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See List Of Newgrounds Groups for information on the groups, crews and rivalries within the Newgrounds community. Newgrounds is a Website created in 1995 that hosts Macromedia Flash Animations and Game s. It was created and is currently owned by '''Tom Fulp''', who is assisted by his brother ('''Wade Fulp'''), and is also helped by '''liljim''', an administrator living in England. '''Tim''', Tom's former roommate, also assists in running the site. This site allows its users to submit their own Flash movies, games, and Music , and view submissions from other users. Over the years Newgrounds has grown significantly, and must rely on the cooperation of its visitors. Visitors are encouraged to review the submissions. A rating system produces lists that direct visitors to the most popular flash movies and allows the site designers to easily locate any material that might be considered for deletion or promotion. The site now has close to 1 million registered members and over 300,000 flash submissions. Out of those about 75,000 still exist due to the auto delete system known as "blamming". Newgrounds is partners with many other flash and media websites. DEVELOPMENT Newgrounds started as a website made by Tom Fulp, for his brother and friends. In 1995, he created a site called, New Ground Remix. The site had few interesting things, until the summer of 1996, the site's creator created two games, Assasin, and Club a Seal. There was a primitive BBS system back then, and some games created by Tom Fulp and his brother. Ever since he was a pre-teen, he created and programed his own movies and games. When he went to Drexel University , he had no way to update his website. He created Assasin 2, and Club a Seal 2 during his free-time. While he was at Drexel, he created New Ground Atomix, a new website. He created Beep Me Jesus, and Cat Dynamics for his website. When he moved into a new apartment at spring, he had connection to New Ground Remix. He combining the original Assasin and Club a Seal with their respective sequels. A bulk of traffic ignored New Ground Atomix, and strayed in New Ground Remix. Tom Fulp then started experimenting with Macromedia Flash , and created Teletubby Fun Land. In the fall of 1998 , Inside Edition wanted to write a story about Tom Fulp's game, Assasin. They later abandoned the story, but Tom Fulp wasn't discouraged. To get a domain name, he changed, merged his sites together, and created Newgrounds with an increase in cost due to hosting fees. The next year, he was in a crisis. He had to put banner ads in his site to pay off the hosting fees, that made him pay $1,000 each month. Fortunately, Troma helped pay for the hosting fees. Tom Fulp then created Pico out of Flash 3. He was satisfied with flash, and used it to create many games later on. At the year 2000, he created a nav-bar so people can easily view his site. People started emailing their flash work, and Tom Fulp had to see it, and manually put in on his site. Because of this, he told his friend Ross to work on an automated flash portal. Later that year, they finally created the famous portal, and the site grew even more popular. His site was now getting stable, and now he started earning profits from his site. He also created the BBS that year. During 2001, he updated his site, and created lots of flash work. At 2002, he and Dan Paladin, (currently the member of The Behemoth ) created Alien Hominid . He created more flash during the year, and at 2003, he added the audio portal. By 2005, his site was runnning smoothly, and at 2006, he updated the NG logo. Other then that recently Tom Fulp's recent portal game "Dad and Me" was made to promote the popular newgrounds game Alien Hominid. The portal game Dad and Me was nominated for the most popular web game in the IGF 'Game Developers conference" and won the award with much popularity. VOTING SYSTEM As both a means to gauge the quality of content and to filter out poor submissions, all submitted flash are subject to a vote which both members and non-members can participate in (members have the ability to have their votes weighed more; see "Voting Power" below). The flash submissions are rated on a scale from 0 to 5. After a flash is submitted, it is considered "Under Judgement" and must pass three checkpoints (based on the number of users who have voted) to survive. It must have at least a rating of 1.0 at the first checkpoint (100 votes), 1.25 at the second checkpoint (150 votes), and 1.6 at the third checkpoint (200 votes), otherwise the flash is permanently removed in a process called, "blamming." A blammed flash can no longer be seen by users, however, a listing is kept at a page called the "[http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/obituaries.php Newgrounds Graveyard " (also known as the "Obituaries"). There, the removed flash's reviews, author's comments, and score at the time of removal remain visible. Experience and levels There are two ways of increasing the worth of one's vote (known as "Voting Power"). The