in our familiar sense, it would like weird a lot of people out because even if you are consciously aware that X might be an adult, the appearance subconsciously causes a different response. But then you have characters like Riolu in Pokemon who have been intentionally designed to be the child form of Lucario. Trying to say that is not the case is kind of delusional, especially with how Riolu even acts within the anime.

Well and that is kind of thing, it is a Slippery Slope, and I think people are very much overthinking the change. While, no removing it doesn't necessarily stop pedos in a macro context, and I don't think the change is intended to stop it or eliminate it, but more as a limiter. Like Basian reasoning tells me that the more likely reason is not to "protect the kids" but more to remove anything that could remotely be mistaken for an underage character, plus a lot of other reasons. So far the evidence points to more of a problem with how characters are being depicted and presented regardless of intent. Artists are communicators and it is our job to make sure we are adequately doing what we can to make sure we are communicating properly.

Also, a super majority of the works posted to FA are SFW despite how much it seems it is an adult site. It really isn't. The adult furry content is only a fraction of the site and our perception of how much there is, is skewed by our interactions. I also know plenty of serious freelance artists who are not leaving or even finding a problem with it. But rather being thankful they are finally getting strict about characters who look underage, regardless of the "well actually" type rebuttal. E.g. the 1000yo vampire girl who looks like she is 13 and still acts like a child otherwise. That as for all intents and purposes would be considered a child if not for the "well actually..." type statement.

Also, as a scientist, I think communication and respectful conversation is the only real means to effectively create some sense of understanding. So I appreciate that you have shown that in return

the whole problem with these rulings though is that it doesn't just affect a small amount of artists, especially with how vague it is in the end. as we can see on this very post the rule will affect things that are obviously not children acting this way because someone somewhere might find it so. its a common problem in the world that rules are so subjective it leads to constant false positives in defiance of evidence. as someone whos studying con-law (in one of the top 20 most corrupt US cities no less) i see it all the time where someone is arrested on some overly vague law because it might count maybe if you squint hard enough. the same applies here, whats fine today wont be fine tomorrow because a different mod said "nope". given the staff already ban people for silly misreads like removing 3d artists for being too realistic because "RL Photo rules" and for posting certain memes because it "causes hatred" I cant say I blame people who are up in arms over this change. its so overly vague to the point it creates a massive schism in the fanbase by telling artists they will have to censor themselves even with context out of fear it will be used and them dragged regardless. meanwhile other sites don't have such rules because the common sense prevails (for now) that creating a ban, just like creating certain laws, will only create an equal underground movement in defiance.

one of the worst parts of it all is the double standard. people have posted images depicting murder of real life individuals and a threatening message against said individual as the description, they stay up for months if not years, yet I post something both innocuous and true like a history lesson on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic or citing the FDA/CDC reports from the late 80s on the banning of MRNA usage any time over the past 3 years I would get banned for the karen cough misinformation policy within minutes. one could post an actual child by all metrics of artists description getting railed by something 5x their size and the mods wont care if it doesn't appear childlike while someone posting an aged up treeco gets the hammer regardless of the fact the anime showed evolution does not equal age. someone posts an image of a fantasy character in cannon form who is indeed too young for their species in a particular style and its fine, but god forbid someone posts a self made image of their DnD Kobold ArchDruid character that is canonically of age and has children. the mods are not good about these things in the past, and by the reports coming in they are really not doing good by people now.

I could understand it if the mods actually acted like they cared or listened to us on this subject, but the discord debacle showed they just wanted pats on the back and nothing else. its an echo chamber over there, given where I know some of the staff came from I cant say I'm overly surprised. add on top of it all that the world is going full clownworld at the moment in terms of persecution for wrongthink and fake virtue? its a really bad time for everyone and destroying peoples escapism from the insanity only makes things worse, especially when its not for something that can be easily fixed with a basic webpage function like the aforementioned blacklist feature or a signed consent to see such with a penalty to users both avoiding the tags and false flagging content for rulebreaks. its unfortunate such rules have to be a thing to begin with, and i might not ever understand whats so hard about going with your existing fanbase thats increasing steadily and their wishes over the whole wider audience thing, but at least (for now) there is always another site to move to for the illusion of freedom just like subscribestar to patreon after they did the same thing.

This I agree with, it is vague, but I also don't know if there is a better means of defining what is included in it without have to constantly add addendums which would create a lot of work for the mods who are mostly volunteers. I also think most people kind of understand what child like means, but at the same time, I kind of wish the mods had better internal communication, report tickets are reviewed by at minimum of 3 mods when it comes to this content type report. I do understand that people are mad about the collateral damage this has caused, but certain users, who I shall not name did post actually tagged cub content to IB, and post the exact same image here and claimed it wasn't cub, even though it was tagged that way on IB. the 3D models thing, I can kind of understand if we are talking like movie level quality, where it is technically not IRL, but it is clearly meant to be representative of IRL. For Memes, this would really really really depend on the meme, because like there are some which are intended to be offensive but funny to a certain group. Corridor Crew did some "semi offensive bowling animation" contests if you want a reference for something that tows the line but is fairly okay. Some of their animations from the few times they have done that contest amongst themselves had a few that were so overly offensive the other associates were shocked and they actually couldn't even actually share those animations on YT because of how over the line those particular animations went.

Yeah, again, I think the staff need some sort of internal guide book for how to determine how to rule. I think it is hard to rule on, because there are users here who have a style and skill level where much of their characters look like children, even if they say they aren't. Like, I am not saying that the characters ARE children or that the person is trying to skirt the rules, or is a secret pedo, or whatever, but how they have chosen to depict their characters, regardless of overall style, look too much like a child because various features. Like, this is kind of a problem, there are a good number of people whose accounts I have checked out and I have no doubt they fully intend for their characters to be adults, but they have failed to even adequately attempt to make the characters look like adults. And I mean, I could hold a picture of a 10 year old next to it, and it would match almost all of the proportions of the photograph. And I think that is kind of a sensible line, and while it is still going to cause false positives, there really isn't a way around that.

Yeah, I can speak for the Discord situation, and again, I don't disagree about the staff having problems with communication or any of that, like they really need a dedicated PR person who knows how to communicate, and they need to get on the same page for what is an is not allowed, and how they are measuring their decisions.

As far as Patreon goes, I think part of it was payment processor thing, and my freelance artist friend made sure to keep notes one who got their accounts nuked when it comes to the child porn content, and a lot of them were people who had that anime style that really pushed the boundaries between knowing if a character was an adult or teenager. See 1000yo vampire who clearly looks 14 but only technically isn.t. But Japan and Anime in general kind of straddles that line socially as is. Subscribestar is very explicitly to be an Adult facing website, that requires a lot hoops to jump through, and being it is adult specific, like any adult store IRL, it is clearly labeled as being for adults, so there is a sort of implicit understanding expectations of the userbase that comes from just using the website. Where Patreon and FA and Twitter are more like your other stores in a mall that are not explicitly adult facing, but have like an adult section, so their are going to have stricter guidelines.

And that is how my freelance artist friend put it to me, which I intuitively understand, but didn't know how to articulate until he framed it that way. Think of the internet like a mall, where you have all kinds of various stores, most are going to be general, some will be general facing, but have adult sections (Like you might find in bookstores or CD stores from years ago), and some might be very explicitly adult stores that are basically opaque and you can't look in and you have to have you ID checked just to get in.

Pretty sure ive explained a far better means a few times, but i will reiterate anyways. Make a blacklist function that works to filter listed tags, make a report feature that's easy to use and doesn't require people jump through 27 hoops to figure out for people who try to skirt it by omitting tags, punish people who abuse the report system falsely/moderators who frequently abuse their power or make frequent enough bad calls and allow a just as easy appeal system for people who have been wrongfully punished by directing them to staff other then the initial ones. Beyond that people sign a simple agreement when the account is made that says "i accept all responsibility and accountability for my own actions here including the willful viewership of content i might find personally distasteful." Beyond that, free speech absolutism. If someone doesn't like something and its not the artists/platforms problem or fault, so long as its not inherently illegal then its the viewers fault for clicking it.

The meme thing might need an example, i shall provide it now. About four years ago someone made art of a diaper wearing furry shitting in the decapitated head of a certain orange president with the title "what i wouldn'tl give to do" and a description "one of these days i will be outside mara lago waiting for you, just wait" this was allowed to stay for months and is probably even still up right now, this is an open domestic terror threat against a sitting politician and is illegal by all metrics of US law. Around the same time you had an image floating around depicting joe biden in old soviet propaganda lposters with a description that was from orwell and rands writings which were taken down in minutes after upload under call to violence rules. A double standard to the nth degree based solely on the moderators personal politics. It isnt about if there are rules, its are they enforced equally. Again, look at the covid rulings the past 3 years and how many people were banned for warning of historical precedent on the very topic while people openly threatening to shoot others for not wearing a mask walked free. The mods already dont enforce the rules in many cases where it suits them.

Lastly, this whole thing about the 1000yo vampire that looks like a child has to stop being used as an example. Can the person prove it isnt? Is there some context that can be presented that shows it to be the case? I can think of a thousand reasons a vampire might look like that from real world biology, psychology and sociology like attracting prey that will believe them harmless or using the guise of a hurt child to garner sympathy and support from an ignorant crowd against someone who figures them out. This exact thing is in skyrim with the assassin Babbette. I would further argue that genetic defects such as certain stunted growth conditions that affect ones stature can also be taken into account. There are species that are smaller or age differently then humans in every fantasy media. We cant just assume the worst on sheer allegation because what if it is true, because what if it isnt? Innocent until proven guilty requires the accuser to present evidence of wrongdoing, its what free societies base any legal ruling off of, banana republics on the other hand believe its on the accused to prove they didn't do something while accusers can demand whatever they want without precedent. This rule enforces the latter, not the former and allows the current staff to not properly fix things with the site itself and instead just broad stroke everything. Even you have to admit the optics seems like the things they could have done better all falls on the staff's unwillingness to do work and instead take the easiest way out at all cost? I'm going to make my own allegation and bet at least some of the staff are getting off to the power trip from this and don't care what happens yet. My evidence is their prior history of rule enforcement, their behavior on social media platforms and the fact they know they cant be held accountable regardless.

In the end we also cannot forget the idea of free expression. Is art subjective? Yes. Will art, no matter what form, offend someone somewhere for some reason unknown? Inevitably. Should we all censor everything we personally disagree with? No. One can disagree with the art without trying to destroy it or the artist. You can hate bestiality and still appreciate depictions of the tale of king minos or leda and the swan. You can hate savage murder/rape and still appreciate homers greco-roman Odyssey. You can hate gore and guns but still appreciate all that doom and quake has done for gaming. If you can prove its someone being a creep like a kerothewolf situation then its not about the art but the actual harm they are doing at that time. Thats the standard to set. I know ive harped on it a lot, but punishing the masses to get at a few individuals will not solve anything. Throwing anything vaguely childlike into the bin because someone maybe sees that and doesnt like it is silly. If the standard is if it offends someone its not allowed or might be seen a certain way and any context be damned is to be banned then everything is. Your freelance friend is saying a lot of things, but i dont know they can argue this site has neglected many requested features for years in favor of a vague."we will get around to it maybe, possibly.tm" like the blacklist, name changes or even a simpler report system. Case in point on the last one I've tried to report this same artist several times for intentional mislabeling and miscategorization. After 7 times of nothing happening to this same artist posting anthropomorphized planes going at it in the general animal (non anthro) category i gave up because it wasn't worth the hassle jumping through so many hoops to reach the report forum to that response. I think i speak for a lot of people when i say i went there to see funny cat pictures, puppy's playing and dragons acting cute not a 737 whacking it in a dirty diaper. Staff trust was low far before this update, trust in the website improving was lower then that. The only people to blame are the staff themselves for that one, some people might still trust they want whats best but there are some people out there who argue stalin and mao were right in what they did no matter the hundreds of millions dead so its hard to trust anyones word when it comes to power grabs by any authority. After all at the end of the day power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and power will always be abused by tyrants who use the excuse of protection of the masses to justify atrocities of the highest order (one of the few things stalin got right on the money). While quite hyperbolic, i think my point comes across there. In the end it wont end, there will always be another boogieman somewhere for them to go after and some new line of censorship to cross in a year. They will use the same excuse of protecting children or the like to get rid of more artists, everybody knows it, everybody (even those unaffected by this particular change) are making backup plans on itaku or IB or even pixiv for that inevitability as proof positive to the trust it ends with this change.

My concern was less with a system of reporting, blacklisting, and etc, but about the rules and their definitions. Like, the rules do not exist in a vacuum and are not the result of a vacuum. The rules came to be as a result of trial and errors. in some cases. Take the underage and pregnancy exception clause that used to exist that no longer does. The moderating staff gave a bit of leeway for that specific topic that people asked to be allowed for depicting because it was important to the stories they wanted to tell. Which worked great up until the point people started fetishizing it, so it got taken away with the most recent set of updates concerning underage characters in sexual/potentially sexual situations. Exceptions still exist for non-sexual breast feeding of infants, birth, etc. So for as nice a lot of those features would be, let's say the rule still exists, even if we implemented many of those features, on limiting child like appearing characters. How do you create rule for such a topic without it becoming a giant list of addendums anytime a limit or boundary get pushed or broken. The vagueness of it is not great, but I also don't think there is necessarily a better option. Like, most of kind of generally know what a child looks like and we are really good at telling when it comes to people in most cases, there are outliers because of genetic conditions, but when making rules for websites and the like, you tend to rely on averages because you can't rely on being able to account for every possible exception.

Like, all of those are bad, why some are still allowed to stay up is kind of....concerning. Like for the Mask stuff, I would understand an explainer type image to stay especially if used information from the CDC and other reasonable sources. But I have not personally run into those specific examples, but I will take you at your word they exist, and it is concerning that the staff is not applying the rules equally or equitably. And again, I do thing that for the purposes of the staff/mods, that they are lacking so much internal communication, that this rule change has been a nightmare all around.

Like, yes, in the proper context and setting, this would all be fine, but how many images are posted here without tags, without descriptions, or even a hint of the context unless the image itself is extremely fleshed out. And that is a larger problem that would put a lot of burden on the users if FA staff wanted to start enforcing tagging and descriptions. I know artists who post something like 10+ sketch commissions every few weeks and tag none of it because limited time, and their gallery is literally several hundred images deep. imagine how many day that would take to fix if FA staff wanted to enforce that. I think the rule cannot possibly account for all the possible exceptions you or might think of and find appropriate when given the right context, so they are leaning on the average, and they are seemingly doing this largely to minimize ambiguity for the average user/visitor to the site. The site can no implicitly expect users coming to the site to understand the "lore excuses" for certain content, unlike a site that would otherwise be dedicated to Pokemon and Digimon and other content, where it would be generally implicitly understood that the userbase understands all the associated lore. This doesn't excuse the inconsistencies of the mods/staff, bur I think in principle the rule is trying to reduce ambiguity and the potential liability that comes with that.

I think there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than what is being said, the "protect the children" mantra does feels forced to a certain degree, and I think there were a lot of factors playing into the decision. I wish the staff was bit more....transparent to why the change or what there logic was. It could be the complaint tickets, payment processors, or just generally want to make the site more welcoming for a more casual viewer, someone who is on the fence about the fandom and is just exploring what it has to offer. Like wading in the shallows before taking the deep dive. Because getting a good first read is important, because it gives one context and understand for some of the stuff that might be more ambiguous and send the wrong message regardless of authors intent or agreements signed at the forefront. Subscribestar is very explicitly clear about the range it allows upfront, but it is also very explicitly an adult site, and there is that generally implicit that the users knows what they are getting into or could find. FA, Patreon, Twitter, are much more Generally facing.

The best analogy would compare the internet to a mall, with the websites like the stores people visit. FA and most sites are generally open to the public, though some have adult sections, they are generally open, where sites like Substar are very outwardly adults only, would not be generally open to the public without some sort of age check. It is not perfect, but that is what made it click for me when sites start making rules like this. It is not intended to target specific people but certain content, and sometimes how people depict things, their stuff gets caught as collateral damage. It is a tight line that gets walked. Again, this does not excuse how the mods of FA have handled this, because I will admit this was handled badly, like very badly, because of the lack of good communication from the mods about why this change happened.

okay, its been two days+ at this point. i can see im not going to change your mind in this using historical precedent or common sense. im going to ask just two questions given what you have said to me and what you have said to others below me.

1. you already agree the rule goes too far, its too broad and the risk of misuse is there. you claim its a lack of other options but will not accept anyone pointing out a better way (the implementation of features people have asked for going on over a decade now that would take maybe a couple of hours to make work.) you acknowledge the fact this will do nothing to actually protect minors or change anything aside the public image/perception, thus kindof proving my point about the wider audience fallacy. given all of these facts and the things i have pointed out without even going into the staff's public twitter pages or bans because of off site activity I.E. see jasonafex being banned for calling out staff members for past and present hypocrisy or the banning of nikasharkeh for being for wanting to protect innocent russian citizens getting caught up in a witch hunt against putin. with all that has been said, by me and others pointing this out, i have to ask why you are so deadset defending the staff here?

2, and the more important question: if you acknowledge this rule will do nothing to actually protect minors, will do nothing to stop actual criminals and is a provable virtue signal by the staff that will be misused inevitably in the future. its all to maybe, possibly become more mainstream through sacrificing identity and forcing self censorship (again, see that thing i keep citing about wider audience fallacy and its ties in the failing portions of the anime/video games/comics or even film/tv industries) to appeal to them. the mainstream doesn't want anything to do with the fandom, the boosts in people becoming interested are interested in what it is now not what a very select and very vocal minority demand it could be. get rid of that identity, you get rid of all interest people had, you backstab your current audience to appeal to one thats not interested to begin with. its ultimately not changing anything, its not "fixing the perception" its definitely not changing the world or the like, its just censoring things because reasons™. the question lies, and this goes double for you right now, if you don't care that it is censored because it doesn't affect you and doesn't fix anything then why do you care so much if its not censored? fighting with so many people over the past two days over it, i have to know.

1. I am not defending the staff as individuals or even their specific implementation of the policy. I am saying that the policy, with FA being a privately owned website, that they are within their rights to limit the type of content posted. I was here for the IMVU initial ban on underage characters in sexual content. And at that time I had no issue with it, if anything I was glad to see that content be pushed to site more suited for that sort of content. This policy update is an extension of that rule to close possible loopholes people had been exploiting and minimize ambiguity when it concerns certain depictions of characters. This is not an implicit accusations of the artists effected. It is also not to target specific individuals but to target specific content that is generally considered to be problematic, it just so happens that it ends involving a some people more than others, and again it is not making an implicit statement about those people or their views.

2. My friend pointed this out, it doesn't necessarily have to be about "protecting children" or preventing assault or any number of things. It is more about not wanting your platform to host content that has a habit of drawing out particular issues and potential conflict because of the very nature of the content itself. I don't think FA is the platform where this content should be hosted, nor should people feel like FA has an obligation to host such leaning content because people will always push an already nebulous concept as far as they can.

And like in some of the cases, I should have realized arguing was an exercise in futility. People feel very strongly about it and like, guys, we can agree that the staff needs better PR and needs better internal communication and consistency when handling Upload Policy violations, but are really going to argue for keeping content that is child like in appearance/leaning in a privately owned website that is within its right to exclude certain content because of that contents inherent problematic nature. I looked up several of the users who said they felt targeted and much of the way their characters were drawn looked very much like a 10yo. Whether or not that is there intent, if I didn't double check some of the tags or have prior knowledge before looking through their galleries, I likely would have flagged them.

FA is a public free to use website that supports adult content, it is not an adult focused site like Subscribestar, and it if we're to be up front about it, it would have to ban all the account owned by minors and implement other guards like age verification even just to access or navigate the site. So, I don't think FA is the appropriate site for underage content or even content that could mistaken for such. Yes it sucks how it was implemented, but it is not like underage NSFW content was ever a core part of the fandom to begin with.

PR will not fix whats wrong with the site, will not fix the continued bad decisions, will not fix the vagueness of the policy and will absolutely not fix the damage they did to their own community. you i concur with the futility of this argument since you clearly are going to continue dodging any questions and ignoring peoples points. after 2 days you still cannot seem to grasp the idea that staff demanding everything be "publicly facing" will not matter and is exactly what ive been saying endlessly in these comments about the wider audience fallacy which you also will not acknowledge without spouting on about "but my potential pedos" with the tired 1000yo vampire that looks like a child argument. the argument itself is moot, you are right that we will not agree because i look at things objectively and your choosing to side with fake virtue on plays to emotion and appeal to authority fallacy. if you cannot even acknowledge that the easy answer is make people take responsibility for their own decisions instead of this nanny state garbo. this needs to be a matter of free speech, doesnt mean you have to like whats said, but you cant just jail people for saying it either. this concept applies to art, period, if it didnt then we are right back to spanish inquisition level book burnings. on this we will never agree because you don't personally want to see things (ironically ignoring the entire point of a blacklist is ensuring you don't.) and instead of choosing to just, say, not look at it. you would rather it not exist/side with people removing it on this fact. your posts both to me and others here have made it all clear, you just want tumblr 2.0 where everything is so sanitized its like a padded room. this friend of yours, by your own explinations of their statements, I can only assume is a staff member here or on another platform that is just as censorious. we are done with the conversation if you cant get past the cognitive dissonance and see the minefield we are trying to warn you of.
good night, good day, whatever it may be sir or madame.

Free speech only protects you from the government and even that is not absolute, there are limitations to free speech. Like you can't block traffic, prevent people from entering building or protest on private property in many cases.

My friend is not a staff member me, I can guarantee you that, but he has both NSFW and SFW accounts here, and he said from the SFW side of things, people have really only seen this policy update a blip from the little bit of spill over it has caused to those who run almost exclusively SFW accounts. Some questioning why the rule needed to be clarified again and why the rule allowed what it did previously.

He actually made a comment here in this journal. Responding to another user.

Objectively, this site is privately owned. Objectively this site is public and free-to-use and hosts adults content with guidelines. It is not strictly an adult website, that would require it to have other features be in place, like age verification.

Also people will not take responsibility, so the staff has to do it for them, because people who want a stricter definition on things are those who want to know where the line is so they can walk right up to it, but not cross it.

I would love a blacklist, but even if it had one, FA does not have to accept cub or underage appearing characters. This is not me wanting a Tumblr 2.0 that is so sanitized of all porn, this me understanding that FA is a objectively a privately owned website and they are within their rights to exclude certain content.

"This is not me wanting a Tumblr 2.0 that is so sanitized of all porn, this me understanding that FA is a objectively a privately owned website and they are within their rights to exclude certain content."

Sure. They can do what they want with their website.
However they cannot control the fandom. So if this is an attempt at looking "better" towards mainstream, it won't work. It will never work. If anything, it should tell you all you need to know that people would rather go on Inkbunny as a result.

What I really can't understand after reading you for a few days now is why are you actively defending this. You seem at least half reasonable and certainly intelligent enough to see that it is causing damage. This isn't a case of banning cub which (I assume) most of the fandom was ok with. It's banning massively popular characters, many of them being the reason some of us became furries.

You said in another post that you agree that the community comes first. I don't care what FA says, I don't care that it's their website. I want to know why YOU would rather die and that hill knowing what it's doing to people right now.

I will respond to both comments at once, link for anyone who is following the thread: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:59974112

It has been three days, its time to stop. Guilty until proven innocent is how tyrants do justice, period, end of story. This rule assumes guilt on the part of the artists by the staff and lets them accuse whoever whenever for it, period, end of story. If you either are unwilling to see that or too blinded by false promises then i will never convince you either way. And on the basis of the first vs private businesses? Platform vs publisher, section 230 communications decency act disagrees with you not that i expect the government to do their job properly just like i doubt the staff will for very similar reasons and it doesn't mean people cannot or will not choose to leave over feeling persecuted, period, end of story. Believe whatever you will at this point, but when the censors inevitably come for you down the road just remember you had the choice to stop them before it got there and you lose the right to complain to those of us who were against it this time.

No one is saying anyone is guilty of anything, that is your presumption about the rule change, you agree to the abide by the rules of any website you user. Would you be saying the same thing if a new website about people's private Discord Server's if they said no IRL Ferals, No MLP, no remotely child-looking characters, and no non-consenting kinks? No, I would suspect you would think that the owner of the server just wanted to prevent potential problems and confusion between various users' opinions and perceptions.

Section 230 protects websites from legal liability for the content that is posted to their site, especially if it concerns illegal material, so long as it is making an attempt to moderate the content it hosts. It does not say that a company cannot be stricter with how it chooses to moderate nor that a website is not allowed to restrict the content posted. If it did, I don't think DA would be able to limit their site to only what would otherwise be Artistic Nudity, or that IB would be able to limit what people post to only non-human content. It is simply a way to make the poster the party responsible when it comes to the legal side of things, it doesn't say anything about whether or not a website can put limits on what its users post. That is why you have both the TOS, COC, and the UP, those are the things you are agreeing to abide by when using the site.

It is very clear that you are motivated by fear and mistrust. I don't have to trust the staff in their entirety to understand that just because something violates a rule update means that I am being accused, it only means that some of my content might be against the rules, that is all, nothing more, it is not an implicit statement about me or my beliefs. You are the one who is making that Hasty Generalization and Assumption without Proof.

the rule presumes guilt by its own written standards and the staff's 'calls' on how its to be enforced, if you dont want to see that then i cannot help you. go read "first they came" by pastor Martin Niemöller and understand what you are doing. it is not a hasty generalization given what staff has done in the past, you refuse the proof you have been given and the things people present to you. regardless, its no longer my problem as you wont listen no matter what people present until its your problem. this has taken up too much of my time trying to explain it all to you.

Guilty of what? It is not like we are putting people on trial here. if a piece of content violates the policy, it violates the policy. If you upload a video to YT and you break policy, YT is going to take it down. Period.

You really expecting each piece of art to be tried by a jury of peers? Do you know how futile that would be?

