So, after a site called FurryLife Online crashed to oblivion over the feral ban and the Twitter-like pettiness, so I have read. I have stumbled upon a site called Buzzly. Seems they went there after the shutdown of the new SheezyArt, due to how, from what I have read, feels like old DeviantArt. But also I have found out that they have banned not just feral, but also incest.

It makes me wonder on how these DeviantArt and FurAffinity alternatives seem to push these people away over absurd laws and then crash and burn once they alienated a majority just to cater only a few.

It also makes wonder how FA, and to a lesser extent, Inkbunny and SoFurry, managed to survive through many changes while having a quite permissible content (FA bans cub but allows feral, IB allows cub but bans humans). And what is to be learned when making an art gallery site far from staying away from another site's absurd policies while also allowing, or at least tolerating more contentious content?

Banning cub, feral, incest, bestiality, etc. is not a recipe for success in furry land.

lance_armstrong said:
Banning cub, feral, incest, bestiality, etc. is not a recipe for success in furry land.

Personally, I can agree with that.

Makes me wonder why art sites don't include blacklists at launch. I remember Y!Gallery having a blacklist, and even then they banned furries at one point, and would ban women even if they were background characters.

alexyorim said:
I remember Y!Gallery having a blacklist, and even then they banned furries at one point, and would ban women even if they were background characters.

what

There's still NewTumbl. Furry Art kinda gets buried under people who are like "oh this porn actor has so much hair they're furry" but you can easily hover over those user's names in searches and click the three dots, then block their account. Feral is more reasonable of a search, as long as you tell it to look for images and not stories.

alexyorim said:
So, after a site called FurryLife Online crashed to oblivion over the feral ban and the Twitter-like pettiness, so I have read.

I went back one day to check on things, turned out they had nuked all existing content and users from the site to start anew. Not sure what happened to those who had paid donated to get those special status badges. It went down sometime after and now returns a permanent 500 Internal server error. Guess it died.

And what is to be learned when making an art gallery site far from staying away from another site's absurd policies while also allowing, or at least tolerating more contentious content?

Under most circumstances (barring real-life violence/porn and sensitive/abusive material), banning anything is a downside. That includes how e621 controls it's content and quality, albeit it makes for consistent or better artwork quality throughout the site. As well as DeviantArt and Tumblr going for the "No Porn Allowed" route, with the former apparently paywalling it. Twitter is, by far, the most successful and open website to host content, but it makes for a terrible art gallery.

If a new website wants to become the new FurAffinity or DeviantArt, it needs a few important things.

• Firstly, an open content policy. Any and all content themes would ideally be allowed on the site; however, certain types of content would need to be controlled based on interest and legality.
• Catering your website to specific groups of interest may be ideal, as opposed to allowing all forms of artworks (such as furry, rule 34, human, scenery, pottery, crafting, etc.).
• Banning content not because it is a niche/kink, but only if it runs the risk for your website to face legal/financial troubles. Advertisers generally would not like extreme kinks, unless your website is supported by the content creators themselves (through donations/buying ad space).
• An effective tagging/blacklisting system would be a big bonus.
• Secondly, an active/competent moderation team. A potentially-large website needs a potentially-large moderation team to make sure rules are not being broken.
• Responsible for enforcing content policies and to respond to reports in a timely manner. Don't automate things like with Twitter if your website is still relatively small.
• They should not cave in to community pressure, such as bringing up bans for cub/feral/incest/bestiality/etc. Suggest alternative solutions like blacklisting (if it is effective).
• The userbase also has to play a part in it all. E621 is still small and manageable, but I can't imagine the amount of trolls/spam/shitposts that would come for bigger websites.
• Thirdly, and most important of all, the incentive to move from the more established websites.
• Nobody is going to abandon FurAffinity or DeviantArt any time soon. A strong enough draw would be needed for your website to prevent it from falling into disinterest, look into what you can offer that the other doesn't have or does not already.
• E.g., FurryNetwork was the result of the mass panic following FurAffinity's acquisition by IMVU, but since nothing much had changed to FA since then, FN has been slowly declining in interest over the years.
• If you are starting small, you need to be constantly improving and online to stay relevant in the long run. If people think your website is dead, then there will not be any interest in it.

May I suggest e621.net, my good man.

Jokes asides, rule34.xxx hosts feral art (23k tagged) so you could give that a good, another not too common way to find sites is to simply reverse image search something and follow the sites where you find said image, which I have found to be a very practical way to find stuff I am into.

Edit: Yet another way, is to look up terms in different languages, furries are not exclusively english speaking, so if you got the skills/knowledge, that's an option. Use different search engines to broaden your results.

strikerman said:
what

Y!Gallery, short for Yaoi Gallery, was a site for gay Japanese hentai, so had a policy against female art. They also had heavy restrictions on furry art, notably it couldn't look "too feral" (and in specific, one policy was they had to have visible eyebrows and portray human-like emotion). It may have become a full ban later on, but I don't remember as other adult furry sites were cropping up then and furry artists were starting to go elsewhere anyway.

azero said:
May I suggest e621.net, my good man.

