I recently had a couple of pieces of art removed without warning or notification. As near as I can tell, the reason they were removed was because they were rated M as opposed to A, perhaps? Neither drawing was particularly explicit- a nude woman from the side, lying on her belly. And another nude, completely covering herself with her hands, with no more skin showing than would be visible in a bathing suit. Beyond the nudity, there was nothing sexual about either drawing. In the past, mods have edited the ratings of my posts when they felt that needed to be more strict, but this seemed strange to me— no communication, no notification, I just noticed that the two pieces were missing. It’s disappointing that the action taken was to completely remove the posts as I lost the ratings, views and comments that they had already garnered.

I wonder, is this a new policy to just delete posts deemed inappropriate without warning, or were instances in the past when I encountered mods who simply edited the ratings against the norm?

Hello, so far as I can tell, your art wasn’t removed, but was bumped up to being rated A. New policy on series of art is that the lowest uploads’ content ratings are bumped up to be the same content rating as the highest in the series. I may be wrong about it, but that’s what it looks like in the mod log.

I know that transparency isn't exactly the culture du jour, so I don't want to undermine my appreciation for you posting at all by nagging you with questions, but can you clarify:

1) If by "in the series" do you mean images in the same post or do you mean "in the series" as in related series of posts (same character, property, story, etc.).

I ask because neither make any sense in the context of @PsychoGoldfish spending over a year to produce a UI that has per image ratings as a special feature. There's even special code in the interface reminding you "At least one of your images must fit [the post's] rating!", implying he was coding to a standard that planned for post to have the rating of their lowest or "average" individual rating. If this policy you're talking applies within a post he wasted hours if not days for that feature to be made irrelevant by the mods. There are other portal features we still want that he could have used that time delivering. Is no one steering the ship? Why make everyone's favorite coder waste his time like that?

What's the idea?

2) Do you know if this new policy has made it's way into any verbiage (portal guide etc) us plebs can see? This seems like a pretty important change that warrants a general news post.

Again, I don't want to complain at you just because you've made yourself available but obviously there's confusion as evidenced by this very thread.

Thanks for replying, the art was definitely not just re-rated as I would have expected. It was unpublished, and without any notification made to me. I noticed the art was no longer there while looking at my own portfolio. After not being able to find the two pieces, I entered the name of the pieces along with my username into google and found links to the pages I originally posted. When I follow that link there was a message- an angry emoji face, and “ERROR — This submission was removed by the Newgrounds moderation team.” Here’s one of the links:

https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/lookitme/caught-naked-003

Moreover, in the projects listing of my own profile, both projects are listed as having been unpublished. I have since re-posted both pieces under new titles— literally with the suffix resubmitted added, and with ratings of A as opposed to the original M— but these are completely new postings made by me, not the original posts restored and re-rated.

So issues of the complete removal of my art as opposed to simply re-rating aside, what you are saying is that if a piece of art is considered to be part of a series, it is now Newgrounds policy that every single piece of art in said series contains the same rating? Even if, for instance, there are several pages of set-up in a series/story leading to a Mature or Adult reveal on the last page, then all the installments need to carry the M or A tag?

This sounds like the primary issue: you’ve had several images that were re-rated in the past yet you keep rating them low.

It sounds like whoever moderated your images had had enough and opted to delete your images instead.

It looks like it’s certainly driven the message home this time, as you’ve re-rated EIGHTY-SEVEN of your own pics to Adult.

As Leo Tolstoy said, "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I appreciate the two mods weighing in on Look's specific case, but again while you're both tuned in, can we get a general comment on:

If a post contains a clothed/unclothed variant or a comic has a skippable adult section, must the post be the rating of its highest image? 

If a series contains post of different ratings, must the series be marked to its highest post? Is this retroactive? What constituents a series? Works under the same title? Containing the same characters? All work by an artist?

In both cases, why then does per image moderation exist?

I know that mods are reluctant to comment, but Look (and thus this thread) has been offered two different explanations (a new "highest wins" policy, versus consistent re-rating) one of which constitutes a policy shift I can't seem to find documented anywhere but which does indeed seem to be a thing mods are doing based on other artist comments.

