this, guys, is a mail an artist i work with, received some time ago from hentai foundry :(






"I'm sending this email to inform the community of a large and unfortunate change that the site will be undergoing. As I'm sure some of you may be aware; the depiction of underage looking characters in artwork has always been a grey-zone and there have even been cases brought to court over such content. This has lead to several sites being forced to tighten up their "allowed material", and now it's time for us to do the same.

If the site was still small, I would probably just say "fuck it" and shut the whole thing down rather than start censoring content. However, HF has grown too large to do that, and I don't want the tens of thousands of artists with hundreds of thousands of submissions to suffer over a minority of the content.

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce, effective immediately, all art and story submissions featuring characters that are (or appear to be) underage will be removed from Hentai-Foundry. In addition, future submissions containing such content to be against our Terms of Service and will be met with rejection and deletion. This policy change also results in the removal of the Lolicon and Shotacon content labels and all submissions tagged with them. You will continue to be able to view your own submissions for a short time to allow people to backup their own content (but you should already have your own backups anyway).

For the authors here, I suggestASSTR.org as an alternative. For the artists, I don't really have a great alternative, but there must be sites that specialize in this type of content.

At Hentai Foundry we prided ourselves on being a community opened to all forms of art, so no one is more troubled by this turn of events than us staff - as we are now required to halt an entire genre from appearing on the site. Yet protecting the site and its members takes precedence. The threat of underage art possibly being viewed as child pornography is becoming all too real.

No members will be penalized for the removal of this content from their galleries, although it is important to understand that future submissions featuring underage content will be met with penalties by those ignoring the policy change or attempting to sneak it in. Repeated offenders will of course face disciplinary action including and leading up to being banned.

Understand that this policy affects appearance, so fictional canon has no say on this matter. If a character LOOKS underage, even if they're over 18 in their universe, then the content is against our terms and will be removed. A submission featuring a character that visually possesses the traits of a minor, despite any efforts at flavor text stating an older age, will be treated as an underage submission. We trust our community members that if they look at a submission and ask themselves "Does this look underage?" they'll be able to make the right judgement call.

We understand that this new policy, especially the appearance aspect, is harsh and we definitely do not take pride in enforcing it. We simply have no choice at this point in time if we wish to remain a stable and safe site for our members and guests alike.

We hope someday to be able to make the site truly uncensored and open to all content. Unfortunately, until the problematic old conservatively minded politicians around the world retire and are replaced by a new generation of more progressive thinkers and the anti-porn feminists & religious fundamentalists that businesses and politicians fear become irrelevant, full artistic freedom can not exist.

We hope you'll continue to use Hentai-Foundry. We don't want to lose any of you. Thank you very much for reading."











=> so here we go, one of the biggest community of artist, censored the loli and shota stuff :(

oh man, this is ... i have no word for that :(

so thats it ? no more loli in the futur ? i can expect to see ex hentai shut down in 1 week, because of loli and shota stuff ?

ow man :'(

It is too bad, but I wouldn't worry quite that much yet. The internet's a pretty big place, and exhentai in particular is behind its finicky login wall for a reason.

One thing happens to stand out to me though; how can he say that the site prides it's self to be "open to all kinds of art" when they are have the most insanely arbitrary QC standards I've ever seen. I've seen artists with some really good artwork complaining that they always get a generic "anatomy problems" rejections.

Like this one: mdetector5.deviantart.com...-Hentai-Foundry-373238949

Some amount of quality control is nice to keep out the junk that makes your eyes bleed, but that site takes it to an illogical extreme. Either they are setting the bar to "perfect" or using 'anatomy errors' as a shorthand for "not fond of your particular style, so fuck you".

I am finding that I am more hopeful that this might spark someone to make a new, more open site as an alternative to Hentai Foundry than I am sad that Hentai Foundry is forbidding a specific genre on their already restrictive site.

To be fair that guy is insanely delusional if he thinks his art is just plagued by "minor errors."

As for loli/shota b&, I want to say "good" but compliance with the rules before they're written just means they're going to reach even farther if/when they are.

The key is that a lot of this stuff is flat-out illegal in first-world countries that aren't America or Japan (and in America only barely, because "Free Speech Coalition v Ashcroft" means prosecutors can't roll with anti-loli laws on the books), so once a site gets big enough they're basically stuck either putting it way behind a wall like e-hentai, or banning it, or otherwise hiding it through blacklists like here, or "free registration" walls like lu.scio.us

Perhaps.. but then, being given generic rejections and no feedback on what to improve can cause a person to get defensive. The specific piece highlighted in the journal though is not bad. It can be nitpicked in many areas, but then, so can almost any drawing if you want to get anal about it.

There were more, and some better examples of the arbitrary rejection thing, but it's been a while since I saw them and trying to google them is not giving me any results because newer complaints from people who really are terrible at drawing are taking up the high spots on the results.