So what do you mean by presumes guilt?

day 4, you still dont get it and demand its me that doesn't... i will make it very simple.
the rule is enforced as "could be perceived as minors" see your constant hammering on about 1000 year old vampires in manga. who decides what age the character is? is the person looking at the art, or the artist themselves? is the masses deciding the intent of the artists? or the artists intent being shown to the masses?
who decides what is or isnt? let me break it down piece by piece for you since you still do not see where anyone is coming from.

if we all infer the subject of a piece is a minor regardless the artists stated intent then that's a presumption of guilt. we are presuming he's drawing minors when the intent is not there.
then we get into a second presumption of guilt wherein we then have to assume he's trying to skirt existing rules against minor related content, regardless if really was or not. we don't know the intent of the artist there.
this leads to a third presumption of guilt, the artist says otherwise but we have to ban, or "jail" them, on the assertion that he's willfully lying to not be punished for violating a rule.
finally we get to a fourth presumed guilt where if they are found guilty on all the above (which will never be a fair chance on the above's grounds being public while the appeal will not be) then the community at large will presume them into the exploitation of children on the grounds of what they were 'jailed' for. this will lead to mass brigading, harassment, doxxing and even threats of violence to that individual who by all accounts has done nothing provably wrong by any standard of justice or fairness. it was a witch hunt, the artist falsely accused is a victim in it, now they have to suffer regardless of their innocence because one person out of a hundred might have been guilty. to let 10 guilty men go free that one innocent man need not suffer pointlessly, or to punish 10 innocent men so that one guilty man might not go free? you be the judge of which you want to live under there.

as someone whos been falsely accused and convicted for domestic violence. I told an abuser to not come home, to the home I payed for, if they are going to beat on me again. spent a week in jail and had a prosecutor demand it was a threat of violence with intent to assault and murder in a never ending pre-trial that lasted 5 months while he tried to find evidence. thought crime, violation of the first/fourth/fifth/sixth/eighth at minimum. i wasn't even the only person arrested for similar bogus reasons THAT NIGHT. someone whos lost friends and family over the public shame i went through regardless of actual guilt and even though I more then proved my innocence in court... seeing people defend a system that allows that really grinds my gears. its the primary reason ive slowly become more hostile over these 4 days. takes 5 minutes to look up what anyone has given as examples, hell, takes 30 seconds to simply look for a gadsdon flag which historically stood as a reminder of the people's will to be free from tyranny at all costs vs the MaP pride flag which stands for pedo's being normalized on this very site. just a mention of the gadsdon is likely to get me in hot water with some of the staff.

this is not justice, this is not fairness, and this is in fact guilty until proven innocent. this will be seen as an attack on the fandom or even a deflection of the staff's own inadequacies, especially when several of the staff themselves had cub in their favorites (some of which was added less then 6 months ago) which when called out they banned the people saying anything, scrubbed the evidence and played the victim. i cannot continue to fight with you, nawka and whoever else over this. you will never change your mind, you will all keep demanding people are just paranoid or overblowing it when a basic scratch test of these rules proves otherwise. if you cannot see you are walking into a minefield because maybe things will be different this time, the staff and their friends swears it, so be it. please leave me out of this insanity, cause going forward i like many others who are being false flagged already, this is one wild ride i want nothing to do with anymore.

please don't make this a full 5 day thing, i see now why everyone else was so hostile from the start. i don't condone such usually, but given the lack of self awareness site wide i don't blame them either. i am, as always and forever, become the bigger fool for arguing with madness

1. I have a full time job which is why responses are just a once day thing.

2. Your questions are things that artists and audience have contemplated for a while. It used to be the creator and their intent was absolute, but now the audience and 'death of the author' are also now a prevailing ideology. The age of a character is determined by the creator, but that does make that information mutually exclusive of appearance, especially if the creators intent is to make that character look a certain way to convey a certain meaning. Artists are communicators, if they want a character to be perceived as a child they will rely on certain features and characteristics. If they want a character to be thought of as an adult, they will rely on certain features to convey that.

3. You are over reading what the staff is doing, they are updating how they are enforcing the policy because PKMN and DGMN should have been enforced since 2015 but were given leniency because of lore reasons, they are not accusing anyone of anything. Would be on the same cry if they decided to get rid of the extreme gore when everyone knows that the artist or whoever is not actually a murderer, like with any other horror media. The people who are calling artists and other people pedos already held that belief well before they changed how they were going to enforce the policy. So no, the staff are not making an accusations, just that the content is actionable per Policy 2.7 which says that a minor is defined as an character whose appearance is exceptionally childlike and includes adolescent animals, real or FICTIONAL.

--Pokemon and Digimon are fictional animal species, they have species whose appearance and purpose are to be the adolescent forms of other species in their evolutionary line. There are examples within each anime that provide reasons that they can still be in an early stage and be an adult, but we are talking about the average depiction and average intended perception. (E.g. Riolu is the child form of Lucario, Cubone is the child form of Marowak, the literal Baby Pokemon). Not everyone can be reasonably expected to have this lore knowledge, example here in Old Man Treecko, something I did not know existed in the lore, but his appearance was also altered from the average to show age. So for all intents and purposes, some species in vast majority of instances, are considered or intended to be perceived as adolescents from their source material. This is factually a violation of the policy, nothing more. Because again, the people who are thinking and calling artists pedos held that belief and bias long before the policy changed, and they are just as wrong to assume such just as much as you are wrong to assume that is what the staff is implying.

Read the words on the page, not what you think the words mean. Read the denotation, not your perceived connotation.

4. But with your last paragraphs, I now understand why you are so biased against any sort of change in how a policy regarding content is applied. I am sorry that happened to you, that does not make it right, and it does not make it right how people treated. I understand your wariness, but the rule itself is not changing, just how it is being enforced is, and why the staff for years did not take action against certain content when they could have, is beyond me.

https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10553034/
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10581826/
entire galleries toast over perceived minors, all because of the art style.
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10559228/
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10553420/
have yet to receive a response on the matter, likely will follow suit due to already shown enforcement by staff.

1. im not asking you to respond to anything, im asking you to look into whats being said and realize its both not just me saying it and that its already showing major consequence as the rule is screwing artists over for presumed guilt over perceptions of a third party.

2. who is the arbiter of what artstyle is allowed, who decides what people are and are not allowed to do based on their own skill or talents? stopping particular people and their individual styles because of third party perception does nothing but stop skill growth. you are again missing my point and trying to avoid answering the bigger question once again. i have seen endlessly now you wont answer, but i will ask them again. who decides what is or is not minors. you cant just say "everything with particular features or styles" when that's the entire problem to begin with. saying "just these specific characters" also isn't a real answer because as has been seen its not. double so when its proven these character(s) in question have in official media not been all minors themselves as you have now cited yourself. this brings us to.

3. it means the staff have to decide, based entirely on arbitrary grounds, is it a minor. they have chosen to just blanket ban it all instead of anything else. your own statement here is contradictory.
" So no, the staff are not making an accusations" "So for all intents and purposes, some species in vast majority of instances, are considered or intended to be perceived as adolescents from their source material." i reiterate, by who? not the artist, not their fans, not the community at large? you cant really say everyone because all of us calling staff or you lot out understands the difference between small or young appearing and child. by someone on the outside looking in? someone who has no idea what they are talking about? why does anyone care about the opinions of censorious busybodies and professional activists/slanderers who will just attack something else when its gone? you made the greatest point in the defense against it, and might not have realized it yet. "Pokemon and Digimon are fictional animal species" "There are examples within each anime that provide reasons that they can still be in an early stage and be an adult" case closed, they are not real and by your own definition do not infer minor purely by appearance. you then contradict that statement by saying "Policy 2.7 which says that a minor is defined as an character whose appearance is exceptionally childlike and includes adolescent animals, real or FICTIONAL." note the bold, thats the key word. its not real but just carbon on paper, just code in a machine. its not hurting anyone. its a waste of time to go after perceived minors instead of the real problems. we need to stop the enforcing of such asinine garbage and go after actual creeps and groomers with that time instead. but we cant do that, we are too busy fighting over whether or not the old man treeko or ash's bulbasaur counts as being a minor when drawn in its cannon state because someone on the outside looking in who doesn't contribute anything but drama might demand it so. if you stop for a second you might realize we agree on the fact that protecting actual victims is the goal, but we disagree so vastly on how to do so. the current rule, even before this "clarity update" has done nothing and will continue to do nothing in that matter but divide the community and make it harder to stop REAL problems because time is wasted going after fake ones. it creates more victims of the system in the act of trying to protect other ones.
i will reiterate what i said about "first they came" by writing exactly what i mean out for you.

"First they came for the loli/shotacon styles, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not into loli/shotacon styles.

Then they came for the cute and small styles, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not into the cute and small styles.

Then they came for the aged up r34, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not into the aged up r34.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

4. i accept the condolences, but its not wariness or paranoia of the change. this "clarity" just drove a wedge into the community (more like used a bulldozer to drive through its heart) and tossed out many artists of particular styles or those with particular personal characters. many of whom cant do better because they are already doing their best at this moment. some of whom are not even NSFW artists who have to take things down just because a staff member told them "someone made a demand it was suggestive or did nsfw fanart of this design so you cant have it now." how many must be sacrificed for perceived crimes of the few being pushed on the many? how many artists will never take off because they lost what little they had over a bad call on the basis of someone else's accusation? i care more about the little guy here, this does not affect bigger artists that much, not until the line is moved again. it might not be changing much, but the "clarity" did nothing but make it more of a mess then it was.

4.5 do i really have to repeat myself on why the staff did nothing about it? do i really need to repeat the staff members favoriting actual cub art for years and therefore didn't care until accusations against them came forward? must i really reiterate the fact that for years the line was not "all pokemon/digmon/chibi art" before this change and that's just a justification for new censorship without taking heat? i mean come on... its literally out of the Stalinist playbook. "to use the excuse of loopholes existing to gain more power over the ignorant who will go along with it believing it was always meant to be this way." its classic definition fascism and tyranny as defined by histories biggest tyrants like stalin, castro and mao. read the dystopian fiction like orwell, huxtly or rand (who i believe need to be required reading in schools personally, but i digress.) people who survived russian ww2 and the stalin regime when they talk about these things and where they always lead in the end. you will begin to understand why i fight for that freedom, even against my own self interest or preservation as a fandom member and irrespective if i am into such things or not. whether pokemon, digimon, chibi, loli, feral... i fight for torture, incest and rape artists too even if im not into many of these things because i fight for every fetish people come up with so long as it remains fiction. without protecting these things we wouldn't have anything for anything less then total freedom of speech/expression is a slippery slope that never ends up a fallacy. people ignore it and pretend its fine, but "then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." people of today forget this is a reality far too often, and its a sad state of affairs. i hope with this you, nawka and anyone else demanding i (or anyone fighting this new enforcement) just dont get it or are taking it too far are not in the wrong standing up or speaking out on whats believed. we just see both the damage its already doing now from personal experience or connections and whats down the pike if we dont take a stand. we are all terrified of the results this will bring after years of seeing those results everywhere else. the jobs and families lost, the lives taken both directly and indirectly, the destruction of the very happiness we fought so hard to attain all done by but a single accusation. the evidence and facts be damned for "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." in the end, who decides who is guilty? the staff. who made the accusations and allegations against them? the staff. who decides how the rules define guilt? the staff. who changes the rules on a whim to suit any reason? the staff. with this who holds the staff accountable to their actions when they violate those rules themselves? no one... who makes sure staff punishing people wrongfully or misusing their power are held to account? no one... who makes sure the staff are kept in check and don't exorcise power or authority they don't have? no one... ive spent too long writing this, im actually getting light headed again. hopefully with this the message is perfectly clear, as longwinded as it is i try to be as descript as possible. it is difficult for me to tell where confusion lies, therefore to mitigate it i end up doing so.

So, here is the thing with that, they all have made it their brand to a small set of content. I could make my entire gallery solely contain aquatic animals and make that my brand, but in doing so, I leave myself open to be upended if aquatic animals every got banned. This is a hypothetical, but this is a very real hypothetical for any one who uses a very niche (not in the small interest sense, but more in the ecological sense), where if you do only Latex work, only snuff, only males, only X species, only aeromorphs, etc. Any artist who feels an "ecological niche" in the community is subject to be upended at any time. This is true is general ecology as well. If an animal has evolved to overspecialize, it is much more vulnerable to an animal who is a generalist. This is a fact of life. It is sad that happens, but it does.

1. See above for being screwed over.

2. We are 20+ something year olds here, At least I hope we are all adults. We should be aware of what does and does not represent a child in appearance, It is nebulous concept to begin with, because you try to apply too many strict definitions you will get both false positives and false negatives. But I guarantee you, that if I showed you a series of images, you would be able to pick who and what is and is not a child if given no other context clues, just the image. Because humans are innately able to recognize child like features. It is why we bred dogs to look a certain way. So when it comes to content, I could say some characters looks like a child, and you could say no it doesn't. We could both try to make appeals based on features that make us lean one way or another. Like, can you come up with a comprehensive definition that would work perfectly. Like I said, it is very clear the staff do not have some sort of agreed upon set of criteria for judging it. And I think that no single person should be giving the thumbs up and thumbs down, it should be at minimum 2 people, if not minimum 3 people who have to either all agree or all disagree before making a final decision.

3. For old man Treecko and the old Scyther that I am aware of, both their depictions are done differently to their younger counterparts. And they are very explicitly relying on adding, altering, and changing other features to show age. But again, in the case of how the rule is written and how they are planning to enforce it, it is because they say they were getting enough reports of the years that the content featuring pokemon and digimon that were considered to be an adolescent stage or be perceived as child like was making a lot of people feel uncomfortable. Reference not everyone having the requisite lore knowledge to understand/accept the depictions. Removing the fictional part would just allow cub art back onto the site, because then the only depictions they could enforce would be of anthro characters. They are basically extending the enforcement policy to include all the other technical lore reasons for why a character who would otherwise be considered a minor, is being depicted in sexual situations. The ban is not for the characters in general, it is solely for their use in sexual material. I think we were in agreement that is only covered sexual content, but wanted to be extra clear.

3.5 I will also point out that I learned to day that in JPN, the Digimon evo stages are not called: Fresh > In Training > Rookie > Champion > Ultimate > Mega > Ultra but are instead: Baby > Baby II > Child > Adult > Perfect > Ultimate > Super Ultimate
Bolded, because if these terms had been used in the US, our perception and expectation of these stages would have changed drastically and our biases would have also changed. So food for thought.

4. So I don't think this wedged the community as much as you seem to think it has, maybe in your pocket of the community it has, but when DA and Artstation annouced they were allowing AI generate art on their sites, the front page for like 5-10 pages deep were covered in those protest signs that said "No AI Art" and they were all over twitter too. So, of the 1160 people I follow, I have seen 10 posts responding to this, most are on this "this sucks, but I will adapt and update a few commission policies." and only had like 1 or 2 that were very adamant about how bad this policy is. I have several friends who were said "nice to know" and then proceeded to carry about their day. So until I see a very united response like I saw with AI art on DA and Artstation, I don't think this is effecting as many people as you perceive it to.

I don't think there is any confusion, I know exactly what you are trying to get at, but I have friends who are find the change sad, but understandable, some who are a bit flustered because of it makes things a little harder for commissions, but it is not too overly restrictive, some who glazed over the rule to begin with, because it was never going to impact them, friends who think the rule is poorly written and should be reworded, which I don't disagree with, I am just not sure of a better wording. Like there are a lot of reasonable explanations for the change and people getting caught in the crossfire was going to happen no matter what. I think the staff is not being consistent, in how they are enforcing it, and that is a concern. But I do think a vast majority of people are overreacting to the intention and principle of it when it comes to a site wanting to moderate their content. Like it is very solely about the content, not the style, the skill level, etc. It is about what content is and is not allowed, and every website like DA, Artstation, YT, etc will have upload policies of what is and is not allowed. Like YT's semi recent update to swearing and other stuff received a fair bit of backlash, because it was becoming more restrictive, and I think some people has some legitimate complaints about it, and other complaints were things that really only effected them significantly or a handful of people. So it is more that I am not confused, I just don't agree with your premise based on what I have observed from my corner since the initial announcement.

then we agree to disagree, regardless of what is said. i choose historical precedent on such subjects, your choosing to go with endless logical fallacies while arguing others on the basis that they are the ones using such and ignoring the signs and warnings given. the appeal to authority, the use of bad reason to reject evidence, the use of kettle logic to dismiss people already affected and the endless begging the question. if you really want to defend tyranny this hard because "maybe one of them WAS guilty" or "maybe the staff MIGHT be fair about it" or even "but my friends all say its fine guys, nothing to worry about here!" then fine. lets stop this and drop it cause, again, i will never convince you of what you speak being nothing but censorship for censorship's sake and the rule not being enforced this way before because it was not written to do such (ergo, this change makes it a new rule not an unenforced old one). you and your crowd can have your quickly devolving website being infested with bots and activists more then artists, its clearly what you wanted. to the staff and their most ardent defenders, like you, thank you for tossing everyone else out of a burning building cause we are all now down the street making our own while you sit there and laugh at or insult us. when the flames finally catch up i and many others wont hear a word, and wont give a drop of sympathy, you did this to yourself. i dont even know if that is a spoken concept you will understand but im saying it anyways.

Nice conversation you two, had to hop in here because what you wrote reminded me of people calling me a pedophile for drawing aged up dragon characters xD my god, I think I'll be targeted more... which is not good

its a sad state of affairs these days, seeing freedom of speech, expression and press destroyed for ideological grounds. unfortunately after 2 days i am unsure i will ever get across to them how dangerous a slippery slope it is because they demand its just a fallacy while ignoring that same argument in the past always comes back to bite the very people who demand it. i feel bad for everyone having to be put under such fear, i especially feel bad for everyone basically losing everything because its so vague as to inevitably affect them. knowing people like you, who use aged up characters or even canonically adult characters whos species are just smaller stature like kobolds/gnomes/pokemon prevo's are basically force to feel that way should be proof positive enough to say this rule change is bad. but for some people for some reason its not. choosing to side with a vague rule believing it wont fall on them someday instead of standing up for things they might not care for before it does has always failed, and they don't realize it. the sheer paranoia and anger it has created in everyone even possibly effected in the slightest chance, seeing everyone say common sense labeled crazies...

I really wish it wasn't this way cause I'm right there with you. ive been called pedo, ive been called dogfucker, ive even been called toxic/downer by people i considered my best friends who abandoned me after all for defending other people let alone myself over these same types of things. I dont do art much anymore because i know personally I can never share images of my DnD characters, and never have simply because of the paranoia around such ridicule or band that come off that rule already being badly enforced before the change. my favorite characters like my kobold druid Auriel or kenku ranger Rattles whos backgrounds would get me banned 100% what with references to child slavery/torture and the like for them. my kobold sorc Bryter likely would also get me banned because they are a mated pair with a fae dragon who are both species that are small stature and both characters act the part of intentionally cute children, even though they are obviously adult to anyone who knows either species, simply to bait sympathy from ignorant masses whenever they are in trouble for something. Cant upload my main characters either for similar reasons. Gaia, Rot, Irene... all elementals or draconic species older then they appear yet the simple fact someone somewhere will demand its just child/animal abuse with their stories or depictions and report it means hard no. whether its Gaia (a spriggan-type elemental) being a purely feral wolf in a relationship with a human with multiple children. rot (a badly internally deformed dragon, from birth mind you, and elemental of null (antimagic, the magical contradiction which causes his suffering.)) going through child military experimentation because of what his powers could do if weaponized, Irene (a barely above human sized leviathan with PTSD after seeing a rape of her closest friend as a child) struggling to find friends when she reacts so poorly (deadly in fact) to physical contact. these stories are already deeply written, many events that created the depth weren't even my plans as they got those developments from text based RP servers years ago and they stuck, but I still cant risk it especially not now.

in this you, me, most of us all agree its all just insane. the staff and their defenders attempted deflection of real solutions like doing whats been promised for a decade and getting a blacklist/ToS that protects the creators while adhering to the first amendment as an american company is equally so. pretending its the creators fault for the perception of an ignorant, willfully or not, viewers assertion is madness. the person im fighting with, hell all of us have been fighting with in this chain knows it but the cognitive dissonance is so strong.

last thing i can really say in the end is the best advice i have ever been given. from back when sex appeal in comics and video games was being attacked so hard "feel no sympathy for those who side against you when it mattered because it doesn't affect them. the moment they come knocking for your help because they are losing what does affect their likes they themselves are simply reaping what they sowed. in short: karma is only a bitch if you are."

quite a long one, but as a free speech absolutist this topic burns quite deeply for me. i am sorry in advance if its a bit much for anyone.

Neither of which we are suggesting or implying. Our comments and conversation are in regards to the policy and the art it encapsulates. It is not accusation against any user or a statement on any users views or beliefs. I myself have had to edit out one of the sketches from a sketch page I commissioned from an artist. It is sad that it had to be done, but accept why it was in violation of the policy update.

Inserting myself in the middle a bit, but generally speaking, most realistic understandings of the average site userbase pretty well would at its best imply that barely approaching 20% of the userbase of FA is anywhere close to being genuinely affected by mere potential of the policy. There's a *lot* of misunderstandings as if the nsfw community/content volume is actually as big as people think, in that traditionally speaking it never tends to succeed in exceeding more than around 20-25% in totality. Even Tumblr was proven to be in that ratio and while its monetary "value" isn't nearly what it was, it's still chugging along just fine ultimately. Mostly the loudness of the backlash comes down to one of the biggest examples of a very vocal minority.

I can say with a lot of confidence with observations (and a probably unhealthy regular focus for years on observing multiple such sites from an S.E.O. perspective) that the actual size of FA likely wouldn't tangibly suffer too much, especially as regularly in operating a batch of sfw focused accounts that the last couple weeks of watching, this entire issue has barely registered from the other perspective as a blip of activity, other than that the other end is hearing about it to only ask why certain particular fringe situations due to wording were even ok in the first place.

20% if the rule is used as written, such things hasn't been the case in the past and everyone has seen rules that are 10% as vague being misused for things they don't really apply to already. going forward
a lot of us are (justifiably) leaving as we understand it will get worse, not better. look at historical precedent, not faith for that answer. I'm not going to continue hammering home that point, ive done that plenty already and am tired of trying to point it out.

as for tumblr? no, its not chugging along doing alright when it went from a 1 billion dollar value a little over ten years ago to being stuck in a less then 5 million evaluation begging to get picked up for sale just 2 years ago with it likely being shut down in the next few years due to its active userbase stagnating or declining year over year for all that time and its overall value still falling. nobody wants to take the risk since the name has become synonymous with toxicity just like buzzfeed or gawker. saying its alright is like saying CNN or Disney is alright financially. the fact a simple activity check and stock eval that took 3 minutes blows that argument out of the water shouldn't surprise me, but it does given your standing.

To which I'd say a number of things:
- define what things haven't been the case in the past.

- how much is a lot

- if anything, Tumblr's initial perceived value was grossly inflated in the first place, it was a site that was had a great outlook to venture capitalists around 15 years ago and they poured nearly a billion dollars up front, but then repeatedly found out later that it wasn't a site that really ever became profitable in the first place, and gradually the owners kept writing down the value they decided it had when they also lost tons more money elsewhere. Essentially Tumblr is more or less at its original value from the point at which investors got over-excited.

The main other thing being that Tumblr's niche is still slightly solved by other sites in a way that's not exactly comparable to sites like FA, which are already tiny in size by comparison, far and beyond outclassed by DA by and such by huge margins. Even if such people completely leave, they'll have to hope that their justification is strong enough to outweigh the inertia of actually transforming any of the other sites at a fast enough rate to outstrip the broader public's value towards those who continue using the site or simply divide themselves among them. Which all in all will more or less require a complete change in the public conscience of FA's general known existence. i.e. it'll take making more or less a singular site an even greater household name than FA has built for its ~18 years.

1. Its been three days for this post, people still fighting the general community outcry and saying its a minority are getting ratio'd by the same people they call a minority. Read the actual full thread for all the evidence ive brought forward for staff incompetence and misconduct which i will add one more here. The staff has been banning anyone publicly calling them out for hypocrisy on this rule. Dragoneer himself had many cub pictures, not just perceived but actual full blown cub stuff, in his favorites until people began calling him to the mat which he swiftly banned them and tried to cover it up.
2. Even a single ban for this guilty until proven innocent nonsense is too many. It does not matter if you don't think that's what it is, the rule itself and its wording would disagree. Some artists i follow are losing 8+ years and 90+% of their gallery for their art style according to the mods themselves on those rulings. People do not trust it, justifiably so, and i'm growing tired of fighting the same two or three people on that fact. As a staff member on other sites and longtime fandom member you should know better then to assume this.
3. Im not even going to argue this one, tumblr themselves have shown their numbers publicly and its not good. In fact its become a joke in some circles whats become of the place. The owners want to shut it all down, the staff who run it cant right the ship hard enough because of the public perception.

In the end, if FA doesn't lose a great deal of people over this air of paranoia and fear the guilty until proven innocent stuff creates then great, good for them. I doubt it will, and i especially doubt it stops here. When they come for anything perceived as too feral most of us wont want to hear it, we warned you, but you didn't listen. They already showed intent and did it recently to werewolfdegenerate, ivorylagiacrus and many more i do not know about personally no doubt.
If you have any other demands things are or are not correct i advise you read the room first. Average twitter/tumblr/neogaf users, who left these places because they made them toxic echochambers that are now too toxic even for them and/or cant live with other people being content in life not dealing with them, are not making anything but drama for the site and shouldn't be catered to first. You should know that better then i can explain.

After three days of this nonsense, i cannot continue to fight y'all on this. If you wont listen to the evidence, wont listen to the outcry and willingly ignore entire portions of whats been suggested or said then i will not convince you.

A very vocal minority is the reason we're getting this non-sense to begin with.
Again, comparing bubble to bubble, while that may be true that most people don't care, it's also true that most people did not actively consider Pokemon art as problematic.

So in this case, it's a matter of caving to a minority that wants to censor things based on perception, on arbitrary feelings, on lines drawn in the sand.

It's unfortunate that some people cannot see the problem with that nor feel concerned for the fandom as a whole and where it's going, especially with all the evidence that people pushing for this don't tend to stop there. A whole other kind of body types (ferals) is already heavily under attack, with exactly the same underlying arguments, and a small number is also attacking fursonas having non human genitals.

