Newgrounds.html



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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	Flash animation hosting service
Registration	Optional
Available in	English
Current status	Active

Newgrounds is a 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. The site was created and is owned by Tom Fulp, who still oversees numerous aspects and regularly produces in-house content. Newgrounds is distinguished from other Flash websites by its automated submission and rating system.^{citation needed}

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.

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.

Flash portal

The Flash portal is utilized by Newgrounds members to submit flashes. 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 submitter can reply.

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 and Excessive).

Then the system automatically rates it as:

• All = This flash is suitable for viewers of all ages.
• Teens = This flash is suitable for viewers with an age of 13 or above.
• Mature = This flash is suitable for viewers with an age of 17 or above.
• Adult = This flash is suitable for adults only.(viewers with an age of 18 or above)

However despite ratings any user can watch every type of flash, no prohibitions are made. The system enables the submitter to record a credit for all audio used in the submission and links directly to any audio taken from the NG site.

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

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

Audio Portal

The Audio Portal is a place where amateur 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 Creative Commons license).

Since the 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.² 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 Castle Crashers.

Newgrounds Flash Collection(s)

The admin. 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 Salad Fingers and Blockhead. 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.

Newgrounds Forum (BBS)

The Newgrounds Forum has a community of roughly 5,700 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 November 16, 2008, houses more than 994,683 topics.³ In the Flash or Art forum there is a far more serious and moderated discussion as the staff strongly encourages a creative community.

newgrounds also has forum mods (or moderators)to help with keeping the furoms clean and spam free.

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, posters and patches and DVD on popular flash series.

The basic store used payment by Paypal whilst the new version currently only accepts credit cards. Although, it has been requested that Paypal returns as a way of payment.

Site redesign

On 16 July 2007, Newgrounds underwent a total redesign. The redesign process took many months to prepare and the site was down for about one and a half days to implement it. The under construction page showed the Newgrounds tank being welded by three TANKMEN characters, while text said "IN UR TANK, UPGRADING UR FEATURZ". The redesign added a number of new features, including blogs on user pages and modifications to the level and blam/protection systems.

Several system upgrades were commenced on 28 April 2008. A similar 'under construction' page was shown, this time saying "IN UR TANK, UPGRADING UR SERVERZ :3'. Further upgrades commenced on 7 May and 12 May 2008.

On Tuesday, June 3, 2008, the servers underwent maintenance. During the process, the same animation as the redesign and server upgrade was shown, under which was text saying 'IN UR TANK, MAINTAININ UR SERVERZ :3"

In the media

• Teletubbies: In 1998, Tom Fulp of Newgrounds created a spoof of Teletubbies called Teletubby Fun Land⁴ which resulted in a law suit from the BBC.⁵ This resulted in a boost of notoriety and media exposure, and the video was renamed Telebubby Fun Land.^{citation needed}
• 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.⁶ 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.⁷
• Jeff Weise: Jeff Weise, infamous for the Red Lake High School massacre, posted a violent animation on Newgrounds.com.⁸ Its existence was discovered and reported after the massacre.

• 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 14 million times,⁹ and copied onto hundreds of other websites and blogs, making it the second-most watched viral video of all time¹⁰ (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."¹¹ On September 8, 2006, he reappeared with a professionally produced video titled "New Numa".¹² 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.¹³
• 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.

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:

• NG Mod Meetup (2005)
• Comic-Con (2006)
• NG Sketchbook Tour (2006)
• NG Sketchbook Tour (2007)
• Montreal NG Meet-up (2008)
• Big Apple Con
• Comic Con 2008

References

External links

• A collection of historic Newgrounds Flashes
• Dissertation Focusing on Newgrounds
• Newgrounds BBS
• Newgrounds Collabs
• The Newgrounds Wiki
• Newgrounds Log
• Tom Fulp on MySpace
• Wade Fulp on MySpace
• Newgrounds Archive
• Tom Fulp's biography