Newgrounds

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Newgrounds
Type Private
Founded July 6, 1995
Headquarters Glenside,[1] Pennsylvania, United States
Key people Tom Fulp: Founder & CEO
Wade Fulp: Administrator & Public Relations
Rob Rosenbaum & James Holloway: Back-End Programmers
Tim Miller: Sysadmin
Will Stamper & Jeff Bandelin: Web and Media Designers
Bob Rudderow: HTML + CSS Designer
Slogan "Everything, By Everyone." (Former slogan: "The problems of the future, today!")
Website www.newgrounds.com
Type of site SWF hosting service
Registration Optional
Available in English
Current status Active

Newgrounds is an American website headquartered in Glenside, Pennsylvania, United States and created in 1995 that primarily hosts Adobe Flash animated films and games, but also features a music oriented page, as well as an art portal. The site was created and is owned by Tom Fulp, who still oversees numerous aspects and regularly produces in-house and out-house content. Newgrounds is distinguished from most other Flash websites by its automated submission and rating system.[dubious – discuss]

Contents

[edit] Front page

The home page of Newgrounds displays recent submissions chosen by administrators as a special showcase of their favorites. On April 19, 2001 the first front page icon for a user-submitted Flash game was posted under the heading "Tom and Wade Recommend". The game that was posted was Taipan 3000 by Josh "Psycho Goldfish" Tuttle, a remake of a popular Apple II game called Taipan!.

As Newgrounds received more and more quality submissions the "Tom and Wade recommend" section grew from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, and 4 to 6 icons. There are currently 24 icons on the front page. The rate at which this page was updated also increased, from weeks to days, eventually leading to the removal of the "Tom and Wade recommend" heading and becoming a staple of the Front Page, making it easy for new users to the site to find quality content.

Originally the icons were created by other users, as were the short text descriptions (The same process used for the collections pages), but this proved to be an extremely time consuming tedious task. Currently users are given the ability to attach their own icons with their submissions, and write their own brief descriptions.

In January 2005 the front page archive was launched, keeping a month-by-month list of Flash content that was deemed to be worthy of display on the Newgrounds front page. This includes either those who performed well in the daily awards, or simply those the admin deemed worthy.

On July 26, 2005, the Icon Helpers system was launched for Newgrounds volunteers to make and submit icons for older Flash content that was lacking an icon, making the integration to automated collections pages much more effective.

On a few occasions, when maintenance has been performed on the site, the front page has been replaced by an "under construction" page showing the Newgrounds tank logo being welded by a maintenance crew. The image is accompanied by a message describing the work done, such as that displayed during the major upgrade that occurred in July 2007 and July 2009, "IN UR TANK, UPGRADING UR SERVERZ :3".

[edit] Flash portal

The Flash portal is utilized by Newgrounds members to submit Flash content. Registered users can submit new Flash games or animations and can vote between 0 and 5 on existing submissions. They can leave textual reviews as well, to which the author can reply. If the submission has been uploaded recently, the user can choose to Blam the submission (a vote from 0 - 1) or Protect the submission (a vote from 2 - 5). Submissions will be deleted if they fall below the following scores after each amount of votes:[2]

  • 100 votes: 1.0
  • 150 votes: 1.25
  • 200 votes: 1.6

Voting on submissions regularly and depositing experience (10 points earned for voting on 5 submissions in a day) increases the voting power a user carries. For example, a level 35 user's vote is worth 7.65 votes. This power is further increased by successfully voting on submissions during the judgement period. Protecting a submission that passes judgement earns protection points, whilst blamming a submission that gets blammed earns blam points.

Uploaded files must conform to certain requirements:

  • The file must have the extension: .swf
  • The file may not exceed the given capacity of 10 MB (Megabytes) except by prior agreement with the Administrators - a size that used to be far smaller but has been increasing in line with increasing bandwidth and tolerance for download times.
  • Basic quality guidelines are in place - disallowing 'pictures in a slide show format with no interactivity', 'movies or games made from public .FLA files', 'photographs that are illegal' and so on. If these are not met, the submission will be 'whistled' by users.