I had a mod re-rate a handful of drawings, on one occasion, nearly a year ago (12/29/22). And that particular mod very kindly wrote me and explained why they did what they did. I don’t think I would qualify as a serial abuser of the rating system by that metric.

And yes, given that I had a couple of pieces deleted without any warning or notification, I sure did change every piece in my gallery to A. Since you clearly took a look around my portfolio, I’m sure you noticed many of those pages didn’t include anything even close to nudity. I am engaging in an over-abundance of caution in light of a lack of transparency about why my pages were removed as opposed to re-rated, a practice that @sourcherryjack, who weighed in previously, seemed to have indicated was what was recorded in the mod log.

...

I'm sure it wasn't meant this way, but it is always best to avoid a Kurt-Vonnegut/Joseph-Heller/Franz-Kafka vibe and *not* portray compliance and evidence of a willingness to take action as an indication of wrongdoing and/or greater guilt...

I am not 100% sure on this -- what with the recently released update to multiposting to the Art Portal -- but I will seek further clarification for myself, as well as look into updating the Art Submission Guidelines to better explain how collections of Art Portal uploads should be rated.

From what I remember off the top of my head right now: if a user uploads a multipage webcomic and one of the pages is rated E, but another page is rated A, everything in the entire collection should be rated A. If it isn't, and a page is Flagged, Art Mods will come in and adjust the rating to reflect that. I will dig deeper and get you a more complete response when it becomes available to me.

Okay, now I know where the breakdown in communication was. Lookitme was not using the multiupload function for what looked like a webcomic when I checked their gallery to investigate so I answered as a "series" being uploaded one individual post at a time, but linked in title and description.

From my understanding: if a user is using the Multiupload function the whole collection of images will show as the highest/default content rating if the series is opened, with individual content ratings still filterable. That was my fault, I forgot the expanded multi-upload system allowed for individual content ratings per image.

I wouldn't say we're reluctant to comment, we're volunteers and sometimes don't have all of the knowledge on new systems being implemented, or are simply not online to respond. A good amount of moderation policies -- especially as new systems are launched/reworked -- are made as issues pop up, we try to work with admin to get the developing policies documented in the Guidelines as fast as we can.

The above issue of how rating series' is actually a great example of me not remembering new functionality when I answered you initially and responding as though it didn't exist.

First off, @SourCherryJack, thanks for replying and--more broadly--being a mod. Sometimes the power differential makes it all too easy to forget that moderators are all overworked volunteers also working from incomplete and changing information.

Speaking of, I might can actually offer some help. :)

The way it actually works is that there is a "meta", "collection", or "post" rating (depending on how you look at it) that you need to submit in addition to your per-image/page ratings. By default all of your ratings inherit this post "meta" rating, but you are free to set any given image/page as you wish *except* (and to use the phrase, I believe this is indeed the "exception that proves the rule) if all of your pages exceed the the post rating. When that happens you are blocked from posting by a warning like the following:

If you have a "T" post that has an "A" page it shows up as a "T" post in the portal. If you visit it and are either not logged in or have "A" content filtered. You won't see the pages that should be filtered. They will be replaced by a message about your filter/log-in status and special icons in the navigation UI.

Given that, you can see how this is confusing:

You can see how that's an incredibly confusing stance. If that's the case, the special message, the special UI elements, the "meta" rating, per-image/ratings, the special filtering mode, none of it has any reason to exist. We're talking man days if not weeks or months of coding, testing, design, art, review that all add up to "post should take on their 'lowest', rating". If mods take the opposite stance, it's equivalent to "Lol! The staff are a bunch of chumps!"

Please do! The flipside of us users forgetting that all the mods are volunteers is that sometimes I think it's forgotten just how much it means to us users to hear back from the void. Thank you so much! Again, not just for this thread but modding at all. :)

The above comment was made when I was talking about multi-post projects before I remembered there were separate content ratings per image in a multi upload post, please disregard it.

as an aside specifically with Adult content: if a user is submitting a project with adult content in it at all: I would argue that they should automatically make the project’s default rating A — not even as a mod, just as a person navigating the site.

At 11/12/23 11:02 PM, SourCherryJack

No worries. I just like to be thorough. :)

At 11/12/23 11:02 PM, SourCherryJack

I can totally see where you're coming from, though I myself personally never understand why people who don't want to see "A" rated content turn it on (it's off by default). Regardless, if higher rated content "taints" a submission, it naturally raises the question:

Why then does the per-image rating (and related features) exist at all?