Jokes asides, rule34.xxx hosts feral art (23k tagged) so you could give that a good, another not too common way to find sites is to simply reverse image search something and follow the sites where you find said image, which I have found to be a very practical way to find stuff I am into.

Edit: Yet another way, is to look up terms in different languages, furries are not exclusively english speaking, so if you got the skills/knowledge, that's an option. Use different search engines to broaden your results.

Beginning to wish e621 had some kind of txt/document hosting (beyond just people throwing something in the description). Sofurry has been deleting tons of stories and I don't know of a single other story-specific site that doesn't have a myriad of content rules these days.

orangeleaf said:
Beginning to wish e621 had some kind of txt/document hosting (beyond just people throwing something in the description). Sofurry has been deleting tons of stories and I don't know of a single other story-specific site that doesn't have a myriad of content rules these days.

Asstr and AllTheFallen are kinda the only ones that come close. The former is effectively defunct, the later is primarily focused more on loli/shota. All of the other story-hosting websites I'm aware of ban ferals/bestiality, furries, underage, noncon, general non-vanilla, or some combination thereof.

votp said:
Asstr and AllTheFallen are kinda the only ones that come close. The former is effectively defunct, the later is primarily focused more on loli/shota. All of the other story-hosting websites I'm aware of ban ferals/bestiality, furries, underage, noncon, general non-vanilla, or some combination thereof.

I was talking specific to the furry niche, but yeah, there's not a lot left.

I know it's probably not going to happen, but I do feel like 90% of the infrastructure is already there.

orangeleaf said:
Beginning to wish e621 had some kind of txt/document hosting (beyond just people throwing something in the description).

That question has already been asked before and I have given my answer, see topic #32177.

thegreatwolfgang said:
That question has already been asked before and I have given my answer, see topic #32177.

I feel like a lot of the reasons there are a little iffy. Tagging what you see isn't exactly all that different from tagging what you read, people already frequently under/overtag images (the best solution there is probably to present the poster with a list of the most commonly black-listed tags and have them confirm that those specifically aren't a subject of the work since tags that make people upset are the ones that need the most care). As for plagiarism/intellectual property/etc that's already a factor with artwork. Plagiarism probably has better resources that you can use to test for it than artwork. There are also tools for rapidly analyzing text for general readability and such, though I do acknowledge that pictures are quicker to consume than text.

But if it's not something the site wants to get involved with I get it.

It's wild to me how the feral-haters don't realize that banning feral is not even a full hop, skip, and jump from banning all NSFW furry art. They're just shooting themselves in the foot.

Chrissakes, think.

Weasyl right now is pretty much the only usable art gallery site at this point. 2022 and it's the only one with tag blacklisting that I know of.

lonelylupine said:
It's wild to me how the feral-haters don't realize that banning feral is not even a full hop, skip, and jump from banning all NSFW furry art. They're just shooting themselves in the foot.

Chrissakes, think.

People who treat fiction with the same level of seriousness as reality aren't typically sought after for their cunning intellects.

leotheairwolf said:
Weasyl right now is pretty much the only usable art gallery site at this point. 2022 and it's the only one with tag blacklisting that I know of.

Inkbunny does it too.

Works so well that I sometimes forget that that I have it on and wonder stupid things like "I wonder why there are no diaperfurs on Inkbunny? You'd think they'd be right at home here."

alexyorim said:
So, after a site called FurryLife Online crashed to oblivion over the feral ban and the Twitter-like pettiness, so I have read. I have stumbled upon a site called Buzzly.

Thought I'd pop in. It looks like Buzzly's having a similar crisis already, with users leaving en-masse (or threatening to) over a public poll posted by the site.

alexyorim said:
But also I have found out that they have banned not just feral, but also incest.

Digging back a little it sounds like the incest debate's been their main problem, and along with a "lack of moderation" regarding someone posting Nazi-related content ended with Buzzly nuking their official Discord from orbit.

It's worth noting I only know this site at all from following a handful of NSFW-unplugged Twitter artists who publicly state they'll instant-block anyone they see interacting with feral porn and retweeting threads about how porn fanart of For Children properties such as Pokemon is unforgivable, so results like this are likely repellent to those people.
Although, only 15% of poll respondents stated they'd quit the site over something like that.

It's also notable a large number of comments I saw stated they don't want Buzzly to be "another DeviantArt," accusing DA of containing too much unmoderated degenerate fetish content. (i.e. incest and feral I guess)

magnuseffect said:
...It looks like Buzzly's having a similar crisis already, with users leaving en-masse (or threatening to) over a public poll posted by the site.

