Since we've been getting quite a few threads about this topic, and there likely will be more in the future yet, we've decided we'd make this PSA/heads up to hopefully answer all questions before they crop up.

TL;DR: Nothing will change for any already existing files, we will be keeping those around indefinitely. What will change is that we will no longer be accepting new flash files after January 2021. However in order to view flash files in the future you will likely need to download a standalone flash player projector and play the games/videos locally.

Long Answer: The death of flash is purely related to both the browser plugins as well as the continued development of the creator programs. The end user can still download the older versions just fine and use them locally, there just won't be any new updates to either of those. Since the Adobe Flash Player parts are compliant with Windows 10 they will likely continue to work natively on Windows for a decade or two at least.

How to get and use the standalone Adobe Flash Player Projector:

1.) Visit the Adobe Flash Player Debug Downloads
2.) Click "Download the Flash Player projector" and save the executable to your computer
Optional: Move the executable to a directory that you're less likely to empty on accident so you don't lose the thing
3.) Run the executable, click "File", click "Open...", select the flash file you want to start and open it.

Optional: You can set the projector as default for opening all flash files by following the below steps:
1.) Right click a flash file
2.) Select "Open With..."
2.5) If it already has an association this might change to "Choose Another App..." instead
3.) In the newly opened dialog box click "More Apps"
4.) Scroll down to "Look for another App on this PC" and click it
5.) Navigate to your Flash Player Projector executable and select it
6.) Click "Open".

All flash files should now have their icon replaced from a white rectangle to the Flash Player icon, and when double clicked directly open the file in the projector.

Finding your save files from browsers and migrate them to the standalone flash player projector:

Important information for all instructions: Flash Player saves everything in .sol files in a cached directory, if you follow the instructions below any reference to "save files" means these .sol files.

Finding your save files

Mozilla Firefox & Internet Explorer

1.) Navigate to %AppData%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\​ (simply copy the stuff in the code block and paste it into the Windows File Explorer address bar), then open the single folder you see there.
2.) Inside are all save files, sorted by "website" you played on.
-- The save files from e621.net are stored in a folder called static1.e621.net.
-- Anything you played locally in your browser(s), are located in the localhost folder.

Google Chrome

1.) Navigate to %AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Pepper Data\Shockwave Flash\WritableRoot\#SharedObjects\​ (simply copy the stuff in the code block and paste it into the Windows File Explorer address bar), then open the single folder you see there.
2.) Inside are all save files, sorted by "website" you played on.
-- The save files from e621.net are stored in a folder called static1.e621.net.
-- If you played games in Chrome after downloading them they are stored in a folder called localhost

Migrating your save files to use with the Adobe Flash Player Projector:

The Adobe Flash Player Projector will store all files in a folder at %AppData%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\​. Open the aforementioned path by copying the link in the code block into your File Explorer's address bar and open the single folder therein.

All savegames must now go into the localhost folder. Once pasted in they should show up just fine when next starting the projector.

You can use Lightspark for playing Flash/SWF files.

felix_nermix said:
You can use Lightspark for playing Flash/SWF files.

Directly from the page:

Current status
Lightspark is still in alpha state, it currently implements around 67% of the Flash APIs.

The original adobe flash player projector is perfect and should be preferred above any third party creation that may or may not actually work as expected.

felix_nermix said:
You can use Lightspark for playing Flash/SWF files.

As NMNY said, it's best to use actual Flash Player for now, as all the open source projects that are meant to replace it aren't production ready yet, and won't be for a long time.

randomguy85 said:
As NMNY said, it's best to use actual Flash Player for now, as all the open source projects that are meant to replace it aren't production ready yet, and won't be for a long time.

One thing I remember being even default in Ubuntu over 10 years ago was Gnash as this was open source alternative on offer as the OS did not ship with any closed source software or support by default, even MP3 playback required installing the restricted extras package. All I remember from that is that almost literally nothing worked and solution was always to install proper flash.

Lightspark seems to derive from Gnash. Also similar to Gnash, they seem to focus on browser plugin support and websites primarily rather than flash file compatibility and they have compatibility still for sites like speedtest which has already moved on to HTML5 ages ago.