The UI and filtering system have been specifically changed seemingly to support--for example--cases like having a censored version of an image available to all with the adult version substituted for those who are logged in with "A" enabled.

If higher rated content "taints" a submission, there is no need to have anything other than one rating per post and there's certainly no need for new UI elements, portal filtering rules, etc etc.

These weren't done on a lark. The portal update took more than a year. These features cost real money and time and were done by paid staff at the NG offices.

It's not on you to speak for the mods, but do you know if there's anyone that can address this seeming rift between the volunteer mods and the paid staff? You can see how, as out-of-the-loop users, it makes us feel like we're taking crazy pills.

Speaking purely from a personal stance - as I was when I said if there is adult content in a project, it would make sense to rate the general project as A with ETM submissions in it individually (expanding on that for clarity)- : if I click on a webcomic that is grouped as a project with a project rating as "T" and read a few pages and it has some violence and edges into or becomes Mature content, that's more or less fine. But if it becomes explicitly pornographic later on into it, I would have liked to have known in advance the content was going to take this turn before getting invested in it. It's not as big of an issue if a mostly E or T project dips into some M content, but dipping into Adult content is where the whole project goes from suitable for mass audience with some discretion, to "this is not suitable for minors;" this becomes a bit of a problem, especially for underaged users who will not be able to/should not be able to view the complete webcomic after beginning it, but also just for someone who doesn't really want to view pornography. Again, this is me speaking as user, not a moderator.

As I said earlier, there's not so much a rift between Mods and admin, it's just Moderators not having all of the answers all of the time, or new issues popping up that we weren't ready for that Mods and Admin will figure out how to handle going forward, as well as put any new or updated policy in the Submission Guidelines. Utilize the site's functionality and rate projects in the Art Portal how you feel they should be according to the posted submission guides. If in the future something needs to change than something will change. In the inciting case of this thread, the OP was not utilizing the Multipost Project feature - they were individually single-posting pages of a webcomic with links to the other pages in the description, leading to art content changes and deletions that I was not initially aware of.

So anything up until my last post where I realized this miscommunication should be disregarded entirely vis-a-vis multiposting and content ratings. And anything where I specifically said I was speaking as a user - should be taken as me not speaking as a moderator.

No worries @SourCherryJack. I think you've totally cleared up any confusion and I really appreciate you doing it. Like you said, Look's original case wasn't quite the one I brought up (though you clarified that one too) so I especially appreciate you addressing my questions both personally and as a mod.

New stuff is new, and apologies if I made it seem like we needed all of the answers all the time. I hadn't thought about the admins sometimes being as mysterious to the mods as mods are to us mere mortals. :) Truly Tom Fulp is a Titan but mods aren't gods. Some are pretty awesome though, as evidenced by this thread.

Using the tools the admins have provided and seeing what nuances get introduced later in guidelines and being patient as things might not be certain in the meantime seems sensible. It even seems like it would help in Look's original case to look at the multi-inage features, so everybody wins.

Actually, you've had a lot of submissions re-rated, not just a few. You and I discussed this, yeah, not quite a year ago. You've forgotten already? Imma schedule you fer a brain scan to make sure you're alright. Ah, wait, nevermind; probably a resident of the Center for Mischievous Beings at work here!

You sure about that?? While not everything needed an A rating, the majority if your submissions include nudity.

Mods have the option to remove or re-rate a piece. The fact that "she's covered and shows less skin than a bikini" doesn't change the fact that a bikini is clothing and she is indeed fully nude, meaning, no clothing at all.

I cleared my emails, or I'd post the messages from back then. It's really not necessary, tho. (or so I thought...) I'll send you something again if you need it. Just stay on top of ratings, and if in doubt, a higher rating is usually a safer bet. But also, in the future, incorrectly rated submissions may be removed instead of corrected.

sorry i know you are just speaking from a user perspective but i have to disagree that having an adult piece in a series means the whole series must be classified as adult. like what alsoknownas1 said why then does the per-image rating exists at all. specifically i think violence are not suitable for minors too that's why it is classified as mature. if someone were to turn off the mature rating because of abhorrence of violence and then went on to read a series with T rating but have M rated pages, shouldn't your reasoning apply for them too as they also would have like to have known in advance that the series has violent imagery?

