More and more, I find deviantART staff getting stupider and stupider. It makes me question whether or not they even bother to look at deviations that are marked as "inappropriate" or if they just have a quick select where they are shown only the title of the deviation and the artist, and they then select everything and just hit "remove".

It started months ago when deviantART decided that my most popular and one of my oldest deviations, [link] , was actually violating some form of a copyright. I got DA staff to put it back, but it lost all of its favs. Thousands of favs were lost from that crap. For the unaware, the wallpaper I linked uses artwork created by a friend of mine, *funkyalien. He gave me his permission to use his art and even provided me with a high quality, white background version.

Shortly after this, a number of "removals" hit friends of mine, in particular =shadowoflight01 and =angelskully. I will admit, one of =shadowoflight01's was bad and shouldn't have been on DA, so she deserved that. However, she had another one removed on the grounds of sexual content which, quite frankly, I see nothing wrong with. Here is a copy of it found on HentaiFoundry (Note, HentaiFoundry itself is NSFW): [link]

As for the piece done by =angelskully, it was a Sasuke/Sakura piece, one that I felt was done in good taste and again had nothing wrong with it. It was just Sasuke sitting chest deep in a hot spring with a towel on his head, while Sakura came up from behind him and wrapped her arms around him. There is no sexuality in it, there is no showing of naughty bits. It was just... removed. Here is a resubmit she sent in of it, in case it stays up: [link]

And it happens everywhere. I know it does. People get their stuff removed all the time because of this reason, stuff that has no reason to be removed. Why do they remove it, though? It's because of how their policy works. Basically, if a picture uses characters that are underage or that are from something designed for people underage and has sexual content in it, it's not allowed. They even define what they consider as "sexual content", which you can find here: FAQ #565: You prohibit the submission of 'pornographic imagery'; what do you consider this to be?

However, they either don't follow it themselves, or they don't properly review content that is being deemed unfit for deviantART.

What's even more stupid about the situation is that there is a LOT of content on deviantART that does far worse than some things I've seen drawn, yet it remains on deviantART. What is this stuff you ask? A lot of artistic nude photos. While according to the sexual content policy they does not break anything, and while they do use models over 18, some of them are unfit to be considered art.

I'm now going to bring up the most blatent example of the artistic nude problem that I can find on deviantART:

`Pelicanh (And I so know that this guy might actually see this journal thanks to his making a comment in Angel's journal, but I consider that a good thing.)

Now, I will admit right now that he has a good deal of photos that are fine. However, the problem lies in a single type of photo he takes, which he submits quite often: The close-up of a woman's vagoo (Thank you Least I Could Do for that word). This isn't something that has only happened once or twice. If you go through his gallery you will find several of these pictures strewn about. In the first 360 deviations (upon the time of writing this) I found 13 cases of this problem. I also found, while performing this check, a photo of lactating breasts that I couldn't believe is even allowed on DA.

And obviously, this problem gets worse as you go in.

What do you think DA staff did about this? That's right, they made him a Senior Member. Instead of removing a single thing that caused a problem, they made him something between a regular member and a mod itself. They put him in a position that basically said "Yea, we're just gonna let you submit what you want. You won't get in trouble for it." What the hell?

And I know there are other artistic nude photographers out there that do this, and it's sickening. There's no form of "art" coming out of these photos, it's just cheap pornography!

Something needs to give. Something needs to change. It's about time that deviantART staff starts reviewing stuff properly, stops removing deviations which are perfectly fine, and starts to look into their own policies and change things, because the way it is now is no damn good. Enough is enough!

- Skye