And FA is sending a signal that it's ok to keep pushing.

So yes, vocal minority maybe, lots of people don't care. But only up to the point where their own stuff gets flagged as "problematic". Then maybe they'll remember they're part of a fandom that needs to be defended.

It's really interesting how it came to mirror what's happening with our politics all over the world.

The timing of policy changing alongside politics on going, sure. But I can 900% assure it's definitely not a recent mood, but doubtlessly always had an undercurrent even within those who largely support people exploring what they want.

to anyone else who tries to read deeper into this whole thread, i shall spell out the wider audience fallacy real quick. its very simple and has reared its head in so many mediums, the fanboys and IP owners alike always declare they dont get how the failure happened.

a niche community is made surrounding a particular subject. whether its a certain genre of art, a certain franchise or a particular brand its founded and small. years go by and more people join the community for what it is, major content creators are singing its praises... then they aren't but we will get to that. as the brand becomes bigger the people in charge get this idea that going mainstream by deleting what makes it popular among the niche it has, replacing it with being identical to other mainstream IP's and backstabbing their own current audience will suddenly make them more money or more of a userbase. this is where the schadenfreude happens so pay attention here. the biggest fans leave, they no longer promote it willingly and instead are very open about being stabbed in the back and sing someone else's praises publicly. the newer or smaller voices in the fandom see whats going on with the bigger voices and will take a look at the new thing with that knowledge they were betrayed. at minimum half of them will not look back. all the people who just window shop and are not a vocal part but enjoy watching the others having their fun are now faced with the dilemma. if they want to still follow the people they like then they have to go elsewhere, but a very small minority of the dying legacy's most devoted and its leaders declare nothing is wrong... they are, of course, lying. this is orwellian double speak in action. "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, believe only what you are told. it was big brothers final, most essential command" is the line i would call to. i digress, the fandom knows what happened, most of the major players have left for greener pastures as they still cannot trust they wont be stabbed again, they took both the smaller fans and the window shoppers with them. they are not returning anytime soon, thats almost the entire community that exists gone... wheres that wider audience? they dont exist, they never existed, it was a lie. taking something that is becoming popular for what it is now and changing it fundamentally for something that doesnt exist cost yourself everything as that newer audience was only here because of the good PR the fans existing created. now its only bad PR, everybody is avoiding it because even hardcore bigger fans are saying to stay away by their actions. there is no wider audience, there is no mainstream appeal, and if you willingly sacrifice to the flames what you have to appeal to what may be then you deservedly have neither.

may this leave some understanding with some people. apply this to marvel, star wars, sony california/playstation, modern hollywood etc. these things were far bigger then FA, they did the same and they are failing badly for it. now lets look back to FA, 2/3rds of major artists are declaring a stance of self censorship on the site and promoting the competition willingly to find all their work out of fear for a false positive ban with these vague rules given the history of false positives, general activism based action and the staff response to being told innumerable better ways of going about it. its created this lingering air of fear with all of them. the smaller creators are following suit and leaving not just partially but entirely with many because most of them are even more afraid of being affected by potential wrongful bans given they don't have the same voice or power in the fandom as narse, barlu, tojo or morca let alone people who have already been banned for less like ivorylagiacrus and jasonafex yet these big voices are clearly not comfortable with it all. trickle down effect in action. the people who are only here to view these people are realizing they are getting shafted if they use this site and are told to find the entire thing uncensored elsewhere. they are leaving to follow for the full gallery, they will stop coming here in time so long as those galleries are updated in full. at this point you have to ask wheres the mainstream to bolster? nowhere, because the mainstream will forever associate the fandom with its biggest problem actors like kerothewolf or the highly niche fetish content like vore/inflation/diaper/feral etc. regardless if these things stop being allowed on "the mainstream platform." so lets take a count, new users cut to less then a 10th of what it was day over day, old users use the site less and less if not leave outright and to top it off the mainstream perception has not changed in the slighest.

thus the wider audience fallacy explained. no matter how much the staff or their staunch defenders will say otherwise, we the people have the ability to be the change we want to see. if they wont change to suit their audience, then we have both the ability and right to found better places where we can have our freedom. do not give an inch on this, do not let them sucker you back in after so many backstabs and let the fandom properly flourish under the will of we the people.

What complains? In that infamous feedback thread on discord there were hundreds of people against this ruling for 3 people for it, and their arguments were, as is often the case today, completely subjective and inquisitive.
Almost nobody, not even on Twitter, is supporting this.

We're talking Pokemon stuff. Digimon stuff. Famous Disney characters. Everyone is aware it's not cub. Those who aren't shouldn't be making the rules anyway.
It's also definitely not "niche" in the furry fandom. Just like ferals aren't. If some people don't like it, they can look the other way like we've done for decades.

What is rather niche is people trying to tell others what made-up character they can or cannot draw, and attempting to frame them for being something they're not.
And it's stupid and irresponsible for a large website such as FA to listen to them.

As for the "problem", it is rather simple. You want to protect minors. Start by forbidding access to minors. Make this site +18. Add black lists.
Problem solved.

I am fine with the new rule, but then it never really applied much to me to begin with. I was already keenly aware of character design and appearance. While my other artist friend help articulate it. There have been a number of piece posted here, by some well known artists who very intentionally skirted the rules by simply not tagging their works as underage, because they posted their stuff to IB and had it listed as underage. So people were abusing the rules and leniency afforded before the update.

We're talking Pokemon stuff. Digimon stuff. Famous Disney characters. Everyone is aware. Those who aren't shouldn't be making the rules anyway.
-Frankly that is not how this works. We cannot assume that someone else has the same level of knowledge or implicit understanding that you or I might have. When it comes to to the literal Baby Pokemon category, are you really going to argue that should be allowed because "technically." No, they are intentionally designed to look like children by about every metric. Again, Theory of Mind, as someone with Asperger's this should be harder for me to understand, but I also spent years of my life reminding myself that the implicit knowledge I have gained on a lot of various topics is not shared by everyone, even when it comes to supposedly famous, everyone should know it, media. This would be the Ad Populum Fallacy that I mentioned above, you are are arguing from the point of that these franchises are popular and thus everyone should have the same implicit knowledge. And yet, I have met a few people in the fandom who had very little if any interaction with Pokemon or Digimon in any form of media. So sorry to burst that bubble, but I have personally interacted with these artists.

As far as niche goes, while it is not niche in the fandom, the fandom itself also is no longer as niche as it used to be, especially with how frequently we get referenced by Non-furry Youtuber's making videos about topics that tangentially involve us. Which means that we also need to make sure that the current big name site, it more broadly appealing, even to a more casual viewer, including grandma and grandpa for as weird that might seem. FA is a general site first, with guidelines for adult content. Also, this circles back to a Theory of Mind problem that people seem to consequently keep forgetting is a thing, and instead are thinking selfishly about how they think things should be, because "They know the difference"

Also, no that doesn't solve the problem because currently it is very easy to lie about your age on FA. Granted it is also not too hard for most sites, but locks keep honest people honest. And making FA an 18+ only site wouldn't solve the problem either, especially as many people finding their way into furry are usually in their teens, and if FA wants to become a sort of centralized landing space for furry, I think their policy update is pointing towards that being part of the goal. Rather than having people end up scattered and distributed across many platforms or platforms where connecting as a new member in the fandom would be significantly harder. Twitter is great if you can kind of have a semi reasonable starting followership, Most other furry sites are not nearly as active. But also by making the site 18+ only, you are now closing the door the general public and that can do more harm than good when if we want to make sure we, as a community, put our best foot forward to the general public. Like, I remember when I first got into furry, my family who were very closed minded to a lot of various things, not necessarily conservative in terms of political leaning, found furry to be gross, even though what I did was no worse than Disney, but over time, they accepted it once they saw that it wasn't that bad.

TL;DR:
-I can't speak for what was said in the Discord or on Twitter, but I find that the update in Upload Policy is fine, and perfectly reasonably if you zoom out from your little pocket of perception.
-I have personally met and commissioned artist who were not familiar with Pokemon or Digimon, so your appeal to popularity falls flat.
-The community as a whole is no longer this niche thing where everyone has the same implicit knowledge, and being we are being referenced by non-furries on platforms like Youtube, we are slowly becoming more mainstream.
-Locking FA behind an 18 + barrier would do irreparable harm to the community at large, and make it harder for people who might want to become part of the fandom harder to find community, by effectively being locked out one of the primary landing sites for Furry, and with other options being subpar for finding connection and building that community of friends, they might not join at all, not to mention it removes a level of transparency for the casual viewer and general public.

I'm glad that you are fine. It doesn't apply to you. It doesn't apply to me either.
But it does impact a lot of people and that alone is worth taking a step back and asking ourselves whether it is truly achieving anything positive.

"There have been a number of piece posted here, by some well known artists who very intentionally skirted the rules by simply not tagging their works as underage, because they posted their stuff to IB and had it listed as underage."
You can make whatever rule you want loopholes will be found. What should matter first and foremost is your active users who play by the rules. Many, many artists that get arbitrarily affected and labelled something they are not.

"We cannot assume that someone else has the same level of knowledge or implicit understanding that you or I might have."
Well, that's the most profitable franchise in the world, for one.
Even then that's not the point. The point is that it doesn't matter. If they don't know about these characters that does not mean they automatically get a say in what is acceptable or not.
In this case yes, a large number of artists say they never think about cub while drawing an Eevee or an Agumon, that's all you need to know, whether you know the lore or not doesn't matter at all. Since it's all made-up you're really just gonna have to trust them that they are not drawing them as cubs.

Also, an Asura is absolutely an adult. Anyone who's played Guild Wars knows that. There is no room for interpretation. A mod doesn't believe the GW community? They can look it up. Or better yet. Assume good intent, trust them.
Let's see, what's hurting the fandom more, a bunch of people drawing Asuras from their favorite games or an even smaller bunch of people witch-hunting and ignoring what they have to say about it?

The problem is not, has never been the characters. Characters don't exist, they're made-up, they're drawings. They're fantasy.
The problem is obsessing over controlling what our fellow furs might or might not like, may or may not think when they look at drawings. It achieves nothing beside dividing the fandom. And if it didn't click with you this time, maybe it will when next time a move is made against ferals using the same flawed logic you can read all over the policy.

Speaking of pockets of perception... if the goal was indeed for FA to open itself for a wider audience, what do you think they should go after first? Hardcore stuff like rape, snuff, gore, or a cute Eevee?

Are we going to keep a straight face and pretend it's not completely ridiculous? That FA, a website that is absolutely an adult centric furry community, is the right place for grand parents to look at furry art when they keep all the fetishes there?
Or should we now ban all fetishes for the reaching a mainstream audience?

FA only survives because of it's adult content. Business/Commissions is in majority +18 content. It may be unfortunate for some but that's the truth. So when FA makes rushed decisions with no concertation or care for feedback and ends up causing another massive exodus (to inkbunny with that!!) I will argue that it's when the fandom gets hurt, too.
And more generally, what does irreparable harm to the community is letting mainstream opinions dictate how our fandom should be and try to cast out its own artists.

Sorry, I think you guessed it by now, I couldn't care less about youtubers or any other external pressures when the fandom gets roughed up and artists galleries are getting emptied because of a few individuals. The community comes first.

Yup. I think you summed it up perfectly. However, this person does seem to be one of those that is pushing for furry to be mainstream so there does appear to be a bias at play. Meeting a few artists who haven't heard of Pokemon or Digimon does not mean they are not popular here.

People like this are working to change FA from being adult centric to being mainstream. Some wrongfully believe that it is a general site, not as much an adult site. I'm like no.. it's absurdly rare I come across a gallery that has straight up SFW content and they don't have some NSFW alt. I love my porn but it's not the only thing I commission so yeah it makes sense why SFW would be the majority of the content here by raw numbers. However, I'd wager that SFW accounts make a significant minority of accounts here.

I do think in time they will reach a ban on hardcore NSFW and at the bare minimum a ban on "non-sentient" feral works. There is a major push on the Twittersphere to basically ban anything even remotely considered pedophilia and zoophilia. Hell I was even blocked by a friend a while back who equated an interest in Pokemon lewds to be bestiality. Reality is I simply don't give a shit what goes on in fantasy.

It's ironic we're told we aren't looking at the bigger picture and that our perspective is limited. The reality is we are looking at the bigger picture and it ain't good given the path we're on.

But now they're working it so if you like certain Pokemon/Digimon, you're a pedophile by default and because you're now labeled a pedophile no one should associate with you. I'm honestly surprised Dragoneer bent the knee to that crowd because they have the most absurd takes on things.

This policy change is a successful divide-and-conquer psy-op perpetuated by rebranded right-wingers masquerading as "concerned furries" and their useful idiots who are the equivalent of the "LGB Alliance" cutting the Transgender out of the LGBT: as soon as the furry movement gained some popularity and acceptance, instead of continuing to move together as one as per their core foundation of tolerance and inclusion for all no matter how weird, they looked at the elements of the community that were being more slow to assimilate into the mainstream and threw them under the bus in order to appease the gatekeepers of public acceptance, who have been opposed to the entire community since the beginning. They basically switched to the side of the oppressive system because it's the easy thing to do and because they're now on good terms with it.

And of course they won't stop here, because the whole point is to cause infighting and division and weaken the whole community until it crumbles.

FA is not adult centric at all. Around 80% of the content on FA is SFW, you likely have a skewed perspective of what is and is not on the site because of the content you search for and interact with on a regular basis.


Also stating that having stuff removed is staff saying someone is a pedo by default is both assumption without proof and a hasty generalization. Some individuals might call other uses pedos which is harassment, but saying something is a violation of the rule does not mean the former automatically assumes the latter. They are not mutually inclusive conditions otherwise that is just bad logic.

I did some specific number for some very specific search terms with specific restrictions below, and for those results it averaged closer to 60% being SFW and 40% for the rest. My 80% was pulled from a presentation from a decade ago, so those numbers could have shifted a bit since then, and IIRC, those numbers include all posts, not just those found via search, and included more than just stuff under the "Art" filter.

Define a lot of people in this case. Like a lot of people you know personally or over 50% of all artists? FA and its staff say they have received enough complaints, but they had been lenient until recently. So something changed or enough people were skirting the rules.

Most profitable franchise in the world means nothing without context. Yeah Pokemon has had a lot of revenue, but profit margins are still only 1-5% after you account for all the other payments, but that is not your point, and again the pont is that even if the artist doesn't consider it underage, they have context that not everyone else has and unfortunately even if people are not familiar with it, it still poses a liability to the website as a whole. The wrong person at the wrong time can be devastating.

I never said that the Asura were not adults, I said that out of context they have a lot of features which makes them look borderline child like. To me personally, they look like gremlins, but not everyone is going to see it the same depending on the depiction and if there is context within the piece, because I went through a few examples and some are incredibly questionable.

Great, the characters are fantasy, that doesn't mean they weren't designed to have child like characteristics and stand in as the child form of another design, e.g. Riolu who was intentionally designed to the be the child form of Lucario.

So, there was something I came across where someone pointed out that things like vore and etc are so absurdly unrealistic in their depictions a vast majority of the time where a,lot of the content being removed could be used as an analogue for other purposes. That is what I have seen others point out. Cause child porn, is highly illegal, and some countries don't care if it is fictional or real. So artists are responsible for making sure their content is well communicated.

Also, no, FA is not a mostly adult content website or solely reliant on it. I wish the website still existed, but AdjectiveSpecies did a statistical analysis of content on FA about 10 years ago. And a vast majority of it was SFW, only 20% was Mature or Adult, and like only 5% was strictly Adult. You might interact with the Adult side of the site, but that skews your perspective of what is actually on the site.

Yes, the community comes first, but that means more than the usual 10% that are the most active. Look at any fandom and you will find that a relatively small percent of the people are extremely outwardly vocal. A vast majority of people are more casually in the fandom. But here is the thing, you should care, because again if the wrong person with the right connections says something fallacious. I mean look at Florida right now, do you honestly want something similar to be targeted at the furry fandom, so again, the content, regardless of people's personal views or opinions, is a liability.

A lot of people: Over 200 versus 3 in official feedback channel.
Constant ratio on every twitter post.
The negative feedback was overwhelming enough that they shut down the official channel and deleted it. You can still find a history of this if you look in social media.
Even if it was only impacting to only a few artists that are drawing their characters in good faith, as a community, that would still be a problem.

Now let's see what evidence the "other side" has.
Where are all these "complainers" that the staff mentioned? Did you personally complain that Stitch should be banned?
Who did? Someone from within the fandom? some crazies from Twitter? Those usually very happily will tell the world how much better they are than everyone else, but where are they?
I don't trust the staff on this. They (and you it seems) believe we are in a bubble? They are too, in a smaller one.


Not an adult website? How often do you see SFW commission versus NSFW? What are all the Patreons about, what is the gallery of this artist about, your gallery, the gallery of the mods? At the time of this posting, 50%+ of the art in home page is adult.
I'd be curious to see what remains of donations if FA decided to ban all fetish stuff and keep only anthros with human dicks.


"Not everyone is going to see [insert species] here" as acceptable is why most websites implements black lists. It's utterly impossible to regulate without falling in a slippery slope like Searinox explains it very well bellow. It's people drawing lines in the sand. Today deciding arbitrarily (if you have to say "to me personally", it's arbitrary, therefore can and will be abused.)" that Pokemon, Digimons, Asuras and whatever are not acceptable, tomorrow it's Ferals, next years it's animal shaped penises.
Catering to a minority of puritans will do that. Theses characters are fantasy, what some anti decide to see them as should not matter to any of us.


Again if the community comes first the goal should be to defend our own, to defend our artists, to fight back against those that wants to censor us. Burned Furs died and can remain that way.
There is definitely room for everyone in this fandom if we separate things probably and have a g******** black list feature.


Finally, not that I care at all what the Florida man think, but again, the argument of "wanting to look good" for mainstream does not work. Snuff, Rape, Gore and all that still exist and wasn't touch. It's very much there, on a website where mods think it's ok to let kids connect to.
And even if it was banned, the other sites are there too and they're not about to follow FA in their bullshit, so Florida Man won't really care either way.

Are you counting all the people in the server who were not participating? Because with most communities, you only really get about 10% of the total userbase to be very actively involved. So you need to count the total people in the FA server, because you at least need to count them as ambivalent or uninterested, either because it doesn't concern them or because they don't care one way or another.
Same with anything on Twitter, the only people who would be extremely vocal are more likely to have a problem with the policy for one reason or another, those who don't have a problem are more like to just carry on about their day.

From what another user told me about them shutting down the channel on the FA server, was in part because people started to actually harass and dox the staff members. Like, seriously, I get you having grievance with the staff, but resorting to harassment and doxxing tells me that those people are just as much of a problem. Like you don't resort to that shit, period. Like, for those people, it means that I have no reason to give them any credit because they have shown that are not of sound moral character.

Do I think Stitch should be sexualized, I don't really care, it is not for me, it is kind of off putting personally and I have it blacklisted on e621. Do I think that the manner and style of the depiction matters, yes. Regardless of whether or not I personally like it, I still care about how the character is presented. If you are going to depict Stitch with very explicitly childlike features and put him in a sexual situation, I would be raising some eyebrows, vs if you chose a depiction that otherwise unambiguously adapted Stitch to have a depiction with more adult like characteristics and anatomy, then it would be less of an issue.

Like, I do wish the staff were better at communicating, they really need to have an actual PR person writing their updates and notices, it would do them world of wonder. As far as reports go, all I can go on is their word, I have no evidence to suggest that they are lying about getting reports for it, but opening up about how much and who and when would lead to some very concerning privacy concerns. Like, would you have more or less faith in them if they started publishing their tickets? Cause to me, this would make me very wary about how they are handling our data on the back end, and our overall trust in them. You can opt to not trust them, but in the.....decade-ish I have been in the fandom, I have been given little reason to not take them at their word. Do I trust them fully, no, but do I way that against the likelihood of other options, yes. That is how science works, we weigh a hypothesis against presented evidence and then weight it against other likely scenarios. I think it is far more likely that the Staff lacks good internal communication about policy changes and are very bad at communicating those policy changes to the userbase, this is far more likely than them being prejudiced or whatever other assumptions people are trying to say about the FA staff.

At the time I am typing this, on Browse Page 1, showing 72 images with Category set to All under heading Visual Art I have 43 posts that are SFW, which makes for 60% SFW. But that is a small as hell sample size, if you want even a remote chance of getting a good average, you need 14 pages just to get over 1000 images, maybe more if you are trying to keep pace with uploads. If you want some really good averages you would want 100 pages. I don't have time for that. SO backup plan being I can't leave the search blank and get numbers for it.

Searched "Dragon" in the extended format so it covers tags and description.
Time Frame: All time
Type: Art only
General: 1,338,495
Mature: 275,217
Adult: 579,575
Total: 2,193,287
General is 61% of the Visual art content that is posted when searching for Dragon

Search term: Wolf
General: 1,295,974
Mature: 254,125
Adult: 477,267
Total: 2,027,366
General is 64% of this search term

Search Term: Pokemon
General: 681,980
Mature: 184,748
Adult: 319,892
Total: 1,186,620
General is 57% of the search results

So I don't recall the exact means that AdjectiveSpecies used in their analysis or what posts they were including and excluding, but even just doing a search set to just Art, you can see that SFW work posts are still a majority, and that is likely in part a shift since the decade when I went to their presentation. There is also likely some overlap in the data points, but not having better tools at my disposal I have no way of knowing how much there is. maybe if I excluded things like YCH, and a few other terms, it could have given a more refined result.

So, they are taking a hard stance on anything that could be remotely mistaken for a child character. It also isn't really as arbitrary as you might think. Like honestly, do you really think a Riolu is an adult archetypal character. I don't want the "well actually" type argument. I want a real straight answer, even if technically Riolu could be an adult because of whatever lore context can be given, was Riolu designed like. Or is it more likely that Riolu was designed to explicitly be the child form for Lucario? Same goes for all the Baby Pokemon, In training Digimon. What does their design convey about how you should view those designs and characters? Like regardless of how the artist thinks about it, regardless of lore technicality, how do those designs read just naturally? - They were designed to very intentionally child coded, both in design and behavior. They are made with the intention of being a child form for a later stage. Yes, the rule change has had collateral damage, but if you are going to implement a rule, you need to at least attempt to apply it consistently, which yes, I agree has not entirely been done, because I don't think the staff are communicating with each other as much as they should be.

Snuff, Rape, and Gore are mainstream in the horror genre of the various forms of art. You know what isn't really found in mainstream fictional media, underage porn. I can think of more movies and series that show very explicit gore and snuff, and while fewer, there are still those that contain rape, but I don't think I have ever come across a form of media where child like characters are presented as sexual, at least outside of Japan where Loli and etc are more socially accepted in fictional media. But that is an entirely other culture in another country with very different societal norms

In order:

- I wasn't counting everyone, and I don't think I should. At best they are neutral. Not participating. But they could have if they wanted to. Let's not forget this is a change pushed to the community, the "defendants" didn't ask for it, so I would assume that if a lot of people wanted that change they would have voiced it. Apart from 3 of them, they didn't.
Also, -no evidence to suggest they are lying-. I don't know who told you there was harassment, I was there the last few days of the feedback channel. I did not see any of that in the 200+ (I think it was 260 something by the end) people participating, I read very passionate people attacking the ruling but that is not harassment. If there were a few specifically calling out Luffy, that was on Twitter, and yes that is unacceptable.
Claiming harassment is convenient in this case. They said they would read feedback, listen to it, then communicate, and they didn't. That's lying in my book.

- "I don't really care" is the sensible answer I would expect to read from any sensible adult. It's not for you. Maybe it offends you. And that's alright. But that's hardly a reason to go after it over the suspicion that some artists might have something else in mind, even if that's where yours is going. I don't think Narse was thinking cub when he drew it.

- I have been assuming good faith for years when it came to the staff, up until recently I would have agreed with you. I'm a dev myself. While I find the lack of updates frustrating, I could at least understand it.
Here, whether the fuck up is due to lack of internal communication or not doesn't matter: The public feedback was overwhelmingly negative and they decided to sweep it under the rug and move on. What happened is public knowledge.
So no, I do not trust them. And you can believe me (or not) it pains me greatly, I used to hold Dragoneer in high regard. When the first massive ban happened, his reasons were at least motivated, it was external pressure. Not this time.

- So, 40%+ are adult art. That's rather large for a site that is welcoming minors, isn't it?
And also, I think a good metric would be to obtain a percentage of how many accounts are strictly SFW, aka how many accounts can minors even browse. I have some SFW art, you do too, that doesn't make our spaces SFW.
Another metric would be the amount of business transactions that are NSFW versus SFW. But that'd be impossible to measure. Let's just say I have yet to see SFW YCH sell for much.

- You use Riolu rather conveniently. That's fair game. Yes, personally, I see a baby when I look at Riolu.
However, I don't when I look at Stitch, Eevee or Agumon, Gatomon, Guilmon etc, their behavior certainly isn't. And my Asura kills two elder dragons everyday, he can take care of himself :D.
If we can't agree on what is or isn't a child, then it's rather arbitrary.
As many people have said, the better rule would be looking at context. Narse's Stitch is clearly not a child, but another artist could draw it in a child context.
Regardless of the technicality. "The rule change has had collateral damage" is exactly the problem. In order to weed out some users abusing loopholes damage was done to many other good people. As a result of that some people (including one of the 3 in feedback channel) was already calling the artists caught in the cross fire "cub artists". And Twitter... well Twitter does what Twitter does when the crazies feel empowered. That's not a good way to treat your community, that's not how you defend it.

- As for your last point. Well honestly yes I agree. But then question why is that acceptable for these rather extreme things to be displayed on a site (accessed by minors, again), why is that ok to fantasize about, to promote illegal behaviors, but then an Eevee in a lewd context is deemed unacceptable. Like, again, it is utterly ridiculous to me.
Lewd feral stuff isn't exactly mainstream either. In fact there's a very vocal minority trying to vilify when it was never a problem 10 years ago.
Will you also be fine with a policy banning them (including dragons of course)?