Open source versions will definitely be required in the future for maintained security, performance, archival, etc. but as of writing this, for normal users, simply use regular flash and use files from known sources, especially as it is updated still. You'll just hinder yourself by using other solutions at this point one way or another.

I think an ideal scenario would be to try to get more users to screen-capture non-interactive Flash posts and re-upload them as webm files, if possible. Since most modern browsers support webm out-of-the-box, it would mean that the content could still be enjoyed by many users without them having to install the standalone Flash Player projector.

thuser85230558 said:
I think an ideal scenario would be to try to get more users to screen-capture non-interactive Flash posts and re-upload them as webm files

I get the feeling screen-caps would cause generation loss (data/quality loss due to conversion)

Anyone who wants to have flash support indefinitely just needs to keep an old version of their browser installed. I don't plan on updating my browser once Flash support ends.

mynameisover20charac said:
I get the feeling screen-caps would cause generation loss (data/quality loss due to conversion)

As long as the quality is acceptable and the resolution high enough I doubt very many people would care. I use screen recorders a lot and I don't usually notice very many problems when playing back video of programs I have recorded.

The quality may not be 1:1 but at least it would be better than nothing imo

thevileone said:
Anyone who wants to have flash support indefinitely just needs to keep an old version of their browser installed. I don't plan on updating my browser once Flash support ends.

That's a pretty bad idea, old browser versions tend to have a lot of security vulnerabilities. so I wouldn't recommended it unless you use it exclusively for e621 (I still use IE11 just to browse Twitter though, because fuck Twitter's "redesign")

mynameisover20charac said:
I get the feeling screen-caps would cause generation loss (data/quality loss due to conversion)

If you captured losslessly then used something like ffmpeg to convert to webm, with the right settings you'd barely tell the difference.

There's also a program called JPEXS decompiler you can use to extract video from flash files directly. You'd still need to convert to webm, but it can be useful for removing a game UI or something like that.

rlctntfr said:
If you captured losslessly then used something like ffmpeg to convert to webm, with the right settings you'd barely tell the difference.

Converting what is generally a vector graphics format to a basic video is a terrible idea. A massive flash content website from back in the day whose name currently escapes me did just that - several years ago.
They are now stuck with medium resolution at best (which was 'high resolution' back then) videos of what would have otherwise been scalable to whatever resolution the viewer wanted, and they ended up converting some interactive media as well, ruining what interactivity it had.

IMO if you are to add a converted video of a flash file, do so as an optional download and leave the original file intact for future access by those willing/able to still do so.

rlctntfr said:
If you captured losslessly then used something like ffmpeg to convert to webm, with the right settings you'd barely tell the difference.

There's also a program called JPEXS decompiler you can use to extract video from flash files directly. You'd still need to convert to webm, but it can be useful for removing a game UI or something like that.

Pretty much this.
Only problem I see with screencaps is framerates. You might not be able to match the original framerate and depending on your machine, you can end up with frame drops which then are at the end encode.

Newgrounds Swivel gets rid of this issue and has lossless AVI capture (just need to use -c:v rawvideo with ffmmpeg input file for it to work), just make sure that the capture is set to same resolution flash originally was to avoid scaling artifacting with bitmaps.

Best approach with newer flash files which are essentially just a video is definitely use decompilers. Altough do take note that some artists use flash to insert e.g. watermarks on their work, so overlaying those with video encoding is nice thing to do.

wharrgarbl said:
Converting what is generally a vector graphics format to a basic video is a terrible idea. A massive flash content website from back in the day whose name currently escapes me did just that - several years ago.
They are now stuck with medium resolution at best (which was 'high resolution' back then) videos of what would have otherwise been scalable to whatever resolution the viewer wanted, and they ended up converting some interactive media as well, ruining what interactivity it had.

IMO if you are to add a converted video of a flash file, do so as an optional download and leave the original file intact for future access by those willing/able to still do so.

Last several years I haven't seen proper vector using flash files at all, but they were really essentially what was flash 10-20 years ago.
This is also why telling how to convert flash files is pain, because no single flash file is same as other, they can be done with almost any way or contain almost any files. Many users are having problems even knowing if flash is using vectors or bitmaps.

