It has now been over two years since I came to Newgrounds, and if I thought less than a month was a big change, I should have waited until the two-year mark! And as in those days, my biggest recent change seems to be a return, at last, to video games. In 2007 it was simply playing Zelda again after two and a half years or so of mental, spiritual, and political decline, blamed on WWE fandom but possibly more rightfully attributed to the malady of the teenager: sure, I blamed McMahon for my ruin at the time, but as I rebuilt my life I realized that teenage rebellion, not professional wrestling, was my downfall. Now, with my personal world being once more set right, I return to the old games not crawling on hands and knees but triumphantly, not as a beggar pleading for a return to his old life but as a man asking simply for his old recreation. Almost everything is back as it should be.

As before, I say almost because no perfection exists on Earth. Something is not as it should be, and that something is once again the Flash Portal. Since the decline of spam which began just before my arrival, a decline which I foolishly cheered on, the Flash Portal has declined immeasurably in some intangible way. There's far fewer submissions than I remember, a smaller percentage of them are from recognizable artists, and the quality of all of them? Down the drain. Maybe the spammers, by going against the expectations of 12-year-old boys who desire DBZ ripoffs in the form of Mario/Sonic crossovers and Family Guy set to video game characters (the second of which, at least, is a complete bastardization of the games and makes me wish Egoraptor would lose his drawing hand in an accident involving gay bondage), actually formed a vital part of Newgrounds: the controversy the caused somehow kept this site "going", and without the controversy it "stopped". Or more likely their disappearance was just a sign of NG's decline and not a cause. Either way, something is missing here, and there's some connection between the lost activity and the loss of well-done, infuriating spam. And by "well-done", I mean it stays in the Portal for more than five minutes because the author doesn't turn around and fileswap with hardcore gay porn, and then gets a 10-page minimum total of posts on the BBS complaining about it that doesn't get deleted.

Of course, the admins' handling of the issue didn't help this state of affairs (the inactive Portal, mind you, not the lack of spam). I'm not going to focus on the featured game of the week taking up that all-too-prominent spot on the front page, practically guaranteeing whoever sucked Tom's dick the hardest Weekly 1st and even a period as All-Time #1. I'm not going to place too much attention on the side banner ads on the front page either, because I can actually see a reason for them, even if it sucks to have them when there's supposed to be side parts to a theme there (Tom could have at least waited until now, after he took down the Halloween decorations). No, this too relates to spam, and I mean the manner Wade dealt with it. He must have thought that by quietly deleting it he'd make the rule-breaking that all to often comes with the spam go away without damaging the overall Portal activity, but no. The one time I can remember where NG had a chance to slow down the spam on its own, the one time Wade actually showed a sign of doing what was probably the best idea for tackling spammers (as later shown) was right here, on the BBS. If you don't understand what I mean, I'll spell it out for you: "quietly deleting" the spammers makes it safe to savewhore. If I were Wade, I'd have made the community do its own cleanup, focusing on the actual rulebreaking and occasionally making a thread in General showing movies that, by all counts, should never have passed, mostly made up of movies that managed to pass Judgment but dipped below a certain score threshold, most likely 1.00.

The way Wade handled it made it safe to savewhore but unsafe to spam, meaning spammers, instead of figuring out ways to make their spam interesting (it's sad that I have to go back to the 2008 re-release of a 2007 Kberkag movie to find funny spam), had nothing left to lose and could be as chaotic as they wanted. The good spammers mostly got tired (though if he didn't fileswap so much, one more recent spammer would impress me greatly, he has a pretty good sense of humor for a spammer when he's not phishing Kirby fans), the bad ones, especially one in particular, were the only ones left, and the Portal descended to its current state. That's just the way things are.

But that's not the way they have to be.

As bad as things look at any point, something god may make it through the night. The sun can rise again. The sun will rise again. My anti-spam position was misguided, to say the least, and the Petition, if you can call it that, became a subject of jokes (including one I'd like to see re-released this Christmas in its own two-year anniversary, if you're listening, KB), but it's time I make things right, or about as right as they can be. This is my dedication: to end the night, to help NG grow as a website and a community in any way I can. I will not leave again until I see the rising sun!

Oh, and there's at least one spammer(/ex-spammer?) out there who was around back when I was anti-spam instead of simply pro-Newgrounds. If he, or maybe it's "they", remember me from those days: no, this is NOT the Surrender of SoulMaster71. "Right" usually means fair voting, so if your movies suck, I still support giving them zeroes. The particular spammer I have in mind is far from "sucking", in fact he's amazing, but this is just giving him a heads-up. Also, this may mean I'm going to start making Flash. How does a Flash remake of ET for the Atari 2600 sound?

Well, that's it. May rule-breaking Flashes ever be flagged by your Whistle, may those accounts used to harass you forever end up deleted or locked, and may the users of the Portal smile forever on your legitimate Flash submissions. Until next time...
SoulMaster out!