1. They didn't say it happened in the server or in the channel specifically for it. Though as far as numbers go, you cannot exclude them from the data set, and that is good science, you can count them as ambivalent and neutral to the rule, or even just, "no comment" And with how you are describing things, if I was there, I probably would not have spoken up either, because there is definitely they fear of getting dogpiled and being unable to adequately respond to people's comments. Here in comments, it is much easier to take the time, read the response, process the response, and formulate a much more well articulated answer.

2. Narse has said as much that he was not thinking of the characters are being cub, or even considers them as such, nor is anyone accusing him of drawing cub. I am certainly not, regardless of my personal preferences. The rule change seems more to move FA into a safer space from a liability standpoint by reducing the amount of ambiguity and uncertainty of character depictions and the reliance on a tacit understanding of the "lore excuses" from the userbase. Where on a dedicated site it would be generally implicit that you understand those "lore excuses" that would be inherently built into them. So it is more about what can the staff implicitly expect users to already have prior knowledge of. Like, compare DA to FA for a moment, what could be a reasonable expectation of the average person visiting either site? DA, I expect to see a lot more photography and now a lot of AI generated content, and DA could implicitly expect me to understand that. With FA, I would implicitly be expected to understand that I am getting into anthropomorphic art, and that with that it could be expected that I would depictions of a variety of things including adult content up to a point. But being Pokemon and Digimon only tangently end up part of furry content, FA cannot reasonably expect me to have all the "lore excuses" for a franchise they are not directly involved with.

3. I will say this whole thing has been a PR nightmare. I will happily agree to that. I feel like their justification for the rule comes of as means of saving face, but it did not goes as intended. Their "think of the children" reason feels off, almost like it was a forced reason. But what I do think is that they did get complaints, how many I don't know, I don't think we will ever know, but there could have been one complaint that was extra concerning and could have had even worse consequences for FA had something not changed. It could have been a Payment Processor reason. But I do think their change to the teenage pregnancy thing was because when they mentioned that change specifically that said their intention was to allow people to tell stories concerning it, because it is a very real part of people's lives and that they to not want it to become fetishized, which tells me that people started doing just that. Give an inch, people take a mile and abuse what leniency you give them. Like, it could be a combination of all 3 reasons, from complaints, payment processors, to shifting implicit expectations of the userbase. I have found that younger generations are much less accepting of the, just move on if it is not for you. Like I hate to bring this up, but it is like the group of people who have witch hunted DarkNatasha for drawing tribal themed pieces by claiming she is being racist and sexualizing indigenous peoples on Twitter, where you have so many "no true Scotsman" fallacies being flung by supposedly First Nations people while others who also say they are First Nation descent appreciate her art celebrating their culture while not appropriating specific rituals. I am not going to debate this, this is just an example.

4. It does seem like a lot, and I kind of pointed out to another person that trying to find a way of managing what minors actually see is kind of hard, because I too was once 16/17 and found my around many adult filters, and we both know that underage people are bypassing it. It's the locks keep honest people honest type deal. So....you end up in a catch 22 of trying to prevent access by enforcing reasonable measures, but also want to not block it off completely because some teens need that community, and I have at least 1 story from an acquaintance who chose not to commit suicide because of the community they found in the fandom. Like, AdjectiveSpecies I think had a bot that could take data, and I don't know what filters were used. Also I don't think FA limits minors access to accounts specifically like Twitter does, being we cannot set our account to be strictly for Adults. I think FA only filters out the content itself. As far as measuring money exchanged, I don't know if that is the best metric. Like NSFW stuff will always sell of a higher price, that feels like a given. And this was surprisingly what AdjectiveSpecies mission was if it still existed, it was started by people who had degree in psychology and wanted to do legit scientific research about the furry community and write actual scientific papers with hypothesis, experiment and conclusion for publishing. But like many topics, there just wasn't enough grant money or even donors willing to pay for it.

5. Yeah, it is the first that came to mind and the most obvious example. as far as the other examples, I think they sit on the line, like really hard the sit right on that fine line. Veemon and Impmon definitely feel more childlike than Agumon or Gatomon. Guilmon looks adult in proportion and relative scale, but acts like a child in the anime because it is more innocent than the other characters being quite literally the first instance of that digimon species. Eevee is.....hard to say, cause on the one hand it is a cute fox, but on the hand, compared to it's evos, it does feel like the kid form. It is the epitome of being in a super position. xD Instead of Schodinger's Cat, it is Schrodinger's Eevee. I do think some of the examples and choices were more to play it safe with what they expected the average visitor to the site to be aware of when it came to certain lore excuses for things.

5a. Like, those are individuals being accusatory not the staff, but now I understand why other have felt that the staff was implying that people who like Asura or otherwise liked cub, when the staff have not given a hint of that, even implicitly (at least with the screenshots that have seen). Cause making that sort of statement is both Hasty Generalization and Assumption without Proof. But if they were using the transitive property because of how accusatory certain individuals have been. That makes a lot more sense why it was really hard to argue with some people about why those sorts of claims were fallacies in regards to the staff, especially because I know some staff had reservations about the rule change, maybe not in concept, but in implementation. But, at least we both agree that Twitter.......will be Twitter and take things way to far. Why can't people be reasonable on that site? This baffles me.

6. I think it is because largely Snuff, Rape, and Gore in some of these contexts are so fantastical that there is no analogue or direct IRL interpretation for the content. Like, even going to some milder like Vore depending on depiction so impossibly unreal, that it would be ludicrous to try and claim it as anything other than fantasy. Which I see being part of it. Like we know horror movies and games and even generally violent video games don't cause people to become violent or even condone the content within, but again, some of these things are so absurdly unrealistic. Like, I do understand where you are coming from, but Psych 101 taught me that when you start getting into this, psychology gets weird, and that the brain when imagining things, doesn't really distinguish fantasy from reality. It takes the conscious part of our brain to know the difference, but experientially it only has one way of processing experience. It is not like we have a separate part of the brain for actual sight versus calling on the visual part of a memory versus imagining sight. I did learn something really cool from the end of one of Kyle Hill's Office Hours Podcast streams. Current Neurology is starting to have evidence that the way our brain works is not bottom up, but top down, that it is more like our brain is hallucinating and using reality to measure it's internal model for accuracy. Like, just trying to think about that makes my brain hurt. But yeah, the brain is weird.

6a. As far as feral stuff goes, I am like...I definitely understand why some people have issues with IRL feral animals but not dragons, etc and it is because we don't have a standard reference point. But also also again, I am not surprised that there are those who are trying to vilify sapient feral art by trying to equate it to IRL animals. Namely PETA comes to mind.....and that would go down it's own rabbit hole of conspiracy type thinking. I think for me, if IRL animals got the ax, I would be kind of ambivalent when it came to FA, because I know other sites would likely still house it, but for fantasy and fictional characters, we'd have to see. Because the former, it would be like, 'okay fine, I get that it can ambiguous" where the latter would be like, "and this is ambiguous how?" But it would still need to be very clearly an adult and adult looking, not just on a technicality. Like, this starts getting into the, I don't really know, I can only guess, because it hasn't happened yet.

It's getting more and more time consuming to answer so I'll try to shorten my answer, but I appreciate the conversation and keeping things civil.

"If I was there, I probably would not have spoken up either, because there is definitely they fear of getting dogpiled and being unable to adequately respond to people's comments."
So there was a 6 hour slow-mode specifically to avoid that. Also from experience, the dogpiling tends to happen the other way around these days, with puritans harassing people who just want to be left alone with their fantasies.
It's just difficult to take "you're in a bubble" at face value when nowhere has there been any evidence of this rule being popular.


"With great power comes great responsibilities". FA has been a central hub for the community for almost 2 decades (wow...) now. As such, it has to be responsible for its community, old and new. It think it's wrong to turn its back on a portion of the community without so much of a discussion first, to assume guilty and raise suspicion on some artists based on what some users may or may not see in their drawings.

The fact of the matter is anything can be sexualized and anything can be fetishized. You say Dragons are fine. Okay well. I could make the argument that some people will see them as glorified horses to fuck. At least when it comes to gryphons or hippogryphs some artists have a tendency to make bits that very much resemble the real deal.
With the current mentality that things needs to appear "acceptable" for a minority and mainstream folks, this can become a problem, even for dragons. And before you know it you'd have to justify why no, you don't think about fucking a horse when you draw two dragons fucking.
If this sounds farfetched it's because it is, but there's definitely people out there after ferals who are simply like "quadrupedal = animal = bestiality" and they will want it banned and will harass people over it.
The same logic applies here with Pokemon/Digimon. They are not cubs, they are not human. They are made-up. And yet a small portion of the community absolutely want them to be, and what, to "appease" them, the rest of us need to play along?

Similarly, I'm a bit confused when you say that themes like rape and gore are too fantastical for any IRL interpretation. Spyro is a dragon, Asuras don't exist, Pokemon don't exist, but somehow that is too close to real kids and therefore it needs to be vilified, but rape wouldn't be?
Like, I get what you're going for, but if anything it shows how arbitrary this whole thing is. Some people were traumatized by abuse and many pictures on this site will trigger them. I'm sure everyone will find something they find deeply offensive if they spend only an hour looking here.

These rules are lines drawn in the sand. It cannot possibly be anything else because all these species and characters come from the mind.
If anything, Inkbunny probably has the better ruling there. Ban humans. There, simple. Ban the one thing that is cannot be up to interpretation, allow everything else.

But with FA, yesterday it was cubs, today it's small/cute species, tomorrow it's ferals, in one years it's anthro art with anatomically correct animal bits. And in 5 years we're all fapping on humans with cat ears.
Call it a fallacy, but there is evidence of a push for all of that. I don't know if you heard about the short lived "FurryLife" but it's one of those things that did end up banning ferals because its twitter maniac base felt offended by it. And then they kept on having to make rules and edge cases (MLP was allowed, go figure) to try and satisfy everyone.
And now thanks to FA, these people know that their strategy to ban things they don't like is working.

I will insist on this: We're all (supposedly) adults. If you're uncomfortable with something, look elsewhere. Just do that, it's much healthier for the fandom than trying to regular art and fantasy.

PS: I failed miserably at keeping it short...

Attack the argument, not the person, right? This the first thing I learn when you are trying to have any manner of discussion that is complex. I rely on evidence first and foremost, and the only way to build any sort of understanding is to be civil. I wouldn't be sitting here having this discussion you or another party became uncivil.

I definitely get that, though it is important to be aware of our biases and perception and consider the circles we gravitate towards and how that might influence our behaviors and perceptions on a subconscious level. Like everywhere you have gone, you have seen descent, but you also likely interact more readily with people that would naturally share your beliefs. And this is where my scientist brain goes, I want numbers and statistics and consideration for the whole, not just the vocal portion of it. Like, when we talk about communities and interest groups, you can only reasonably expect about 10% of that group to be on the higher end of engagement and more vocal about the things going on in the community. That is kind of why we can't just consider the people being actively vocal about it. This is true with everything from Video games to movie franchises. So depending how involved someone is will kind of determine what sort of biases you build up over time. As far as dogpiling goes. I made a very reasonable rational statement about the fact we can not reasonably expect the average visitor to the site to to have the general understanding for the 'lore reasons' for certain characters and species to appear as they do and not be mistaken for underage characters. That it was to extend the original rule to close some loopholes and content that the staff had previously been lenient on. And look at how many people I end up with jumping down my throat, some more civil than others.

I think this is a huge misconception, FA is not implicitly accusing people of being into pedo or cub stuff simply because their content violates the extended policy. People certainly feel like they are being accused, but they aren't. It looks and feels more like that they are trying to close some very specific loopholes that people have been abusing, and wanting to moderate certain content because it puts you in the firing range for drawing out particular issues is just that. It is simply about the content, it is not saying anything about the users. It happens to involve some users more than others, but that is because those users have very explicitly chosen to draw their characters in a certain manner. I went and honestly looked at some of these people's profiles, and there was one image where it looked like a Cubone was getting gang banged by some Gengar, until I checked to the tags to read it was a Marowak. Like, if you, as an artist, are not doing enough to effectively communicate that something is not a child and relying on tags or descriptions to justify the appearance of a drawing, then you aren't being an effective communicator. And other artist, whose I will say has not fully developed their skills, depicted their characters in a way you could hold a diagram showing the average 10yo, and it was almost 1:1
Grabbed these from another conversation:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lcqady61x.....s%202.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/43rp0t1xu.....s%201.png?dl=0

This next stuff should be a bit shorter, while Pokemon and etc are not human, that doesn't necessarily mean that certain species/characters are not made to be child coded, e.g. Cubone, Riolu, the baby pokemon, which are literally called that. Referencing back to the diagrams, we as artists rely on those average proportions for conveying and depicting certain characters to read in a certain manner. There are some exceptions to certain features, but usually other features are emphasized as a result. I don't think the community thinks of all Pokemon as being child like, but extremely on model depictions of Cubone getting gang banged, when Cubone is literally leaning on all the tropes of a child to be viewed as a child and treated as a child within in the Anime. When we see those features barring others, it will generally be perceived as child like or child presenting. Contrast that to Yordles from League, or Yoda's Species, they do not read as being child like, because other features are emphasized which override the stature and other relative body proportions. I hope that makes sense. we are generally adverse to children or child appearing characters in sexual situation because children cannot consent, whether fictional or real, a vast majority of people would be very uncomfortable with it.

But, when it comes to Pokemon, Digimon, Asura, etc. Characters and species which have a lot of those child like features, and lack other overriding features, can be looked past if you have the requisite lore knowledge and excuses, because that knowledge and bias will act as the override for their appearance. And I think it is reasonable that we can't assume everyone is going to have that sort of knowledge. Like I had no idea the Asura were even a species from Guild Wars until this whole debacle happened. And I will say when I went to look them up, some screenshots reminded me of gremlins and other 3D models looked way to child like for me to appreciate.
Too Child Like: https://preview.redd.it/oh-good-god.....dc97b1ca661e3b
Not Child Like: https://64.media.tumblr.com/baa2193.....q13o1_1280.jpg

The only reason I think some of the hardcore fetishes get overlooked is because even if you swap the fictional species for humans, you still get some super unrealistic stuff that the brain sort of skips over a lot of things that helps it land squarely past that point of discomfort. Also just how mainstream Horror content is, and that it interacts differently in the brain.

Like, Twitter was always going to Twitter regardless of what FA did or said, like let's be real. Some of the vocal people on Twitter are.....unwell? Can we call them that? Or is that rude?

Failing on the shortness means that you care about the subject matter enough to discuss it. But I do think we are both aware of the faults of the staff in how it was handled and kind of the scope of what was included. I think some of the named Pokemon and Digimon gave good examples of what they meant, while others were more head scratching. I think while we disagree on certain things, I think we at least understand each other a bit more. I get where your concerns are, I don't think they are invalid, but I don't think things are as alarming as people are making them out to be. *shrugs* But we will kind of have to see how the rest of the month plays out and what happens come July.

I don't shy away from talking to people I disagree with (unless they're engaging in bad faith), so I've come to experience a whole lot of opinions. When I was still stupid enough to try and debate people on Twitter I was getting called a communist and a racist the same day. Fun times.
I guess what I want to say is... sure I'm biased in this, we all are. But I try to keep an open mind.

And well. Yeah, lots of people are jumping at your throat (figurately) but that's also because you actively engage with them while trying to defend a policy perceived as arbitrary censorship.

Yes, you're right, We're a vocal minority voicing our concerns. So are the people pushing for this censorship. You can turn the problem around all you want. The "quiet majority" doesn't have a play in that. Well. I personally think they really should, that they're either not paying attention to what's been happening or that they won't care until it hits them, but regardless.
So it does come down to a minority of people pushing for censorship, and another minority pushing back against it.
Now, we are a fandom. We are a community. A very diverse one rooted in freedom of expression. It's been our identity for decades. Forget about FA being FA and doing what they want on their own website for a second. I'm talking fandom.

You're seeing major artists having to delete big chunks of their galleries and being forced to look around for other places. I've seen dozen after dozen after dozen of journals like that over the last few weeks. I'm sure we don't watch the same people, but we're all part of the same fandom.
They are leaving not because the silent majority wants them out, but because a (vocal?) minority is showing them the door, making them feel unwelcome.
Now, can you list me dozen of high profile artists defending this policy? I'm not talking of the silent majority, I'm talking about people advocating for it. Since FA initially claimed there was positive feedback about it, surely they must be somewhere?
Heck, are -you- on their side, really? You admitted many times that there were issues with this policy. In this very thread, you admitted knowing that Narse didn't draw a Stitch cub. So I count you out as a firm supporting of this.
So who is supporting this 100%?

Please, feel free to burst my bubble, show me that side on the fandom - not on twitter - that wants so many of our peers out for drawing an Eevee.

If a chasm is to happen, at least let's make it clear who is behind it.

And let's not forget. FA and its staff actively shut down the feedback. They made no effort to address concerns.

Here lies my biggest interrogation while reading you all around. I get that you're concerned about scientific facts and being technically correct, but I don't think you're reaching anyone with that here. Everyone knows FA owns their turf and can do anything they want. But because they can do something, doesn't mean they should. Because a Stitch could be interpreted as cub by some doesn't mean there should be a rule about it because exceptions can be found all over the place, and I really think you come short of understanding how much it can affect someone to be told that their drawings (or entire fursona, sometimes) are now deemed problematic.
Whether FA is accusing them directly or not, it has the same effect. This is the internet, bad actors feel empowered by this and harassment happen, and it happens a very serious and potentially career threatening topic.

This is the whole issue here, it's a fandom many joined when it was still a safe space of freedom of expression, to see it be ravaged day after day knowing what will come next is worrying, and as a member of this community I don't understand people choosing to remain passive over this.
But what do I know.

Just adding a quick comment following what you said on another thread. Yes, there is very much mistrust and fear here.
The mistrust is evidenced by the efforts to hide feedback, to come back to their words and generally lie about addressing it. You say there isn't proof, but there is, there was, and it can still be found. As a scientific you are ignoring it. It looks like you're only interested by what official channels say. It should tell you something that all comments are disabled on the policy updates.

The fear is also very much on point, too. Because harassment did happen, does happen as a result, and because in its very nature it's a slippery slope. There is no hasty generalization here. The content affected is massive and we still don't know the extend of it, but it does open room for more arbitrary bans and we see that everyday. It's normal to be concerned when it comes from a site that used to be a haven of free artistic expression.

So if FA is as benevolent as you seem to think, mistrust and fear from decade old members should be their primary concern to address. The rule should be paused and not come to pass until everyone is at least reassured. They have shown to have no intention to address any of the concerns, so no, they don't get a pass, they don't get the benefit of the doubt.

And to loop back to the DeSantis argument from earlier, please realize, "this new bill isn't meant to attack X" is the argument he keeps using day after day. We all know what that means.

I was working on my response so I didn't see this until now, but I think my response still covers this.

Yeah, I learned the way that you have to be careful with Twitter, not sure if I mentioned this to you already, but DarkNatasha, my friend and one of the OG furry artists 90's was getting witch hunting on Twitter by...who I could only presume were more extremely left leaning, where using another culture general aesthetic, namely the tribal aesthetic, was somehow cultural appropriation. And yeah, that was mess. But that is entirely off topic.

The keyword in that sentence is "perceived as arbitrary."

So....this is where it gets muddy, because my friend, who has been leaving a few comments here, pointed out to me, the SFW side of FA has barely noticed, like all they have heard is rumors of this fiasco from small points of spill over. Some have said the wording should be changed because it has the potential for abuse, and others are questioning why a clarification needed to be made to enforce it or why the previous wording even allowed for the loopholes that the staff are now trying to close.

So this isn't nearly hitting as many people as it seems, The people who it is hitting really hard are the ones who have relied almost exclusively on using PKMN/DGMN for the content or haven't really developed a style beyond that tangential 'cute' look.

I don't think you would see a lot of artists who aren't going to be effected by it to begin with to really openly say they support this. It's like...with product reviews, you are more likely to leave a negative review over a negative experience than you are if everything worked as expected. You might leave a positive review if it really exceeded your expectations.

Like, I knew opening feedback on Discord was a bad idea, it is so much harder to keep up with, even with a 6 hour cool down, it is so much easier to keep track of trouble tickets than it is 300+ posts in IM.

I do understand how it can affect someone, like, that isn't lost on me, but I also see a lot of people having that emotional response, that one where they have integrated their perception of self and 'identity' around a thing to the point that anything against the object immediately becomes an attack on them. You see this with religious zealots all the time and high school kids when it comes to dress code updates. The way I have seen some people react to the policy change reminds me a lot of high schoolers in a lot of ways. Like, all of these people should be adults, they should be able to recognize and separate these things.

As far as Twitter goes, we can't stop people, this has been a fact of human life since before Twitter. As for potentially career ending, people are playing around with technicalities here, and some people run separate accounts with style changes and 0 overlap specifically to keep their SFW one looking professional for one reason or another.

Shit happens, and policy changes like this where according to my friend, who I trust more than anything, because he observes, takes notes, and shares evidence; this change has been a long time coming as an extension from the original clarification under IMVU in 2015 to close the 1000yo vampire child loophole people used as a technicality.

Like, I need to remind you, this whole crusade people are going on is over the right for people to draw characters (that the apparent majority of those arguing, don't actually own) that are designed with the explicit context of generally being childlike, or are out right child stand ins, in sexual situations. And like you said, and I agree, no one had an issue with the original cub ban, and this extension is closing possible loopholes and basically making sure that the content posted is free of ambiguity, especially when it comes to characters whose entire contextual existence is intended to be perceived as childlike or be child stand ins. Sadly, there was no way to not have some amount of collateral damage. And as pointed out, people on the SFW side don't really understand why it couldn't have been enforced in the first place, or how the previous iteration of the rule even allowed for such content to begin with.

Like, at this point, this is starting to go in circles, like we have people who have conflated their perception of self with their content to such a degree that it feels personal, when it isn't. We are arguing over content that the SFW side are confused as to why it wasn't being enforced in the first place, because the previous rule should have covered it, but staff let it slide because it wasn't explicitly covered. And really we only know what could have been done better in the announcement side because of the Hindsight Fallacy.

I don't think there is really any more I can say other than to take a hard look and consider what is actually being argued here.

If you want to read a long journal about bias though:
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10575933/
My conversation thread with the poster:
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:59964909

But in any case, I think the conversation needs to end here, it has been 3+ days. You have been very amicable and I respect that, and I think we both agree that things could have happened differently, but they didn't. I also think there is a bit of fear people have, but like that become a slipper slope and that has no bottom by design, we can't speculate on the future.

To be honest, I don't think we'll ever agree on this policy.
I don't think harassment from other places was off topic because FA is now empowering that behavior, I don't think they care about the community, I don't think the majority wants (or care about) this policy to be enacted. I think there is more evidence that people don't want it rather than people want it.
I think the fandom is taking an unnecessary hit and that nothing positive will come of it.

But I guess you're right, we can't speculate the future. My guts say all the signs are there and that more pushes for censorship will happen. But I guess we'll see, maybe in a few years we'll be debating another ban. Maybe we won't.

Or maybe we won't talk again because we won't be part of the same fandom anymore.

In any case, good day sir. It was a pleasure debating with you.

Who cares about being mainstream or not? Or more like who wants to be mainstream?

This change does irreparable damage to the FA community like an 18+ lock would too.
I guess the result is the same tho: Other community sites will profit from it.

Which ironically benefits the one site the "mainstream" furs have the most problems with (Inkbunny).

No matter how you look at this, censorship at this scale hurts the community. The list of art links to be removed stands as a reminder of that.

We are witnessing the slow undoing of the post-burnt furs consensus and turning back the clock to the year 2000.

I never said I cared if Furry became mainstream, but it is an observation with how often we get referenced by various YouTubers, some who do pokemon specific content and others who do general media content. Like we have grown to the point that we are influencing a lot of things in a passive manner. Like we aren't just some small niche on the internet anymore. Many furries work in the tech industry, and there is the running joke that if you eliminated furries, the IT sector would be in shambles and tons of websites and equipment would fail as result. And while that is funny, it is also kind of true. A lot of furry stuff started and was driven by the internet. So a lot of the people who were around early on had to be very tech savvy and went into tech as their career.

This isn't as much the case now because of how much access people have to the internet in general, but early on, 2 decades ago, the people online were those with more knowledge when it came to technology.

So, we, as community should do what we can to make sure we put our best foot forward.

Am agreeing with your premise but not at all with your conclusion (the last line).
The people should accept us - not us feeling forced to change or hiding ourselves for them. That would mean to give up our identity!

Also we are talking about NSFW stuff here. "Society" will NEVER accept that no matter what. Not worth even trying. So let's just enjoy ourselves among ourselves.

Here is where I think that logic is flawed. You can't tell me that when going into a new job or new situation that you are a complete ass. You try your best to present yourself well, and let people get to know you first before becoming more open with others.

Also expecting everyone to just accept you is kind of irrational as it is, like some might and some might not, so you are more likely to adapt as the situation calls for it.

Like yeah, you aren't going to share your NSFW commissions, like ever, unless you end up really close friends with someone.

So yeah, like I get why people have problems with how the policy is being implemented, because the lack on consistency is....frustrating, but I think largely the rule update really helps make certain things clearer, and that by trying to eliminate posts where characters could be mistaken for children is a generally good thing.

Are you aware that your harmful logic has been applied by many to homosexuals and transexuals as well by many other communities? Just sweep them under the rug because they are not like everyone else. They shall change themselves and not society/community by accepting them...

That way of thinking does NOT belong into the furry community which I have joined 12 years ago.

But by your logic, that should also apply to generally accepting anyone and everyone regardless. You can't just say "people should accept us for existing" because that road goes both ways. Should we accept a fandom of cannibals, murders, etc? Like, there is a give and take here. I understand where you are coming from when it comes to the general premise, but you also know that, that is not what I am saying when I say you can't expect society to just change on a dime and accept people simply because they have a fandom and exist.

Being a furry and the stuff that comes with it is not directly equivalent to someone being homosexual.

Furry as a fandom is something that we as a community of people have created over the past couple decades of time. All fandoms will have their problems and problematic individuals who can give the fandom a bad name.

