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3 months ago
I made some more detailed updates on what happened on my Bluesky and DeviantArt accounts, but for anyone who doesn't want to go to those sites, to make a long story short, on 6-17-2025, I went to FurAffinity and was taken to a page alerting me that I had been given a week-long suspension.
Some of you might recall, in 2023, when the F.A. staff just decided, without warning, that underage characters appearing in "fetishizing" artwork (even if otherwise Rated G) were not allowed, which many of us first found out about when they handed down suspensions to
Charem, 
Strega, and many other prominent users over content in their galleries predating the rule change, including submissions that had been in their galleries for so long that the account holders didn't even remember them.
Basically, this was an echo of that: The notice claimed I had committed repeated violations of CoC Section 1.1: "Do not encourage or engage in illegal activity" and listed ten reposts going all the way back to 2018.
I also panicked a bit because all of these were reposts and I worried the artists from which they were received may been targeted too. But when I logged out so I could view mine and their accounts, none of them had the markings identifying them as suspended accounts. I also checked the account of a semi-notorious shitposter that I knew for a fact was suspended indefinitely (the one I referenced in my journal about reasons you may have been blocked where I put all of his watchers on my block list too he was that effing horrible) and he didn't have it either, which made me think F.A. had deleted that feature, similar to how, the last time F.A. decided it was going to change the rules and suspend a ton of users, it was right after they deleted the message boards.
I began to think they were once again going to go on a suspending spree and had once again preemptively made changes to keep the rest of F.A. from finding out, and calling them out. Hence why I didn't deal with this quietly.
Also, of the ten submission they listed as "encouraging" zoophilia, eight were humans and Pokemon, one was a human and Toothless from HTTYD, and one featured two non-humans. Which was one of a multitude of things I mentioned in my appeals email, but it's the one that's most relevant because the justification I got back was this:
(paraphrased) "No, no, it's not because of the content of the artwork. Feral-on-human stuff is fine. It's because you had 'zoophilia' as one of the tags."
Long story short: I called bullshit until they de-suspended my account, restored the deleted submissions, blamed everything on one single moderator, and promised to have a meeting and better clarify the rules going forward.
So I think it's over. But just in case, I want to give this warning: Check how you're tagging your artwork. While it's apparently still okay to depict crimes being committed, there is at least one moderator who was eager to interpret mentioning said crimes in the tags as "encouraging or engaging in" said crimes. So if you have any submissions tagged with zoophilia, bestiality, or anything else that would land you in hot water if you tried to do them I.R.L., I recommend deleting or changing them and not using them in the future just to spare yourself the possibility that you may have to do what I just had to.
Some of you might recall, in 2023, when the F.A. staff just decided, without warning, that underage characters appearing in "fetishizing" artwork (even if otherwise Rated G) were not allowed, which many of us first found out about when they handed down suspensions to
Charem, 
Strega, and many other prominent users over content in their galleries predating the rule change, including submissions that had been in their galleries for so long that the account holders didn't even remember them.Basically, this was an echo of that: The notice claimed I had committed repeated violations of CoC Section 1.1: "Do not encourage or engage in illegal activity" and listed ten reposts going all the way back to 2018.
I also panicked a bit because all of these were reposts and I worried the artists from which they were received may been targeted too. But when I logged out so I could view mine and their accounts, none of them had the markings identifying them as suspended accounts. I also checked the account of a semi-notorious shitposter that I knew for a fact was suspended indefinitely (the one I referenced in my journal about reasons you may have been blocked where I put all of his watchers on my block list too he was that effing horrible) and he didn't have it either, which made me think F.A. had deleted that feature, similar to how, the last time F.A. decided it was going to change the rules and suspend a ton of users, it was right after they deleted the message boards.
I began to think they were once again going to go on a suspending spree and had once again preemptively made changes to keep the rest of F.A. from finding out, and calling them out. Hence why I didn't deal with this quietly.
Also, of the ten submission they listed as "encouraging" zoophilia, eight were humans and Pokemon, one was a human and Toothless from HTTYD, and one featured two non-humans. Which was one of a multitude of things I mentioned in my appeals email, but it's the one that's most relevant because the justification I got back was this:
(paraphrased) "No, no, it's not because of the content of the artwork. Feral-on-human stuff is fine. It's because you had 'zoophilia' as one of the tags."
Long story short: I called bullshit until they de-suspended my account, restored the deleted submissions, blamed everything on one single moderator, and promised to have a meeting and better clarify the rules going forward.
So I think it's over. But just in case, I want to give this warning: Check how you're tagging your artwork. While it's apparently still okay to depict crimes being committed, there is at least one moderator who was eager to interpret mentioning said crimes in the tags as "encouraging or engaging in" said crimes. So if you have any submissions tagged with zoophilia, bestiality, or anything else that would land you in hot water if you tried to do them I.R.L., I recommend deleting or changing them and not using them in the future just to spare yourself the possibility that you may have to do what I just had to.
Also yeah I think everyone here who can use their brain knows you'd never encourage that irl.
But I also feel like it would make their jobs a lot easier if they had some kind of "auto alert" feature where, if somebody did use that tag, it would just quietly flag the submission for review, and maybe prevent it from appearing on the front page or any searches EXCEPT for the questionable tag.
I'm fairly confident a lot of trolls don't care if their accounts get banned because they'll know at least one person had to get "triggered" before they could be suspended. Auto-alerting the staff and keeping it off the front page would diminish their ability to do that.
Dont understand why they just dont ban those tags so is impossible to users to upload something if it has a blocklisted tag :/
The one that came up the most in the past was in regards to underage characters. Which, to be clear, I absolutely support any efforts to block from appearing engaging in sexual acts. But when they started proposing banning "short stack" characters as well, or expanding the definition of "sexual acts" to include any kind of fetish content whatsoever, I argued against both because their definitions were far too vague and would enable trolls to weaponize the rules against otherwise innocent users whilst simultaneously allowing trolls to continue exploiting loopholes to get the offending material through.
And when the admins finally decided "Screw you, we don't care" and made those changes anyway... Yeah, that's precisely what happened.
Unfortunately, sticks up the ass are not so easily dislodged. And it's been my feeling that, whenever the stick-up-the-ass types that have managed to stay on, or sneak their way back onto the F.A. staff tried to get content they don't like banned and we successfully argued against them, instead of learning that they're going to have to tolerate that content, they've instead "learned" that they need to be sneakier in how they go about changing the rule so that we don't have time to rally and argue against them.
Kind of like how one state in the Bible Belt or another has had to be told, every single year, that they can't erect public displays of the Ten Commandments. They already know all the reasons that's not allowed, and what will happen if they do it, but one of them tries it again every single year anyway.