Authors self-rate submissions for each of these categories: Nudity, Violence, Audio, Text and Adult themes (None, Mild, Excessive and sometimes Explicit depending if it is text or not). The ratings are:

  • E (Everyone) = This Flash is suitable for viewers of all ages.
  • T (Teens) = This Flash is suitable for viewers the age of 13 or above.
  • M (Mature) = This Flash is suitable for viewers the age of 17 or above.
  • A (Adult) = This Flash is suitable for adults only (viewers the age of 18 or above).

The ratings are only intended as a guide; there is no system in place to prevent people from viewing submissions of any specific rating. The system enables the submitter to record a credit for all the audio used in the submission and links directly to any audio taken from the Newgrounds Audio Portal.

Finally, when the submission is uploaded it receives its own page on Newgrounds and undergoes 'judgment'.

To aid the production of Flash to be submitted, Newgrounds has a variety of preloaders that can be downloaded and integrated into their Flashes.

On May 27, 2009,[3] the Flash Portal underwent a large redesign, switching to a wide layout. Users that disliked the new layout have been given the option to change it via their account preferences.

[edit] Awards

When a Flash movie or game is submitted to the Flash Portal, it has the chance to win any of the following awards.

  • Daily awards:
    • Daily Feature/2nd/3rd/4th/5th: The five submissions submitted during a day that have the highest rating at the day's end are given awards and showcased on the front page.
  • Weekly awards:
    • Weekly Feature/2nd/3rd/4th/5th: The five submissions submitted during a week (which ends on Tuesday) that have the highest rating at the week's end are given awards and showcased on the front page.
    • Review Crew Pick: This award is given to the submission with the best score in reviews.
    • Underdog of the Week: This award is given to the submission with the biggest discrepancy between the review score and the popular vote.
    • Turd of the Week: This award is given to the submission with the lowest score that managed to pass judgment that week. If the file has been swapped once it has passed, it can no longer win this award.
  • Monthly awards:
    • King of The Portal: This award is given to the user with the most portal awards during the previous month. Only the Daily Feature, 2nd, and 3rd Place awards count towards becoming KOTP, with each award being worth 3, 2, and 1 point respectively. Whichever user that accumulates the most points during the month will be awarded KOTP.
    • Best of the Month: As of February 2005, the 2000 active highest-ranked (based on experience points) Newgrounds users, as well as moderators and nominees, have been able to vote for the best five submissions of the month (later updated to five movies and five games). Any submission that wins at least one of the first five awards above or is selected to appear on the front page within the month is eligible. Each of the ten winners is sent a check of $250, a certificate, a t-shirt of choice (this has recently been replaced with store credit) and stickers and often another prize that changes from month to month and is often supplied by sponsors. In the case that a prize is won by a Newgrounds-exclusive submission made by NG staff, the prize is passed onto the next winner. As of March 2009, the $250 prize has stopped in favour of revenue sharing.
  • Yearly awards (Newgrounds Tank Awards), since 2007 ([1], [2]), decided on from all the submissions in a given year by a panel of judges. Nominations consist of the top monthly winners, winners of themed contests and staff inclusions. Winners receive a heavy bronze statue featuring the Newgrounds tank logo.

[edit] Audio portal

The Audio Portal is a place where artists can submit all types of music. When an artist submits their first song an administrator or audio moderator will have to review it before it gets listed. All the music is free to use (under a BY-NC-SA 3.0 Creative Commons license [3]).

Since the 2007 redesign, the Audio Portal has become more flexible and allows artists to edit their submissions or remove them providing they haven't been used in a submission to the Flash Portal or haven't been listened to more than 3000 times.[4] Icons can also be added to audio submissions. Unlike the Flash Portal, audio submissions do not face Judgment from Users. There are also occasional contests in which money and shirts can be won. Some user-created music from the Audio Portal was used in The Behemoth's console video games Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers.

The main purpose of the Audio Portal was to prevent users from breaking copyright laws;[citation needed] users were using copyrighted songs in their submissions, thus breaking the law and running the risk of being sued. Therefore, the Audio Portal was introduced so that users could submit their own original work. Animators looking for music could pick a song from a list of many different genres ranging from Drum and Bass to Jazz, therefore all users had a good chance to get the kind of music they were looking for without breaking copyright laws.

The Audio portal was shut down three separate times early in its lifetime, and is now a permanent feature. Wade Fulp has stated that this experience had a negative impact on many audio contributing users. This incident is cited as one of the reasons Ross was hired.[citation needed] Audiences can rate songs from the audio portal and send them to other users, too.