Homosexuality is something we gave a term for for something that exists inherently in nature, both in humans and other animals. Furry is something we as humans invented. Anthropomorphism is something humans invented to be part of their culture and societies at various points in human history. It is not something just inherently found in nature. Like Anime is a human invention, not something that just inherently existed, it took a little while for Anime to become more mainstream than it was several years ago, and depending on your community if you like Anime, some might have found you a little weird for enjoying foreign media.

And I know you know, this what I am getting at, that I am not talking about how people have swept homosexuals and etc under the rug. If you want to wear a tail from your back belt loop in public or dress up in a fursuit, fine, but you shouldn't expect to be allowed in everywhere you go, because wearing a fursuit is a choice, where someone's sexuality largely isn't.

And there's the false equivalence: that people like murderers and cannibals - who are actually hostile to fellow people's rights and freedoms and seek to harm them - being on par with people who are making drawings and sharing stories and engaging in roleplay consensually with one another and nothing more. People who are just trying to live as they like.

You also forget that this fandom has been fighting since the beginning to be what it wants to be and to explore and display its affinities and sexualities. It has been fighting through zoophile panics, fearmongering by animal rights' activists, parents freaking out and disowning them, attacks from the religious right, mock and ridicule both online and offline, and countless attacks past and present. Society wanted nothing to do with furries and only through continued exposure did they begin to come to terms with it.

Suddenly turning around and taking advantage of the little foothold gained in society's acceptance and playing the moral majority card back against the parts of the fandom that have been more slow to assimilate makes no sense and is a sorry, cowardly thing to do. It halts any further progress and preserves the existence of a structure that seeks to stamp out all who aren't part of the in-group while retaining a still fresh, tenuous allience that could later at any point come back to bite them in the ass if that majority decides one day to push furries back out of the mainstream(there's enough rise in rightwing today for that to happen). The whole point is to dismantle the gatekeeping system not join forces with it.

Well said. Also the next step would be to ban feral characters because surely everyone drawing that is a zoophile irl >_>

Giving in because of craving for attention by a mainstream does just bite you in the back tenfold.

Actually I appear to have been wrong about where the next move will come from. It's not the puritans pushing for more morality in art, it's the rightwing I only just mentioned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o6VHbrOObs Fresh outta Florida, the drag bans are already touching on Furry conventions, and of course it's Fox News cheering it. Minors aren't being allowed at a furry convention because "furry is sexual". Again the same rhetoric as Adleisio on when these unwarranted encroachments happen: "why insist on doing the thing if others don't want you to?". I reckon it's only a matter of time before Furries are the next Groomers. Fascists always need a new enemy to justify their ideology. I think I'm gonna be sick...

Stick to your queers, stick to your furries, stick to your freaks and artists. We need solidarity more than ever, not divisions on moral high grounds over drawings ffs!

Yes, this is what I was warning against to explain as to why FA was likely making the change. Get the wrong kind of attention, and certain content becomes a walking legal liability.

Like, I said in other comments, the "protect the children" reasoning felt forced, like that there was some other motive for very clearly saying that explicit phrase.

Cause let's say FA gets the really wrong attention and forcibly gets shut down, if not simply banned in certain states because of people like DeSantis. Then we would really be shit out of luck wouldn't we?

But funny you bring the phrase "furry is sexual" into it because I have had plenty of other people I have talked to who have said, FA is primarily and NSFW site, and I kept telling them that FA is trying to be a General facing site that allows adult content with guidelines and rules, explicitly because people, like those on Fox News and DeSantis, would start writing us off as not being safe for kids.

FA shouldn't ban minors because minors can't exist on furry sites. FA should ban minors because the site is playing fast and loose with sexual shit left and right and I reckon it'd be a nightmare to properly police in the state it's at and just easier to block them since the site's turned into a de facto pornfest. Other, more competent furry sites(read: all of them) don't have this problem.

FA is already banned in Russia because it's immoral or there's LGBT stuff goin on here or idk wtf their reasoning was. Yeah that's a loss, but who would they really be catering to if they decided to go the appeasement route. I'm sure there's probably middle eastern and african nations who also have a problem with this.

Pixiv isn't banned and it's got loli. FA also stated they weren't under any legal pressure and already had a cub ban in place. Also this site is hosted in the US which doesn't ban this kinda content - or even cub - in ANY state. Yeah, they would've been just fine.

And there are likely plenty of reasons for that, smaller userbase would be my first thought. The only other site I use specifically for furry stuff is Weasyl, and it is mostly dead there. E621 has a comprehensive blacklist for its users, but they also don't do much to stop people from getting onto the site last I checked.

I can't speak for whatever the heck Russia is doing, Russia is going to Russia.

Pixiv is also a Japanese site where Loli is socially normalized to a much more significant degree. Also, they would require censoring of certain parts of the genitalia per Japanese laws, last I checked. Not sure how well that would go over.

The keyword is, the US doesn't ban cub content, but with how DeSantis is running Florida, who is say Florida wouldn't be the first state to start making weirder laws considering all the crap that is going on. Whether FA is under legal scrutiny or not, there are still other liabilities the ambiguous nature of certain depictions could bring and that could extend to contracts FA has made with other private companies. It is a matter of risk management.

I do wish the FA staff was far more clear about why the update to the rule occurred outside of their initial reasoning, and outside of being vague about getting reports which for the longest of times they ignored and gave leniency on. Like, it very well could be there is a reason that they are not able to contractually disclose or discuss, who the hell knows at this point.

But as far the community being built on cub or underage content, seems kind of dubious, while not what you are saying, it does seem like you are saying that the content that is being enforced now made the fandom what it is versus simply being a part of it. It's like you are saying there isn't more to the fandom than the content that is being cut, which is characters that are depicted and appear child like cannot be in sexual pieces containing sexual content. Which has meant that I had to edit one of my posts that was a sketch page that I bought as a commission and I think it helped build out my character very well. But I also why having that part in the continuous could be problematic. So I got permission to make the edit and update the post from the artist of the piece.

So yeah, a lot of people have had some level of collateral damage, but I think most kind of either don't really care and are ambivalent to the rule change regardless or kind of understand why the rule update is happening. Consider how many people are being very overly vocal about it, versus those who aren't saying anything, versus those who appreciate the rule change. I am personally ambivalent, but I also understand that this site cannot implicitly expect the average visitor to understand the lore reasons for while a character looks like a child and is still in a sexual situation, unlike a site which would have been made explicitly for that franchise's content where it would be reasonable to implicitly expect the user who is visiting the site to be aware of the lore reasons for why the content appears as it does.

Background: When the fandom was forming in the '90s, kinks of all kinds started popping up and a movement called the Burned Furs was prominent in deciding what the community would be like. This group was opposed to a lot of "degeneracy" including non-consensual depictions but also stuff like plushophilia, otherkin, gay sex, and more. The movement faltered and a consensus was created to not judge one's kinks(also unsurprisingly the founder of this movement Squee Rat, was a nazi). We then had the community open for all until 2010 when FA banned cub and in the years after others followed suit. Now FA is pushing things further. This history is what my comment was based on. Non-consenting kinks - bestiality, rape, murder, gore, torture, cub - were all as integral as everything else.

With the community foundation topic, you went from my "foundation of tolerance and inclusion for all no matter how weird" to "built on cub and underage". Congrats. I'm gonna try this one more time using all the presumption of sincere engagement on your part that I can muster.

Where Pixiv is located and what the social norms around its content are is irrelevant. Your concern was that FA was in danger of being blocked in other countries for its content. I pointed out that Pixiv - which goes all in - ISN'T blocked in any major countries, so then why would FA - which already sanitized its content prior to this rule change - be at any risk?

And even this angle of discussion is irrelevant because to begin with the staff mentioned both in the rule change and on Discord that the policy isn't related to any risk of payment processor loss or hosting service shutdown. We were discussing why FA is not in danger and instead of concluding on that matter we've now moved to what isn and isn't acceptable in Japan(Do you really think you need to mention this because I don't know it?), stick to the discussion point and stop sliding around ffs!

Now with all this out of the way, let's discuss the current movement. It is a rehash of the Burned Furs now under new branding(@TAPS_Society on Twitter - the Anti-Phillia Society), I see they've cleared out their profile more recently but I'm sure you can use the Internet archive. This is likely some fascist group from 4chan or KiwiFarms, when they formed they ran an op against Charem with the goal of manufacturing a panic over art and getting them banned using similar rhetoric and have been trying to recruit antis and furries and came back with a larger op, which became the success of this policy change.

I don't know if you're familiar with the right-wing "we're just asking questions" or "we're just concerned about..." MO, I'd assume not since you seem to have bought into the narrative, it's the same narrative spreading lies and causing panic over trans people and pushing the Jewish Question, it's the same tactic. The community didn't have a problem being a thriving space for all for years and years, until manufactured division.

Long story short fascists tried to take down furries with frontal attacks such as weaponized the public shock, website attacks, 4chan raids, that didn't work so then they tried to be "cool" to lure them in with groups like Nazi Furs, that didn't work because the community is too left-leaning and now they're doing think-of-the-children moral panic divide-and-conquer and it seems to be working some. Because the FA staff bought it hook line and sinker. This isn't a legitimate community shift. It's TERF, LGB Alliance and Pridefall, the furry version. Also the war on porn had success recently by doing a similar thing - instead of frontal attack, "voice concerns" to encumber porn sites with regulations to take them down.

That is a great history lesson, but while non-consenting fetishes were there from the very beginning doesn't me they aren't inherently problematic depending on depiction, context, and other various factors that influence how it is perceived. While things like rape, gore, etc where likely present, I have my doubts with how much presence they had for an early start to the fandom. And because the horror genre is a mainstay of modern media I am sure people were and still are generally more tolerant to that content than they are of underage sexual content.

I got you were aiming for tolerance and inclusion for all regardless of how weird, but let's be real. So you honestly expect me to believe that cub had any major presence early on and had some pivotal importance to how the furry community developed. I was around before IMVU took over, and before the cub ban, I was very concerned about how people might perceive myself and the community as a whole if 1. They found I was furry and 2. If they knew what sort of content was present on FA prior to that. I sighed a breath of relief because I didn't have to worry about me trying to explain why I participating in a platform that had what some could construe as child porn. And I am solely talking about the stuff that was actually labeled cub, not the stuff that appeared "child-like." I personally felt like FA had become a place that I could more comfortably participate in, and it was much less anxiety inducing having to worry about who I shared my furry-ness with. So, I don't think FA is the proper place for content that pushes the boundaries I'd what could be viewed as underage characters and content. I am also not implying any sort of accusation towards any artist or purveyor of such content. I am also not making a statement about how they as individuals think or perceive the content. There are sites that are better suited to host that sort of content, where there is an implicit understanding that the average visitor will have the requisite lore excuses and reasons for certain characters being depicted as they are. Context matters.

And yes, I am well aware that we have established that FA is not in any legal danger, good, we have hashed that enough. I also don't think it is fair to use another cultures societal norms or how another site is run to justify how a completely separate site wants to moderate their content. I have an Asian friend, lives in Singapore , who stumbled into Loli stuff in his late teens and didn't find it problematic at first, but over time grew to understand how that sort of content is not as normalized in the West, but also why the content can be problematic and as a result wants to distance himself from it by finding other kinks and fetishes to enjoy. Again. FA is taking a stance against the ambiguity that certain depictions have, and the potential problems that could arise from it. Not just within the community, but how people outside the community perceive us. Dragoneer himself mentioned at one point that if FA became a completely SFW site that it would open significantly more business opportunities and allow him to hire an actual dev team to work in the site. But because the site supports adult content it limits those avenues and much of the staff are volunteers. I can get you the full quote that my friend shared with me.

I have not heard of either of those groups, I don't know anything about them. But I am not going to go down the conspiratorial rabbit hole unless you have some pretty hard evidence linking them to recent things. And I mean you'd have to have more than conjecture and evidence, not just a "similar rhetoric." Applying Bayesian reasoning and weighing the likelihood any of this is "an inside job" over pure incompetence is unlikely. People claimed that 9/11 was an inside job, or that they have evidence of aliens, or whatever else. And it is more reasonable to assume that 9/11 happened because various departments of the government failed to coordinate with each other, and turns out is factually the case because if those departments had not kept all their information to themselves, it likely could have been prevented. It is far more logically reasonable to assume that the way the rule is being enforced and implemented is because FA staff/mods don't know how to communicate with us, the users, and with each other to have some level of consensus and consistency.

I am open to evidence, but to confirm your hypothesis, I would need to see some pretty substantial evidence. I understand your anxieties and fears about what this could be, but I am skeptical because I am willing to accept the fallibility of people.

Also, relevant for why I think your claim is a result of mistrust, anxiety, and fear
https://youtu.be/m9MpmS3HBTo

I should also point out, that every fandom has individuals and small groups of people who are generally...unsavory, for lack of a better term, who will try to push their agenda, start witch hunts, etc. That is nothing new, but trying to make the claim that these people are trying to be some cabal, like the Illuminati. I don't buy it. There are far more reasonable and rational explanations that should be considered first.

You can look up Twitter, you can look up the whole FA discussion, you can look up people posting, their associations, and see who was pushing for this stuff, like I said TAPS appears to have wiped info on their profile but I'm sure you can find out who was in these groupings, if you're smart you'll figure it out. I'm tired.

There's a dissonance in values here, you keep coming back to it, whereas to you business and the fearful masses having unwarranted panic overrides the individual's right to authenticity and expression no matter how their tastes are viewed. In any other area of life this would be considered an appalling infringement, but here, for this one thing, an exception has been made. I stand by that this is a problem that needs to be resolved rather than a reality to come to terms with, that kind of thinking never lead to any progress anyway.

If Dragoneer wants to make FA into a SFW-only site it'll be a disaster of his own making, clearly if he intends to keep going with stupid decisions he's got at least several supporters.

In an age when we've seen rollbacks of civil rights left and right this is exactly what we need: more repression and moral policing.

Something's gonna have to give, whether this means creating another parallel society within the furry society or whatever, but all I see is people being made miserable for wanting to express, for the greater good of optics, politics, and fearful people all the while encouraged by rightwingers. I won't be defending this direction and will continue advocating for tearing down these barriers of fear. I gotta say I don't think you're a really good person, I mean neither is Dragoneer but that's that.

Yeah, I am too, I have better things to do than run down evidence for what sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory, that would just be a self fulfilling prophecy. If you want to find evidence to support a preconceived notion, you will find it.

But you know, at this point, you passing judgement on my character shows your bias against anyone who is not willing to go on a crusade against a site wanting to moderate content they host and how little you were serious about reading my words at face value, while I never made statements about your or anyone else's character. Attack the argument, not the person, the first rule of good argument, no? I never mentioned fearful masses, I simply mentioned that Furry is catching more main stream attention because we have become so pervasive. And sites tend to function on a cycle, starting with little to no moderation until it reaches a critical mass of users, and then conflict and problems arise which threaten the site, so moderation becomes necessary, which alienates some users who try to start their own site only to have the cycle repeat.

But I would like to be clear here, we are legitimately arguing over the right to draw characters (that for the apparent majority, which none of the people arguing actually own) that are designed with a context of generally being childlike, or are outright very young, sexually? Because that is what the policy update is specifically trying to moderate in terms of content. It makes no assumption what a users intent was, or how a user individually thinks about or views the characters, and it is definitely not an implicit accusation for as much as you seem to be implying that it is.

Actually no, the 2.7 update post at one point says "we are updating the rule to better reflect our intentions in fostering a safe and comfortable environment for everyone" which is implying that what other people drawing some stuff for years and years on the site - which btw wasn't a problem until it magically was - was making others feel UNSAFE, so I see that they're not just updating a dry policy, they're actually implying that what those people were drawing was making others feel unsafe and I don't think you can be on the receiving end of such a statement without feeling the staff called you a threat.

And there's also the bit in the same post which says "we have continued to evolve our rules to prevent minors from being exploited" which I mean yeah it could mean "preventing fictional minors from being exploited" - a very stupid statement in its own right but whatever - but what with the implication of the paragraph on making people feel safe I think it's fair game to consider they were talking about real minors and implying that the targeted artists were a threat to real minors being exploited.

They were also very happy to let people on Twitter and here start calling artists pedos and I didn't see them make any appeals for civility while people were getting hounded and left "good riddance"-type messages on their front pages. So all I see is artists being chased away and insulted. But you're so adamant about everything you say and I see you posting everywhere about this topic, I have to assume you already know that these things are happening, who knows, maybe you'll be staff one day with all the effort you're putting. I hear they could always use more staff.

You are dealing with 10's of thousands of people. This is no different than a high school trying to balance a dress code to help its students feel safe and comfortable. It is not making any sort of accusatory remarks about those people's views or their character. This sort of backlash is because people have conflated their self perception with their content, much like a religious zealot or high school would feel personally attacked when you make any statement against their ideology or interests. This is a known psychological phenomena, and as adults I would hope people would be able to recognize and separate these two aspects.

And the only reason it wasn't a problem was because the staff was not enforcing it like they technically could have with the previous iteration, but they would have had to make some pretty strong arguments because it wasn't explicitly there, and when a rule is not explicitly laid out, you get people who do the "The rule isn't explicit enough, so you can't punish me" even though, people know what the rule meant. People will find the line they can push and sit on it. And again, are you really going to argue for people's right to draw characters whose entire explicit context from their source material was to be child stand-ins or generally child like, in sexual situations? Mind you characters who the apparent majority of people complaining don't actually own. There was going to be collateral damage regardless because it has now need to be explicitly laid out to remove content that could be remotely ambiguous.

Okay, do you honestly think the staff saying "be civil" would have stopped that from happening, like really? Twitter be civil? That is a rarity if it ever happens at all. But are you going to excuse the harassment that some of the mods faced by Twitter users? Is that okay to you? Because that would be hypocrisy if you are mad about one and find the other okay.

Like, it is a Policy change, people need to grow up and stop acting like the world is on fire. People have a right to be unhappy about it, it doesn't give them the right to attack the staff, nor does it give people the right to call some of the effected artists pedos. The street goes both ways here.

No I don't think death threats and violence are okay, but there's a world of difference, the staff are in a position of power, they're not helpless users who suddenly discovered one day that their art isn't welcome anymore because some clique in an ivory tower decided so. Policy has consequences, much like this had on the users getting attacked, and the people were responding to that. FA staff fractured this community, so they brought all those rightfully angry users on themselves. It was justified anger, it was a lot of emotion(a lot of fear might I add) because people are passionate about this place. The administration has the power and the wealth to deal with any threat to themselves and they know it, and they know we know it. But on the bad apples note, the proportion of supporters who were harassing users was way more than the proportion of detractors harassing mods and I think that's gotta say something.

Your laissez-faire approach has a capitalist naivite to it, like it's their website, their rules, but then some website gets to be a meaningful size to the community, I think they should have a say and there were a lot of displeased people on Twitter saying this - because yes, it had to be Twitter since they didn't have any other place to voice their grievances since the staff disabled comments. By the way - Twitter - very big very important website, bigger than its owner, being run into the ground by Elon but hey he owns it and it's his right to have his way with it isn't it? These privileged people in their ivory towers, they ruin everything for the rest of us.

FA is a terrible website - has been for a really long time - people across the spectrum have said it, this rule made it even more terrible, they made that loud and clear, much more loudly than they were supporting it, but you don't seem to be on Team Users and I really can't help you there, like I said maybe the staff have a place for you on their team, maybe more, because you're doing the work trying to convince everyone that less is more in every journal thread I see, if not for your success then maybe for your effort, I think they should reward you.

So, correction to my number, FA has roughly 2 Million users. How many people are actively complaining? for 1% you would need 20,000 people. I would think a fractured community you need more than 1%. Of the 1160 people I follow here on FA, I have seen about 10 users make any sort of journal regarding the rules update, so....that is still about 1%. Some of them, like Narse here, knew that their content operated on a technicality and that his audience was more likely to know the lore excuses behind why his works were not seen as containing underage characters. Because that is what it was running on, was a technicality. So we have two layers of bias here, 1. Narse's content would already be found by people familiar with the franchise characters in his content and 2. He intentionally made his characters on model which meant that he was making the assumption his viewers were aware of lore excuses that could be used.

Yes, because we are talking about people who already believed that association fallacy and were emboldened. Like, if the staff came out and said "This policy is not accusation of those who have art found to violate the shift in policy, we are doing this because we are only trying to create a space that is more welcoming for everyone." Maybe it could have helped some, but I don't think it would have stopped people who already had that bias for calling people pedos. Because those people are already so entrenched in their belief of that.

Again, high school dress code analogy. Or even work dress code analogy. I would imagine that you wouldn't be allowed to wear a shirt that says "Fuck me in the ass" to work because it would make people feel uncomfortable, it is not because the school or company is making an accusation, it is to make the work/school environment more welcoming and less likely to become hostile.

Also, none of their announcement journals had comments turned on, and the Discord channel on the server was doomed to fail from outset. Even with the 6 hour cool down, do you know how hard it is to keep track of 100+ message notifications, let alone the fact that Discord sometimes just skips entire sections of chat. Like I have been in channel where my new message list starts closer to the end then where I actually left off. That is why they went to exclusively Trouble Tickets. Because of the very real limitations of trying to use an IM for feedback.

As far as being on team users side, I have a friend who runs a completely SFW account with no overlap on his NSFW account, and he said there are people who he knows personally who are generally for people exploring stuff, and that a lot of people have only quietly tolerated the child like characters because the policy didn't explicitly exclude them, and if the staff is to be believed, they left a lot of reports against PKMN and DGMN post not get punished, because while the previous iteration of the Policy could have allowed them to do so, they would have had an uphill battle in doing so. So from his experience being in both halves of the FA community, it has actually been a quiet desire of the community, even for those people who otherwise are open to people exploring some weird stuff. And if you want evidence of this in terms of reports, you are now getting into privacy concerns. So.....you can perceive this policy update as you want, but with the people in my circle of friends and the people they know, especially on the solely SFW side (who have barely noticed this as a blip) basically said:
1. The wording should be changed because it does have the potential for abuse, which I don't disagree with, but unless you want a dissertation length of exceptions, examples, etc. There are limited options.
2. Why did this clarification need to happen at all when they should have been enforcing it for PKMN and DGMN to begin with.

So, yeah, to me, like others, this rule should have applied to PJMN and DGMN a long time ago for the characters whose entire intended context is to effectively be children or exceptionally childlike. Like, the entire set of baby pokemon, Cubone, Riolu. Because even by the original clarification from 2015 which reads "Minors are defined as real or fictional humanoids with a childlike body or younger than 18 years old, and any adolescent animals or fantasy creatures." There has been no change to the rule's wording with the exception of now making it so minors cannot be depicted as pregnant, they only made it so that the rule was going to start being applied more equally when they were letting a lot of stuff slide in the past.

Gotta love their "lore excuse" thing because they said Judy Hopps - who has "childlike" proportions - is okay because there's this scene of her being young and it offers a lore context to Judy's species actually being an adult and that overrides the proportions requirement. But then have an old Treecko in the Pokemon anime as context that Pokemon can be old without evolving(not to mention the many times it is discussed in the anime) and no, that doesn't override the rule. This is what happens when you're dealing with fiction where the way creatures work is boundless, so staff just carved out an exception for Judy, it's great because they show everything wrong with their policy!

Defending the staff for being overwhelmed is again something only a staff member would do, since they'd be admitting to being poorly equipped with dealing with their own damn website, not to mention lack of foresight for the policy response and everyone else would expect the competence fit for the biggest furry art site, but it looks like I'm wrong here since you're also defending them.

Going exclusively to trouble tickets means they're gonna take tickets to enforce their policy, which means no policy discussion, it's over, the policy is in and you just have to comply now. It's not a solution to lack of policy feedback, it IS the policy in force.

Only 1% of people made journals but more didn't and are either unaware, haven't been on the website in ages, or forgot an Eevee pic they drew ages ago that's now going to get them in trouble. Surprise trouble is the best isn't it? Some just up and cleared their galleries silently. There's a lot of scrambling going on on e621 to preserve content and I'll tell ya it doesn't look like one percent to me.

You say your friend says there's some quiet majority who wanted other people's art gone because they don't like it and that they were "tolerating" it, I wonder where they were on the day all this went down. But anyway, there's a lot of art I also don't like, some pretty disgusting stuff I see in many places, stuff I'd block if there was a tag system on this site, but I would fight to defend their right to have it posted, that's the difference between me and your friends' friends, I understand civics and they don't. I'm sure there's a lot of smart people on FA who do, and the staff should've talked to them instead. The public outcry doesn't look to me like they talked to a lot of people, and I don't know your friend. Let's keep it that way.

I'm gonna try a different tack here than my other post: trans people are 1%, should their freedom to be authentic in their self-expression be restricted by some majority who doesn't like what they are? Also, some people want to stop other people from having abortions, because they think abortion is murder. And we all know murder is unacceptable, disgusting, and reviling. Should their facts-divorced opinion force others to suppress themselves because they think it's objectionable? Should any policy that adds restrictions not based on facts be nonetheless enforced because, either some people feel morally very strongly about it, or because those they don't agree with are only 1%? And yes a corporation has more leeway than civil rights, but when something private like Twitter or FA ends up serving such an important role in a public space that affects so many, and that something is made what it is by its USERS anyway, shouldn't it be bigger than just the corporation? If the answer is no then the powerful and colluding will always wipe the floor with the minority. And I don't find that something to be proud of and going around telling miserable people with hit galleries that they were nonetheless in the right to be hit. There's a term for that kinda behavior, starts with G.

Do you think I honestly know what has an hasn't gotten the ax in terms of them updating their backend part of the policy when they decided to start including PKMN and DGMN and other into their actionable handbook, especially when it won't remotely effect me. Again, the wording hasn't changed, just what they are going to start enforcing more equally like they should have long ass time ago. I would hope that Baby Pokemon would have been enforced regardless, and I would hope that you have expected the same. Yes, you can have an old, unevolved pokemon, but unless someone is altering their appearance to convey such, then it would still violate the policy for having an overly childlike appearance. Like example, Yordle's from Leage of Legends have a lot of overriding features that convey age beyond just proportions and size. A Cubone in it's average appearance is to be a child stand in. A Riolu in its average appearance is the child form of Lucario. So unless you are giving them features that override that appearance, they would violate the policy as written and should have been enforced. Like, people are 20yo+ adults in most cases, they should very well have had a good idea what the rule was meant to include and that they were playing with technicalities when comes to average on model appearances.

