Is there a way to just have depictions of suicide, self-harm & torture just be banned? You state in the rules that you don't want things posted that are a trigger, but for some of us these things are extremely triggering & not needed in the artfight setting. 

Esp since there isn't a different like description of what the "sensitive" content is in the filter. I literally have it on because of these topics, and nothing really else because having been a survivor of 2 suicide attempts and now about 3 years clean on SH this can be triggering AND cause relapse. 

I just cannot believe that you all allow this??? Where is this needed??? 

Edit since NONE OF YOU READ: Self harm and suicid3 as in THE ACT OR OPEN WOUNDS. Why would i as a damn perosn with SELF HARM SCARS need that censored?? I didnt say that. 

Also you can gladly draw that on your free time. Reality or not: this is not the place for you to show case it. Its not needed in a place like this.

Im mot REPLYING TO PEOPLE. DONT. @ ME. God. 

Sorry this is the last one i swear, Im just so stunned that we've had filters for people to put on nudity and adult content this entire time, kids are stopped from seeing it, sex has never been allowed (again im not asking it to be) and yet something as harmless as a pinup is a no-go with the new rules. Someones kinky pride outfit is a no-go. Art embracing love, sexuality and admiration of things that tie into it would be banned- not just needing a filter, outright banned

Meanwhile you can have art depicting suicide, self harm, torture scenes and other extreme violence and gore just fine here behind a filter. The thing that, you know, if someone doesn't want to see it either right now or at all, can completely and easily avoid it? Filters are great! can we just keep using them, please? (I'm not calling for gore to be banned too by any means, nor am i shaming anyone for making gorey art btw)

Every single other adult artist I know is sane enough to recognise not everything we draw should be shared in every situation, that's kind of step 1for any social interaction whether it's sharing art or not. We don't go shoving that on people who don't want to see it! I don't make artfight attacks with any subject matter that people havent explicitly stated was okay in their permissions, and if I'm unsure, I just ASK THEM before I make it, it's really not that difficult

Also, it's kind of hilarious that I might have to remove my drag queen dragon from this site because he dresses in ways that are deemed too inappropriate for the new rules, but not because he literally eats people... I'm tired y'all. happy pride i guess.

WeylinPlaya Ik the rule seems a bit stupid and while multiple eyes may not be direct body horror, I agree, it does freak some people out (like me, who has trypophobia that gets oddly triggered) so a warning is sometimes nice

I just made my account in late May. I’ve been reading these comments here about the updated rules and announcements. All I have to say is:

Please don’t fxck up the website on my first year. I just joined, don’t do anything rash yet! I need the full experience before anything changes haha

I feel bad for this year’s moderators. They’re gonna get high blood pressure. 

WeylinPlaya They encourage dm'ing a mod to make sure you're in the clear, so you're probably best off doing that to be certain you're not violating anything. 

lunarhallow I see.
I just checked sensitive content and there they still specify that real life species with 6+ don't need a warning, but it's unclear if that actually still applies because they don't have that exception listed anywhere in the body horror section on this rule. If it does still apply, cool, it should be mentioned there.

WeylinPlaya Well that definitely wasn't there before, and kinda frustrating the staff didn't say anything about it. If they're waiting to make one big announcement post to address the controversy and what fixes they made, they could at least waited to make the changes go live with the announcement because I would not have seen that until someone said something about it. At least there's a grace period and all but...

Edit cause I could've sworn that it wasn't like this when I last checked all the filters but I couldn't find a snapshot on the wayback machine to tell me if I was right or not. They put emphasis on the Suggestive themes and AU, that changes to Body Horror just got completely missed, I guess. Suppose this is just a reminder that you have to go over everything to make sure *shrugs*

One last edit: The eye thing has been part of the sensitive content filter before the update, uhps. Think they just added it to the body horror since many people didn't think that would be a Trypophobia thing

In all the hubbub about the suggestive content guidelines, I hadn't even realized that the body horror ones got updated to include any characters with more than 5 eyes on their face. Which kinda just means most spider anthro characters have to have it now for some stupid reason?

My spider anthro, Meru, doesn't even have all 8 eyes that most spiders usually have, and even she's hit by this. Two of her eyes aren't even usually visible, hidden under her hair, but since they're shown on her reference image and are canonically there she needs a body horror tag? I think that's really stupid tbh. There should at least be more nuance to this rule if it is to stay, characters of actual real life species that in real life have more than 5 eyes needing to be marked "body horror" makes no sense imo

I posted before on here re: it makes more sense just to remove that section with how it’s laid out at this point than keep it dysfunctional. However, I do think it’s worth a more laid out discussion.