Digging back a little it sounds like the incest debate's been their main problem, and along with a "lack of moderation" regarding someone posting Nazi-related content ended with Buzzly nuking their official Discord from orbit.

It's worth noting I only know this site at all from following a handful of NSFW-unplugged Twitter artists who publicly state they'll instant-block anyone they see interacting with feral porn and retweeting threads about how porn fanart of For Children properties such as Pokemon is unforgivable, so results like this are likely repellent to those people.
Although, only 15% of poll respondents stated they'd quit the site over something like that.

Big yikes and a big oof.

Some people are going back to DA and Twitter from this trainwreck, or moving to a site called Inkblot, which I don't know about its features. I just hope it doesn't end up like FLO or Buzzly where it succumbs to a pressure of a vocal minority and then screws up spectacularly.

magnuseffect said:
It's also notable a large number of comments I saw stated they don't want Buzzly to be "another DeviantArt," accusing DA of containing too much unmoderated degenerate fetish content. (i.e. incest and feral I guess)

Huh. Seems my "it feels like the old DeviantArt" goes the other way too.

Apparently the buzzly situation has begun boiling over. Admins getting removed, twitter account holder has gone rogue, and more. Man, they basically speedran the flo controversies in such a short time.

magnuseffect said:
Thought I'd pop in. It looks like Buzzly's having a similar crisis already, with users leaving en-masse (or threatening to) over a public poll posted by the site.

Digging back a little it sounds like the incest debate's been their main problem, and along with a "lack of moderation" regarding someone posting Nazi-related content ended with Buzzly nuking their official Discord from orbit.

It's worth noting I only know this site at all from following a handful of NSFW-unplugged Twitter artists who publicly state they'll instant-block anyone they see interacting with feral porn and retweeting threads about how porn fanart of For Children properties such as Pokemon is unforgivable, so results like this are likely repellent to those people.
Although, only 15% of poll respondents stated they'd quit the site over something like that.

It's also notable a large number of comments I saw stated they don't want Buzzly to be "another DeviantArt," accusing DA of containing too much unmoderated degenerate fetish content. (i.e. incest and feral I guess)

It's almost as if running an art gallery site is hard and requires more than just "good intentions" to manage one. It's also almost as if the fandom has been around longer than most of these people have been alive and they're just repeating the same mistakes we did and tried to warn them about.

lonelylupine said:
It's also almost as if the fandom has been around longer than most of these people have been alive and they're just repeating the same mistakes we did and tried to warn them about.

Burned Furs 2.0 let's goooo baybee

wat8548 said:
Burned Furs 2.0 let's goooo baybee

Well I mean
They're pulling out of organised communities rather than trying to clean them up
And also the ones doing the burning behind them.

I've been wondering if the problem is that these new gallery sites only pick up at all ^{(we all know how sticky FA is)} because these people are looking for a fresh site without the content they don't like, but they're followed by fanbases containing those who are into the problematic content. I like some of these artists too much to get myself cut off by pointing out I like things they don't; there's gotta be a lot more than me keeping quiet. The vibe I'm getting is they'll never be happy on a centralised platform and will always revert back to their decentralised circles on Twitter and Tumblr where there isn't a dedicated art frontpage. They will never have a place where they can curate their viewerbase to the degree they want, and so nowhere they go will be restricted to the userbase they want.

lonelylupine said:
It's wild to me how the feral-haters don't realize that banning feral is not even a full hop, skip, and jump from banning all NSFW furry art. They're just shooting themselves in the foot.

Chrissakes, think.

Honestly I think a lot of these people are largely indifferent on general NSFW art. They probably couldn't care less if porn went away entirely as long as it meant feral/cub/incest/fanporn went away.

magnuseffect said:
Honestly I think a lot of these people are largely indifferent on general NSFW art. They probably couldn't care less if porn went away entirely as long as it meant feral/cub/incest/fanporn went away.

Then just go that route. Yerf was quite popular up until the database blow up (always back up your data, kids.)

"dangerous content"

lance_armstrong said:
"dangerous content"

Help, help, the zoophilia and cub porn are coming at me with knives!

lance_armstrong said:
"dangerous content"

votp said:
Help, help, the zoophilia and cub porn are coming at me with knives!

it's more in the sense that works of fiction, available from the internet or a local library, will lead people to doing things irl, which is an unfortunate reality. perhaps not quite so exaggerated as what's in the fiction, but you have people who will actually want to fuck the aliens if we ever make first contact. zoophiles who would not be if it weren't for internet access. criminals who would not be if they weren't desensitized by existing crime either in real life or in fiction.

the benefit of internet presence and the imaginary realm of fiction is that these people will study the topics presented rather than going in blindly. hopefully, with good (or less than bad) intentions.

aversioncapacitor' said:
but you have people who will actually want to fuck the aliens if we ever make first contact.