primary method is to gain "levels" by accumulating "experience points" (also known as "Grounds Gold"). Members may gain 10 experience points per day by voting on 5 different flash movies or games in the Flash Portal. There are 30 levels within Newgrounds with progressively increasing requirements in terms of experience. The level requirements and range of levels 1 through 8 remain the same: 50 experience points to reach the next level. The requirement for level 30 is equivalent to the experience points of the user (or users, in the event of a tie) with the highest amount of experience. Levels 9 through 30 expand to even out the experience point differential between 9 and 30. Because they are variable, their requirements and range cannot be accurately given. 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 (see here for both the icons and experience requirements for each level). Levels influence one's voting power in the Portal and to indicate amount of experience. Thus higher levels do often command respect. Certain levels also unlock secret flash and options. These secrets are not allowed to be discussed at all, as stated by the BBS rules. Blam/protect system The other method of gaining voting power is by accumulating "blams" and "saves" (also called "protects"). This system is often referred to as the "blam/protect" system. Existing primarily to encourage voters to vote on movies under judgement (thereby streamlining the process), users are given points based on whether or not their votes on flash under judgement reflect the flash's ultimate fate. Thus, if a user votes a two or higher on a flash that survives, the user is awarded a "save" or "protect point" and if a user votes a zero or 1 on a flash that is removed, the user is awarded a "blam point." Votes which are contrary to the flash's outcome award no points. While blams and saves are tallied independently, only their total is relevant to one's "rank," a title given to a user on their profile which also determines by what percentage their voting power is increased. For example, a "civilian" (a user with less than 100 combined blams and saves) receives no bonus to his or her voting power, however, an "Elite Guard Supreme Commander" (a user with more than 30,000 combined blams and saves) receives a 60% bonus. Each rank is also accompanied by another icon, a badge/insignia, however, unlike the level icon, this icon is only visible on a user's profile. See here for a more detailed explanation and a link to a list of ranks, icons, and statistics. In order to prevent Group Think and attempts to game the system, a submission's score and reviews are not shown while it is under judgement. Also, users who uniformly vote zero or five on flash under judgement are often detected and punished by having their accounts erased. REVIEWS Only members are able to post reviews for submissions; however, any visitor to the site is allowed to view past reviews of any surviving flash in the portal. Although Newgrounds encourages users to give only constructive feedback, reviews which feature unrelated advertising, spam, or outright verbal abuse sometimes appear. To help control this, users can indicate whether they felt that a review was helpful, not helpful, or abusive. Reviews which garner a number of votes indicating them as abusive are directed to the attention of certain members called "review mods" who sort through them and punish the reviewers with temporary bans from reviewing, and, occasionally, deletion of all their reviews (including reviews that were not marked). Members who 'flag' abusive reviews are rewarded by a whistle icon (found in their profile), which ranges from 'normal' to 'deity' in accordance to how often they do so. In order to prevent abuse of this system, however, users are unable to see their exact score. Those who do 'flag' inappropriately are rewarded with a 'garbage' whistle, which can rectified with good behavior. Contrary to popular belief, multiple users can obtain the 'deity' whistle, and he/she sets the benchmark for the gold whistle. The popularity of the system has elicited a number of members to post links, found on a thread in the forums, to places where such reviews can be found. Oftentimes, people will rate violence a 10 on flash clips that have no violence in them; whenever a user give a stupendous rating on them. PORTAL AWARDS When a movie or game is submitted to the Flash Portal, it has the chance to win any of the following awards:
