Hello everyone. Sorry I'm late, but I hope you had a Merry Christmas time, and a Happy New Year! I hope 2025 will be a much better year for you all...
As for me? Well... so far, things aren't looking any better. For one thing, my Twitter account still struggles to gain any traction. I've been stuck at barely over 100 followers there for well over a month now, and straight after losing over a third of them as a result of a massive bot purge too. The algorithm there does not smile in my favour... And to think I've been on there over a year now? Not a nice way to end 2024...
More importantly, my Newgrounds situation is still just as bad as ever. There's no algorithm to speak of on this website, and since I am STILL unscouted, nobody here will see any of the artworks I worked hard on drawing unless they are already following me, or by sheer coincidence.
I tried my hand at animations and video games, thinking that might attract some new people due to those portals not employing the scouting system (as worked for my friend @raphaelcarrard). Alas, nobody outside of my own dwindling audience cared, and no new fans were made...
Sure, I have quite a lot of fans on DeviantArt, but it's dangerous to have all eggs in one basket. When DeviantArt dies, which is quite possible with their staff's obsession with AI against the wishes of its users, then what little legacy I have dies with it. UNLESS I am able to establish myself outside of that one website.
I think I'm going to have to finally summon the courage to ask the Newgrounds staff if I can have my scoutability restored, because it's definitely been over a year now (a whole year with none of my art being available on the Art Portal). I just need one last check, from one of you guys, to confirm that there is STILL no option to scout me when you visit one of my art posts. Because if there isn't, then the information I received about unscoutability only lasting a few months was a LIE, and the only way I'm ever going to resolve this issue is by getting in touch with staff...
Best of luck!
Gekkotsuki
May I know how did you get descouted/pruned, and who told you that "it only lasts a few months"?
(I'm just asking this from my curiosity - as if it's not obvious enough already, I don't form part of the Newgrounds Moderation Team, so I can't help you with this case in any way, but I'm still interested into knowing what exactly happened.)
LiquidFreakStudios
Hi!
I first noticed I had seemingly been removed from the Art Portal in August 2023 when a strange error message started showing up when I clicked on my "Art Scouts": https://liquidfreakstudios.newgrounds.com/news/post/1381288
Never had I received any kind of notification from the staff or their bot that I had been descouted, so to this day I have no idea why (when I checked the page of the user who scouted me, his scouts were seemingly inaccessible too, so it is possible I was pruned for this reason). Later I noticed when submitting art that the system would tell me that my post wouldn't show up in the Art Portal because I was not scouted, confirming that I had in fact been descouted for whatever reason.
Things got even stranger when friends of mine told me that there was no longer even an option to scout me, meaning that not only was I descouted, but now totally unscoutable too. This really killed my motivation to share my art here, and has continued to affect my mental health while using this website ever since. Nonetheless, I tried to convince myself it was just a temporary problem, and I even read somewhere that it was just a form of temporary shadow ban, and that scoutability status would eventually be reset. I think it was this forum post here: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1518520
When friends confirmed that my scoutability had not been restored when 2024 arrived, basically ruining my New Years optimism, I decided to continue posting to this site anyway, hoping that maybe I'd just have to wait a full year rather than a partial one. Alas, now that 2025 has come and I'm still unscoutable (as far as I'm aware), it seems that the scoutability resetting was misinformation, and that the only way I'm going to resolve this problem is by contacting someone from the staff. I'm not going to ask them to have me scouted again, but I just want to be scoutABLE again, because I didn't do anything wrong to deserve this!
(Ah, okay... yeah, I guess I'd better contact somebody from the moderation team pretty soon)