Nah, it's pretty clearly below HF's standards. I've got enough reasons to dislike/not use HF (mostly its community,) but neither this or the "no obvious 10 year olds" rule seem like valid ones. If someone wants to make HF2 - Now with worse pics and loli, too! they're obviously free to try. Hell, it's probably be pretty successful if they managed not to go full-on dA tier stupid with how they handle NSFW. The landscape of the internet's changed enough in the last few years that image hosting sites can get made and blow up pretty fast now; it's not like HF is some unstoppable black hole that prevents the sites these people want from attracting members.

Old news, the loli ban. They were pressured by a german 'child protect' organisation (paid with donations and tax money)

They should have just moved hosting outside Germany. Then again its only a matter of time before we to have to start removing it to. Might be in weeks, months, years.. who knows. But eventually laws will be made against it.

The liberalization of popular fantasies like unjustifiable violence while unpopular fantasies like child abuse continue to be restricted is really a ridiculous double-standard.

People keep forgetting that we don't live in the future. Like we (in the US, at least) tend to think of the culture back in the 50s as intolerant or close-minded and as something we've moved past, but the people who grew up in that culture are the ones actually making our laws and handling a lot of money today. That culture is very much alive and, despite all our technological advancement, it's going to be several generations before old-fashioned thinking dies out of the political system. There are other voices now, and their influence is how we get what seem like double standards, but a lot of people are growing up taught restrictive thinking. The worst thing to do would be to act like it's just a bunch of nobodies raving, because that's how you wind up in jail for running a website. It's better to be preemptive than jailed when it comes to stuff like this.

It's not that easy. If you think about it logically then no one comes to harm with loli/shota drawn pictures. It's not like there is a victim like with child pornography. But they are scared that this will lead to these cases and mindsets that if one is okay, the other one is as well. They don't trust people in understanding the difference. It's on the level of video games and FPS getting blamed whenever some kid runs around shoting people, but on a larger scale.

Almost everyone I know either sees it that way for loli/shota with a decent percentage even extending it to all anime. Once I had one of my friends say to me he would feel bad watching anime at all because he'd feel like a pedophile. And he meant normal anime running in japan on daily television, not R-18 Stuff. He's normally a very open minded person and quite intelligent but his opinion on the matter was just very different.

Personally I am known to my friends as someone who watches a lot of anime and even hentai. I try to stay away from loli stuff as far as possible though. It's questionable content at best and illegal in my country anyway. Japan has a completly different mindset (and laws) and they could counter every loli-ban with freedom of speech. Other countries weren't so lucky, with one translator in Sweden even getting arrested because he was translating loli Mangas. If I remember correctly, he was even doing it for work (could be wrong though).

Laws in most countries are made for the stupidest of people and that is really the only way it can be done. There're always some people that will suffer because of it but that's just the way it (sadly) is. I don't think there's anyone out there that will openly fight a law like that. It would be political suicide to ask for legalizing "virtual child pornography" (as it is called in these countries). It might be a generation problem like TakyonH is saying, but I doubt it. It is not like Japan is slowly getting more accepted here over time - Japan is getting pressured hard by other countries to change their laws.

I want to close with a comment from one of my favourite comedians, George Carlin. It might be a funny quote, but it nevertheless is and always will be true - no matter in which time we live.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

Basically, welcome to a world where people know what a slippery slope fallacy is but never acknowledge that they're pulling one.

Pretty much full agreement here.

I don't even get off to loli, I just really really really like cute things and lolis tend to be cute to nearly silly degrees.

You're pretty much agreeing with me, though. People are being raised on values that cause them to shut their ears and go LALALALALA whenever certain topics (not just this one) are brought up. That obviously isn't going to stop for a long time; it's so ingrained that it seems like it's part of human nature but I don't really think it is, given that the spread of what gets LALALA'd is different depending on what country you look in and that it changes over time. Think of stuff like weed. Discussing legal protection of it used to be impossible for a serious politician for the same reason as it is now for this stuff, and that was definitely the hand of the older generation rather than any natural reflex against something. Drawn porn altogether is obviously not as mainstream as weed so it'll take even more time before people are willing to talk about it. It's not just loli that's at risk; a lot of hypnosis stuff could get banned too. Drawn stuff should really never be illegal unless it's obviously breaking one of the necessary freedom of speech clauses (whatever the artistic equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater would be.) The argument that it incites people to actually do horrible things doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but the stuff being discussed is still too taboo for people to reconsider the standing opinion on it.


You write stories about high school girls, you disgusting sick-o! ( :3 ) That'd get lumped in with loli bans if they were actually legally obligated to "root it out" or whatever. It's not just the obvious stuff that's at risk, is the thing. I could give a shit if loli went away and we could be done with it, but I don't want to have to jump through hoops to get my hypnosis and furry on either, and those could plausibly come under attack from rape/bestiality standpoints. THAT is why I don't like sites making this banning shit seem like it's an acceptable norm.

Obviously, it's drawing lolis. ( :3 )


It wouldn't be hard to make them college age. Vampire roommate's characters are college age, and Tea Club could easily be retconned if necessary. Not that I'm going to do that because this is still bullshit. :P

This contributes nothing, but I'm with Dreamshade on the "lolis are cute" thing. Hypnotized lolis are even cuter.