While I’m still perfectly fine with mods wanting to scale back on the NSFW levels, I do still think there needs to be clarity as to why, how, and what that actually entails. Characters with “emphasis on parts of the body” is extremely vague and with how it’s mentioned, more of an “if you know you know.” If not, it’s likely going to be most cartoon characters, and without very clear explanations accordingly, moderators are likely going to take that up to interpretation. There were already very fatal lacks of communication the past couple years that don’t need more room to be fed. As an example: My sona has very large ears & tail because she’s a cartoon fennec. And a predominantly feral one at that, so would really not like rhat assumption made. Idk I’m jist confused more than anything, even as someone looking forward to having a tamer run this year. After seeing all the other filters fully written out, very well established parameters, that section felt like a cop out - and changing it from “sexual” to “suggestive themes” also felt like a weird sanitization of it almost? There’s absolutely no “do this, not that” with examples. Even just a banlist then a “these are okay with or without filter” with collars etc would make more sense. There are plenty of people who will genuinely not understand the nuance and do deserve it clarified.

And I do think that if this was because of incidents of minors & people with minors’ characters receiving NSFW content (yikes???), there are better ways of handling this. Including, for starters, addressing those concerns with the community itself, apologizing for that, and finding solutions collaboratively versus trying to damage control it and ignoring feedback from the group. I would argue that most of ArtFight’s userbase, I would hope, would understand that. The objection is that this feels more like a rug-sweep than a solution. I feel like I just left one of those and stepped into another, respectfully. It’s best to be upfront, honest, and concise.

Leaving the discussions of kink & queerness aside because I think others have addressed it more poignantly than I can; I think clarity, honesty, and transparency are the most vital right now.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks the censorship is getting ridiculous. I was fine with not allowing porn but this isn't "protecting minors", or anybody really, if that's what the goal was. It's perfectly reasonable to require filters for commonly upsetting or mature subject matter - graphic gore, explicit nudity, etc is pretty standard and makes perfect sense to me. This just feels like coddling a loud minority who don't have the coping skills to deal with seeing things (in passing, because they are perfectly capable of scrolling/clicking away) that they don't like.

- "Words that refer to explicit sexual content or acts" <- so i can't draw a character saying "suck it" as a meme? my friend wanted to draw a character wearing a shirt that said "robot f*cker", but now they can't? can i even use the F-word as a verb at all anymore?
- What constitutes "fetish gear" in the first place? Collars and harnesses are allowed if they're not in a sexual context but they are fetish gear? Why are they allowed but not cuffs or hoods or gags? What about non-leather/latex fetish gear like schoolgirl uniforms or fursuits, or improvised substitutes like zip ties and duct tape? Why does any of this count as fetish gear but lingerie doesn't? I have a character that's intentionally made to look like a living gimp suit, but his "default" is just smooth shiny black body with a gas mask - does that count as fetish gear? The lines are so arbitrary and blurry at best, bordering on outright discriminatory at worst
- Gore is a non-sexual fetish for a lot of people but that's allowed? What about hyper muscle? Plush/pool toy kink? Motocross gear kink? All of this has the potential of excluding anyone who only has characters that fall under "nonsexual fetish", which I expect is gonna disproportionately affect autistic/otherwise neurodivergent users since we're more likely to gravitate toward the same interests repeatedly
- Flower gore doesn't need to be censored but mushroom growth does???
- "Realistic meat" needs to be censored? I realize this was probably intended for like, raw flesh or animal characters eating a carcass or something, but the way it's worded it would also apply to a steak or chicken breast on a plate. They show actual meat on commercials during children's TV shows
- Extra eyes as body horror sounds fine on the surface, but all the explanation and examples feel like a remnant of Tumblr's "tag for scopophobia" phase. Scary Godmother - a book/movie series specifically geared toward young children - has a monster with 5+ eyes all over his head, kids draw monsters like that all the time. Naruto has a character with mouths in his hands and the target audience for that is pre-teen boys. But one eye on a character's chest or back is too horrifying and needs to be censored? Why does one eye on the chest warrant a body horror tag but a cyclops doesn't? 
- The hyperrealistic eyes is uncanny i guess but we all survived Annoying Orange and all the dozens of memes that use this style
- Who decides what qualifies as an "unsettling manner" for body distortion? I have a demon with really long limbs, I don't find him unsettling at all and clearly lots of other people don't either, cuz he gets a decent amount of art every year


The argument for rules like this is always the supposed mental health of the people who may or may not hypothetically see it potentially. What about the mental health of the people whose work you're saying is inherently, objectively upsetting and inappropriate? There's been real, actual, published scientific research proving that excessive content warnings are MORE harmful to people with triggers and phobias because it reinforces and amplifies that fear. There's also been real, actual, published scientific research proving that being told the stuff you like or make is morally bad or tasteless has serious psychological effects. Obviously I'm not saying to get rid of filters altogether, and I'm aware this is supposed to be just a fun internet art game. But we have 160,000+ people in said internet art game, so it can't be treated like a silly little thing a small close-knit community participates in anymore. Being more restrictive and enforcing stronger censorship has never worked in anyone's favor.