Uhm.....you do realize that much of the staff have other regular full time jobs, right? Like, I don't keep up with how much goes on, on the back end, but I do know enough that part of their staff are legit just volunteers who do mod stuff in their free time, and other staff either do this part time, or have a full time job on top of this. I barely have time to go through the messages in the 5-7 servers I am in on Discord on days I work. So unless you have evidence that FA has a paid full time staff outside of a small handful of people, you would be right, that they likely don't have enough resources/man power to manage their own site. Why do you think the design refresh took so long, and other features haven't materialized.

Last I checked that is how most major websites work, is it not? Also, if other sites are asking for feedback, they likely have PAID FULL TIME staff to handle all of it, and other times the policies just get updated, end of story. SO why should FA be any different?

It only seems like a lot from your perspective, because of the community you have circled yourself in, plus confirmation bias because you are literally looking within your circle. As far as the groups of people I interact with on a regular basis, haven't really put up any complaints outside of being confused on some of rulings. So I would look at more of WHO is complaining, and from what I see, it is the people who have largely leaned on the leniency afforded prior to the enforcement update in regards to Upload Policy 2.7. Plus a lot of stuff was going under the radar that would have otherwise been enforced if it ever got reported. FA seems to largely work from a list of repeat offenders or rely on the report feature, because again, limited staff that can't just police the website all day every day, which I saw at least one other person mention -> https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:59970294

They likely didn't, I know some of the staff had issues with the enforcement update, but I do think this move is largely to more equally enforce the rule where there was a lot of leniency for certain things before. And yeah, for most other things I would too. Everything from incest to extreme gore. Otherwise that would mean you are quite genuinely advocating for people being able to draw what would otherwise be children or overly childlike characters in sexual situations. WHICH on the right website, with the right context, would be fine. I do not think FA is the proper place for that, especially not for having 2 million users and it being a public free to use website that merely allows adult content with guidelines. Unlike a site like Subscribestar which is very upfront about it being an adult website, where people can join membership lists and would be completely aware of what they are getting into. And before you tell me this site is an adult website. Here are some numbers from a fairly popular search term:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme.....4112/image.png

We know anything Adult is very explicitly sexual or extremely hard gore, but anything in Mature can vary widely, so trying to tease out nuance would be extremely difficult. So stuff in the Adult, the very NSFW category only account for 1/4th of the content based on the numbers being reported by FA when doing a search. So NO, FA is not an adult centric site in the slightest. Also, you will likely notice that the first set doesn't add up to 100%, and this because of how badly optimized FA's search is. And this is me, providing evidence for a claim that I have made in other posts.

As far as your second post goes, we are not talking about government policy. And I would happily defend the 1% of people who want to make super gory art, like fine, I don't have to like. BUT I also don't think a website has to be forced to host it. DA I don't think allows super gory stuff in their Upload policy, let alone anything beyond Artistic Nudity on their website. Are you going to say that if DA decided to get a little bit more restrictive with their Upload Policy concerning whatever it was they wanted to restrict for whatever reason. That you would be up in arms about that too? Because "historical precedent?" Like I know what you are going for here, but that is bad analogy because I can list plenty of websites that have more restrictive content policies than FA, and have had changes to both be more lenient and be more restrictive about how that content gets uploaded and managed. Are you going to go crusade them as well every single time they make an update to how a policy is enforced. Like these changes don't happen in a vacuum, nothing does.

You say they should have made this change long ago and look, maybe they should have. They decided the payment processors issues weren't worth the trouble in 2010 but somehow they didn't fully commit to the change. Why? I don't know. I remember those years, Pokemon was one of the biggest things getting people into furries and the website sure was providing. I imagine it couldn't have been a good decision for the influx of users, who were building this site's community to what it is today, and really wanted their Pikachu and Eevee porn! Fast forward to today, MSI is trying to get jiggy with the furry crowd and the diversity of content exploded, to the point where it's possible to switch allegiance to the capitalist-friently version of furry even if that means less diversity and doing in dirty loyal artists and content that was part of FA's culture - including stuff that Dragoneer himself had posted and faved! And this is being sold as the moral thing to do.

You say you know people who had their galleries affected and somehow it's fair. Let's see how fair it is to the young budding artists who don't have proportions quite figured out yet and how a policy so inconsistent, in a world of creatures so insanely diverse, is going to be fairly applied to people's art; actually scratch that, there were so many I lost count who were complaining about how this hit them from the very start, with even some parroting your talking points who don't draw cub feeling insulted that something they drew was deemed "childlike" and taken down. I think that's still going on actually, maybe you should check with your buddies again, see if they're still thrilled with this.

In FA's history I haven't complained publicly about any other site decision, most of the bad decisions about how they run their site don't have to do with what they do change, but with what they don't change, though I probably will have a second look now that you mention it. The little I did was show support and solidarity with the people I saw affected, which I think is a nice thing to do, but I'm the little guy, I don't have a following, so I do what I can.

Now you're an artist, and you say you weren't affected and, actually I think this policy not affecting you has a lot to do with why you're running around singing its praises, if we are to talk about who's living in what circles. You went as far as DA furs' journals to prop it up and I see even here in this journal thread there were people who cut it with you for it, but you keep doing it, why? One of life's great mysteries. Look I'm saying, if this policy was so good why would it need people like you running around defending it everywhere? And you only seem to show up in places where people were hit, I've yet to see journals declaring what a Great Success it is, but if you find one be sure to post there, maybe full time!

I never used the words "historical precedent" anywhere, to justify anything, that's something conservatives like to do, maybe, with the recent Supreme Court I don't think they care about that anymore. I wanna respond to this but I don't know what you're talking about.

I know they're exploiting their mods, this website makes money for its admins and they're not seeing a penny. And yet there doesn't seem to be any time spent on things people have been begging for years, like bigger image upload limit, video support, blacklists, thank goodness it at least hasn't been hacked in a while cause we were all getting tired of having to change our passwords or fear our notes being leaked, our family or employers finding things out everytime the website got hacked! Hell they should've been working overtime to prevent that! So no I won't take any damn excuse for why they can't get things done right. Now they can't handle even their own policy? That's making me care even less, who knew that was possible...

And look, yes I get what you're saying about adult not being all there is on FA, but as I said this site is being run miserably, quite miserably. I don't think it's in their competence to herd the cats quite frankly and be able to make it even remotely safe for SFW, I've seen plenty questionable things, even porn, in SFW Mode, which I didn't even use much, it was thrust on me by accident as default and it was still enough to see what a joke it is. If anything it'd be a liability for children! I haven't said anything more about FA going non-adult-centric in a few posts nor about campaigning against that, but good to know someone has their back in case they ever do that, I mean I won't get in the way of your vocation, you seem quite invested.

Yes we're not talking about government policy, which at least on this front seem to be okay, at least in the US it is. I mean the Bush administration tried to ban stuff with the PROTECT Act but the Supreme Court struck down the artistic depictions provision as violating the 1st Amendment, maybe make the most of it while you can, never know with the current Court! In some countries like good ol' Canada drawing "Stuff" is prosecuted the same as having committed that with a real victim. That's where this is heading, sanity be damned. Anyway; corporations are basically people by this point when it comes to what they can act on externally. But at the same time what they can do internally is more twisted and autocratic than ever. If you ask me a community takeover of FA would be in order, with an elected board that does voting and is accountable to its users. Some here have advocated for putting up a fund to buy FA from Dragoneer, which I gotta say is not out of discussion when you consider the way it's going, FA might one day be worth pennies! But right now it is what it is and so people like me are talking. And you and FA's staff are gonna keep bumping into "talkers". Consequences.

Kudos for still trying after so long.
Ultimately the 1% argument is flawed. In fact, the exact same logic could be applied in reverse. It's only 1% (I doubt it's even that much) pushing for this. "I heard from a friend" is not an acceptable metric to determine what is and isn't wished by the community. And there again, FA made sure any form of open debate wasn't possible.

Nobody is rooting for this rule. Nobody is asking for this. Whoever is doing that is doing it in the shadows. If it was a majority, or even if it was a bigger minority than ours, we should have many more people debating us, we would have many more journals in favor of the rule, we would have mods that wouldn't be afraid to turn on comments, let people debate it out.

This whole situation stinks and is a damn loss for our community. But honestly I don't see them changing their mind. They want censorship, they'll have it. We'll just have to agree to disagree and move out to more accepting and less bigoted websites, and hopefully rebuild our community there.

Okay, we are going in circles of rhetoric, I want to circle back to my very first original comment, because I I have shown up in major conversations in like 2 journals, her and on ECMajor's. Because my original comment made no mention of whether I thought this enforcement update was good or bad. So I want to ask a few simple questions so we can establish what we are actually talking about. Everything else is tangents to the topic. I also investigate to see what people are saying, if it just the standard "this is bogus" comment, fine, that is an opinion, I don't actually care, the part that got my initial response what that it is an overstep in enforcement, and I don't think that is case, and I am going to try and demonstrate that.

We have established that pokemon, in general, have be here since the beginning. I am not disagreeing with that. However pokemon would be considered fictional animals, yes?

The policy says a minor is defined as any character whose appearance is exceptionally childlike in nature, and includes adolescent animals real or fictional, right?

Baby Pokemon, and Fresh and In Training Digimon are intended to be the child forms of certain evolution lines, right?

If you have said yes to these 3 question then we have used deductive reasoning to establish Pokemon and Digimon are fictional animals, those specific forms are considered adolescent stages of their evo line and they would by definition violate the policy.

Some 1st stage Pokemon and Rookie level Digimon in their evo line in their AVERAGE general context would be considered either exceptionally child-like in appearance or to be the child form of their evolution. E.g. Cubone, Riolu, Impmon, Veemon, etc. Correct?

I understand that we have examples of old first stage Pokemon like Treecko within the lore, but can we reasonable assume that everyone has the same level of lore knowledge that could justify claiming some of the more childlike appearing species are adults? (Keep in mind I wasn't even aware of Old Man Treecko until you brought it up and I went and searched it, also his appearance was made be different from the average.)

If you said yes to the former and no to the latter then we have once again used deductive reasoning to explain why they should have been enforceable when the clarification was made in 2015 and that the staff was being lenient because of those lore reasons, and things may have come to head where it was starting to cause problems.

In summary, we have established that we can't expect all visitors to have the same level of lore knowledge to justify exceptions, that Pokemon and Digimon are a fictional animal species, some species are designed to intentionally be the child forms or exceptionally child like in their average context, so they would be considered and/or perceived to be adolescents for all intents and purposes in a vast majority of instances, and that is a strict violation of the content policy.

As for the other species from other franchises that are also getting the ax, I can't speak for all of them, because yes some look exceptionally child like and could not reliably be viewed as adults by all visitors. And as another user established Stitch has had a lot of reports in the past if people were reporting those posts. Am I confused by some of the species getting the ax, yes. do I agree with all of them, no. Do I think FA staff is being inconsistent, yes. Do I think FA staff is also just being more strict in some cases to avoid ambiguity, yes.

For you other comments, I will try to be brief.
-Groups and communities change over time, group perception and attitudes towards certain content will change over time as new members come in and other members leave. Do you think this community is just a stagnant unchanging collection of people?
-I have at least one artist who was a bit more annoyed than others. And yes people are going to feel insulted, but again that is because they tied so much of their self perception to something intangible.
-Regardless of skill or style there are things artists can do to convey a difference. We are communicators and we have to be cognizant of that. Yes it sucks for some of the more beginner artists who are still trying to learn, but I had similar hurtles when figuring out stuff for DA. It is part of the growing/learning process.
-You are using the claim that because PKMN/DGMN were a part of the early years of furry means that either they should be exempt or not be considered part of the policy enforcement change. Thus "historical precedent" but this feels like the non sequitor fallacy. Where just because it was allowed and the staff was lenient in the past that should remain lenient and allow the content in the future
-Also continuing to tell me I would make a great staff member tells me you are way over reading why I am arguing, because I likely would not get along with much of the staff. Also. Like hell I would want to be responsible for solving people's problems, but if I did I would be much more willing to give some sort of an explanation beyond what I have seen in some cases.
-So yeah, again, I would be far more concerned with the government taking away rights and privileges when it comes to art making than a website trying to control the content it hosts, like any other website has done for the past couple decades with shifting policies as problems arose and things needed to be said. I am sure you have seen those lovely signs in Port-a-Potties that read "don't drink the blue fluid." Like it should not have to be stated, but it did, because someone did it.

Okay, so hopefully we are done going in circles. Because I have 1 final question and I think this is the most important.

If you were to run a website, what limitations on content would you have and why?

Or a vast majority don't care or that there is no reason to make a journal with a positive statement for the change in enforcement of the policy. Like humans are hard wired to basically respond more vocally to something they deem as a threat. For those that thing the enforcement change is a good thing, why would they do any more than go "Cool, they are finally going to more equally enforce policy" and then just carry on with whatever it was they are doing. It is like leaving a review on an item, you are significantly more likely to leave a review if you had a bad experience with it, because are wired to warn others of danger. If everything is fine and works as expected, you are way less likely to make any sort of remark.

And being it is a policy update for content, there really isn't anything to 'rally' around. There is nothing to share like a screenshot. Basic psychology should explain why you are not going to see "positive" journals for how the staff are going to enforce the policy going forward. It ends being a more muted "well that's good" because there is nothing to really say or share or do as a result. And most of those people are not going to sit and fight and argue with people because that would be an exercise in futility for them. But for me, I really hate people using bad logic to explain why they think something is bogus and why things shouldn't change.

Like, just sit and try to rationally come up with a reason for a person to make any sort of journal basically praising the sun when it comes to policy update, when there is every reason to make a journal, post, comment, when you feel attacked. Like take a moment step away from your biases and try to consider why some people might have had issues with the content, and why the staff are changing their enforcement of the content. Because as they said, they gave a lot of leniency to PKMN and DGMN and others after the initial clarification in 2015, when in reality, it could have been enforced, but they chose not to enforce it for certain franchise characters.

There is a disagreement on basic priorities here, on what should matter more, and as long as that exists discussion will go nowhere. What just continues to bewilder me is the passion for white-knighting for FA's rules. Trying hard not to believe Ulterior Motives here. My curiosity's run out though. People will simply see who is being good and empathic to them and who isn't.

Everyone has biases, you do too in the way you choose to consider some things as evidence but will go out of your way to explain why others cannot be valid, but only when it goes your way.
See, let's try using your own logic once again:
Before this whole fiasco there must have been supporter of the change right. People that were NOT happy about the current state of things, right? Okay. Where were they? Where are their journals complaining, citing Pokemon/Digimon as "problematic" and criticizing FA for it?
Oh I'm sure you'll find the twitter crazies to complain, crazies that you admitted yourself aren't worth the trouble.
I'm using your logic. People that are not satisfied tend to be more vocal.
Oh yes, of course. It was all in tickets. Convenient.
However now that, somehow, is evidence enough for you.

With your way of thinking there is absolutely no way to ever satisfy you with evidence, because you are biased for one side. All you have to say is "but there are people, somewhere, who exist, and they are against it, but they don't need to talk about it". You delicately make sure to make it a win-win situation for yourself.
You don't provide proof, but then claim that absence of proof is proof. You decide to trust the words of moderators when there is public evidence that they haven't been trustworthy, at least on that topic.
Imagine if governments did that, imagine if they would call something necessary without so much as one bit of evidence and all we had to do is to accept it.
Oh wait, they already do that, and that gets people in the streets, and rightfully so.

When a law comes to pass you usually see demonstrators from either side, the "winning" and "losing", who is fighting back.
There is a losing side here, but there is no "winning" side bragging about it. Cub has been banned for years, you're gonna tell me you never see people say how glad they were that it was banned? Where are these people when it comes to this rule?

We're talking about a rule that erases the work of many established artists, and you'd expect people to be fine with no evidence whatsoever that such a massive part of the fandom wants it to happen?
If you and FA are so sure that they've got the numbers, why not make a poll? Take all the time you need, rally the people in favor of it. Or don't, but then with such a lack of evidence nobody will buy it.

"Basic psychology should explain why you are not going to see "positive" journals for how the staff are going to enforce the policy going forward."
This is the era of virtue signaling. People absolutely do it when it comes to censor things they don't like, they'll do it with pleasure. It happens all the freaking time these days.
I'm not saying it is rational, but it is there. Then again, there is nothing rational about making a fuss over lewd pictures of a Pikachu. Holy freaking shit, can you imagine your younger self ending up on AGNPH and randomly finding a picture of Charmander and being all like "oh this is problematic content, this hurts people". Holy shit. No it doesn't. It never has, never will, this whole controversy is grotesque and insane.
Even my freaking parents laughed it off when they found out about my stash of yiff. Oh sure it was awkward, sure, maybe some parents could have been a bit less cool with it, but the problem then would be about homophobia or animal themes in general, or even the fetishes at play, and not "omg Pikachu's size is problematic". Nobody thinks that, nobody truly think a lewd Pikachu is made off real pictures, or that anyone will turn bad evil guy from watching a lewd Pikachu.
Wake up, this is not the fandom we grew up with.

I'm sure that people had issue with the content. I have issues with tons of content, too. I find snuff, dismemberment and similar extremely offensive. Rape in art for many is offensive (and no it's not mainstream in movies either... in fact the few movies that depict it usually get controversial too). This site has tons of controversial content, and a PIKACHU and an EEVEE is not where any normie would draw the line. This, once again, is batshit stupid.

You're trying too hard to find positiveness around this rule where there simply is none.

And yes, I know, I agreed to disagree, but the constant call to biases really bothered me as it feels like a repeated attack on character. You're at the very least guilty of having biases as well.
You're absolutely not reasonable in the way you expect people to just take the word of a few mods for granted and have their safe haven of expression censored without any evidence.

Okay, you forget one major thing that FA did a long ass time ago. BAN CALLOUT JOURNALS. Also, why would be people openly start arguments of that nature when it would be futile arguing with people it drew out of the woodwork. Like how the policy update drew a lot of people out of the woodwork. Their first journal was pretty shit, yeah, cause it was vague and not clear, so I was like "I think I know what they mean, but that is bad."

Are you familiar with the no black swan fallacy. Just because you haven't witnesses something doesn't mean it doesn't exist somewhere. You can't use lack of evidence as evidence as you have pointed out. You believe that nobody is for this change because you haven't seen people be openly praise the sun about this. But I have at least talked to people I know to get their perceptions of it (specifically because of these arguments) some of whom have had feedback from their groups on it. And generally they have been fine with it, if not appreciate that the clarification from 2015 is being enforced now. I had one friend who was only vaguely aware of the update to enforcement. One friend who literally just glossed over it because it wasn't going to effect them and their commissioning habits. Another friend of mine confirmed he did that "that's nice," and moved on, and even went so far as to say he doesn't understand why the mods even made the announcement at all when they could have been enforcing it anyway, and should have just started enforcing. BUT the mods knew that this could have big implications for sizeable part of the community, and some people would be more greatly effected than others. So they were at least being courteous.

So, being that I am only seeing about 1% of the people I follow make journals about it to some capacity, fewer have been really erked about it, and more have been, this sucks, but it is what it is, and understood. So we definitely have numbers for about how many people this is effecting. By observing how many people are actually complaining. I have had no spill over on Twitter, at all.

Again, we are not talking about a government trying to suppress human rights, we are literally talking about content moderation on an art website. which one do you think is the bigger deal?

Either A, I have controlled my connections very well, or B, I just have not seen a lot of that, only heard about it. Also I had to go look up your website, and....1, it looks to be very openly a porn site being it require an age check to get to the actual posts, and prior to now, no idea existed. But on that site, I would expect their to be the implicit understanding that the visitors are generally aware of the lore reasons for the content.

Again, I agreed that some of the lines being drawn are not where I would have drawn them, I have had several friends give me confused looks in regards to mentioning Eevee in its on model form was getting the ax. And yeah, I was personally like...I can see it, but if you squint a little bit, and depends how on model and a lot of other factors. I feel like that is a playing it safe one, more than really.

You are taking this as me stating there are loads of people who openly wanted this, and I have outright not said that until getting confirmation from my friend who talks to way more people than I do regularly, and even then I have not stated how many, but the number of people complaining about it, are not as numerous as you are making it out to be. You are acting like the entire community is up in arms over it, and I am sitting here watching a tumble weed blow by waiting for the entire community to start complaining about this. Meaning more than 25 percent of the artists I follow making a journal about how bad it is. You know the same reaction that DA and Artstation had to allowing AI generated content.

Yeah, I have my biases, but I also look at numbers, and use evidence to inform some of my biases. Like, honestly, I really could not care less if people find the policy update garbage, I care about the bad arguments people are trying to explain why it is bad without even considering if there is a rational reason for the change in how the policy is going to be enforced. People can believe it is bad if they want. But is not censorship in they way you are trying to define it, it not because of some conspiracy Psy-Op campaign to fracture the community, because that requires too many assumptions and there are better more probabilistic reasons, or whatever else people are saying. Saying it is bad because some artists are going to be hit harder than others, fine, but that is still not the best reasons for why it shouldn't exist, it can be a reason to not like it, but not justify not implementing it, especially if people made a brand around the content, because that could happen for anyone who only does a super niche thing, you are generally at greater risk of being upended by something.

At the end of the day, I don't think this will hurt the community as much you think it will. Until I start seeing a response like DA and Artstation had to AI content, then maybe it is a really fucking big problem.

"At the end of the day, I don't think this will hurt the community as much you think it will."

It hurt some people, when it could have hurt zero. Don't you care about them? I do.

As far as I can see your argument for not allowing lore-accurate depictions and only caring about appearance is the ignorance of users, is about on par with what you've been showing to value. I don't think I need to comment on that, it speaks for itself.

I am going to respond to both comments at once.

It is not that I don't care, it is that there was no way for it to not have hurt anyone other than by doing nothing or to simply start enforcing the policy as it should have been years ago, especially with how it is worded. They are least gave us the courtesy of informing us when they didn't have to. If you as an artist are going to fill an "ecological niche," you are at greater risk of being upended. Like if I someone only did Aeromophs and that suddenly was no longer allowed here, because FA wanted to switch to strictly exclude any sort of living vehicle, they would be screwed. You see this in actual biology and ecology all the time. You cannot make a change and not have some level impact somewhere. The only way you would have no impact is to either not exist or do nothing. Nothing happens in a vacuum, not even an update in how a policy will be enforced. The future is uncertain, and if someone is going to choose to pigeon hole themselves and cry out they have been upended, when they could use the opportunity to reset and adapt. It is how evolution has carried our species to where it is now, people are adaptable, they can choose to give up, moves sites, or shift gears. Those decisions are in their hands.

Lore accurate also means changing physical features from their species default appearance to show age. You see it in the elder Scyther during the Orange Islands arc with Tracy. And now I have a reference for Old Man Treecko coming up in Hoenn. So, yes, appearance is a short cut to how something will be perceived and considered. People with the lore knowledge will understand it, but not everyone has that knowledge, even here, because I have commissioned at least 1 artist who had no familiarity with Pokemon at all.

Artists are communicators, and there it is their job to make sure they are communicating themselves as best they can. And this irrespective of style or skill level. I had to deal with when I was just starting out and using DA which had much more strict guidelines and rules than here on FA.

(Ok I apologize, bad timing, I was going to remove it all to just ask the question because yes we're all like broken records here and it's exhausting, sorry for the confusion, i'll put it back)

Okay first, it is absolutely censorship. It's the furry fandom and they are banning many species. It's censorship. Period. There's a pretty interesting article on Flayrah about it.

Second, no, the mod team was not courteous. I am not going to repeat everything that was done to shut down feedback again.

With that out of the way, as far I know, they banned calling out people (which doesn't stop anyone but that's beside the point). Someone saying they don't understand why X is allowed is not the same thing. There was a lot of public support to ban cub too. That is not a problem. I also haven't seen anyone get in trouble for saying this rule sucks, have you?
Again, to me it appears like more mental gymnastics to justify the complete absence of campaigning for a policy. You claim they're bad arguments but you have to keep stretching to explain why there is no apparent support for it. Whatever works to not come to the more the obvious conclusion which is simply that people don't have the problem with this type of art, and that - I have to repeat it - holy heck it's a drawing of a lewd Eevee, jeez so evil.

Also, speaking of fallacy, there's one called fallacy fallacy. Because something can be construed as fallacy doesn't mean it cannot be true.
By your logic, to win an argument one would only have to claim they're dealing with a vocal minority to make pretty much anything appear invalid. Not only is that dangerous and opens the gates for abuse, but you still refuse to see it both ways. All your examples are personal experiences too. "My friend who speaks to a lot of people" is no more valid than everyone here telling you the overwhelming majority of feedback is negative. You claim to be looking at numbers but by your own standards it's no evidence either.
Yet, you agree that policy was fine (you said that) in principle, based on nothing but hearsay.

That someone is "fine" with the policy also doesn't mean jack. All of your examples are from people from the passive majority. It means they're not impacted. It doesn't mean they were advocating for the censorship. That's a big difference. I'm sure you're telling the truth about it, just like I am when I tell you I know nobody who ever had an ACTIVE issue with Pokemon/Digimon outside of the Twitter crazies.
The difference, maybe, lies in the fact that I could link you tons of journals, twitter, a log of feedback, while you will simply repeat ad nauseam that most people don't care.
If they don't care, then there's no need to change anything. Problem solved.

Even if it is lower than 25%, or even 10%, it's still a huge chunk of a once tolerant community that you're kicking out, so if you're gonna do that, maybe don't do it in the name of people who don't care. Like again, I will appeal to your sense of community. Do you realize that even just 5% of artists is still a sizeable amount of people that see their careers impacted? Do you realize that FA doesn't exist in a bubble and the precedents it sets do impact people and enable harassment? You mentioned a great artist that I also happen to have met (at EF14 I believe, forever ago!) be the target of such attacks, so you know.