[edit] Art portal

The Art Portal was released on June 18, 2009.[5] All art submitted to the Portal is subject to a Creative Commons license similar to that of the Audio Portal. The Art Portal is intended to be a showcase of the best art created by the Newgrounds community; users are encouraged to submit art to the Portal, which will be automatically featured in a private gallery on their userpages. Experienced and skilled artists among the community are given the 'scouting' privilege, which allows them to authorize individual users to submit their art directly to the Art Portal, and also the ability to 'scout' other artwork. The intention of this system is to keep the art featured in the Art Portal to a relatively high level of quality, as it lacks a judgement system similar to the Flash Portal. Users who have been scouted and have submitted artwork of poor quality can lose their submission privileges.

[edit] Collections

The admins of Newgrounds maintain a large group of collections of different types of submissions. Header groups such as Games or Toons are subdivided into types or years. The collections help viewers of Newgrounds navigate the website easier and find what they are looking for. For example; the Clock Crew collection contains Flash videos pertaining to the Clock Crew, a specific Flash group on Newgrounds. Series collections are also alloted to popular serial Flash, such as SharkBoy, Eskimo Bob, Retarded Animal Babies, Salad Fingers, Blockhead, and Jerry Jhonson. The admin create the collections and decide which submissions go into the collection, but viewers can vote on which collections they think a given submission should be put into, which may influence this decision.

[edit] Newgrounds Forum (BBS)

The Newgrounds Forum has a community of roughly 10,000 unique posters a day. Its community discusses a variety of popular topics in each of the 12 forum categories ranging from site related Flash submissions, to personal and off-topic discussion. The most popular section on the forum is "General" discussion which, as of July 13, 2009, houses more than 596,547 topics. The entire BBS currently contains more than 913,690 topics.[6] In the Flash or Art forum there is a far more serious and moderated discussion as the staff strongly encourages a creative community. The most registered users to ever be on the BBS at the same time was 774 (Tuesday 17th July, 2007, at 5:23 PM)[6]

Newgrounds also has nine forum mods (or moderators) to help with keeping the forums clean and spam free.

[edit] NG Store

In 2007, Newgrounds started a basic store, selling shirts and stickers of different Newgrounds series such as Pico and Tankmen. On August 19, 2008, Newgrounds launched its official store, selling more products than ever, including those made by other Newgrounds artists. Items for sale include:

  • Many T-shirts representing/displaying popular and successful artists and/or their work upon them.
  • Keychains, stickers, discs, toys, comics, posters, patches and DVDs depicting popular Flash series.

The store currently only accepts credit cards and Paypal. Store credit can also be earned from winning various contests.

[edit] In the media

  • Teletubbies: In 1998, Tom Fulp of Newgrounds created a spoof of Teletubbies called Teletubby Fun Land[7] which resulted in a law suit from the BBC.[8] This resulted in a boost of notoriety and media exposure, and the video was renamed Telebubby Fun Land.
  • Kaboom!: In mid-2002, Newgrounds received notoriety for hosting Kaboom!, a game in which the player controls an apparent Palestinian suicide bomber who kills men, women and children in Israel.[9] Despite receiving criticism and calls for its removal from the internet by congresswoman Nita Lowey, several groups including the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, and other sources, Newgrounds continued to host the game.
  • Oklahoma City Escapades: Newgrounds received more negative attention in 2004 by refusing to remove Oklahoma City Escapades from its site, which is a game that was developed by Joshua Bend, that spoofs the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.[10]
  • Jeff Weise: Jeff Weise, infamous for the Red Lake High School massacre, posted a violent animation on Newgrounds.com.[11] Its existence was discovered and reported after the massacre.
  • Adam Fulton (Livecorpse): Adam Fulton, was an animator with 100 submissions who committed suicide after a surreal series of events leading to a three day manhunt for his arrest. These events were described in a two-part suicide e-mail.[12]
  • Numa Numa Dance: Gary Brolsma first published his "Numa Numa Dance" on Newgrounds on December 6, 2004, where it has since been viewed more than 15 million times,[13] and copied onto hundreds of other websites and blogs, making it the second-most watched viral video of all time[14] (only losing out to Star Wars Kid). He has also received mainstream media coverage from Good Morning America, The Tonight Show and Best Week Ever, and, according to The New York Times, was an "unwilling and embarrassed Web celebrity."[15] On September 8, 2006, he reappeared with a professionally produced video titled "New Numa".[16] The release of the video has prompted the New Numa Contest which offers up to $45,000 in prizes. On November 14, 2007, he posted yet another Numa video on YouTube, entitled Numa Three: Crazy Loop!, this time using a song that did not have the word "Numa" in it and in English.
  • Attack of the Show! From July 5-8th 2005, Tom Fulp was a co-host on Attack of the Show! in which he would showcase and describe popular Newgrounds Flash submissions.[17]
  • The Virginia Tech Massacre media blowout: V-Tech rampage, Virginia Tech Shootout!, and others achieved fame from allegations of making fun of the Virginia Tech massacre.
  • The Torture Game 2: Newgrounds currently hosts a game in which a player tortures a lifeless rag doll-like human. The game sparked controversy, receiving short airtime on Fox News.
  • Wallace and Gromit: To promote the Wallace and Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death, Aardman Animations submitted a Wallace and Gromit mini-game on the site.
  • Thomas Briggs Arrest: Thomas Briggs (known as Sirtom93), an active user on the Newgrounds Forum informed Newgrounds in a thread how he would burn down his school with petrol and was caught and arrested after Newgrounds Admins and users collected his personal information and forwarded it to police.[18]

