notmenotyou said:
Greetings!

We've got a doozy this time.
Due to challenges stemming from changes in the political and legal environment, both offline and online, we have had to adjust our content guidelines to preserve access to our site. As a result, any content featuring young human or humanoid characters in explicit situations is now prohibited and will be deleted. This change also applies retroactively, and we have already removed all existing submissions featuring such content.

As with all irrelevant content, we will not issue records for uploads that violate this policy; the content will simply be deleted.

Thank you for your understanding, as this was not an easy decision for us to make.

notmenotyou said:
For everyone's convenience here's the new section of the Uploading Guidelines:

Bad Things to Upload:

• Underage Human & Human-Like Characters: Any submissions containing underage human or human-like characters involved in explicit sexual activities, or featuring those characters nude with visible genitalia and / or anus, are not allowed.
• "Human-like" means all humanoid fantasy races, especially ones that have more skin than fur, and either no or only very minor animal features, like tails, ears, claws, etc.
• This includes, but is not limited to, elves, orcs, vampires, dwarves, gnomes, "human but has a tail and animal ears", stylized humans like The Simpsons, and similar content.
• Visual appearance counts for what is "young" first and foremost, but canonical age may also count for borderline depictions.
• If the young character is uninvolved in any ongoing explicit activities themselves, or is not nude themselves, that is allowed.

FAQ:

What exactly is now forbidden?

Young humans and anything that looks vaguely like a young human in NSFW contexts. This includes plain humans, stylized humans like cartoon characters (The Simpsons, etc), elves, orcs, vampires, zombies, kemonomimi, humans with a few glued on animal features (noses, tails, ears, whiskers, etc.), and similar content.
Basically, if it mostly looks like a young human (even with stylistic or other small changes), it is no longer allowed.

What about cub / anthro?

Young anthro characters / cubs are unaffected by this change and are still allowed to be posted.

The sudden deletions pushed my upload limit into the negatives, what do I do?

Email us or DM an administrator, and we'll bump your limit back up to being usable to you.

I think one of the submissions you purged was done in error, as it does not feature a young human or young humanoid character. Can that be reinstated?

Yes! We're working through everything we deleted to restore content that got caught by error, and if you know something that's affected, we'd be more than happy to have a look and restore it if applicable. We hope to get all false hits sorted out by ourselves, but that might take us a while due to the massive volume of posts to go through.

I believe I have found a submission that breaks these guidelines, but was not deleted, what do I do?

At the moment, if you find anything please send us an email ([email protected]) and we will have a look. However we will try to have an on-site option in the Flag For Deletion menu for this ASAP, and will edit this entry once that’s all sorted out and live.

Why didn't you manually vet all deletions before deleting anything?

This whole ordeal had to be implemented sooner rather than later, and as such, it was sadly not feasible to go through all of the content first. But as we can restore things without lasting consequences, we believe our approach outweighs the negatives of some false hits being inaccessible for a small period of time.

notmenotyou said:

toradrow777 said:
Do draenei count as human-like?

Yes, particularly if they're rendered with more human like skin instead of fine fur.

notmenotyou said:

mklxiv said:
Oh, fuck off. e621 was one of the last safe havens for all kinds of fictional content and now that you're banning things too I'm pretty certain I'm done posting any of my art here. This deletion shows me you aren't afraid to cater to puritans and nothing else is off the table for being banned as well.

If you're gonna make lame excuses of "legal changes" then please specify what has changed, as to my knowledge that's been nothing, especially considering that the content that's being banned is legal in the United States where e621 is hosted and operated from (especially considering this is what the United States federal government explicitly told the United Nations Human Rights Counsel in 2019, check page 5). Changes in the "political environment" are 100% irrelevant as peoples' personal opinions don't effect the law.

It's wishy washy because it's the best we can offer. There is no single law we can point to as the tipping point, and while we were sitting pretty unaffected by most things, the same can't be said to a bunch of our business partners who did not appreciate the heat we attract.
And since we can't function in a vacuum we have had to adjust.

theory0fstrings said:
So now I have at least 94 of my works deleted, many of which didn't violate the rule. Wonderful. Lovely. A warning would have been nice at least.
Or at least further clarification on what exactly these "changes in the political and legal environment" even are.

I've had a quick look through and restored anything caught by accident in your deletions that stuck out right away.
This entire thing had to happen much faster than we would have liked, so we went in with a shoot first ask questions later mentally.

Trust me, I would have preferred more of a heads up myself.

Page 2

notmenotyou said:

mklxiv said:

notmenotyou said:
It's wishy washy because it's the best we can offer. There is no single law we can point to as the tipping point, and while we were sitting pretty unaffected by most things, the same can't be said to a bunch of our business partners who did not appreciate the heat we attract.
And since we can't function in a vacuum we have had to adjust.