FIRST CONTACT, FINAL FRONTIER

I’m still confused over what the whole issue is here. This is all because the site didn’t want to ban incest? Is that all?

scaliespe said:
I’m still confused over what the whole issue is here. This is all because the site didn’t want to ban incest? Is that all?

Incest drama sparked tensions and possibly motivated the devs to launch The Poll.
But the issue people have with The Poll is that even entertaining some of the questions on it is abhorrent to them, in addition to feeling that certain questions paint their preferred option as incorrect.
I wasn't picking that up much myself, but I'm also evidently not in that demographic.

magnuseffect said:
Incest drama sparked tensions and possibly motivated the devs to launch The Poll.
But the issue people have with The Poll is that even entertaining some of the questions on it is abhorrent to them, in addition to feeling that certain questions paint their preferred option as incorrect.
I wasn't picking that up much myself, but I'm also evidently not in that demographic.

I took the poll without knowing any of the context behind it, and it didn’t seem like a legitimate poll. They were mostly leading questions that seemed to have a “right” answer and a “wrong” answer. I could see why the poll would be upsetting regardless of the context. It strikes me as rather condescending.

That being said, I don’t like the idea of people demanding that incest/feral/noncon/etc. be taken down, especially since Buzzly had just recently implemented a tag blacklisting system so you can simply avoid stuff like that.

Whatever happens, I’m sorta hoping they can get past whatever the hell is going on and recover from it. Buzzly has maybe the best UI I’ve seen in a personal art gallery site so far. FA’s site has always felt poorly designed to me, and while DA is pretty good, they don’t allow porn, so…

aversioncapacitor' said:
it's more in the sense that works of fiction, available from the internet or a local library, will lead people to doing things irl, which is an unfortunate reality.

This is the exact same logic they used when they were trying to ban video games back in the 90s.

It was horseshit then too.

It has the implicit assumption that people are not actors with agency, but only simplistic reactors to stimuli. The inevitable conclusion of that kind of thinking is stringent censorship.

aversioncapacitor' said:
it's more in the sense that works of fiction, available from the internet or a local library, will lead people to doing things irl, which is an unfortunate reality. perhaps not quite so exaggerated as what's in the fiction, but you have people who will actually want to fuck the aliens if we ever make first contact. zoophiles who would not be if it weren't for internet access. criminals who would not be if they weren't desensitized by existing crime either in real life or in fiction.

the benefit of internet presence and the imaginary realm of fiction is that these people will study the topics presented rather than going in blindly. hopefully, with good (or less than bad) intentions.

If somebody is unhinged enough that fiction is enough to push them over the edge into violating the law, they were going to do so anyway.

lonelylupine said:
It has the implicit assumption that people are not actors with agency, but only simplistic reactors to stimuli.

Probably true tbh. Meanwhile, I see censorship stimuli, and laugh at it.

I hope these Buzzly refugees don't ruin Inkblot once they move there.
And they use their blacklists rather than whine against unsavory content.

We don't want a scenario of these kids go website hopping just to censor the heck out of everything and ruin a potentially good website.

alexyorim said:
I hope these Buzzly refugees don't ruin Inkblot once they move there.

Wait why would they even run to a site that allows any of the things they're mad about? I have seen a few posts from Buzzly users recommending it, so I assumed it was a similarly tame site given they're a double-up for the IB acronym in this industry.

magnuseffect said:
Wait why would they even run to a site that allows any of the things they're mad about?

So they can raise a similar stink and attempt to get it banned there too, or kill the site in the process of trying.

magnuseffect said:
Wait why would they even run to a site that allows any of the things they're mad about? I have seen a few posts from Buzzly users recommending it, so I assumed it was a similarly tame site given they're a double-up for the IB acronym in this industry.

They're like herpes, nobody wants them, but once you get them you have them for life.

This is why e6's "use your blacklist or GTFO" rule is one of the best things about this site.

lance_armstrong said:
Banning cub, feral, incest, bestiality, etc. is not a recipe for success in furry land.

Agree to disagree. We can get along without that type of content and many furries absolutely live without it.

pheagleadler said:
Agree to disagree. We can get along without that type of content and many furries absolutely live without it.

Many are in denial or lying. Either way, these restrictive sites don't seem to do so well. Good riddance.

This is why I always favor having the option of a blacklist function instead of outright banning stuff I personally don't like (with the exception of actual illegal stuff). If I see something that I don't like, I will take the necessary steps to add whatever the content is onto my blacklist so that I don't see it again. Hell, I'll even take the extra steps of making sure the post is tagged correctly so that it doesn't get passed my blacklist again. That way, I'm satisfied with the content being filtered out of my search, and the people who do like that content can still enjoy it amongst themselves.

Is it really such a hot take to say that I genuinely don't care about other people's fetishes, as long as it's not illegal? The world doesn't revolve around me so I'll handle my own responsibilities to ensure that I have the best experience for myself.

lance_armstrong said:
Either way, these restrictive sites don't seem to do so well.

