Hey folks, someone referred me here to share this recent story...
Basically, I'm used to being accosted by overzealous powertripping admins on FA, since a majority of my art is not of the graphical furry porn variety, and everyone there with an ounce of power seems to want to enforce their own interpretation of FA's content policy. I've had probably half a dozen submissions deleted for falling into vague wording holes in the AUP despite being technically allowed, and banned twice for contesting them (FA admins don't like being told they're wrong, who knew?).
Now, I have a very long-standing policy of my own, of marking all of my submissions as mature, regardless of the content thereof. Most of my work on FA is adult in nature, and I use this primarily as a means of protecting myself from unregistered users and my more general artistic works showing up in searches on a furry porn site, and to keep minors from finding my gallery and watching me, as I do post adult material and journals frequently. This has never been an issue before, but today a particular FA admin, CerberusNL, took notice of one and decided he must immediately do something about this inexcusable violation of THE LAW.
Or, I'm sure that's what it sounded like in his head. In practice, what he did was post a condescending comment on my piece, criticizing it for being still life photography, but commending me as if I were a child for putting some artistic thought into it, in what basically amounted to 'I guess I'll let this slide since there's an exception in the policy for things of artistic nature... and oh by the way this shouldn't be marked as mature, so change it.' His wording was fairly offensive, and I was about to the point of ignoring it and leaving it be, except a few minutes later he replied to his own comment with "well then I guess I'll have to do it." and edited my submission to change the maturity rating.
I hid his comments so they wouldn't detract from the rest of the discussion there, changed it back, and noted him, explaining that I didn't appreciate his attitude, his comments were devoid of intellectual merit and thus hidden, and that I was perfectly aware of the ambiguous wording of the AUP, and how there was nothing wrong with marking generally safe submissions with higher maturity ratings since it didn't undermine the rules, the intent of which was to prevent the opposite. He replied, and in so many words and in his own condescending way
conceded that I was correct about the purpose and intent of the AUP, but then insisted I had to change the rating on it anyway, writing, and I quote: "No if's or but's, rules are rules, they apply to every single user on FA. If you do not feel like cooperating, then don't expect us to lenient[sic]."* I looked briefly through his own gallery, and saw that 'every user on FA' doesn't apply to him, though, because if we're going to be uncompromisingly strict about the letter of the law, some images depicting full or partial nudity in his own gallery were in violation by being marked general.
So I changed it. Instead, however, of changing the rating on my work, I simply changed the work, adding enough obscenity to the image watermark and description to warrant a mature rating, and updated the description accordingly, explaining the change and apologizing to viewers who may be turned off by it.
In retaliation, CerberusNL slapped me with a 7-day ban.
You are being suspended for 7 days for failure to comply to admin instructions, and blatant disrespect in a re-uploaded submission and in notes.
So there you have it, ban #3. It's not so much the ban that frustrates me at this point, but that there's still no way of reporting abuse or having any of these things corrected, due to the complete lack of responsible and mature people on the FA staff to appeal to. I used to be able to just approach a more intelligent and level-headed staff member and have them overturn things like this, but now it's all just a mass of rampant cronyism and collective narcissism.
* I recovered this snipped because I quoted it to a friend in IM. The rest was all deleted, or is in my notes which I don't have access to now, so I can't quote verbatim.