So it's nothing to do with any law changes, just "business partners" (translation: external pressure by private groups). Yup, thanks for confirming this site is no longer worthwhile.

Guess what put pressure on some of our partners?

That's right, governments.

Guess who would like to continue doing business in places where those governments are?

That's right, our business partners.

romaniaglory said:

notmenotyou quote

notmenotyou said:
It's wishy washy because it's the best we can offer. There is no single law we can point to as the tipping point, and while we were sitting pretty unaffected by most things, the same can't be said to a bunch of our business partners who did not appreciate the heat we attract.
And since we can't function in a vacuum we have had to adjust.

I've had a quick look through and restored anything caught by accident in your deletions that stuck out right away.
This entire thing had to happen much faster than we would have liked, so we went in with a shoot first ask questions later mentally.

Trust me, I would have preferred more of a heads up myself.

The last thing you ever wanted to admit was censoring your website to appease advertisers.

Nah, all our ads are handled directly by us and as far as I am aware none of them had any issue with the contents we host.

notmenotyou said:

musicw0lf said:
Or do you have other business partners beside ads?

We do indeed have more business partners outside of people giving us money to run their ads, correct.

notmenotyou said:

musicw0lf said:

dythul said:

musicw0lf said:
What do I get wrong here?
Business partners forced us to delete minor content, but all ads was fine with content. Or do you have other business partners beside ads?

I assume it would be the business that is hosting the server hardware (assuming the site owner isn't running the hardware locally out of their house) and the ISP that is running the internet connection to said server.
which make perfect sense to me why they would not want to be hosting/serving that kinda content.

Then strange they were ok with that all those years.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Things change, they were okay with it previously and now they aren't. They want to continue making money and we're stuck with the consequences.
And no we can't just stop business with them, there's no way in hell we would be able to cover the gap that would cause, be it donations or otherwise.

notmenotyou said:

arli said:
Will there be a dedicated spot or anything for disputed posts to be restored? I have a few also caught in the crossfire that don't feature a young human/oid but do have a young furry with a human in the picture

We're still looking into the best ways to handle it, and will most likely make another news post once we've found something that we think will work well.

Page 3

notmenotyou said:

aspy_dragon said:
Ok so by doing a bit of math, (admittedly making a lot of assumptions, mainly assuming that all deleted posts were due to this new rule) we can calculate how many posts have been nuked and give that as a percentage of said nuked posts

4915640 (The most recent post at time of calculation)
-4299626 (number of posts at time of calculation)
—————
616014 (total number of nuked posts)

616014 / 4915640
———
~0.125 (total fraction of nuked posts)
So about 12.5 percent of all posts on this site have been nuked since its birth and the moment I make this comment, (idk how many of these posts would make Chris Hansen show up) and I don’t know if my calculations are correct or not, and I might need some more information on how many posts were nuked today, so we could determine how big of a chunk this decision has taken out of this website

Roughly 45k posts today, but there are confirmed false hits that will be restored in due time.

donovan_dmc said:

Same aspy dragon quote

Ok so by doing a bit of math, (admittedly making a lot of assumptions, mainly assuming that all deleted posts were due to this new rule) we can calculate how many posts have been nuked and give that as a percentage of said nuked posts

4915640 (The most recent post at time of calculation)
-4299626 (number of posts at time of calculation)
—————
616014 (total number of nuked posts)

616014 / 4915640
———
~0.125 (total fraction of nuked posts)
So about 12.5 percent of all posts on this site have been nuked since its birth and the moment I make this comment, (idk how many of these posts would make Chris Hansen show up) and I don’t know if my calculations are correct or not, and I might need some more information on how many posts were nuked today, so we could determine how big of a chunk this decision has taken out of this website

It was exactly 45,787 posts (<1%)
We have not been close to 4.9 million active posts, you're counting posts deleted for any other reason ever over the last almost 2 decades

notmenotyou said:

k4rn4ge911 said:
So I went into my favs and checked young, feral and human. Now I get stuff like Zelda content and even young children, that's fine. BUT SO MUCH GOT CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE! Paw Patrol, MLP, FERAL ADULT HUMAN ON POKEMON, even stuff with the Adult lore tag! ALL GONE! MOST OF THAT WASN'T EVEN ANTHRO, IT WAS FERAL.

I just hope the falsely flagged stuff gets restored, because that is A LOT OF CONTENT.

As said previously already, we were under a pretty steep deadline, and as such used a shoot first and ask questions later approach. We'll be going through and restoring anything caught that shouldn't have been, now that we have more time to breathe and do so.

Page 5

rainbow_dash said:

waba said:
Anyways, was this because the servers are hosted in Arizona? I've heard that Arizona was also discussing about implementing those "online child safety" laws like they did in North Carolina and straight-up banning sites but I don't know what the outcome of that was. Sounds like a "We gotta protect our own asses now so that the government doesn't come after us in the future" type of move, hence the rush.

