Changes: Flash Portal

Revision as of 03:39, 23 February 2018

The Flash Portal is the page where Registered Users can submit Flash files to Newgrounds. On this page, viewers can see their .swf files, view them, and vote on them as they go through Judgment. After Judgment, those which survive are viewable on this page. It has a search box to search an author's or flash's name, then various lists of recent and notable Flash. Displaying Flash submissions has always been the primary function of the site, so despite its growth and branching out into art and audio, the Flash Portal remains the most important page after the Main Page.

Brief History

The Newgrounds portal was once manually updated by Tom Fulp. In 2000, Newgrounds.com initiated the automated system, which is now in place today. The Flash Portal is a system on Newgrounds that allows any registered member to upload an Adobe Flash movie or game for any one to see, rate and review. It is the cornerstone of Newgrounds and the feature that has drawn many users to Newgrounds since its inception in 1999.

The Current Page

The modern Flash Portal page can be divided into several sections. Below the main Newgrounds banner is an image of several popular Newgrounds mascots, known as The Gang; links to other parts of Newgrounds related to the Portal; a key to the rest of the page and a button through which one may submit a Flash movie or game.

The majority of the Flash Portal page is occupied by three a column list of movies and games:

The Latest Submissions List

This list on the left displays the 50 most recently submitted Flash files, with the most recent on top. Movies have a small film icon next to them and games have a controller icon. Many of these submissions are also color coded based on their score. Purple submissions are under judgment, and have not yet been blammed or protected. Red submissions, which are rarely seen, are on the verge of death, and are almost always blammed. After judgment, most submissions remain uncolored. However, a submission with a score of over 3/5, which constitutes Green submissions are great score, will be colored green, while a Blue Submissions are awesome score of over 3.6/5 will be colored blue. Below this list is a section called NG Alphas, which is currently not in operation.

Best of the Week

The list in the middle, which displays the fifteen submissions that got the highest scores during the last Wednesday to Tuesday period. Below that list, the winners of several awards are displayed. The Review Crew Pick, Underdog of the Week, Turd of the Week, Obituaries, and the King of the Portal are included. The number of submitted and blammed flashes are also shown. At the bottom of the column, previous winners of the Daily Feature and Weekly Users' Choice awards from the same day or week over the past five years is shown.

Best of All Time

The third column is dominated by the Best of All Time list. This list displays the current fifty highest scoring Flashes in Newgrounds history. Unlike the other lists, this one is fairly stable, and some submissions stay on it for years. However, recent very popular submissions tend to jump to the top of the list for a while because their average score is influenced by Stat Whores as they go through Judgement.

The Best of All Time is only updated once a day, which means that, for example, the movie in our caption, Empty Space jumped into the top 50 and stayed there for the day, even though people had voted it down to less than 4/5 by the time this screen capture was taken, still showing the score it had at the beginning of the day. Since some voters can deliberately vote down any submission they deem unfit to be on the list, it can mean that a movie can be "zero bombed" by users all day trying to vote it down, so that it ends up with a score below normal.

Best for today — This movie jumped up to the B.O.A.Time for one day, months after submission,

At the bottom of the column, there are several links to interviews with popular Newgrounds authors. However, these links have not been updated since 2006. The very bottom of the page includes an additional Portal search bar and several additional links.

Judgment

When a Flash submission is first submitted to the Portal, it goes through the Judgment stage. During this time, users can vote on movies a voting scale of 0-5. If the voter votes 0 to 1, they will get a blam point if the submission gets "blammed", or voted to be deleted. If it is given an overall score of 2 or higher, and the flash is "protected", that is, chosen to remain on Newgrounds, the voters who voted 2 or higher will get a protection point. If the score of a flash is under a certain threshold at the time it reaches a number of votes it will be blammed:

The Obituaries, in the middle of the Flash Portal Page.

100 votes: Under 1.0
150 votes: Under 1.25
200 votes: Under 1.60

These thresholds, especially the final one, are often referred to as the Blam Threshold.

If the submission is deleted during Judgment, or at any time, a record of the submission, along with any reviews it had, will remain in its place in the Obituaries Flash Portal Page The Skull Picture

Submission regulation

Submissions can also be whistled (marked for administrative view). When a submission is whistled, the whistler will receive whistle points if it is deleted by an administrator. If the submission is cleared, the whistler will lose a large number of their whistle points. There are three simple rules submissions must follow, or they will be whistled:

The Flash can absolutely not be stolen or submitted by another person other than the original creator, even with permission.
The Flash can not contain any pop-up windows or have links to malicious websites or files.
The Flash can not contain racism, hardcore pornography/child pornography, or contains anything illegal.

Two Extra Rules

For a couple of years, two rules were added to the submission page. The first stated:

"if your submission has a long and fancy introduction, followed by crap, we will probably delete it."

This first rule seemed to be a response to spam crews and other Portal spammers (like the Kitty Krew), who often use overly complicated preloaders and intros to give a misleading first impression to low-quality movies, hoping people would vote before seeing the poor quality.

The second stated:

"If your submission or collaboration includes pointless "screamers" that make a lot of noise and startle people, we will probably delete it."

The second rule was a response to the fashion for producing movies with a quiet beginning, leading to a sudden 'scream', which, as Tom Fulp has said, was funny once, but is boring now. However, some time during 2010, these two rules dissappeared from the Rules of Submission entirely.

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 ===The Latest Submissions List===
-This list on the left displays the 50 most recently submitted Flash files, with the most recent on top. Movies have a small film icon next to them and games have a controller icon. Many of these submissions are also color coded based on their score. Purple submissions are under judgment, and have not yet been blammed or protected. Red submissions, which are rarely seen, are on the verge of death, and are almost always blammed. After judgment, most submissions remain uncolored. However, a submission with a score of over 3/5, which constitutes a "Great" score, will be colored green, while a submission with the "Awesome" score of over 3.6/5 will be colored blue. Below this list is a section called ''NG Alphas'', which is currently not in operation.
+This list on the left displays the 50 most recently submitted Flash files, with the most recent on top. Movies have a small film icon next to them and games have a controller icon. Many of these submissions are also color coded based on their score. Purple submissions are under judgment, and have not yet been blammed or protected. Red submissions, which are rarely seen, are on the verge of death, and are almost always blammed. After judgment, most submissions remain uncolored. However, a submission with a score of over 3/5, which constitutes Green submissions are great score, will be colored green, while a Blue Submissions are awesome score of over 3.6/5 will be colored blue. Below this list is a section called ''NG Alphas'', which is currently not in operation.
 ===Best of the Week===