Connoisseur of cars, cuffs, and cuddly companions!

First off, lil mental health update - doing a lot better now! I've gotten closer to some very important friends - both IRL and in the furry community, and that has been an improvement to my mental health. You know who you are, thanks <3 Now with that out of the way...

Yes, I have to talk about the thing - ignoring the elephant in the room doesn't make it go away. I don't even need to name what I'm talking about, do I? Hell you can see the banner at the top of the page above this damn journal.

First off - the intentions were 100% in the right place for the changes to the upload policy. Banning sexual content of minors is something everybody agrees on. Well at those... those whose opinion is worth listening to. (Hint... if you are pro-"cub" porn, your opinion isn't one of them. Fuck off.) I also understand the need to stop the whole "they're not a minor - they're totally 4000 years old in a loli body!" loophole. But... well I wouldn't be writing this journal if everything was peachy, now would I?

Honestly, the majority of the issues I have isn't even about the changes to the upload policy itself - it is how it has been handled by staff.

(THE BIG ONE) Closure of All Methods of Official Communication - Look, I know the community is pissed, and a lot of people aren't being civil about it. Yes, that is an incredibly difficult situation for staff to deal with. But to close all of the comments on FA, lock the discord thread (that was promised to remain open for discussion), and leave only trouble-shooting tickets as the way to communicate? That is a big fat fucking Y I K E S from me. Moderating toxic/uncivil discussion is one thing - completely closing all criticism and silencing ALL community discussion is fucking bullshit. Yes, go ahead and delete the toxic and inflammatory comments, but silencing good-faith criticism is a morally poor choice to make, on top of making the situation even worse. On that note...

Condescending/Dismissive Attitudes From Staff - Dismissing people who disagree with the specific wording of these rules is an asshole move. People rely on your website for a living - they are the reason why your website makes any money to begin with.

Staff Integrity - I'm not naming names here, but when species that otherwise would have been banned are conspicuously exempted, and a member of staff just so happens to have characters of that species? Yeah... we're not stupid.

Now, for my problems with the rules themselves...

De-facto banning of small characters - Yes, I know it's not an outright ban on small characters on paper. But when the rules basically boil down to individual moderator discretion over vague guidelines... not exactly very confidence-inspiring is it? This WILL result in people being warned/banned over short adult characters. It puts an entire natural (ADULT) body type on thin ice.

Banning Species - Yeah this is just dumb. No further comment.

Explicit Allowance of Fetish Content With Minors - Vore and TF are still explicitly allowed for minors. In the rules. That's fucking gross, that is disgusting, and that completely undermines the actual good reason for this entire rule update in the first place. Even if that's fixed by the time I post this journal, that should not have happened in the first place. That has completely destroyed any semblance of trust I had in the staff here.

And as I was writing this... other things that slightly annoyed me about this website started to resurface in my brain. Why is the mobile UI still so crap? Why is the UI so jank? Why does making a journal your profile's featured journal follow a different procedure in the UI than featured submissions? Why can't we edit things after 5 minutes? Why is the support for written work non-existent? Why do I have to download a document to read it? (Totally not a security vulnerability, no siree.) The only reason FA is an ubiquitous as it is, lasted as long as it has, and is as successful as it currently is - was because of the community. And the behavior of staff (let alone the actual issues with the proposed rule changes) are making massive numbers of major, upstanding members of the community very, very mad - even people who don't have art that would be affected by this rule change.

Gah I feel my blood pressure rising, better close this journal before I pop an aneurysm. It is a two-way relationship between FA and artists, and I would strongly suggest that FA doesn't try to slap the hand they shake. Or FA may find itself without a hand willing to shake with anymore.