With vectors I have been instructing those converting them into videos to either use double the original or 1080p. Because even mobile phones these days have 1080p so when original vector flash file was sharp as hell, converting it with same resolution to video now it's blurry with video being upscaled by the player.

This is also why with e621 the ruling is that we do accept filetype conversions with animations, however original is the one we want the most and conversions should be set as child posts to original. Additionally I'm trying to enforce that quality of the conversions is of really high quality so we aren't getting blurry messes with screencap UI showing and framerates being slideshow.

高一学生表示看不懂（doge）

你们这个网站换头像的地方在哪儿呀？
Where is your website changing its Avatar？
高一的塑料英语瑟瑟发抖
（我只是随便找个帖子进来问问……）

huron said:
高一学生表示看不懂（doge）

huron said:
你们这个网站换头像的地方在哪儿呀？
Where is your website changing its Avatar？
高一的塑料英语瑟瑟发抖
（我只是随便找个帖子进来问问……）

On any post, press Set as avatar on left side panel.

gattonero2001 said:
It appears the standalone will not be available after the EOL.

I guess that makes sense, because normies are still downloading the goddamn android APK to install on their phones.

gattonero2001 said:
Does that change anything about e621's approach to the issue?

Not really, no.

OK, so what can we do? It's dead fileformat that's being buried by its creator. We are already on stance that we won't delete old uploads and still accept new uploads even if format is deprecated. Do you have some kind of suggestion how else to approach the situation? Are we somehow accountable when the files are not directly viewable by viewer?

gattonero2001 said:
If you don't mind the question, why keep the old uploads and accept new ones if nobody can access them? Or perhaps it can be done and I misunderstood the situation?

There will likely be a 3rd party player people can use if there isn't already. There will also likely be people who will distribute the last functional version to others. In other words, the reason to keep the old uploads is in hopes that there will be way to access them in the future.

nromrore said:
There will likely be a 3rd party player people can use if there isn't already.

There isn't much progress on that front unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be enough demand for an open-source emulator or something for Flash Player at present.

I know Newgrounds is already using an alternative front-end for the playback of Flash so at least that's something. But the time-bomb thing is worrying - are all Flash player installations going to bricked starting 2021? Is there going to be any sort of viable workaround for this? Will we have to distribute cracked version of Adobe Flash with the time-bomb removed or something? The future is pretty uncertain.

Long story short, Adobe are dicks.

gattonero2001 said:
I'm not a tech savvy person, so I can't really contribute substantially to the discussion. I guess I was just hoping there would be a way to save the site's content, but if that's not possible, it's perfectly understandable.

That's what I'm asking: What is there to save? The content will not alter at all in any way in future, the bits stay identical.
Or are you saying that MS-DOS games are dead and not saved, because nobody uses MS-DOS anymore?

thuser85230558 said:
I know Newgrounds is already using an alternative front-end for the playback of Flash so at least that's something. But the time-bomb thing is worrying - are all Flash player installations going to bricked starting 2021? Is there going to be any sort of viable workaround for this? Will we have to distribute cracked version of Adobe Flash with the time-bomb removed or something? The future is pretty uncertain.

Long story short, Adobe are dicks.

I'm just more and more baffled on how people see this situation.

Flash is browser plugin and browsers like chrome will have it included with installation, so of course that means in future that the support for the plugin will not be available and with chrome there won't be flash in new updates at all.
However Adobe Animate CC will continue to exsist and be used by fuckloads of people. Projector is freeware standalone software, what is there to crack?

Also Adobe isn't dick, they just made a frankensteins monster and haven't been able to kill it before this.

gattonero2001 said:
The standalone projector has to be cracked because there is a time bomb in the code. The time bomb was put there by Adobe to prevent the use of the standalone projector after the EOL. I'm not sure how Adobe Animate is relevant to the discussion, though.

Where did you get this whole time bomb deal?

means Flash player plugins specifically, because for regular end users, that is the software they are meant to use and the block is mostly about browser manufacturers full on disabling the plugin support which flash relies on.

Also it is kinda relevant as Adobe Animate CC is Adobe Flash new name and it will install Flash projector for your machine so you can preview the content you are making with Animate CC or have exported in flash format in past.