But instead, despite knowing that, you choose to shut it all down as being conspiracy theories. I'm sorry, friend, but no, you haven't been paying attention.
You don't have to care to understand the ramifications and be against it. Minorities sometimes are worth helping.

I'll end with this simple test. Type an hardcore non-consent fantasy thingy on FA, then open another tab and type Eevee. Look at the results for both and tell me, in YOUR opinion, which one is more likely to hurt sensibilities, kids, and mainstream audiences.
Do that, and tell me again that you're fine sacrificing even 5% of the community.

The way to hurt nobody would have been to use context.
Like, does this art represent a cub in context. I don't know if you've ever been on Inkbunny, but it's... quite obvious when cub is cub. Ugh. They don't hide it.
As for the people who try to cheat and have different tags elsewhere, that's an easy proof to present the mods that they indeed are cheating.

That, and be honest and listen to feedback and be open to suggestions.

But for something like the furry fandom where all our depictions are pure fantasy you cannot make a rule around body size. Just like a quadrupedal doesn't automatically mean zoo a smaller size doesn't automatically mean cub.

Responding to both comments here.

Yes, we are going in circles, because at the end of the day, our views for how to measure things are different. By numbers I mean to compare the total number of people against the number of people making complaints. There is a lot of other complicated math we could do to figure out how to exclude certain number to a get more accurate number. But based on the number of journals I have seen people make about it is only about 10, and only1 maybe 2 had some really harsh things to say about it. That is not a lot of people, at least not for the circle of people I surround myself with. So I am fairly safe to say that your corner has an over representation of people complaining, and mine might have an under representation of it. But I have had 0 spill over on twitter unlike DA or ArtStation had with AI stuff, where even on Twitter I could not escape while only watching.....30 people at the time. SO that had a very significant of spill over.

I am just going to kind of skip over the rest of it, because I already explained why trying to use an IM for feedback was a bad idea. And most of it is lack of adequate man power.

My reason for no apparent support has been consistent; people don't want to argue, the update doesn't effect them, or they think the update is a fine/good thing and there is not much to say on the matter.

Making any comment on minorities is a trap, because are not talking about human rights violations. We are solely talking about an update to content policy, that is an extension off the original clarification that closed the grey areas when it came to age vs appearance of a character when they were depicted in sexual situations. You may draw art however you want, that is protected in terms of the government, but it is not a right when it comes to website content moderation. If websites had to abide by that line of thinking, actual porn should be allowed on DA, but it isn't.

As far as the two search goes, yeah, I don't even need to do a search to know what those number might reveal, the former is far more generalized to a large group of people to the point that some artists only do stuff like that, where a pokemon artist has many many many species to choose from, so that is a really bad comparison.

And yes, that is what I have been saying, context matter, but not everyone who comes to FA can be expected to have that context of lore knowledge when it comes to Pokemon.

And no, I don't really use IB, I have an account to keep up with like 3 people? I don't actually know, I have been on the site more than to clear messages, I don't even know who I am following because I haven't cleaned out that list in ages.

It is not strictly body size, it is a lot of other features which give something the appearance of looking underage. E.g. all the traits we bred into dogs to make them look more babies/children. Because humans are wonderful about sacrificing an animals health for appearance. Aren't we great. So, there is a lot more to it than just size.

"It is not that I don't care, it is that there was no way for it to not have hurt anyone other than by doing nothing" and there we have it. The best decision of all there could have been! They keep their payment processors, keep their entire audience, remain in the good graces of the law and continue to host - absolutely nothing changes, and doesn't have to, because they weren't under any threat. Nobody loses. Except, they had to be cruel.

I didn't shut it down with conspiracy theories, I pointed people, places, movements, and told you to go look it up because I can't spoonfeed. I said, pay attention to what's going on around you, if you're smart you'll figure it out. If not, maybe the next time when they come for even more art!

When I asked to search it wasn't to look at numbers, it was a call to common sense.
I bet you absolutely what you want that any normie (and lots of furries too) would find snuff art infinitely more problematic than a lewd Eevee.
But you'll die on that hill that banning the later is fine, because only a minority complained.
But you won't use your own logic despite the fact that you know this new rule is pushed by a small (likely even smaller) minority.
Your priorities are twisted. People - if they exist - pushing for censorship should be the one coming up with enough arguments/evidence to cause the change, extension or whatever you want to call it to happen, it's not for the defendant to prove that it shouldn't happen and that it doesn't make sense. Guilty until proven innocent.

I think your way of teaming up "people who actively support it" with "people who don't care" AGAINST people of your own community just because it only impacts reputations/careers and not their human rights is extremely problematic.
Being LGBT wasn't considered a human right and still wouldn't be if the quiet majority never cared. Of course we're not talking human rights here, we're instead talking freedom of expression and increased risks of harassment & mislabeling.

"I don't want to support it because people just don't care enough to argue" is very poor. If you don't care, if most people don't care, then at the very least you have no reason to fight people who do.

But I don't think you'll ever see that until it affects you directly.

"We should be aware of what does and does not represent a child in appearance"
Yoshi is banned. Is Yoshi a child? Does Yoshi look like a child? Does the lore matter to know if Yoshi look like a child?
"Because humans are innately able to recognize child like features."
Yes, for our own species. Not for made-up species, even less feral made-up species, and even less feral CARTOON species. There were many great posts also showing that more cartoony it gets, the more it can be interpreted differently by people.
Is Robin Hood an adult? I see a teenager. I truly do, in fact. Should I ask to get it banned?
Is Judy Hops an adult? Lore wise sure, does she LOOK like one?
She has a kid version? So does Yoshi!

If it's so easy to find contradictions/disagreement maybe it's because the policy is absolute shit garbage to begin with and therefore should not be defended.

I'll repeat, context matters. And yeah, sure, some people will be tempted to abuse it. Oh well. FILTERS.
Filters & Black list. That's your only consistent solution that hurts nobody.

Nothing else.

"I could make my entire gallery solely contain aquatic animals and make that my brand, but in doing so, I leave myself open to be upended if aquatic animals every got banned."
So that's your desired outcome for the fandom... Holy shit do I miss the 00"...

Or it very well could be that they received enough reports for content that involved a high percentage of the adolescent appearing species of Pokémon, depicted by artists who did nothing to try and convey age, solely relying on lore to cover themselves. Which even then is tenuous at best regarding even the original rule clarification from 2015. And it likely came to a point they knew they couldn't enforce some and not others. This is far more reasonable, and goes back to my original statement from my original comment.

How can one reasonable distinguish the difference between someone who is skirting the rules versus not if you looked at the pieces in isolation against the rule itself? And how do you account for people who are not aware of the lore and could not tacitly be expected to understand the characters to be 'adults?' When making and enforcing rules, you have assume the lowest possible of implicit information that can be reasonably expected of the audience to know using the platform. This is strictly a theory of mind problem, where you and I might be aware of the lore knowledge, but not everyone is.

Also I did reopen the issue of your conspiracy, you say if I am smart I am smart enough to know there are far more reasonable answers based on probability that don't require a game of connect the dots which you can manipulate to how you please to get the evidence to say what you want. Even people who absolutely hate the mods think that hypothesis is total B.S. Occam's razor and Bayesian Reasoning apply here. Your hypothesis requires a lot of assumptions to be made and have a low probability of being true. Also the people I see parroting it are use almost the exact same language and can't articulate why they believe that, they just say "the evidence is there if you look" that is not how burden of proof works.

I would generally agree with that snuff is far worse than Eevee (caveats depending on depiction, then they are equally bad far as I am concerned), and yet snuff is far more culturally acceptable, which I have 0 control over. Same with FA's less than stellar SEO. Cause you can use a general species for search with all ratings for search, then filter for one at a time, and your results don't total your original. And the journal updates said it was due to an greater and greater numbers of report tickets, you can choose not to believe that reasoning, that is you. But being there is not much more to go on, and this being the internet, I will take it at face value, because there is no reason for me not to. But I guess that would make me the optimist instead of the cynic and become bitter.

I am not positioning those who are indifferent against you, they are indifferent. But when looking at the percentage of people who have a problem with the update you still need to include those neutral when doing the calculation, otherwise that is just bad statistical data, and in a paper of any scientific rigor would be considered manipulating the data. This doesn't mean there aren't valid complaints within those who are complaining, but "mah freedoms" is one, not when it concerns content moderation on a site that is not legally listed as an adult website, unlike e621, Subscribestar, PornHub, F-list, which usually have additional requirements for site functions and access.

We are clearly still arguing, because people keep using bad reasons for why the change shouldn't have happened, and I have given multiple rational reasons why staff might have changed how they are enforcing Upload Policy 2.7
1. We cannot implicitly expect visitors to generally understand the "lore excuses" for why otherwise child looking characters are appearing in sexual situations/Can't rely on lore as a crutch for not adequately depicting characters as adults.
2. It was making some users uncomfortable, leading to increased reporting of what would be violations if not for staff having been lenient for the lore, and depending how those numbers looked, that instead of trying to police individuals, they made the enforceable extension to keep moderation more equally applied to avoid favoritism towards certain artists with higher level of skill or different style.
3. Payment processors or legal reasons which people have said Dragoneer confirmed these were not the reasons. (Funny how they will take him at face value on those explanations but not take him at face value when it comes to him giving the reason of having an increased number of reports on certain content, funny ain't it?)

None of these reasons require a biased stance, your reasons of suppression and censorship require some sort of bias against anything that limits or restricts aspects of a website, especially if it is done after years of it being a certain way. My two reasons and assumptions are founded simply in the reality of running a website. Whether I like the mods or not.

Here are some valid complaints though.
1. Seeming lack of consistency in ruling
2. Poor wording, though being it should concern only adults, most of which should be 20+ we also should be really aware of what does and does not potentially straddle the line. But that might be expecting too much out of people.
3. Poor communication, which frankly a lot of furries seem to be hit or miss at being able to do.
4. Having an appeals process that is more than just one other moderator/staff.

Yes, context does matter, I will always advocate looking at context. And part of context is where content is uploaded and the average expectations of what knowledge the average visitor will have. Context is more than just the content in isolation. E.g. telling a rape joke will end poorly depending where, when, how, and what it contains. Telling it to your female coworker when you too are chit chatting, Bad. Telling it to an audience going to see a comedy show, Probably fine, mileage may vary. Trust me I have first hand experience when trying to repeat Jeff Dunham jokes in high school to people who were not already familiar with Jeff Dunham. But Monty Python was mostly fine. If this not a clear example, I don't know what will be.

Filters and Blacklists are nice features. But they are not mutually exclusive to also enforcing content moderation. And with how bad FA's SEO is. This feels more like it might really hamstring the ability to search on fa more than it already has by being able to use negative searches to exclude terms and tags.

Uh....no, when did I say that would be desirable. It is clear you are reading more meaning from the words, and assuming a connotation over the denotation of the words I am choosing. Stop making assumptions about what I am saying and read the words on the page. That is clearly an example of over specializing such that any change in attitudes or otherwise when it comes to allowable content would be putting yourself of risk of being upended. You don't have to leave, but now you will have a harder time rebuilding yourself. Did I say anywhere in my previous statement I desired that outcome?

"Uh....no, when did I say that would be desirable. [...] That is clearly an example of over specializing such that any change in attitudes or otherwise when it comes to allowable content would be putting yourself of risk of being upended."
That's victim blaming. Like it's somehow their faut for not having enough clairvoyance to know that something that was widely accepted for 20+ years* is now facing a witch hunt by a moderation team they used to trust.
You don't think that's desirable then? Me neither. So why supporting policies that achieve just that?
It doesn't hurt every once in a while to go against the bigger guy when they are clearly hurting others. If the bigger guy owns the land, sure you can't do much, but you can (and should) remain loud.
* If you think that's not true, please bring in some evidence. 20+ years there should be plenty.

"We are clearly still arguing, because people keep using bad reasons for why the change shouldn't have happened"
We are arguing because it's extremely easy to poke holes at this policy and even though you don't deny it you stand your case that this should happen.
We are arguing because you make statements that you can't sustain with evidence while calling for "bias" when others do it, even if they do have evidence to show.
We are arguing because you try to get a check mate by methodically shifting the burden of proof and relying on argument of authority as only evidence.

https://twitter.com/furaffinity/sta.....69857464303617
800k+ views... 500+ replies & quotes... and 154 likes.
A like takes nothing, isn't a big involvement. The typical "oh that's cool" then move on.
Sure, Twitter is twitter. The fandom isn't just twitter. But It's because you dismiss that, the journals, the official feedback and choose to instead rely only on your own acquaintances, and because you made up in your mind all of that is worth nothing against the word of a few mods that we are still arguing.

You value mods above all. Here's some words from the man himself. Which one of the old Dragoneer or the new one do you find the most reasonable and logical?
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fwyb8tR.....yqZ?format=jpg
- https://web.archive.org/web/2015082.....-Cub-Art/page3
I'll repeat, I used to have a ton of respect for him. He stood up the test of time despite vicious attack from kiwifurs and elsewhere, this makes it even more disappointing now.

---

There is no innate ability to recognize jack when we're talking cartoon. I can't find it anymore but many pointed out with illustrated evidence how the less details/more cartoon a character appear, the less we can know for sure, that's of course even more true for feral characters as we are humans, and not animals.
This is why people can't agree on Yoshi, on Judie Hopps, and why you can't help but agree that some decisions are harder to understand.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fwy0ZH5.....muW?format=jpg
That's very old art. So let's look at context. No lore needed. The Veemons are small, sure. but do they behave like children? Same goes with Narse's Stitch, which is also small.
Some will say yes, some will say no. But there's no consensus and the lore plays no part in that.
It's the beauty of cartoon. Same apply to all. And sure, you'll absolutely get various degrees of responses. I'm sure more people will agree about Riolu, but a lot less about Yoshi. Even less about Renamon (who is a Rookie)
I also would say that some would find Jodie Hopps to look a bit childlish. And yet... biases biases, this one passes the FA security check.
Here's a fun one, no lore BS. Are the Citra species, a once very popular made-up furry species, children? When you answer, will you adapt your answer based on what you see, or what you know of its author?

Yes... Yes. I'm sure that somewhere, somehow, some people had a problem with some Pokemon.
Because so many things can be interpreted as offensive it is hardly surprising that so many things have been (Kudos if you get the reference).
At the end of the day, Pokemon/Digimon in general don't have a cub context attached to it, but people who want to see it, can and will see it.
That doesn't mean you should act on it. That doesn't make it a "good reason".
...And It's only the opinion of a minority, anyway.
You've gone on and on about vocal minorities and how you shouldn't act on their demands. Can't have it both ways. Either you're for the rule of the majority, or you accept that everyone should have a voice. If you use that as a "good" reason versus the "bad" one, you are more biased than you think. Here's, you're not siding with a majority or a minority, you're siding with mods, an even smaller minority, and mods being mods makes your whole argument (of authority).

---

People have given you tons of good reasons to explain the pushback and why this rule is both arbitrary and hurtful.
You spent almost half of your last message conceding that they are many issues. Yet you won't, for some reason, cross the Rubicon and admit that it shouldn't be enacted as a result.
If it's not for some sunk cost fallacy at play here, then I sincerely do not understand how one can keep this position for so long.
Yeah, sure, I am much more skeptical towards mods, you trust them. I think freedom of expression is more important than puritans invading our spaces, you don't.

But we can at least both agree that the policy needs work, discussion and feedback. So in theory, we should still reach the same conclusion.

And maybe beyond that.
Do you honestly think the fandom was so much worst years ago? Do you think a young adult today discovering his interests have it easier because of policies like that, having to double guess what they should and shouldn't draw, who they should and shouldn't speak to?
You keep mentioning how small the impact is, but who actually won anything in this?

They will write us off as not safe for kids NO MATTER WHAT! They fricking started banning books over there.
Those people only seek division of the public and catering their peers.

Are you seriously advocating giving up who you are to be liked by fox news?! You are insane, man.

Well, not agreeing with you or FA is also a choice :)

It's sad because I used to enjoy your art, being a fan of cetaceans and similar. But your are purposefully overgeneralizing now to suppress significant parts of the fandom.

Never meet your heroes, I guess.
Discussion over.

FA's staff has botched a lot of this. I don't think the rule is inherently wrong, there was always going to be collateral damage. FA staff clearly doesn't haven't any sort of real internal communication of what is an is not part of this rule change or how the rule gets applied. That I agree with is a major problem in a lot of this.

Like, we all know what a child generally looks like and what specific features make something look child like. The rule change seems to be mostly a result of trying to eliminate ambiguity for how characters are getting depicted, because the fandom has grown large enough, that the site can no longer implicitly expect its users to understand the "lore context" when it comes to certain characters and how they appear. It can no longer just assume that the average visitor will be completely aware of the lore surrounding various characters.

I am sorry you are disappointed by me in all of this, I don't think the rule change is wrong in and of itself, I think the lack of consistency and lack of transparency for reasoning to amend the rule is what is the major issue is here.

One thing I don't really agree with FA's perspective is that this site is friendly for the general audience. FA front page is notorious. It's current state is totally unmoderatable, it's literally the freshest, hottest uploads in the last few seconds/minutes when its slow. There's no kind of adult protections,sometimes these might have been miscategorized in error and get fixed before a mod looks at it. But ultimately it's notorious for showing underage users explicit NSFW content and sometimes illegal content when FA gets flooded with malicious attacks.

Also a total lack of a blacklist, one of the hottest requests for years. They even have more of the technical workings implemented.

I think generally the community is frustrated that FA advertised this change as something the community generally wanted it, but there are a significantly small minority in favor. Perhaps a larger percentage that don't care either way, but with how loud the community generally has been against the change it seems like FA isn't actually catering to what their community wants. Which that is the issue I think a lot are having with the policy. Generally just poor communication from FA's leadership and many have felt as though they were lying about it.


The thread on their discord was a bit of a clown show. Indeed it was heavily against the new policy. Like hundreds of users versus single digit numbers. They closed the thread because FA staff was getting harassed and doxxed, a nightmare to moderate.

Personally, I have interest in the arts they're looking to remove from their platform. Like Narse, I never perceived them as minor characters. And while I don't understand FA's motive since they don't seem to want to share it. But ultimately this is a privately owned site, they can do whatever they want. It's on their terms of service.

Like, yes there is plenty of problems with the site, like the lack of a true blacklist feature or one at all. But yeah like around 80% of posts on this site are actually SFW. So yes, FA is a General content facing website that allows adult content with guidelines, it is not an adult centric site. Anyone who says as much has only been interacting with the adult part of the site and it has skewed their perception of it.

Also keep in mind that with any community you will have only like 10% of the group be extremely vocal or active about any given topic.So while the Discord had 100:1 ratio of against to for. You need to also count the people who aren't saying anything because it either doesn't effect them or they just don't care.

So it could still very much be something the community wanted based on the trouble Tickets that staff reviewed and were lenient on for the longest of time, we just don't know what those numbers look like, nor do we really have a right to know as that could cause harm for those that reported certain posts or submitted the tickets. It can become a huge privacy concern.

Like just because you don't see the effected characters as minors. That is really only a technicality because of the implicit understanding you or I might have. And not everyone is going to share that view. Like even if they know consciously that the artist isn't a pedo or anything like that, they can still view the characters as being too child like in appearance. And like that is what allows people to enjoy it to a point, is that technicality.

Peculiarly, looking off a neutral term like "The" we can get an idea of the ratio of SFW vs NSFW content.

All time:
~ 36% NSFW (Adult + Mature)

Last 5 years
~44% NSFW

Last 1 year
~47% NSFW

===


Sure, maybe not focused to be an adult site. But it is a rather significant portion of the content here.

Honestly, I wouldn't want my 15 y/o little brother on this site even if he had an account tagged as a minor. The chances of him seeing explicit content are insane.

The last 1 year results really don't surprise me too much because I definitely think there has been a fairly significant shift in the content being posted, because the users from a decade now are adults with disposable income, so more and more users now adults, which is not terribly surprising because almost 3/4's of out lives are spent as an adult. So not only do you have teens becoming adults, but also some people who are currently adults finding the community, because furry is starting to have a much broader reach than it previously did, so more people are discovering it even just passively as we, people in general, are becoming more integrated through the internet.

With how the internet has grown and changed, furry stuff is just kind of popping up in places people are not expecting it.

Like, I think 15/16 year old kids are fine, like, most are almost certainly going to have found, seen, been exposed to explicit content in some way at that age. And this is not an argument for lower the age restrictions on certain things. But teens are going to naturally be curious and find ways around it as is.

So....it become more of a question with, are their better ways of managing that risk, like "getting parents permission" with a validation email, which I think would be detrimental as well, especially is someone is using furry as community to find some semblance of belonging. There is no shortage of stories about people finding community in the fandom and a sort of outlet to feel like their belong so they didn't commit suicide from the feelings of isolation and shame they had between their family and school. I have heard at least 1 personal story of someone who said that the found family they gained within the furry fandom literally kept them from taking their own life.

I don't know if you are familiar with Five Finger Death Punch's music video for their song title Coming Down.

Oh yeah, there's no doubt that being a part of a community brings a sense of belonging. There's a lot of nuances here too.

I think probably one of the easiest way to mitigate explicit content on FA's perspective would be have a week buffer before content is accessible to minors. It allows adult accounts able to flag content that happen to fall through the cracks. Would at least help to mitigate mistagged uploads. Ideally it'd be nice to at least have honest accounts avoid the content. Undoubtedly there are minors that are clever enough to find their way around even rather robust protective systems. Like in China, minors would acquire accounts from adults in order to evade their weekly quota of gaming. Or purchase them from their party sources.

A policy change like UP2.7 is difficult to measure the benefit. But it's certainly caused a fair bit of accusitory and mental strife with individuals interpreting the restrictions as accusitory in being relatead with cub/underage content.

Personally i'm not against the change in policy. I'm really only dissatisfied in their communitcation and PR of it. I can understand the goal of wanting to move the platform into safer territories and away from the grey area of ambiguity or implicit context/knowledge.

I think artists that might depend on art as a source of income that might be impacted by this change aught to find other websites or galleries that support that kind of content. One shouldn't be putting all their eggs in one basket and having the fate of their livelihood in one private entity's hands. The more sites, the broader the audience as well for their personal business.

And also I think generally the community could to worked towards better self-worth and reslience towards external factors. The policy wasn't intended to be accusitory but many felt to be labelled as criminals for drawing that kind of art. It is a bit of an overreaction, but there's also those "White knights" that find the policy as reason to harass others for having that kind of content.

I do with FA was more clear and considerate towards underage accounts and allowed some control over the cross over in communication between underage and adult accounts. Like my account for example is clearly like 80%+ NSFW content. I wouldn't really want a 13 y/o to send me notes from the small % of SFW content that I do have. While I don't get NSFW with anyone off the first note I at least want to be explciitly informed if someone is a minor if FA happens to track that already.

I think some of those things would be more complicated to roll out than one might think, but it could help.

See and that is just is, the staff are not accusing anyone of anything, they are not saying "you are pedo because you have art with a character that looks childlike." They are simply saying "the character could be mistaken for child, it is against our policy now, please remove it." Like, feeling like they are being accusatory is both a hasty generalization and assumption without proof fallacies of argument.

Right, and that is largely what this change is for is to eliminate grey areas of ambiguity, or rely on the implicit assumption that the user knows the "lore excuses" behind the content being presented.

And my professional freelance artist friend basically has been trying to tell other artists for years to stop relying on a single site for all their posts, they should keep up with multiple galleries, even if it is only 2 or 3 so if one site goes under, there is already a back up that you don't have to spend days working on catching up.

And yeah, I think other back end things, like managing DM's and etc would be more beneficial, but again, how much work would that take to properly implement on a site as old as FA?

Yeah, difficult to say really. Not sure how many programmers they have at FA or what it's backend is in. But they're relatively simple features.

But theoretically the blacklist is mostly implemtned, they just need to let users save a string on their profiles that would append it to the search they use. Negative search terms are already supported.

Minor accounts already have flags in some way to enforce SFW uploads/searches. Can either add an icon similar to FA+ icon and/or mandate a search term like the above.

Most difficult part of either would probably be changing how the front page and submissions section works. But submissions seems to have built in filtering to some degree to support the SFW toggle.

Yeah, I think a blacklist would be great, just in general, as far as staffing, most of them are volunteers and have regular day jobs.

I am sure there are some further features that could be implemented, but who knows. This whole thing has been a huge mess.

the fandom itself also is no longer as niche as it used to be, especially with how frequently we get referenced by Non-furry Youtuber's making videos about topics that tangentially involve us. Which means that we also need to make sure that the current big name site, it more broadly appealing, even to a more casual viewer,

For what reason should we change the site and the content we post on it to suite outsiders? Why should the fandom try to appeal to the mainstream? At what point do we ban anything beyond cute SFW art?

Personal experience. I was relieved when the initial cub ban happened, because of the mere problematic nature that sort of content can bring to bare. The IMVU clarification made it easier for me to feel comfortable to talk to coworkers, friends, and family about my art hobby and my interest in the community. And I didn't have to worry about explaining why I was using a website that hosted such contentious content. I didn't have to change anything about myself, but it made it much easier for the people around me to be accepting of me and my interests. Which in turn gave them the opportunity to pierce the veil without really needing to step into, but it also meant they they could view it as a generally good community that has some weirdness at the surface, and is like any other fandom or community.

I don't agree with how far the extension has reached in terms of how it is being enforced. The staff have failed epically in their ability to communicate with its users adequately. While we don't need to appeal to the mainstream, we should be presentable. Like....you aren't going to going into a job interview wearing your fursuit would you? But if you make yourself presentable, people get to know you, then when you go do things like cons and what not, it make it easier for them to accept your passion for this community.

We don't have to make furry mainstream, but we also don't want to give people a reason to fuel a smear campaign against us. Look at the show "My Strange Addiction" and their Furry episode. Or how PETA sometimes presents Furry.

I get people's concerns, but there are sites which are better suited for certain content, as the visitors can be reasonable expected to have some level of tacit understanding that they are aware and understand what they might see. It is sad there was more collateral damage, but the policy update is clearly trying to close gaps from previous clarifications of the no underage characters in sexual situations rule. People will push boundary after boundary to be "technically compliant" even though they know exactly what was meant by the rule.