Notes: One must have at least 30 reviews that week to win an award that involves calculating the review score as well, such as the Underdog or Review Crew Pick awards. Weekly awards are awarded on Wednesdays. FRONT PAGE ICONS 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 Psycho_Goldfish, a remake of a popular Apple II game called Taipan. Over the years, 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. The rate at which these icons 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 Newgrounds admins, as were the short text descriptions (The same process used for the collections pages), but this proved to be extremely time consuming and soon users were given the ability to attach their own icons with their submissions, and write their own brief descriptions. In January of 2005 the front page archive was launched, keeping a month-by-month list of flash content that was deemed worth 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. SITE MASCOTS Besides Pico, the unofficial mascot of NG, there are P-bot and A-bot, each respectively the mascot of their own portal (P-bot being the Flash Portal Mascot and A-bot being the Audio Portal Mascot) and both appearing on their own pages. The bots were originally designed by Andrew Dickman years ago. He was commissioned to design them for the site at the time (the original design can be viewed here ). Since then, the two mascots have been redesigned by MindChamber , a popular NG artist. According to the P-bot's NG profile , they have been with the site for 6 years now. The P-bot alerts you of your Flash submissions' status by email; whenever you submit, whenever your flash is blammed and on a weekly basis if you permit so. There is also a G-bot (Grounds Bot), but there's no image of it. Email notifications for lost password, Newgrounds account creation etc are sent from G-bot. G-bot is also seen on the NG BBS for the BBS rules and the sticky section for the Flash and Audio section. NEWGROUNDS ORIGINALS Tom Fulp has submitted several movies and games to Newgrounds. These are referred to as ''Newgrounds Originals''. His work includes:
COLLABORATIONS Another popular activity on Newgrounds is the ''collab''—various Animator s, Artist s and Programmer s collaborating on a single Movie or Game . It began with group works by the Clock Crew and flourished when the Newgrounds Time Trials sparked a more general interest among authors. Collaborations are a great way for artists to work together and get to know each other. They are also a great way for up-and-coming artists to get in the spotlight with the bigshots. Currently there are a lot of collaborations based on songs, with each participating author animating one or more line each, because of the huge amount of collabs being started at the same time and Spamming the Newgrounds Flash Forum some members took it upon themselves to create the website NGCollabs where people with a batting average (average score of their Flash submissions) of lower than 3.00 could start collaborations. DAILY COLLECTIONS Daily collections existed between 2004 and 2005 . The collections were headed by the user "Coolboyman". They were written, created, and submitted to Newgrounds within the course of one day. Due to the short timeframe, the majority of the included animations are of poor quality, featuring little (if any) animation and for the most part, Speech To Voice Synthesis used for voices. Each collection features from four to five animations, typically with each cartoon produced by a single animator. These collections are generally themed. Most of them are based on TV shows, mainly sitcoms, Anime productions, and kids' shows. Certain collections are based after people, while others have been based on movies, cartoon characters, and video games. The collections have been taken up by the user, "Mr. Show" in early 2006; 8 months since a daily collection has been submitted. However, these collaborations are higher in quality. After a short test run two new collections lampooning The Daily Show and Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends , "Mr. Show" announced that it would be best for the collections to resume in the summer and that he would be glad to continue them. CRITICISM showing Newgrounds with a "red" rating]] Spyware Around 2004, people began to complain that Newgrounds.com had been adding Spyware , such as 180 Solutions to certain webpages.
Newgrounds also has certain content on their site that is sponsored by Zango which must be installed in order to be viewed. Though after installation, it still asks for Zango if you uninstall it. The trade off is that you get access to content that Newgrounds could not afford to offer if Zango did not sponsor it. Pop-up advertising Newgrounds is a free service, transferring an estimated 4 to 7 TB daily. This is funded only by advertising revenue. This includes Banner Adverts and Pop-up Advertising . Those who dislike pop-up advertising could have them blocked using The Browser or Add-on Software . However, to use the site, users would have to configure an exception for Newgrounds because the flash files themselves will appear in a new popup window. Linking to an item on Newgrounds can only be made to a launch page, where the reader has to find and click on a ''Watch this movie'' button. Clicking this button spawns a pop-up window showing the flash file. Users cannot link directly to a page with the flash file without the Interstitial launch page. Most or all popups on Newgrounds are blocked when logged into a Grounds Gold Account. SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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