I would cut your losses and go to Itaku, IB, or somewhere that you can freely post. FA admins are just pathetic and I stopped posting here cause if they decided to remove my shit then they don't deserve my art in the first place.

Yeah... It just pisses me off. It doesn't make sense from any angle - Why make a change you can't enforce and you know will drive users away, unless the point is to drive users away?

Wake was basically told to delete a handful of random pics, after pushing back several times for examples. It's pretty clear to me at least a good chunk of the mod team genuinely doesn't want to uphold these new rules, and it's effectively just stifling our ability to post what we make because we have the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads if we dare to test the theory that it's only a rule "on paper" and won't be acted on.

It may very well be that nobody will be banned for posting 1st evolution Pokemon, shortstacks or Stitch characters. The mod team might not have any right to speak out on their feelings but unanimously feel that this rule was forced on them in a way the site runners couldn't refuse. We can't really know that, though, and all it would take is one non-sympathetic mod who acts on a report ticket by following the ToS to the letter, to ban one of us for good.

I still figure if something is up from before the change, they shouldn't act on it with a ban/suspension - just delete it and go through the account to look for more offending material. I have no way to verify that but it would only make sense... then again, both the rule itself AND the way it's been handled are nonsense, so who knows. Might just be there's nowhere near enough mods to proactively deal with the stuff. They bit off way more than they could chew, the changes are far too wide-reaching, and it's not at all defensible, but they have to keep pretending it's fine anyway. So... here we are.

Yeah its so hypocritical and such. Not to mention the main admin loves his short stacks, but hides it to act like he doesn't.

Oh, I do know of several artists who have had deletion accompanied by warnings, and even some who have been banned. Sometimes without warning.
One example and not the least:  saara
You know, he is SOOOOOOO reknown for his questionable content...........
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10811361/

So no, I don't think you've deleted your gallery for nothing. Actual admins are just lunatic, so anybody at any time could face the banhammer for very, very old, totally innocent and unproblematic pics, while some others will escape with galleries full of really questionable content.
I unfortunately won't be able to follow you on Weasyl, but it doesn't prevent me to approve.

The problem was that it was such a shit show that even they didn't know how to roll it out. It honestly feels like the change was done just to ban certain people, and then they realized just how badly they fucked up.

Or they're waiting for people to forget about the policy change, and then intact it after folks "calm down". The whole thing felt/still feels like such a betrayal.

The admin/mod team for FA is unpaid and chronically short on labor, lacks proper alignment, and as a result enforcement is uneven.

There seems to be a massive, concerted anti-sex push from credit card processors the last couple years, and this smells like damage from that. FA getting told to shape up or get cut off.

It's not just here that's having problems like this. People with obscene amounts of money and influence are trying to sanitize the internet to their tastes. When it comes to people who own and operate websites, it's either comply, or close up shop. And they have to be SEEN complying. It's a shit sandwich that's no one's fault below the millionaire level.

Probably they don't want to take the risk.

In FA's shoes you have these options:

- Use search to find banned characters and mass delete them. This assumes they have the tools to do this, because clicking each submission and deleting is a no-go. There would certainly be lots of false positive and a flood of trouble tickets from artists wanting to contest. A nightmare.

- Just put it in the TOS to appease credit card companies like some claims they had to. Then there is no need to do any more than that, except enforce it when someone flags a specific picture which will be almost never.

I think they did the reasonable thing taking option 2. You deleted your gallery for nothing.

Basically feel the same about FA's stupid restriction on what can be uploaded. It sounds like they only went after a select few individuals and then immediately gave up on enforcing the those rules they were so adamant about. I mean, what was the point? Why bother even creating those rules to then barely do anything with them?

It felt like FA only only did this to specifically attack a few artists they had a beef with and were satisfied with the punishments. I just can't trust trust this site anymore as it feels like I pointlessy deleted some of my art for no reason. FA's tirade basically killed most of my enthusiasm.

Which sucks since I was working on a few artwork pieces. One of them was a new original avatar for my profile to replace this Link pic I found a while ago. I even started writing some stories to finally get into that market. Now, I need to get myself out of this slump before I can create anything again. When that time comes, it won't be on FA.

I don't know much, everyone else here is better informed than I am, but the impression I got from that whole mess was like, some hidden behind the scenes drama, maybe one FA mod had a grudge against some artist or two and used this new "policy" as a weapon to strike just them down, then forgot about the rules afterward.

I sent in everything in my gallery I could think of, including a bunch of Tails the Fox TFs, and was told that all of it was 100% fine, which is weird since your Stitch stuff is a similar size/proportion. My huge problem with all this was always how vaguely defined it all was, absolutely no one knew where this imaginary line was drawn, so everyone feels threatened.

I don't blame you for leaving at all, but I love your art and I miss when most everyone was on a single site. I hope you can keep drawing your amazing art, if not here than somewhere.

If everyone followed every rule on the books all the time then everyone who produces and distributes any kind of pornography in the United States would be in prison.

A rule only matters as much as it is being enforced, and most people, even the enforcers, simply have too much going on to really bother.

Perhaps too much a tangent, but I fear this is the true threat of AI in its currently developing form. The ability to flag the seemingly boundless mass of online media will at last be made possible, and we will be forced to contend with just how strict the rules have always been, without the seldom appreciated luxury of apathy keeping us safe.

Porn is legal in the US, actually! While obscenity laws exist, the courts usually frown on using them to censor all forms of sexual expression.

Exactly, the laws are on the books, but at present they're unenforced. Even an unenforced rule is still a rule though, it's just one that can become a problem seemingly at random, say if a future shift in a political party takes a hardline stance in favor of said enforcement, or even if a particular prosecutor with too much time on their hands decides to make a name for themselves. No new laws need to get passed to start bringing cases against people, and only a small tweak to the laws would let them go after platforms as well.

Furthermore, fear of possible future enforcement is what leverages financial institutions such as Visa or Paypal to pull out of lewd website more than any personal moral outrage on their part. Specifically each payment for lewd work or existing materials would be abetting felony obscenity. So even without enforcement you get a rather harsh knock on effect across websites looking to do business, an effect that is still playing out year by year over the web these days.

The only two ways out from under this particular sword of Damocles by my estimation would be a supreme court obscenity case ruling strongly in favor of porn, or for the laws to be rewritten by congress similarly in favor of porn. At present websites like this and many more exist in part due to their obscurity and political and judicial apathy.

Slight correction I think it would actually be abetting a misdemeanor and not a felony after reading up a bit more on Miller v California.

Just branch out. Relying on single websites has always been a mistake that artists fall into and the confusion with FA is one of many excellent examples as to why it's a bad idea.

I've had a similar frustration with FA, where the looming problems of the questionable policy really shattered my trust in them. I just couldn't trust them to be a safe space online anymore, even when it seemed their enforcement would probably not be spread very far. It feels like someone just wanted to go on a rampage against one particular artist and then shoehorned a bunch of changes through. I would (I'd hope) probably go unnoticed by such things… but just the idea that it could happen was stressful enough.

It really hurts that I had to go dark and leave behind all the community connections and being able to share art with people, but I hope to build it back up again on other sites and places, like Weasyl. It's taking me a while but at least I wont have looming threats stressing me out.