Newgrounds submissions are voted upon in a scale of 0 to 5. The old voting bar for Flash submissions featured Pico's faces as visual indicators.
Voting is a very important part of Newgrounds. Hundreds of thousands of people come onto Newgrounds to view things and play games. Of these, thousands of them vote. To registered users, voting is often a very important part of their Newgrounds activities. Some of the most experienced Users on the site vote for experience points, but they rarely post on the forums, review submissions or do anything else on the site.
Automated Voting System[]
The modern incarnation of the Flash Portal, as established in 2000, was the first automated voting system ever made for a website. It is designed to determine which submissions should be allowed to stay on Newgrounds based on the votes of Newgrounds users. Lowly scored submissions are deleted, recorded in the "obituaries" with a collection of reviews. In this sense, this means that, unlike many other websites, Newgrounds users have a lot of control of the website's content.
In its first form, the 2000 system had the following thresholds, in order to "pass judgment," a submission had to have a certain score after a certain number of votes.
- After 100 votes, the score must be at least 1.0/5.
- After 150 votes, the score must be at least 1.25/5.
- After 200 votes, the score must be at least 1.6/5.
This final threshold is the one usually refered to as the Blam Threshold.
After passing all three points, the submission is permanently kept on Newgrounds, regardless of future voting.
2012 Update[]
In 2012 when the Flash portal was updated to accept HTML5 and MP4, WMV, FLV, ect. formats, it caused the portal to be flooded with new submissions of those file types in addition to the already current flow of SWF files. As a result, in 2013 the now "classic" portal was extended from a unit of 50 displayed submissions to 75 and a new dynamic Blam Threshold was introduced:
- 50 Votes: BLAM if 1 or below. SAVE if 3.00 or above.
- 100 Votes: BLAM if 1.5 or below. SAVE if 2.50 or above.
- 150 Votes: BLAM if 1.75 or below. SAVE otherwise.
Increasing the power of a user's vote[]
A user's voting power is determined by two factors: Experience points and Blam/Protect points.
Experience Points[]
In the words of the Newgrounds FAQ:
- Much like a traditional role playing game, registered users may acquire experience points and gain levels resulting in higher status.
- The best reason to gain experience points is added weight to your votes. Users with an abundance of points will have the strength of multiple voters, meaning they can hurt the movies they hate and help the movies they love. We make the assumption that anyone who visits the site daily will have a better idea of what good content is, so frequent visitors have more influence over the rankings. Remember, you must be logged in for your voting power to be augmented!
For every Flash submissions a user votes on, they receive two experience points towards their next level. However, users can only work towards 10 experience points a day. In other words, if a user votes on four submissions on one day and on another submission on the second day, their votes won't contribute to any more experience points until the third day.
There are 60 levels within Newgrounds with progressively increasing requirements in terms of experience. To illustrate a user's level, an icon of a weapon is shown on each member's profile and below their names on each of their BBS posts.
Blam and Protect Points[]
Blam and Protect Points can be gained by voting for submissions under judgement. Created in order to encourage voting on recent submissions, Blam and Protect points are given to a user voting in line with the submission's ultimate fate. Therefore, giving a 0 or 1 to a submission that's ultimately blammed grants one Blam point, while giving a score from 2 to 5 to a submission that passes judgement grants a Protect point. Although these two categories of points are recorded individually, only their combined total determines their rank. The higher a user's rank, the greater the user's voting power will be. Compared to experience points though, the effect of a high rank is limited: even the highest rank, "Supreme Commander," only grants a 60% boost to voting power, whereas Experience can multiply a users vote by many times that of an inexperienced voter. Unlike experience points, there is no limit to how many B/P points can be accumulated at a time.
Proportion of viewers who vote[]
The charts for the most voted upon and viewed submissions in the Flash Portal note the exponentially higher numbers for the views.
A quick survey of well-established Flash Portal submissions shows that only a minority of viewers vote upon submissions. This is particularly evident from the Flash Portal Statistics section of Newgrounds. The most viewed submission of Newgrounds history, Hentai ~ SimGirls (beta), which has over 45 million views, has less than 400,000 votes, a rate of over 100 views to a single vote. The most voted upon submission of all time, Final Fantasy A+ has about one voter for every ten viewers. In total, the top five viewed submissions on Newgrounds alone have more votes than the entire Flash Portal combined. However, submissions that are under judgement or have just passed through judgement often have much higher proportions: sometimes, over 50% of viewers will vote. This is probably because whereas submissions under judgement are candidates for users trying to get B/P points, more casual Newgrounds users who are not necessarily members, will play or view the more popular submissions on the front page and are less likely to vote. Also, it is likely that most people, apart from those rooting regularly for a submission, only vote once, or a few times, however often they view a submission.
The Subject of Voting in Newgrounds Culture[]
Whilst thousands of casual viewers pass through Newgrounds just to view the odd movie and play the odd game, and care little for votes and scores, amongst the regular members scores and the voting that gets those scores can be very important and is talked about everywhere from various fora in the BBS to submissions. Various Flash Crews and other Flash authors regularly write "Vote 5!" somewhere in their movies. The Clock Crew in particular are well-known for talking as if voting 5 on Clock movies is a requirement for Clock Crew members. This concern for the power of votes is parodied in the major series Lord of the Clocks. On September 20th 2018, Tom Fulp launched a new voting and reviewing system, which is still used as of October 2024. (Link to announcement)