Is moving the servers not an option?

Just to clear this up, since it's come up a lot.

The server location is not the biggest factor. Although yes, the server is located in the US, this change would have happened regardless of where we were hosted. As Nim said, there were many other factors at play here.

Page 15

notmenotyou said:

pandaurs said:
So let's get this straight.

You cannot point to a specific law that has changed, if anything people here have been pointing out that everything is still the same.
You cannot point to specific advertisers nor can anyone point to any specific change in behavior, you have just been dodging the question.
All of this was done suddenly, with no warning and you seem to not feel too badly about this sudden change that has already proven to have crossfired a lot innocent art.

We can't point at anything specific because there's nothing specific to point at. Laws impacting us directly didn't change, but enforcement has and we, and others, have to deal with the fallout. And considering this threatens a few businesses we quite literally depend on for our existence we have to make concessions here and there.
Our options were quite literally either the content goes, or the site goes.

Also, everything we deleted can be restored, nothing has been removed from the servers, and I've we've already started restoring things that have been pointed out to us as having been caught in the crossfire. That is why we're not feeling too bad about it, the unintended damage can and will be undone as we go through it.

pandaurs said:
This is done around the time when a lot of other sites are also getting rid of this content, several times confirmed over political mentality/tastes of the mods/admins of their sites.

To me it seems pretty obvious that you wanted to do this for a long time for one reason or another and this has proven to be the most obvious moment to strike where the least amount of people would complain.

Would have been nice if you guys were at least honest about this but sadly in this current age, that seems to be impossible.

If that were the case we would have destroyed the posts irreversibly instead of just removing them from public view. If the general vibe of the internet / political landscape / legal requirements and enforcement improves all of the deleted content is about 44 button presses away from being completely restored.
We are hoping this temporary, even if it'll take a decade or two, or that we can find an alternate solution entirely, but at the moment our hands are tied and this is what we're stuck with.

notmenotyou said:

genjar said:

silverine said:

genjar said:
I'm just confused about why content like the crucial point in pool #3668 ended up deleted in the first place, when it had nothing nsfw.

Likely because of the Tag Child it was likely a take all these tags and delete them knee jerk reaction and people have to apply to reinstate on a case by case basis since fictional art is no longer fictional....

Also something a friend mentioned it could also be in part due to Ai art training prevention. Since that is becoming more prevalent.

Not that there's a way to confirm if something needs reinstatement, when the original source is gone and you don't remember which post was which.

I have no clue how many of my uploads got incorrectly deleted, and no way to check.

Went through the deleted ones and restored the 4 applicable ones.

Page 16

notmenotyou said:

disposableyeens said:
Please let us know the best method to appeal things we believe were removed in error or due to a misrepresentative combination of tags.

Best way right now is to DM me directly, or send us an email.

disposableyeens said:

notmenotyou said:
Went through the deleted ones and restored the 4 applicable ones.

Its been mentioned that there will be a formal process for appeals.
Any thoughts?
I know I have a good few I would like appeal.

You gotta give me some time to read, I just caught up to the end of the thread.

Page 19

notmenotyou said:

thepsychodog said:
I'm more shocked by the replies from folks BIG mad that the sites and admins who host the free art they consume need money and behind-the-scenes dealings to function and stay up. Sometimes, those dealings will involve make or break scenarios, whether you risk the stability of keeping the site up or the trust of your users. It was probably stressful af to be made to act on a whim like this.

That being said, only 1 of my works got taken down, 4029708, despite both characters in it being anthro

Speaking as an artist: Do not rely on sites to keep your works archived! Always make backups of your portfolio

Restored that one.

daeeb1a said:
Sounds like this whole announcement is using a fairly nonstandard definition of "deleted", then. Unless the goal was to be misleading, it could really have been phrased better: site news is going to be seen by people who don't spend every day using the local jargon, and interpret it instead as the "gone forever" version of deleted, with at best a temporary grace period before anything that wasn't quickly restored becomes completely unrecoverable (or somewhere in between, e.g. only exists in site backups, which in turn might only be retained for a few years).

The wording matches how Danbooru (the software we run on) uses the terms.

Deleted: Hidden from view for anyone but staff
Destroyed: Submission completely and irrevocably removed from the server, including all related data

disposableyeens said:

that and how am I to request an un-delete for something the content of which I cannot view?
I know the mods say we can message them but its like shooting in the dark knowing what should be re-assesed

You're overthinking it. We're aware of the limitations on users, if you have reasonable belief it might have been wrong, hit us up and we'll have a look. Worst we will do is say affirm the deletion.
Neither you, nor anyone else, is going to get into trouble for asking about an ineligible post.
We'll probably only be cross if you decide to link us posts undiscriminately.

