Flash Forward kicks off on February 1st! If you’d like to help with the prize pool, please use the donation option on our Supporter page and PM me a heads up that you donate towards Flash Forward.
In the meantime, here are some things that have been going on this month, along with more plans for this year.
This month we raised the minimum sign-up age to 14 and we intend to gradually raise it this year until we settle on 16 as the minimum age. This keeps us more compliant with legislation in places like Australia and Florida but also feels like a good fit for Newgrounds. Australia may also be requiring ID checks, we’ll have to wait and see what they settle on and what they offer on that front later this year.
Existing accounts will be grandfathered, meaning we won’t be deleting accounts that joined before the change. If you are an artist who was hoping to participate on NG but are too young, please keep honing your craft, we look forward to seeing you here some day!
We’ve also changed the PM system, so that sending images via PM is now a Supporter feature. Reasons for this are people abusing the system with shock photos, the potential for creepy stuff happening and to better comply with the UK Online Safety Act.
The next round of updates will make it so you can't PM a minor account unless they follow you, message you first, or are friends with you. This is also in line with UK regulatory guidance but also for the best overall. If you never noticed, there is already a flag button in each PM you receive, if you ever get something creepy.
If you live in the UK there is more excitement on the way. Starting in July, we will be required to verify your age in order to toggle the Adult filter. There is currently no way we can do this without charging you money and we’re not keen to do that via Paypal or Stripe. Ideally a better option will arrive in the months ahead, such as a UK digital ID that we can check for free.
Various states and countries are rushing into age verification laws that are a total mess and a burden for everyone involved; no one wants to show their ID to random websites. We personally hope progress is made with the Digital Age Assurance Act (DAAA), which would require device-level age verification. This means you would verify your age once on your phone and on your personal desktop PC / Mac profile, at which point it could pass a true or false value to apps and websites. This makes so much more sense than what is happening now and would allow sites like NG to verify age in a consistent, simple and costless way.
In other news…
Pixel Day winners will be announced next month, probably after the Best of January. Please take some time to enjoy, vote on and review the Pixel Day entries!
The NG Documentary Kickstarter is almost to $50k out of the $80k goal, please consider contributing to its success!
Expect some downtime today around 1pm EST as the site undergoes a number of structural changes.