Adobe Animate CC is Adobe Flash (remember the old memes of people asking how to do flash and the answer was flash?) just rebranded for animators (so on paper it's not flash, even though it's literally flash), which is the software to make Flash animations and will continue exsisting in future as well.
Flash player is browser plugin which is used to view flash content on webpages.
Flash projector is standalone flash player used for debugging and handling local files with Adobe Animate. This can also be downloaded by standalone application, meaning it cannot be automatically nuked or updated, so they would've needed to plant this "time bomb" into all and every version they have released ever.

mairo said:
That's what I'm asking: What is there to save? The content will not alter at all in any way in future, the bits stay identical.

Websites and media don't last forever, and any content that they may have may not be mirrored anywhere else and wind up being lost time, regardless of whether its a Flash file or an MS-DOS disk or whatever. That's why preservation efforts like Flashpoint exist, to archive online games that run on Flash so that they aren't lost forever when their hosts disappear (which a lot probably will once the cutoff date passes). I'm aware that at least one file from e621 is already in the project, and the entire thing is over 220GiB large at present (mostly games and various shit like that).

The standalone flash projector is a bit of a hassle to use, but I recently found out that the K-Lite Codec Pack appears to support flash files. It can even handle interactive flash, at least the mouse-click ones, I'm not sure how it'd handle keyboard inputs.

Call me naiive, but there's something I don't get; why is Flash being so arbitrarily declared obsolete anyway? It clearly won't stop being used anytime soon.

pc_genie said:
Call me naiive, but there's something I don't get; why is Flash being so arbitrarily declared obsolete anyway? It clearly won't stop being used anytime soon.

It's long outlived its usefulness as a browser plugin, so the only reason to have it is if you have preexisting legacy content. No new content should use it. Developers can be a stubborn bunch though (I know, I am one), and they like to stick with things as long as it works for their needs, regardless of other problems it may cause, so declaring it obsolete discourages its use and gets more people to move to more modern alternatives. It won't be completely 100% stopped, but over time more sites and people will have to move away from it (and there's various reasons to, including security and mobile battery life).

It should be noted that Adobe plans to remove any download links related to Flash from their website when Flash gets discontinued, so while the Flash Projector will keep working for the forseeable future, it won't be available from any official source past December 31st, 2020.

stupid questions, maybe already asked...
but why not migrate to HTML5?

akarisu said:
stupid questions, maybe already asked...
but why not migrate to HTML5?

Literally about to ask just this. Thinking about doing a couple small web games, but I'm not about to learn a platform that should have been dead a decade ago! Plus it looks like Chrome is about to cut Flash support completely in December which I feel will be the final nail in its coffin. Are there any other plans to support interactive content or will this become solely an image/video platform (with the ability to download swf files) come 2021?

The issues with html5 were mentioned in forum #270886.

But this thread wasn't so much about not wanting to migrate to modern formats, it's about still being able to access existing Flash content. It would be a huge undertaking, if even possible at all, to convert all flash posts to a newer format even if the site did support it.

fifteen said:
It should be noted that Adobe plans to remove any download links related to Flash from their website when Flash gets discontinued, so while the Flash Projector will keep working for the forseeable future, it won't be available from any official source past December 31st, 2020.

In truth, this is probably the most distressing thing about all this. Merely ending browser support isn't what Adobe is interested in. If they could, they'd wipe Flash off the entire internet. Even when used offline. Needless to say, we should probably start an underground network of distributing standalone Flash projectors before it's too late.

fifteen said:
It should be noted that Adobe plans to remove any download links related to Flash from their website when Flash gets discontinued, so while the Flash Projector will keep working for the forseeable future, it won't be available from any official source past December 31st, 2020.

They've already started.
You can no longer get older versions of Flash from the official site.
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html

good news everyone!

https://lightspark.github.io/

akarisu said:
good news everyone!

https://lightspark.github.io/

Lightspark and Gnash has been around for decades. Reason for these projects are that you can utilize these software without relying on closed source software. So stuff like Gnash was included with Ubuntu by default because of that reason and to get adobe flash and formats like MP3 to work, you had to install the package for support of closed source software and codecs.

But the only reason why these projects exsist is because of them being open source implementations, if you have no trouble with closed source, just use Adobe Flash in future as well, especially if you are using it for older flash files which are made to work with adobe flash specifically.