I think a lot of sites could get by fine banning cub, in a hypothetical world without FurAffinity.
But a blanket ban on feral cuts out a lot of art and I think it'd be a hard time getting people to agree on which feral content is fine and what's plain bestiality/zoophilia to trim that out. ^{I mean bestiality here applies to any anthro-on-feral content and often winds up on semi-anthro posts too irrespective of whether they're on the feral or anthro end of build.} Actually on that note it's hard to get people to agree on how far from 100%-human-framed you go before their b̴̩͗į̴̥͕̝́͋́ń̴͍̫͂̚͝ä̶̱͙͐͆͒r̷̛̟̼̟͒͋ͅy̷͕͕̗̆ ̶̠͖̇̋ď̴̰͓̣̋͠͠e̸͕̬̼̼͐c̴̮̎́̄į̴̭̙͛̅s̴̘͍̖̆͌i̸̬̦̣͇̊̚o̵̫͑̉͘͘n̷̬͘ ̴̨͔͈͇̒͑̈ḿ̶̧̳̝ͅå̶͚̳̰̩͌k̴̙̝̓́͠i̶̧̗̯̒̈́͊n̷̨̢͇͕̐ğ̴̲̻̲ ̶̠̪̠̂͂p̷͙͇̫̤̂̓̀͘ř̵̡̳͍̲o̸̗̅̑͆̚c̵̻͙͑̌̈ẽ̶̛̱̖̫̜̉s̴͙̬̙̗͑s̴̢̱̖̿́̅͜ḛ̷̛͊s̷̻̱̐̅̃ decide something's now feral instead of anthro
And lets face it incest is a mainstream porn kink

The thing most people don't realize is that the more tightly you try to control things, the less overall you're able to control.

lance_armstrong said:
Many are in denial or lying. Either way, these restrictive sites don't seem to do so well. Good riddance.

Maybe that's your viewpoint because you like those kinks but don't paint everyone with the same brush. I think you're wrong, very wrong. A lot of these things are disgusting behaviors in the first place. I don't mind if you're not glorifying things that no human should be fine with.

pheagleadler said:
Maybe that's your viewpoint because you like those kinks but don't paint everyone with the same brush. I think you're wrong, very wrong. A lot of these things are disgusting behaviors in the first place. I don't mind if you're not glorifying things that no human should be fine with.

Dude, your favorites list is full of diaper furry stuff. You honestly think you haven't already crossed that line?

orangeleaf said:
Dude, your favorites list is full of diaper furry stuff. You honestly think you haven't already crossed that line?

What line is that? Do people get arrested for wearing diapers in real life? Beastiality and child porn are both quite illegal. Incest is illegal in most jurisdictions, and the Deep South gets a lot of flack for "allowing" it though I'm not sure which parts of the country actually permit it. And I'm not quite sure what "feral" is supposed to imply as I just assumed it was the opposite of "anthro".

My interests do not represent illegal acts and as far as "diaper furry stuff" is concerned, I am a fan of the artist's style. It is not an interest of mine or you'd see my character involved with it.

orangeleaf said:
Dude, your favorites list is full of diaper furry stuff. You honestly think you haven't already crossed that line?

I mean people who draw feral porn jump into Buzzly-centric arguments attacking any of the other topics at hand as long as feral porn isn't the thing that's being called out at that moment.

pheagleadler said:
What line is that

We are talking about the opinions of a demographic that states DeviantArt is too degenerate to associate with. Get too weird supporting 'em and you might find they're picky about their allies.
Also the legality of an action =/= the legality of depicting the same action. But once you get down to it the legality isn't what people care about, it's all morality: If someone thinks what you like is morally wrong, they'll come at you for it. Appeals to legality (whether grounded in legislation or not) are almost always simply a weapon to enforce a sense of morality.

magnuseffect said:
I mean we're talking about the opinions of a demographic that states DeviantArt is too degenerate to associate with. Get too weird supporting 'em and you might find they're picky about their allies.
Also the legality of an action =/= the legality of depicting the same action. But once you get down to it the legality isn't what people care about, it's all morality: If someone thinks what you like is morally wrong, they'll come at you for it. Appeals to legality (whether grounded in legislation or not) are almost always simply a weapon to enforce a sense of morality.

The only problems I have with DeviantART are strictly based on their infantile user base (past ridiculous personal interactions) and their obsession with overupdating the site and allowing their users to overcustomize.

Legality often mirrors morality in specific laws especially those against bestiality, incest, and child pornography. I don't see how anyone could view any of these actions as moral and I believe using art to glorify them is wrong. Wearing a diaper and using said diaper really only affects someone personally and maybe the olfactory senses of those near them, and very little else afaik.

pheagleadler said:
What line is that?