This isn't aimed at you or Sour, more of an aside, but it kind of blows my mind that all these discussions about limiting this or that (beyond what will keep Tom able to keep charging credit cards and out of jail) are taking place on a website that 100% would not exist if not for a game about clubbing baby seals to death, another game making light of a mass shooting, and a video series literally meant to serve as a gateway to (at the time) exotic foreign pornography.

Like, I get "times have changed", "we know better now", etc. To a certain extent that's true. On the other hand, like a critic of colonialism that isn't giving up *their* house, if the powers that be really did have a change of heart regarding exploitative content, they could have started a fresh site with new branding and identical user submission technology and thus effectively renounced everything that was built on those heady "edgelord" days. They have not.

It makes alot of these discussions feel like good old fashioned boomer/gen-x ladder pulling and that sucks cause the kids are alright.

hahaha on the contrary im really happy for the multi upload update. i just didnt think sour's call for explicitly limiting adult rated content for the functionality is sound. warning labels exist for both violence and nudity on most media so why does violence get a pass but not nudity? It felt like they were just using kids as an argument to support their own views.

going thru a series and discovering a page with a rating you blocked means newgrounds did its job of preventing you from seeing content that would make you uncomfortable. i'd even argue there's benefits for newgrounds not limiting the functionality for adult rated content as by default it is unaccessible unless you sign in with an account with adult content enabled. if the viewer of the series is ok with the content but they do not have an account, they might sign up and there's a small percentage that the account holder may be converted to a supporter vs a 0 chance without an account.

i really hope the functionality will not get limited. if it does, i see it as a net loss for artists and the site itself.

I think the project as a whole should take the rating of the highest rated piece in the bunch, whether that’s A M T or E. But I can make concessions for a predominantly E series having moments of T or edging into M. But Adult is generally shorthand for pornography or sexual encounters, or extreme extreme violence which under general US centric views tends to be more taboo. Keep in mind I have been talking about a ‘series’ specifically in terms of a narrative not anything else.

For minor variants in designs such as clothing changes dress ups/dress downs where one post is of a character and another is the same character/same pose/same drawing etc but with their tits out, that would make an amount more sense to rate it the initial project since they’re individual posts not expected to be seen together necessarily.

Again, none of this is how I enforce this as a mod, I am just talking here.

Just to bottom out this tangent, when the multi-image content ratings were rolled out it was stated:

“Your project has a project-level content rating and the option to set the content rating on individual pieces of art. Currently, our hubs and search features will only refer to the project rating, so you will want to rate your project based on the intended audience. Here are some example scenarios:

“Example 1: You have uploaded a comic with ten panels. Eight of these panels are rated T but two of them are rated A. Because the A-rated content is necessary to the story, you should rate your project A.

“Example 2: You have uploaded a series of variants of your OC in different outfits. Most of these variants are rated E but you have one that is rated A. You could choose to rate your project E and people will find it while browsing E, or you could rate it A and people will find it while browsing A. If someone browsing E views your project, the A-rated portion will be filtered if they don’t have A-rated content enabled. In the future it’s possible your project could show up in both E and A results but that will require a larger re-architecture on our end.”

I.e. I’m sure everybody is right and in practise it’s fine.

———

However, I would seriously suggest this long-winded tangent is closed off as (as already recognised) it is not the case here - all of the OP pics are individually submitted - and the more we posts yards of text about this the more the original issue is confused.

Here is where i think it relates to the original topic with how newgrounds expects you to rate content. nudity is classified as adult content here, be it showing genitalia or not. there is a clear distinction between nudity and pornography for a substantial amount of people that these kind of wrong rating incidents keep happening. maybe i am mistaken but wouldnt dragonball(those first few chapters) be an adult rated content on newgrounds if it were to go by those rules? of course i agree if the main story is very sexual or violent then one should rate the whole project accordingly and not based on the lowest rating they have on the individual pages.

… Note that for this thread the artist is submitting comics where an imp is molesting a woman and some step-sister porn.

Regardless of scenarios where nudity could be considered non-sexual, it is blatantly not the case here.

