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Newgrounds Type Private Founded July 6, 1995 Headquarters Glenside and Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania, United States Key people Tom Fulp: Founder & CEO Wade Fulp: Administrator & Public Relations Rob Rosenbaum & James Holloway: 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

Tom Fulp Born Tom Fulp April 30, 1978 (1978-04-30) (age 31) Perkasie, Pennsylvania Nationality American Occupation Founder, Webmaster, and Administrator of Newgrounds, Video game programmer, and co-owner of The Behemoth. Spouse(s) April Fulp (m. 2007–present) «start: (2007)»"Marriage: April Fulp to Newgrounds" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrounds)[1] Children 1

Newgrounds is an American website headquartered in Glenside, Pennsylvania.^[2] Created in 1995, the site primarily hosts Adobe Flash animations and games, but also features a music oriented page, along with 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, as it was the first website in history to produce a fully automated user-generated content system.

Tom Fulp

Tom Fulp (born April 30, 1978) is a Flash programmer, co-owner of the video game company The Behemoth,^[3] and the creator and administrator of Newgrounds.^[4] He co-created the Flash game (which later became a console game) Alien Hominid, and the console game Castle Crashers.^[5]

Family

Tom's brother, Wade Fulp, is in charge of administration on Newgrounds, and handles a lot of user issues. Tom married April Fulp on May 12, 2007,^[1] and his son was born on March 25, 2009.^[6][7]

Front page

The home page of Newgrounds displays recent submissions chosen by administrators as a special showcase of their favorites. On April 21, 2003 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 quality submissions the "Tom and Wade Recommend" section grew from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, and 4 to 6 icons. As of 2009, there are 36 icons on the home page; 12 for Flash animations, 12 for games, 4 for music and 8 for art. 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 moderators, as were the long Flash 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 12, 2004 the home page archive was launched, keeping a month-by-month list of Flash content that was deemed to be worthy of display on the Newgrounds homepage. This includes either those who performed well in the daily awards, or simply those the admin deemed worthy.

On June 27, 2006, the Icon Helpers system was launched for Newgrounds volunteers to make and submit icons for newer flash content that was lacking an icon, making the integration to automated collections pages much more effective. On a few occasions, while maintenance has been performed on the site, the home page has been replaced by an "under construction" page showing the Newgrounds tank picture being welded by a programming crew. The image is accompanied by a message describing the work done, such as that displayed during the major update that occurred in July 2007, July 2009 and 21 October 2009 "IN UR TANK, UPGRADING UR SERVERZ :3".

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:^[8]

• 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 judgment period. Protecting a submission that passes judgment 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 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,^[9] 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.

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, 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.

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 [1]).

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.^[12] 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.

Art portal

The Art Portal was launched on June 18, 2009.^[13] 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 judgment system similar to the Flash Portal. Users who have been scouted and have submitted artwork of poor quality can lose their submission privileges. Users can vote on the art, creating an average score for the artwork, but this does not accrue experience, unlike voting on animation submissions.

A team of moderators oversees the scouting tree, pruning users who manage to take advantage of the system. If a user were to be removed from the tree, anyone who was recursively scouted in his branch would also be removed. This system was unique to image portals at the time of its inception and is the first known instance of such a system.

Attack

On September 6, 2009, the Art Portal was vandalized. A spam group phished the Newgrounds account of an animator known as Egoraptor, by linking to a website using vv instead of w in the URL. They used Egoraptor's account to un-scout every artist who was able to submit art to the portal. They then proceeded to fill the portal with offensive images. The damage has since been repaired and most of the users affected have been re-scouted. There were no news posts on the front page announcing the vandalism.^[14]

Collections

The admins of Newgrounds maintain a group of collections of submissions. General 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 Lock Legion collection contains Flash videos pertaining to the Lock Legion, a specific group on Newgrounds. Series collections are also allotted to popular serial Flash, such as Eskimo Bob, Retarded Animal Babies, Neurotically Yours, Salad Fingers, Blockhead, Jerry Jackson and Pico. The admins 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 has made recent moves to move to a user run Genre system for organizing flash, though this system is still in a data-collection phase.

Newgrounds Forum (BBS)

The Newgrounds Forum has a community of roughly 7,000 unique postings a day. Its community discusses a topics in 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 February 10, 2010, houses more than 621,000 topics. The entire BBS currently contains more than 958,000 topics.^[15] 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 (July 17, 2007, at 5:23 PM).^[15]

Newgrounds also has a fluctuating number of forum mods to help with keeping the forums clean and free from abuse.

The forums are often used to run competitions and community projects. Competitions are generally held for Art, Music, and Writing on monthly basis by an assortment of administrators, moderators, and regular users. Prizes are funded by Newgrounds and have generally been cash, store credit or hardware. In a more unofficial capacity, the NG News forums have been annually used to give away Wacom Tablets to artists who could not afford them otherwise, but have contributed promising art over the last year. These prizes have enabled or motivated many artists to contribute to the world of Flash movies, collaborate, and release hard editions of their product in online stores.

NG Store

Initially, Newgrounds sold stickers and other merchandise through a watered down version of today's store and cafepress. In 2007, Newgrounds started a basic store that was hosted completely on site, 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 or displaying popular and successful artists 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. Store credit can also be earned from winning various contests.

It has become more common in recent history for the community to collaborate and sell anthology style works in the store. Prime examples of this are the Newgrounds calendar and artist discs.

Charity

Since the Newgrounds API was released and users were allowed to split their earnings between authors, users have been donating a portion of their earnings to charities by creating and sharing accounts which resemble the names of the charities for donating. This began in 2009, when a user, ForNoReason, took it upon himself to organize flash artists.^[16]

• The Yellow Ribbon Fund supports injured service men and their families.^[17]

• Breast Cancer Awareness supports awareness and research for the cure of breast cancer.^[18]

• CARE was introduced in the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.^[19]

In the media

• Teletubbies: In 1998, Tom Fulp of Newgrounds created a spoof of Teletubbies called Teletubby Fun Land^[20] which resulted in a law suit from the BBC.^[21] 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.^[22] Despite receiving criticism and calls for its removal from the internet by congresswoman Nita Lowey, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, and other groups, 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.^[23]
• Jeff Weise: Jeff Weise, infamous for the Red Lake High School massacre, posted a violent animation on Newgrounds.com.^[24] 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.^[25]
• 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,^[26] and copied onto hundreds of other websites and blogs, making it the second-most watched viral video of all time^[27] (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."^[28] On September 8, 2006, he reappeared with a professionally produced video titled "New Numa".^[29] 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 5–8, 2005, Tom Fulp was a co-host on Attack of the Show!; he would showcase and describe popular Newgrounds Flash submissions.^[30]
• 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 BBS informed Newgrounds in a thread how he would burn down his school with petrol and was caught and arrested after Administrators and users collected his personal information and forwarded it to the local police. The newspaper in Sirtom's area did not mention Newgrounds by name, which annoyed many users.^[31][32]

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)
• NG Sketchbook Tour (2008)
• Montreal NG Meet-up (2008)
• Montreal NG Meet-up (2009)
• London NG Meet-up (2009)
• New York City Meet-up (2010)
• Big Apple Con
• Comic Con 2008

References

External links

• Newgrounds
• Wikigrounds- The Newgrounds Wiki