The line of what people commonly think is too far. Most people aren't going to distinguish ABDL stuff from any of the rest of it. At the end of the day people are always going to assume it's a sexual fantasy as a proxy for something closer to pedophilia anyway.

Of course when you really get down to it, people also see furry as a proxy for bestiality. Everything exists on a sliding scale.

pheagleadler said:
using art to glorify

Presupposing a lot of intent here.

pheagleadler said:
Legality often mirrors morality in specific laws especially those against bestiality, incest, and child pornography. I don't see how anyone could view any of these actions as moral and I believe using art to glorify them is wrong. Wearing a diaper and using said diaper really only affects someone personally and maybe the olfactory senses of those near them, and very little else afaik.

Wow I can't believe you literally support pedophilia and bestiality by being into diapers and also a furry.

pheagleadler said:
Legality often mirrors morality in specific laws especially those against bestiality, incest, and child pornography. I don't see how anyone could view any of these actions as moral and I believe using art to glorify them is wrong. Wearing a diaper and using said diaper really only affects someone personally and maybe the olfactory senses of those near them, and very little else afaik.

That is true, nobody would see these actions in real life as being moral, and that's why there are laws are in place to protect real people/animals from actual harm.

However, liking fictionalised depictions of them is not a crime and the law in place do not apply to them*.
Movie directors can include explicit rape scenes or sexual abuse in their movies. Game developers glorifying murder and crime in their games. Writers including themes of self-harm and suicide in their novels.
They are all depicting morally wrong ideas, but why do you think people still make them?

The real issue only comes when people can't tell the difference between fantasy/fiction and reality, such as people using violent video games to learn from and commit crimes, or using fictional stories as a basis for their actual crime alibi (i.e., copycat crimes).

^{*The laws regarding the legality of artworks/media is complex and depends on the individual laws of the state/country (e.g., loli content in the laws of the US, uncensored porn in the laws of Japan). Generally, the content laws in the US is based on the Obscenity law.}

Jesus Christ, how many times are we going to loop back into treating fictional "illegalities" as reality before we just wind up banning Rap music? Or is talking about "bustin' a cap in yo' ass" and doing lines of coke off a hooker's ass not under consideration?

pheagleadler said:
The only problems I have with DeviantART are strictly based on their infantile user base (past ridiculous personal interactions) and their obsession with overupdating the site and allowing their users to overcustomize.

Legality often mirrors morality in specific laws especially those against bestiality, incest, and child pornography. I don't see how anyone could view any of these actions as moral and I believe using art to glorify them is wrong. Wearing a diaper and using said diaper really only affects someone personally and maybe the olfactory senses of those near them, and very little else afaik.

Is this attempted murder by laughter? Because it nearly worked.

lance_armstrong said:
Many are in denial or lying. Either way, these restrictive sites don't seem to do so well. Good riddance.

I believe this is more because of organizational problems (more enthusiasm than skill) rather than the restriction of content.

But, yeah, you can't ban feral art without opening the door to banning furry art in general. No matter how much they wish it, there is no way to draw a bright line between feral and other furry art. It's quite laughable that anyone would even attempt it, given how the whole point of furry is blurring the line between humans and other animals already. They're not taking a justifiable moral stand; they're experiencing Narcissism of Small Differences.

lonelylupine said:
I believe this is more because of organizational problems (more enthusiasm than skill) rather than the restriction of content.

More than that, I think it's these sites not having clear goals from the outset, and instead tried to set up a majority rule on contentious topics. It's like these sites didn't know what they wanted and were happy to conform to public demand on any issue, neither of which are good ingredients for a successful recipe. If these sites started by saying flat-out, "We're not accepting this or that kind of content. We're focusing on being a site for this kind of content," and stuck to it (and not made a stink about how evil this or that kind of content was), they may have had a bit more success if there's a niche for a site focused on that kind of content. Instead, they started out letting almost everyone in, then when some people complained about art they didn't like, they opened up a public vote on what kind of content to ban, drawing more attention to the content being under scrutiny and letting the insults fly, ensuring more people would be unhappy no matter which way the votes went. It doesn't help if the site mods/admins then start taking a stance themselves in light of the public poll, making it seem like the poll is a sham and the site will do what it wants regardless (if not cause infighting among staff, leading mods and admins to split and leave the site without enough people to keep it functional).

watsit said:
More than that, I think it's these sites not having clear goals from the outset, and instead tried to set up a majority rule on contentious topics. It's like these sites didn't know what they wanted and were happy to conform to public demand on any issue, neither of which are good ingredients for a successful recipe. If these sites started by saying flat-out, "We're not accepting this or that kind of content. We're focusing on being a site for this kind of content," and stuck to it (and not made a stink about how evil this or that kind of content was), they may have had a bit more success if there's a niche for a site focused on that kind of content. Instead, they started out letting almost everyone in, then when some people complained about art they didn't like, they opened up a public vote on what kind of content to ban, drawing more attention to the content being under scrutiny and letting the insults fly, ensuring more people would be unhappy no matter which way the votes went. It doesn't help if the site mods/admins then start taking a stance themselves in light of the public poll, making it seem like the poll is a sham and the site will do what it wants regardless (if not cause infighting among staff, leading mods and admins to split and leave the site without enough people to keep it functional).