I feel seen. :) Though to defend my impromptu TED talk, the original confusion came from a lack of logs/communication and the speculation from fellow mods that resulted. Plus, I think the tangent was still valuable, especially you and Sours contributions. To wit:

 It's good to have affirmed that use cases like censoring, clothed variants, and sex scenes that aren't story essential and skippable are kosher. Maybe this thread will help avoid future threads (probably not, but let's be optimistic).

Fair enough. Zipping it. Hopefully Look and Ex have worked it out.

hahaha it was an attempt to clear my confusion about user consensus for the ratings of the multi-image content in the guise of staying in topic. i take the single sentence about use cases from alsoknownas1 as good yea?

thanks all in the thread for tolerating me with my questions :D

I maybe late to the party but I'm calling horse manure on your logic. Newgrounds rating system in 2025 doesn't actually let you choose a rating, you check off boxes describing the content in your upload. A lot of times, the UI will give you the lowest rating it possibly can, and from experience I can tell you, the mods will usually rate the content a higher rating than UI suggests, and in some instances, the boxes you've checked will actually remain the same despite the stricter rating applied by the mods. So, apparently, EVERYONE who uploads content may as well just click the harshest variables we can on even e rated art, just to avoid content being deleted because some mod had a bad day. Essentially, this is what you're saying, only your sugar coating it.

(This is the first time I’ve been described as sugar-coating something.)

Couple of things that strike me from what you wrote:

No, it doesn’t.

It will give the highest rating.

No, it doesn’t.

The UI for mods is the same as that for a user, and in order to change the rating the mods have to change the rating.

Content gets reported by the user base. The mods are human and know the userbase are human: the ratings will get boosted up as mods can recognise an M or A misinterpretation or the artist has missed the rating panel.

I’ve deleted stuff in the past where the artist has adult content rated “E” and has left it stagnated in the portal collecting “HOLY CHRIST CHANGE THE RATING” reviews.

If you’re going to bump a 2-year old thread and call what I write horse-shit, you’d better make sure you know what you’re talking about.

I'am new, so there's that, also, I didn't look at the art the OP was actually posting, when I did, it definately brings more context to the point you were making. That is A LOT of "A" rated art, and some of it definately should be "A" rated!

I won't try to debate any of the points you made, save for one. From what I can tell, the UI is not identical for mods and users in 2025. I know this because, one of the artworks I posted was upgraded to an M rating. Initially, I check off two of the three boxes provided as the middle option, one of those was gore and violence. I left "nudity" at the lowest setting, and the result was a T rating when I posted the art. A day later, it was upgraded to M, but when I checked the check list, none of the variables I selected were upgraded, so according to what you're saying it should have remained teen, unless I am missing a finer detail you noticed.

Also, I dunno if this is just default for A ratings, but one of the other pics was upgraded to an A rating I posted, and when I looked to see if the variables in the UI were modded or not, I couldn't even see, or modify the rating. It was locked in place as an A rating, and in place of the rating tools was a message saying the rating was locked.

So there's that, and also, I only assumed the OP's art was deleted for reasons other than the Mod getting triggered about all the adult content was because I read a post in this thread from the user named "Exedor." Anyways, Exedor seemed to Imply that it is standard protocol for mods to remove artwork if a user continues to "under rate" their drawings.

So, I merely interpreted your post as pointing out the elephant in the room without taking a direct dig at the website itself, lol. In all honesty though, I think, they're is an easy soloution to the problem, rather than having three options in the rating section of publish posts for nudity, why not only two options? "Yes or No?" if it is marked yes, the UI should give it an A rating, if it is marked no, it should give it a M rating, simple, yeah? Would solve ALOT of problems for the mods and make their jobs easier, at least I think so.

You’re wrong.

EDIT:

-The “T” setting was because you had “Nudity” at “None”, but the middle option to gore and violence.

-Changing “Nudity” to “Some” will rate it “M”.

-Changing “Nudity” to “Lots” will make it “A”.

I’m glad you recognised that you’re a new user, however don’t say I write horse-shit when you don’t know how the site functions.

Oh , AM I? Cuz According to this screen shot from my account it looks locked to me, and that's actually the edit page. So maybe, just maybe, you got modding privileges I don't have.