[edit] Events

Newgrounds hosts and participates in many events throughout the year to give users a chance to meet each other or to interact in general. Some events are organized by regulars but usually by forum moderators and site administrators.

Notable Events:

There is also a regular meetup of regulars in London. This is attended by regulars from all the United Kingdom though some people do fly from as far as the USA to attend. At the 4th Meetup, over 70 Newgrounds members attended, including several Newgrounds staff members and Tom Fulp.

The year 2009 has shown an explosion of member generated meets. Planned meets for 2009:

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Cheltenham Township Business Directory". January 2007. http://www.cheltenhamtownship.org/businessdirectory/business_dir.htm#N. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  2. ^ "Newgrounds FAQ". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/lit/faq/. Retrieved on 2009-04-03. 
  3. ^ Fulp, Tom (2009-05-26). "Wide Layout". http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1064304. Retrieved on 2009-05-28. 
  4. ^ Fulp, Tom (2007-09-28). "User Reviews, Audio Tools, Rankings". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/784696. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  5. ^ "Art Portal!?". Newgrounds. 2009-06-18. http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1072217. Retrieved on 2009-06-19. 
  6. ^ a b "NG BBS". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  7. ^ Fulp, Tom (1998). "Teletubby Fun Land". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  8. ^ Fulp, Tom (1999-08-03). "First NG Battle - NG vs. BBC". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/lit/bbc.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  9. ^ Park, Michael Y. (2002-05-08). "Videogame Enrages Israeli Supporters". Fox News Channel. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,52268,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  10. ^ J.D. Mullane (2005-02-10). "Ticking off the heartland from Falls". Bucks County Courier Times. Calkins Media. Archived from the original on 2005-08-29. http://web.archive.org/web/20050829055200/http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/219-02102005-447793.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  11. ^ Davey, Monica; Jodi Wilgoren (2005-03-24). "Signs of Danger Were Missed in a Troubled Teenager's Life". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/national/24shoot.html?ex=1269320400&en=abb21f547fa16dd7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  12. ^ Fulp, Tom (2004-06-16). "LiveCorpse Suicide". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/139349. Retrieved on 2009-03-26. 
  13. ^ Brolsma, Gary (2004-12-06). "Numa Numa Dance". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/206373. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  14. ^ "Star Wars Kid is top viral video". BBC News. 2006-11-27. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6187554.stm. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  15. ^ Feuer, Alan; Jason George (2005-02-26). "Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/nyregion/26video.html. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  16. ^ Brolsma, Gary (2006-09-08). "New Numa". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/337573. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  17. ^ Fulp, Tom (2005-06-20). "G4 Co-Hosting!". Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic.php?id=292044. Retrieved on 2008-11-20. 
  18. ^ Grimmer, Dan (2009-03-19). "How I foiled school attack". Evening News. http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=ENOnline&category=NewsSplash&tBrand=ENOnline&tCategory=NewsSplash&itemid=NOED19%20Mar%202009%2008%3A52%3A47%3A223. Retrieved on 2009-03-19. 

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrounds"
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