It's not a good idea to assemble the parachute while you're falling, no.

I'm reading this, and I get some insights in this. Though I'm skimming throughout this due to varying opinions and the walls of text. I guess tolerance matters, but everyone has a level of tolerance and taste as well. And that's why a customizable blacklist matters once you set up an online gallery, but also you gotta do what you gotta do in serendipity, and not let limitations hinder your creativity and the ability to post your stuff.

And somehow, somewhat, I have contrasted the Buzzly situation to the early days of e621. Early e6 had too little quality control run down by asshat mods, and Buzzly had too much and run down by asshat mods. Though that would be an oversimplistic analogy, even by me, just to make a little bit of sense of this.

lonelylupine said:
Is this attempted murder by laughter? Because it nearly worked.

It's okay, I laugh at stuff that's not meant to be funny too.

lonelylupine said:
But, yeah, you can't ban feral art without opening the door to banning furry art in general. No matter how much they wish it, there is no way to draw a bright line between feral and other furry art. It's quite laughable that anyone would even attempt it, given how the whole point of furry is blurring the line between humans and other animals already. They're not taking a justifiable moral stand; they're experiencing Narcissism of Small Differences.

What exactly do people mean when they use "feral" in this context? Because to me it means wild, or non-anthro.

pheagleadler said:
What exactly do people mean when they use "feral" in this context? Because to me it means wild, or non-anthro.

Feral can mean two things depending on perspective.

• In real life, feral is associated with animals/plants that have "gone wild" or have left the domestication cycle, returning to their wild, natural, or untamed instincts.
• In furries, feral means non-morphic or non-anthropomorphic characters, lacking in almost any human characteristics traits associated with full furry/anthro beings.

In artworks, however, there is mostly zero to little indication for characters being "sapient" (i.e., ability to think/reason) rather than "sentient" (i.e., conscious/aware of their presence).
Thus, when people call to ban feral art, it all deteriorates down to people arguing about how a feral is defined and/or how one's character is sapient (and able to consent) or not.

For e621, we follow the latter definition (i.e., non-anthro form) and have no interest in whether a character is sapient or not, as per our TWYS policy.

pheagleadler said:
What exactly do people mean when they use "feral" in this context? Because to me it means wild, or non-anthro.

Ask 10 people, get 11 different answers. Are MLP ponies feral? Some say yes, others say no. They are technically anthropomorphic, they have human-like features, but are quadrupedal. What about The Lion King? They are also technically anthropomorphic as they have human-like features, but many consider them feral. Pokemon? Some people consider even the bipedal ones feral as long as they're vaguely on-model and don't have human speech.

watsit said:
Ask 10 people, get 11 different answers. Are MLP ponies feral? Some say yes, others say no. They are technically anthropomorphic, they have human-like features, but are quadrupedal. What about The Lion King? They are also technically anthropomorphic as they have human-like features, but many consider them feral. Pokemon? Some people consider even the bipedal ones feral as long as they're vaguely on-model and don't have human speech.

So when these kids want to ban feral art, they're also barring bronies, Disney fans, and Pokemon fans, correct?

alexyorim said:
So when these kids want to ban feral art, they're also barring [..] Pokemon fans, correct?

In my experience, within these circles Pokemon porn is a no-no under the statement that creating 18+ content out of an IP targeted at children is immutably immoral, with the reasoning that regardless of where an artist posts it, it'll wind up somewhere a minor can view/be groomed by it.
I haven't seen enough examples of how they feel about artists with semi-anthro OC species within those spaces, but I wouldn't be surprised if such artists find themselves in an and then they came for me situation.

alexyorim said:
So when these kids want to ban feral art, they're also barring bronies, Disney fans, and Pokemon fans, correct?

Potentially. You'll then get fights over whether they should count as ferals or not. And if it's not a blanket ban, there might be an arbitrary line set somewhere between ones which do or don't count. Or where characters like link_(wolf_form) might fall, or various types of werewolves. Y!Gallery was not the most hospitable places for furries when many went there, even though they accepted anthros but no ferals (with difficult to define and very silly restrictions, like "must have eyebrows" and "shows human-like expressions").

pheagleadler said:
It's okay, I laugh at stuff that's not meant to be funny too.

Oh wait, you're serious, laugh even harder, etc.

pheagleadler said:
What exactly do people mean when they use "feral" in this context? Because to me it means wild, or non-anthro.