"If some people don't like it they can look the other way" yes those were good old, normal times but I think nowadays people can't sleep anymore if they don't voice their opinion or attack someone that doesn't agree with them (it is insane!)

Yeah, some people's mental mood seems to be dependent/shaken off of the actions of others. Which is why they tend to be so vocal

It's so frustrating xvx

I agree fully with this. That not allowing minors is the first step. Why in the world are they here in the first place is beyond me. Thats IF any are cause people can lie to get into places so yeah

These crackdowns are literally bc a large number of members of the "antishipper" cult movement are part of fa staff. If has nothing to do with outside influence. It is literally just that.

Proof for such a bold claim? That feels like saying the government is full of lizard people rather than just being actually incompetent.

Considering your other responses on this journal, Im not taking this bait. It's quite easy to look up the history of the staff (and former staff) no matter how much Chase, Luffy, Wadman and Sciggs want to hide it.

This isn't a discussion and the fact you're bringing up an actively antisemitic conspiracy in response to a verifiable issue the staff has had since 2010 means any sort of attempt at discussion with you would be both fruitless and harmful to everyone involved, myself and yourself included.

I am choosing to actively disengage. I will not talk with you further now, or in perpetuity.

Please have a nice day.

Honestly, aside from dragoneer, I have no idea who any of the staff are. It's not like they have a page or anything.

Much less have intimate knowledge of history with any members. I'm just a derg on FA, no idea who the people are like running it.

And I'm sure 99% of others on FA probably have a similar level of insight as me.

Attitudes like this are in opposition to the basic ethos of the fandom. Many of us are here because of the furry fandom's traditional culture of radical acceptance of alternative sexualities and identities. Altering those standards for the 'comfort' of people made uncomfortable by something as tame as porn of Stitch or Charmander is a direct abrogation of those norms.

Of course, those people do deserve safe spaces where they can engage with their interests without being made uncomfortable. Everyone deserves that kind of safe space. Including us. Until recently, FA was (despite its many flaws) one of those safe spaces for me, many of my friends, and (tens of?) thousands of others. Saying that we should simply accept our abrupt rejection by the owners of that space on behalf of the comfort of a hypothetical, unidentified third party is insulting to the blood, sweat, and tears many of us have invested in building community for over fifteen years on this platform. This space was safe for us. Now it's not, and with increasingly restrictive content policies across general-purpose platforms and hosting providers, fewer and fewer spaces are left.

Where do we go? How do we move whole communities and networks of people to other platforms? How do we identify, save, and archive the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of images from abandoned galleries and departed artists that are set to maybe-maybe-not be removed under this new policy? How do we build and manage dedicated platforms when we're suddenly, callously, isolated from the broader community we depended on? How do artists that have been in the community for years or decades and built livelihoods on this platform, only to find their art suddenly unacceptable, find a sufficient audience elsewhere to keep surviving?

Does any of that matter to you? Or does our pain and angst somehow not 'count' in the face of satisfying the comfort needs of this imagined other person now living in what was once our space?

I get where you are coming from, but let me tell you my personal experience and hopefully that will help you understand why I am more bothered by the lack of communication, consistency in application, and overall lack of clear guidelines for how they are distinguishing what is and is not too child like.

I joined FA when I was a Junior high school, and my family was not very accepting of it no matter how much I tried to compare it to Disney and other mainstream media they consumed and enjoyed, because it was 'too realistic' or whatever. But when the initial cub ban came, I was relieved that I no longer had to worry about getting associated with that sort of content. While I was not 18 yet, I was vaguely aware of what was on the other side of the SFW filters, so I relieved of having to try and explain why I was both using and associated with a website that hosted what could be considered child porn. I was also glad I didn't have to worry about running into after I turned 18. At the time it was content that I felt was generally very inappropriate, and that it is not really content that people should enjoy. I currently hold the belief that some people will use that content to explore a variety of things, but there is a time, place, and context component that need to be met and it needs to be in a space where that is the implicit understanding. This would best be served by sites that are very outwardly for adult content, because then it would be far more reasonable to have that expectation and understanding from the viewers.

The updated rule from IMVU in 2015 also didn't bother me, and made sharing my furry-ness even easier, because it limited people who wanted to skirt the technicality of the rules. So this rule extension is another gap closure because we can't assume that everyone will have the same general knowledge and that people have been intentionally skirting that line of what is and is not depicting a child in sexual content. I can think of at least 1 notable person who was labeling stuff on IB as cub and posting it here and not tagging it as such specifically to skirt the rule and using the reasoning of "they are just petite." And there are ways of depicting petite characters without making them look like 14 year olds.

Like, while yes, people in furry have largely been accepting and tolerant of a great many things. Not everyone has to tolerate every thing, every where, all at once. I don't think FA needs to be that place where characters are allowed to be ambiguous or expect everyone to have the requisite lore reasons for why a particular child like character is being depicted in a sexual situation. This is not a statement to be accusatory to the intentions or views of artists and purveyors and views, but with characters like Cubone and Riolu who are very much intended to be seen and viewed as children within their original context, we can not reasonably expect everyone to not find issue with it. A site dedicated to PKMN/DGMN could reasonably expect a tacit understanding that the viewers would understand those lore related excuses for why those characters are in sexual situations.

I am not going to say how it is written is perfect or how the mods are handling it is perfect, if anything the announcement itself and how the staff are ruling on it is not consistent. If you want me to talk about Stitch, I am....ambivalent. It is not my cup of tea. I don't think Stitch sits squarely on either side, but I can understand a reasoning to say that it is in violation and is too childlike for the purposes of the policy update, not whether or not the staff actually think of Stitch as being a child or would consider it cub, but for all intents and purposes of the Policy, it would be a violation.

The people I have largely seen making the biggest deal out of this are those that have largely relied on PKMN and DGMN content or overly cutesy styles, or have simply relied on other factors for their lack of trying to adequately convey the age of a character. You can still have a cutesy style and make your characters look like adults. Artists are communicators as much as they are artists. It is our responsibility to make sure we are depicting content well enough so that the viewer can read it as intended.

Oh man. That is quite the sizable chunk of artwork. Goodness that's unfortunate. Can't blame you for looking at other options/alternatives, when you're being forced to remove that much art from your gallery.

Well in any case, I hope in the future you can continue drawing the characters, and art that you enjoy :)

I suppose portraying characters that may seem young as an adult, seems to be something artists are doing nowadays to be on the safe side. It seems to be working from the looks of things.

yeah I get it, honestly I do. I try to age up characters like jake long specifically cause I know that canonically he is a teenager. With things like agumon , I know he could be in his 40s, but still be that same shape. When they digivolve in the show its never permanent, only temporary. Infact I think it was in season 2 that the series ended with a jump to the future where digimon and humans live amongst each other. The main kids all grown up as adults now, but their digimon partners are still the same rookie shape as the beginning of the show. Its a big mess honestly in trying to label what is and isn't child like proportions on certain characters. At the end of the day I just want to make sure its clear I am not into cub stuff, I just like digimon and stitch :P

The legal situation doesn't help. People writing the law are aware of the "she's a thousand year old vampire that just looks like a six-year-old" line, so some countries just have deliberately vague laws and let the courts deal with it in order to avoid such bickerings. The UK definition is broad enough that it has to specifically exclude any film that has an official content certificate from the BBFC, because otherwise even some respected (ie, profitable) films would be banned.

I'm still sorry that these rules are hitting such a large swathe of your work.

Tbh it's been nice seeing you more active here Narse. You one of them folks i been following since forever haha. Your art shaped a lot of my early intro into the fandom. I hope to continue to enjoy your work here and elsewhere!

Warmest regards!

Still anything that's cute apparently is in violation

I really hope that doesnt turn out to be the case

i think the same words. i hope i am wrong.

Just wait for the feral ban, using the same BS arguments lol

It'll happen. Especially with the absurd push to make this fandom "mainstream"

So desperate for the acceptance of normies they'll do whatever it takes to sanitize the fandom accordingly, basically turning us into outcasts in our own fandom because then we will be considered 'niche'

They'll bend the knee to the normies and the prudes within the fandom to the ferals just as they did with these characters being treated as "cub" and therefore indirectly labeling anyone into it or who draws it as being into cub. That vocal group already equates being into quadrupeds as being into bestiality. It's only a matter of time until Neer bends the knee on that too.

Unfortunately I have to agree with this outlook, however dismal it may be just because the social behavior like that is an observable pattern through history

Indeed. I observe more than I interact. I'm the kinda guy that just watches from the sidelines and chimes in now and again. I'm seeing some ugly patterns emerging that I honestly never expected to see in this fandom.

It's a bigger issue than simply a content ban on one site because now by bending the knee to include characters that have a certain look, discounting everything else about the character, those pushing for the ban can now basically say "Yup, if you're into these characters then you're a pedophile" and I've seen many comments from people being accused of it solely because this rule change made it a thing and they have OCs based on certain Pokemon/Digimon characters.

Hell think it was like 4 years ago after I had grown more of an interest in Pokemon and started really liking the lewds had a friend who basically blocked me after accusing me of being a zoophile because to him Pokemon are animals and cannot consent. These are the people FA's administration are bowing down to now. It's crazy.

Mhm. And honestly their argument it's to protect children is bs. They aren't doing anything to protect minors with the update. The update is a prejudice not a protection. This is a vastly NSFW site. They really want to protect minors, they'd implement a real age verification to see NSFW content, and anyone verified can only interact with other verified adults. But that would require a site overhaul and it's just easier to be prejudice *rolls eyes*

Yup. If it were me I wouldn't let minors on here knowingly given how much porn is on this site and it's really more of an adult centric place overall so the idea of minors being able to freely create an account here is... unsettling to say the least especially with how on Twitter it's rare I see a furry on there without some mention of "no minors" "18+ only", etc. It's too much of a liability as is. PornHub at least had the common sense to put it in their TOS you have to be 18 to sign up for account. Here? "Oh no 13.. you're good. We'll try to block NSFW but no promises, kiddo"

I can barely tolerate 18 year olds let alone a frigging 13 year old.

Yeah I agree to this conversation. The thing is all these "virtue signalling" and yet they won't lift a finger to the real situations out there happening right now. All they will do is take the easy way out and attack artists just drawing whatever and call them anything they can to justify it. Hell an artist was calling out one on twitter and my assumption is that they were doing it so they can get some clout and attention to their failing art.

Here's how I think it'll go:

The whole premise of furry porn is "we find animals/animal traits sexy but animals can't consent, so instead we'll create our own fictional animals and whore them out in any way we like". This premise is fundamentally incompatible with "you can't sexualize fictional minors because minors can't consent" which means we have a dissonant standard for two different kinds of fictional characters - minors/minor physical traits and animals/animal physical traints - where the core issue is in fact the same.

With the precedent they just set, it is only a matter of following the logical conclusion of their new reasoning. Which, btw, taken to its conclusion, basically means furry porn shouldn't exist period. Of course the people pushing for this - people who actually don't give a shit about the fandom - are just going to peel away layer by layer in advancing from the current policy towards the core, slowly dividing the community and pushing incrementally for more self-implosion while the community gets more and more busy arguing rabidly about what is and isn't okay to do to imaginary characters and going into psychotic moral panics everytime something of someone's art "looks too much like" something now on the no-no list.

Everytime the standard is changed further, the story will go that this is the final change and that surely there aren't more to follow, and that "Hoo boy, this should've been done from the start, how could we have been so blind? Thank god we've now addressed the problem!", until enough people leave and the fandom is shaken up and accomodated enough then the next layer of censorship is introduced, shrinking the community further.

Very interesting points you bring up!

Feel free to quote me or appropriate, mix, or spread opinions derived from this as you see fit. I claim no exclusive ownership.

That's when the site truly dies

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/13320613/

What?? This one isn't even NSFW...?

It's part of a larger NSFW comic series so it counts, is the interpretation I'm guessing the staff went with.

is there any reliable ways to contact you? dm me a message.

While some of these I definitely understand the motivations towards removal, others I do not. There is also a clear problem with it being really inconsistent. Images with Guilmon and Veemon have similar proportions to the Jackal/Skirmisher pictures of the same era, yet those works aren't tagged as part of this nearest I can tell.

The whole thing is a mess. It's Thesis fodder at this point, if you ever would be willing to take a few interview questions about this thing, holler back.

WAIT HOLY SHIT I think they missed a spot (Charmander Line).

Considering that the similar works with the Totodile Line and Bulbasaur Line were tagged.

Could you link us to these sites so we can follow you there?

https://narse.sofurry.com/
https://inkbunny.net/Narse
https://furrynetwork.com/narse/
https://e621.net/posts?tags=narse

One of the first artists I've come across. It's sad to hear but wishing you well man. I'll follow you wherever you want to post.

that means a lot to hear, thank you. this is like a form of therapy for me. I dont draw cub, and it feels bad to see art get removed for " child like proportions" when the characters are not cub. Anyway, thank you for the comment, it helps tons :)

Can I ask a follow up? Would I have your permission to print out one or two of your art pieces to display in my house? I wouldn't sell any of them. Just for my own sake. But looking over your gallery has reawakened my love for dragons and gargoyles and I do now live alone haha. Feel free to say no though

I get why FA is doing this. I just don't trust the mods of FA to judge what is proper and I don't expect anybody else to, either, because they haven't earned that trust.

yeah that is what I worry about too. Like , whoever is in charge at the moment and sees the latest upload could have a different opinion then another mod. Its a lot of subjective opinion

Sorry to hear, sucks it will affect so much of your gallery. I watched you on inkbunny, sofurry and furrynetowrk. Found your weasyl but seems inactive.

I forgot I had a weasly, I will have to do some digging to get that up and going. Currently I am getting all the art that is marked to be deleted up on Inkbunny and sofurry

How do you feel about Newgrounds?

I know very little about it. I know it had all the best flash animations back in the day, but with flash being officially gone now does it even still exist?

It had a bit of resurgence I think around the time Tumblr disallowed NSFW stuff so it's a bit used for that now once again.

It's still around!! I've moved back there on account of Twitter going to shit, followed by FA, followed by Reddit. I don't know if it is bigger than the ones people are moving to, but I know it's been around much longer and I have more faith in its staff than any other website except maybe Kilohearts.

Newgrounds is still around -- anecdotally, my furry art there gets around 200-400 views, so about 20x as many views as FurryNetwork, but 50% as much as InkBunny. Their ToS is comparable to FurAffinity from April 2023 (no underage characters such as Bowser Jr, Sonic, etc...)

The biggest knock against Newgrounds is it's not a "furry website" so if you browse it, you're going to find mostly stuff like naked spidergirl and anime titties -- and people browsing for anime titties will occasionally stumble on your art and leave rude comments about it. But overall I've met some cool people there and it's a chill site

Oof thats a decent chunk. Im waiting to see if i get hit with my sona being a kobold and all

That is a very mature take and I appreciate you taking the time to explain what is happening as someone who doesn't have the time to follow all the goings on.

thanks for taking the time to read it and leave feedback. I am trying to stay positive about the whole thing. If anything I am motivated to finally update my gallery on other sites.

I've been using https://itaku.ee/profile/theowinters as my backup. I like the site over all.

You really offered one of the more chill and measured responses on this whole topic. Still following you at IB so happy to see your smaller-character stuff over there. :3 Hope it doesn't discourage you from drawing such fellas in the future.

Thank you. Things like this are never simple, so it helps to talk it through and be level headed. I been updating my inkbunny, sofurry, and e621 gallery :)

Agreed. And there's more important things to life than this stuff too. ^^ Good luck with updating at other places.

I appreciate you for taking these rule changes with a level head and maturity that I very much admire.

Not really a fan how broad a stroke the upload changes are with digimon in particular. I feel like these types of characters hardly count with the "child-like" proportions definition, but I have a feeling that FA may relax a bit on the non-human side of things with time. At least I do hope they put more of their focus on obvious underage character violations first and foremost.

I guess we'll just have to see how these new updates fare over time, but in any case, I feel like you are approaching this with the right mindset :3

Wait, is Stitch considered underage now? Is there a canonical source for that? I always pictured him more as a little goblin-like character than anything else.

I'm quite baffled that Stitch ends up being officially banned. Policy really do be targeting the wrong things x3
I wonder, have you submitted Spyro? I still wonder if he would be banned if drawn in the style of the Reignited Trilogy, which you did well for example here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/29614038/
(I assume not but I'm looking for an official response from the FA staff)

Stitch art has been getting artists in trouble here for years.

One thing to remember is that the mods don't, (and honestly can't), inspect every single thing posted. Instead they mostly rely on reports, (with the remainder boiling down to "we know this guy is going to break the rules again"). If an artist doesn't get their stuff reported, they can get away with a lot, (I've seen more than a couple that would be out on their ear instantly if anyone reported something of theirs).

I believe you are right on that. Really there is no easy way to really monitor all the content that floods in to a site as popular as this one. I totally get why they would ban something like stitch given the body shape. I often try not to stir up trouble or bother the staff cause that could just lead to art getting taken down when if you hadnt said anything in the first place it would have been fine. I dont consider stitch cub and never will, but I get why they gotta start cracking down on it. There is no hard feelings at the end of the day, just trying to figure out my stuff and where I can post it.

Spyro's age has never been officially stated in any capacity aside from "he acts like this but who really knows lmao", and if they do decide anything on model isn't okay there's gonna be a lot more angry people. I think at least a quarter of the userbase here has drawn spyro at least once since the first installment of the Legend trilogy.

Have you considered making a Weasyl account as well? it's compatible with posty birb and I see the bulk of people going there and itaku since Inkbunny and E621 have some questionable issues.

Hello, may I ask what qestionable issues you mean for those sites?

E621 and Inkbunny both have a bad track record of not moderating actual pedophilic content, they focus on tag blacklisting for people who don't want to see that type of content. E621 also has the "high quality" moderation system where art that doesn't reach a certain standard will be removed, making it bad as an image hosting site. Those were the main things people were worried about on the sites that prevented a lot of artist from moving to them.

Oh, I think Inkbunny is still a promising site. If you don't want to see something, filter it out. I prefer a site that allows everything (even if i don't agree or support all of it) over a site that puts out rules over rules restricting artists.

That's a perfectly fine preference to have. But a lot of people understandably don't feel comfortable hosting their work on or interacting with a site that allows that kind of stuff in general. Even if just for the professional association. I am one of those people, which is why I asked Narse if they'd consider making an account on Weasyl, since it's more reasonably about that sort of thing and also a place where many people have moved to now.

It's interesting, isn't it?
In an attempt to "cleanse" the fandom of Pokestuff FA is making more people move to websites allowing some of the more problematic content.

There's some irony to this.

The wonders of the most basic end-user content moderation function: tag blacklists

The irony is definitely real though.

apparently I have one, just dont remember the login credentials. I am gonna do some digging to see if I can get it sorted out :)

Thanks! Please do tell when/if you get that up and I'll immediately throw you a follow there!

uhhh so no more stitch?

No lewds of him unless he's redrawn with adult proportions.

so shortstacks rip

I am still gonna draw him, as close to cannon as possible. I just will upload the images to sofurry, inkbunny, and e621.

This is a real shame. Your art has always made me happy and it's disheartening having to removed from FA. That being said, I do have a FurryNetwork account I can use to follow the art you can't post here, and I will do it!

And on a side note, THANK YOU for not migrating to Twitter.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah my gallery on here isnt going anywhere. Just the images listed in the journal are gonna be removed come July 1st. I will still post whatever I can on here....but things like Stitch or digimon I will post on other sites instead of here just to be safe. If anything this has given me the motivation I needed to get my other galleries updated.

Welp, I was sitting there going 'It's only Pokemon and Digimon, experiment stuff is fine'
Seems not, huh? Been on FA an eternity. Looks like it's time to find another home.

More like Experiment stuff was always sus. According to posts by Mods there was only an internal agreement to turn a blind eye on Digimon and Pokemon chars up until now.

👍👍👍

I guess Spyro and Toothless are banned now, too? Maybe I have to delete some things after all.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I made an Inkbunny account, heard they allow artistic freedom which sounds very promising and freeing. I do not support cub art but same as you I see lots of small characters as adult like Stitch, or Spyro.

Nowadays everything is becoming so sensitive and ppl can't seem to just let things go if it bothers them. Just click back and move on. "If you don't like it, don't look at it!"

I am called a Pedophile for drawing aged up dragon characters... this is so utterly ridiculous.

The thing that's really bogus is that the community doesn't own the largest furry hub. This talk about it being what a business has to do is bogus because something like this ought to be a user coop. It's honestly really gross that it's not and one person has a monopoly on the main hub.

Also fair warning, don't link directly to violating images, that will get treated as if you've uploaded them here directly.

If dragineer really cared about the community he'd transition this into a nonprofit coop

Maybe we should pull an Elon Musk and simply buy FA from Dragoneer, like Twitter. Create a Kickstarter for the funds and then turn FA into a CoOp ... and fire all the incompetent people in charge right now. 😆

Does make me wonder how much they'd sell it for. Not that I think they would for any sum of money though but who knows.

I mean Dragoneer did once and bought it back. The site was owned by IMVU for a while, remember?

Well, what I might do is just post a journal whenever I have content up on other sites. I wont directly like to the post, just my page. I am pretty sure that will be ok

Thats probably fine

Are you able to share links?

I know you're a cool dude Narse, but I'm genuinely surprised to how chill you are over all this despite that much art of you being forced to remove. I'd feel slighted by the moderation and decisions they've made, especially considering how ethereal the rules have become.
You've always been a big name on FA, a big reason a non ignorable portion of users are here. It just feels like they've practically backstabbed you after you've contributed to this platform for so long, even if it used to be more before BD.
Having said that, I don't have a pony in the race and will just hop to the next viable thing once FA has lost its groove.
Oh and as NDC said. I'm also glad you're not abandoning everything to become twitter exclusive, thank you!

I have to agree with your comment :> Big Narse! He was one of the first artists I watched since I joined back in 2009. Sad to see rules forcing great artists to go elsewhere, I'm not big but also forced to go.

I'm just gonna say I think any sane person would never see you as a "cub artist". Good luck on your future endeavors!

Thank you, I appreciate that :)

It's a travesty that they're pushing out their most veteran users, it's ridiculous.

Just give all the characters a beard and mustache. Seen it done before.

Unfortunately you're not allowed to post a journal telling people that you posted stuff that can't be on FA.
CoC 3.3 states:

If you are not allowed to upload or discuss the content on Fur Affinity, then do not link to it, tell users how to find it, or encourage users to seek it out elsewhere. Violating this rule may also result in citation under the site rule the content violates.

Now, maybe it's just another one of those rules that FA selectively enforces only if staff doesn't like you, or perhaps if a twitter mob decides that you need to go and report you for it. I don't know. To be honest, I don't even understand if this rule would allow people to link to their own Inkbunny accounts, considering that site hosts stuff which is against FA rules.


I'm glad you suggested some actual sensible reasons for this new policy, rather than simply accept FA's official reasoning like so many other users seem to do here.
I wonder though... if payment processors (and advertisers) can just keep getting away with pulling stuff like this, forcing more and more censorship onto art, without any pushback, isn't simply giving in pretty dangerous in the long run? Wouldn't it be healthier for the "community" to stop supporting payment processors like these, and support the competition? Of course I've never ran a business like this... maybe this competition simply doesn't exist. In that case, perhaps it's a good idea for a new startup. I know that's an extremely difficult thing to do in today's political climate, but things really aren't going to end well for artists if we keep going down the Youtube route.

...it's still on FA. He's linking to the same site. What are you on about?

They're referring to this part:

"That brings us to what I am gonna do going forward. Well I still intend to draw the same characters I like, so that means things like Stitch , agumon, impmon, etc. To me they are not cub, never have been and never will be. But I do understand the questionable body proportions argument that FA is putting forward. I have accounts on Sofurry , Inkbunny, Furry Network, and e621. now I tend to neglect those accounts for the most part. However, going forward I am going to use postybirb to start updating all those accounts with future artwork, including the list above. Anything stitch related or other digimon projects going forward will be on those sites and not FA, but I will post a journal letting everyone know when I have posted new art that isn't on here."

Fair point, I should read better. Apologies.
That does sound like it'd technically violate the rules, I guess we'll see how that goes.

As a side note:

It has been brought to my attention, that according to FA staff's own claims, there are no outside forces requiring this change. No payment processors, nor any laws are forcing this to happen. The implementation of this policy change is entirely Furaffinity's own choice.

So basically it’s the admins and moderators being dumbasses.

Not surprised in the slightest.

Pretty much.

reading your thoughts on this was very enjoyable, I feel somewhat encouraged to post art again

Respect

When it comes to this, I am truly disappointed.

My issues with it are plenty. It is fine to ban cub art imo, but their way of reasoning really truly doesn't make sense as it looks more a ban on shortstacks, "cutesy" characters (and art styles.) With how selective and vague they keep the rules I'm sure it will spread to other feats like ferals eventually.

Your reasoning on it being due from payment processers makes most sense due to them only updating their rule on "cub" art and not the other extreme fetishes. Why go so far to ban stuff that isn't cub but not the other stuff that would turn off people from the community? Simple that's the only thing they're forced to change.

The worst I feel is this label that either gets placed intentionally or unintentionally on everyone now who is affected by this.

Adapting to the world is annoying at times, but I'm here for the experience anyways. Thank you for sharing all that you do Narse you are an amazing person and great artist! I look forward to more in the future!

“ Don't go adding onto the hate with FA for this change, as I said above I am sure there are reasons they have to do this to maintain the business”

Which I think is a load of horse shit.

It is. In the past he's had no problem shifting blame. Even in the FAQ they straight up said it was feedback from the community driving this one. PR 101. If you can shift blame, do it.

Man fuck FA and its new rules

How the hell is Stitch not allowed? Man this rule gets stupider and stupider as the days go on...

They're calling STITCH cub now?! Fucking puriteens are just ruining everything...

There’s only ONE experiment out of that franchise that can be considered cub…and Stitch ain’t it.

And yes, this entire thing is dumb as fuck.

Well, I have always loved and will love a lot of your art, it's a pity that a large amount of it will be deleted, but nothing disappears without a trace. We will find more of it elsewhere :)Thank you for staying with us <3