Also, I checked the one you linked, the character as part of the focus is a little too young for comfort, so that deletion is fine.

notmenotyou said:

artiamus said:
I'm looking through the stuff on my favorites that got deleted and a lot of it has stuff that just happens to have someone young in it without including them in explicit stuff. No idea how to put it for something like that to get restored.

I'll go through these once my brain stops being soup. The last couple days have been double and triple shifts past 3am and even today I've already been at it for another 6 hours.

notmenotyou said:

aomikan said:

billygoatunicorn said:

genotora said:
LETS GOOOO US GOV W

There is nothing at all that pertains to the US government in this decision. Zip, zero, zilch. This is a purely profit driven decision to sanitize an “everything goes” furry porn site. This isn’t a w no matter what angle you look at it from

100% this. It's due to the current admin team wanting to turn a niche online community into a profitable career instead of what it should be, which is just a fun thing to run in their spare time. e621 should not be a business, and therefore should not be beholden to any "business partners". I'm certain the community would provide whatever it needs to continue to function. Geez, I build and maintain stuff like this for a living and I'd be more than happy to donate my time to being an admin here. I guarantee I'm not the only one.

But let's be real here, it's also clear that the admins are antis who would probably like to have all anime-styled art removed from the site if they thought they could do it without causing the site to completely crumble into dust and then there goes their little "business".

You're free to try and run a project of our size from your basement or with a data center, and see what happens to your finances and lawyer fees once you hit our size and notoriety. This hasn't been a project able to be run without any external scrutiny for over a decade, but particularly so in the last 3 or 4 years.
Our business partners aren't some faceless megacorps trying to figure out how to squeeze another 0.1% profit margin out of their portfolio, but small local ones that get the same shit served on a platter that we do. And unsurprisingly when their livelihoods are threatened they aren't going to be able to just handwave it away, they got their own employees and families to think about.

Do you run sites and servers in the adult industry? Because we do. So do our partners, so do a whole bunch of our colleagues in the broader adult toys and porn industry, so do our friends in porn creations. The vibes have deteriorated quite a bit across the entire industry across the globe, and the impact is pretty far reaching behind the scenes due to the uncertainty this causes.
We don't have any problem hosting problematic content from an ideological standpoint, fantasy is fantasy and I've repeated that ad nauseam in public and private every time the topic came up that we should get rid of either feral, cub, lolishota, rape, murder, necrophilia, and so forth. I have a literal template saved because how often I get to repeat myself to people that apparently think cub porn is equivalent to genuine CSAM but refuse to turn themselves in as murderers for having 1000+ hours logged in GTAV.

However, when the people we depend on for our existence actually have their livelihoods threatened we are forced to react. And that point was reached earlier this week.

Do you know what people in the industry feel when basically every other month a new bi-partisan bill somewhere gets made that aims to make things harder in the industry? And even if it's eventually repealed they all vow to continue bringing it back with minor adjustments until it sticks?
Do you know what's going to happen to a company that gets legally binding content removal requests for months, and has to fear that noncompliance means they lose access to an entire market segment, and then their customers can't sell their products there anymore and will likely jump ship as well?

It is really easy to throw shade when you're unaffected by what's happening and have no idea what's been going on when it's not featured front and center in the news somewhere.

And no, we will not be naming our partners for the sole reason that they don't deserve any heat, they're getting it raw the same way we do, and the same way more places will in the future.

And last but not least, while this decision may have been rash, it does also allow us to protect things in the long run. As long as we aren't forced to purge the files from the server they will continue to stay there indefinitely with the hope that we can make them public again eventually. We already had to irreversibly purge too many as is, and this will at least protect the rest from that, even if we can't share them at the moment.

If you want to prevent shit like this from happening in the future, vote, yell at your representatives, get involved directly. More and more of this shit is getting flung at the adult industry at large from both sides of the aisle, in basically every western nation. The UK and EU want to make encryption illegal, in the US Dems and Reps respectively want to either make porn only accessible ID and SSN or make it illegal entirely, payment processors get more aggressive all the time for everything adult, the UK even has been whining at us for months about some new fucking brainfart they're dreaming up to PrOtEcT tHe ChIlDrEn.

Suggestion: Add purged posts to be contested into a set.

m3g4p0n1 said:
I imagine this would be more efficient for staff to go through than possibly repeated contestations of the same posts.

Or still too soon to better talk about handling the situation? Sorry about that.

donovan_dmc said:
We already have an internal document we're going through

dimoretpinel said:
post #4236328 did not contain sexually explicit nor suggestive content. The questionable tagging comes from the blood.

Can one of the mods check that out?

catt0s said:
Users are welcome to make sets as they please. If you make a set full of items that need to be contested, we can try to merge it into our document. Sets have a size limit though (and you cannot OR them), so we cannot operate out of them directly in an easy way.