*Less* anthro, specifically. Four legs as opposed to two. But even if we're talking about complete dumb animal, there is no getting around the fact that NSFW furry art is sexualizing an animal by process of making it somewhat more human, or giving humans a more animalistic flavor in interest of sexual appeal. Sexual furry art is essentially the same thing as what the ferals do, but the people who say the former is okay while the latter isn't are arguing that the former is better simply because of dilution.

lonelylupine said:
Oh wait, you're serious, laugh even harder, etc.

*Less* anthro, specifically. Four legs as opposed to two. But even if we're talking about complete dumb animal, there is no getting around the fact that NSFW furry art is sexualizing an animal by process of making it somewhat more human, or giving humans a more animalistic flavor in interest of sexual appeal. Sexual furry art is essentially the same thing as what the ferals do, but the people who say the former is okay while the latter isn't are arguing that the former is better simply because of dilution.

I think it's all about sentience so no sexual furry art isn't essentially the same thing.

pheagleadler said:
I think it's all about sentience so no sexual furry art isn't essentially the same thing.

You're thinking of sapience
A real life dog is already sentient, but not sapient.
But a non-anthro animal performing human behaviours is sapient.
post #3229832

pheagleadler said:
I think it's all about sentience so no sexual furry art isn't essentially the same thing.

Literally what I had just said earlier.

If it's all about "sapience", then the focus should be about banning non-sapience and not that of ferals.
And to dig even deeper, why "sapience"? Is it so that they would be able to consent? What about non-consenting anthros (i.e., rape)? Shouldn't they be banned as well using that logic?
Thus, the argument goes on. In my opinion though, going down the route of sapience will lead to nowhere, since you have The Lion King and My Little Pony to break your argument.
Same can be said with four-leggedness (i.e, quadruped), since you would have plenty of bipedal ferals out there (e.g., primates, birds).

So in a sense, any art website that doesn't clarify the concept of sapience, and lack of distinction that quadrupedal doesn't always means feral in correlation to sapience, and potentially banning even SFW fan art involving MLP, TLK, Pokémon, and Warrior Cats due to that logic, would break the chances of such a website thriving, yes?

alexyorim said:
So in a sense, any art website that doesn't clarify the concept of sapience, and lack of distinction that quadrupedal doesn't always means feral in correlation to sapience, and potentially banning even SFW fan art involving MLP, TLK, Pokémon, and Warrior Cats due to that logic, would break the chances of such a website thriving, yes?

Not exactly, the problem stems from wanting to ban content, not in whether or not something qualifies for a certain category.
The moment you (i.e., the administration) decide to bring into vote what stays and what leaves, you are painting yourself and the website as being non-inclusitory.
All new potential members are driven away at that point, since their first impressions is as such.
The rest that stayed behind are going to squabble and debate on what gets banned, and ultimately, a significant chunk of the existing user-base will leave because their opinions didn't matter.
Then, what remains are those who like how everything is going so far, while new members would seek for better alternatives.

It's definitely *not* just about sentience/sapience because stuff like Lion King (the non-anthro kind... which is most of it) always gets tagged as feral. They are animals in universe, but within the context of the work they are in, they exhibit human behavioral characteristics like speaking with one another including outside their species group. I think the people who are put off by it don't care about the mentality, they care about the fact that it *looks* like an animal, whatever that actually means.

Ultimately though, any line around subjects like this is going to be rather bullshit. You'll always have some moralists wanting to push that line further against expressive freedom... and doing dirty shit like getting payment processors involved to get their way.

pheagleadler said:
I think it's all about sentience so no sexual furry art isn't essentially the same thing.

What you think doesn't matter.

Images and ideas are not sentient.

degenregen said:
Wow I can't believe you literally support pedophilia and bestiality by being into diapers and also a furry.

I don't but do go off on a tangent.

lonelylupine said:
What you think doesn't matter.

Images and ideas are not sentient.

Um...so why do we arrest people for child pornography then? They're just images /s

The problem I have is these images represent things, possible subconscious desires. Sites like FA don't ban this type of content for no reason.

magnuseffect said:
You're thinking of sapience
A real life dog is already sentient, but not sapient.
But a non-anthro animal performing human behaviours is sapient.
post #3229832

Fair point I think I did mean sapience. Thanks for the correction.

pheagleadler said:
Um...so why do we arrest people for child pornography then? They're just images /s

Because they're pictures of real children? A drawing of a fictional character is not doing harm, but a photo or video taken of a real young person is.

pheagleadler said:
The problem I have is these images represent things, possible subconscious desires.

That same argument was made against violent video games. "People who like shooting characters in video games have possible subconscious desires." Same argument can be used about furries/anthros... you could just look at normal humans, but you specifically like characters in sexual situations that have animal parts; they represent things, possible subconscious desires. Diapers, which are largely used by babies and young children? They represent things, possible subconscious desires. "Possible" is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting there. Also your use of "subconscious desires" comes across as "thought crime".