I see people claiming it's a legality issue, and AF can't be compared to larger sites like DA and Tumblr - which I agree with. But I (and I fully recognize I have no experience trying to run a site like this) have to doubt that it's a legality issue or a matter of being unable to moderate when Toyhou.se manages to allow all of this stuff. TH has one single staff member, about 3.5x as many users with god knows how many more characters and images, operates year-round and has only 5 filters (including one where you can fill in your own custom warnings, which is genius imo). It can be done. If AF doesn't have enough staff willing and able to moderate these subjects objectively and in compliance with the law, the solution should be more/different staff, not restrictions that feel like they're based solely on personal taste.

I'm gonna get off my soapbox now, and beg the mods to please, please, please listen to your older userbase and not just the people who never learned how to curate their own online experience. If participating means I have to be increasingly hypervigilant every year for the entire month at the whims of arbitrary subjective guidelines, I'll find the door myself

Edit: NM I probably making a fool of my self. LOL

But really, Please consider at the end of the day, we want to have fun and make art for people.

Kink art has been around forever and it's not going away. (no one talks about it but there have been kink caveman art)

If someone states that's OK as an attack and the art is properly filtered, I don't see the harm in it.

not going to @ because it feels rude to ping if you're not wanting to respond again
@/hinatot i really don't think these new rules are going to reduce mod strain at all. as others have pointed out the vagueness is more likely to increase mod strain.
in the filtering rules, lingerie is in the same category. lingerie is allowed, even if posed suggestively under a filter. the only fetish gear explicitly allowed are collars and harnesses, which like you said have hit mainstream fashion. the rules literally state there is no nuance, as the only two pieces of gear allowed are those two. " Works involving fetishes, even if they do not contain genitals, are disallowed on site. This includes (but is not limited to) fetish gear... " it's written right there.
it's frustrating on the other end because they clearly do have the framework to support this kind of stuff, because they have been for the past 8 years.

sharpiepaws

queer people make up a disproportionately large percentage of kink spaces. the link between queerness and kink has been around for decades, it's why we have annual debates around kink and pride. not saying that's the only reason but straight up there is a large queer community subset of kink, and queerness has historically been associated with sexual deviance so training any kind of automated system to pick up on nsfw for moderation purposes is going to be biased by decades of human bias and viewing queerness as a subset of kink, even if the people training it do not hold these biases. it's not just an issue with tumblr's moderation bots but with them in general, they're not rubbing their hands together and scheming about coming after us. biases are involved on at least some level but it goes far deeper than this surface level viewing. though that gets into ai models which is a whole other can of worms unrelated to this current issue

also the banning of trans people on current tumblr is a completely separate issue from the nsfw ban i was talking about. the nsfw ban was because of massive amounts of cp on the site, which caught many non-cp accounts in the crossfire due to the aforementioned issues with ai moderation. the trans bans is because the owner is transphobic

and, small aside that i had trouble figuring out where to fit this in- artfight uses human moderators who are already overworked, hence these clarifications, so that artfight doesn't have to use these ai moderators that have known biases. obv humans can also be biased as well, but we know for sure ai get biased by historic data, and the mods are like all people who have been active in the art community for years and many of which interact with some form of kink content. it's not like there's a lack of nuance going on

lingerie is not in the same category. look at stores like jcpenny; it's depending on context and framing. there is no age filter and the posing is not meant to be overly suggestive. in another context, yes, lingerie can be something not allowed, but there is nuance. nobody is suggesting a lack of nuance

fetish gear, too, is not only an incredibly broad term, but also, there is nuance. there's a lot of jumping to conclusions when we have no evidence that there's to be a lack of nuance in moderation. things like harnesses and chokers used to be solely used in kink circles, now there is still that association but they are also accepted as mainstream fashion items. other items are much more clearly in different camps. nuance is key here and assuming people who have been actively part of the art community for years aren't aware of this is just naive

it's also frustrating that even if this was entirely just a witch hunt and they arbitrarily hate nsfw (which there is no evidence for ).... it's their site. they can do that. the owners also have actively encouraged the making of sites like artfight but geared for nsfw, which doesn't seem especially puritanical and hating on nsfw to me and more like this site just doesn't have the framework to support some types of content but idk

really just responding this once so don't expect a reply if you respond again

mathrock I love vocaloid!! I went to Miku Expo this year and it was so hype!!!! Def gonna go again next year :> 
Is there any specific song you're hoping to see live? 👀

I want to upload a character but I'm afraid get eliminate because he's chubby and has chubby paws :c (isnt a fetish just have chubby paws because it has characteristics of a lynx and chubby because skinny the design looked bad and with muscles too)