Additionally as browsers are phasing out the plugin support overall and are keeping it partially alive for flash specifically, I would imagine that once flash is officially gone the browsers will not bother keeping support alive. Chrome already dropped NPAPI ages ago and PPAPI is said to deprecated in start of next year. Firefox and Safari already stopped supporting NPAPI and are literally keeping it alive for flash alone.

Maybe swf2js could be used if a web browser doesn't support flash? Apparently Bandai Namco uses it for their website.

It should be noted that flash movies are often vector art, and any sort of screencapture will convert them into raster art and therefore remove their innate ability to scale cleanly.
In the case where flash is simply used as a wrapper for a video file, rather than screen-capturing the video, it's much cleaner to extract the video directly using something like https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler

googlipod said:
Maybe swf2js could be used if a web browser doesn't support flash? Apparently Bandai Namco uses it for their website.

I tried to run that on my local machine, and it took 3 whole minutes to load a 15MB game and even then it didn't load any further than the loading screen

The website says that it's still in beta and a long time away from finishing, so I don't really think they can release a stable version in 45 days or so

Although projects like gnash and lightspark aren't perfect, they still do work reasonably well for a majority of cases. Are there any plans to get an open source flash player implementation compiled to WebAssembly so they can be served alongside flash content for end user convenience?

Ruffle! use Ruffle! it was created by the people from NewGrounds and it's meant to replace Flash as a stand alone plug-in for firefox based browsers and it already support most APIs

killswitch activated.

f

attempted to use ruffle as a chrome extension, but it breaks on all files embedded by e6. tried checking homestuck with it too and it's just blank white.

edit: CompileError: WebAssembly.instantiateStreaming(): Wasm code generation disallowed by embedder
i'm guessing there's a setting within the website that disables ruffle from doing what it needs to do.

standalone projector has glitchy movie clip rendering on linux (displaced rainbow boxes), but otherwise runs

edit 2:
the standalone projector built for windows works fine on wine

Is there any way to support Flash on the site like WebM is supported?

thuser85230558 said:
Websites and media don't last forever, and any content that they may have may not be mirrored anywhere else and wind up being lost time, regardless of whether its a Flash file or an MS-DOS disk or whatever. That's why preservation efforts like Flashpoint exist, to archive online games that run on Flash so that they aren't lost forever when their hosts disappear (which a lot probably will once the cutoff date passes). I'm aware that at least one file from e621 is already in the project, and the entire thing is over 220GiB large at present (mostly games and various shit like that).

Flashpoint ALSO has all of the major flash versions with it! All without timebombs like the current ones have

twitch said:
It should be noted that flash movies are often vector art, and any sort of screencapture will convert them into raster art and therefore remove their innate ability to scale cleanly.
In the case where flash is simply used as a wrapper for a video file, rather than screen-capturing the video, it's much cleaner to extract the video directly using something like https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler

I can say with confidence that last several years, almost none of the flash files use vector assets anymore, most of them are either JPGs or FLVs, which is why so many later stuff are so visually compressed and huge bloated files.
Additionally as for those flash files which are vectorized, I usually convert them by doubling the flash own set project resolution which should include more of the detail when viewed on modern display resolutions, but you are correct that you are inherintly losing detail in the process so also hosting originals is good idea. Also as reminder, the flash which is now rebranded as animate CC, also exports video primarily, even though the animations are vectorized still, so in that sense we aren't losing detail in future as the export is no longer vectors, even though they technically were.

gattonero2001 said:
Is there any way to support Flash on the site like WebM is supported?

I will continue to be amazed of people needing to use flash directly from website when there are so easy solution to play them on standalone client instead, which is so much better from all aspects excluding the small inconvinience to need to download the file.

yousankmybattleship said:
In truth, this is probably the most distressing thing about all this. Merely ending browser support isn't what Adobe is interested in. If they could, they'd wipe Flash off the entire internet. Even when used offline. Needless to say, we should probably start an underground network of distributing standalone Flash projectors before it's too late.

They can't wipe it currently from what flashpoint uses. Those files have no timebombs. It includes the last version of flash player without a time bomb. Version 32.0.0.363

To address all of your concerns for this, here's an alternative to play flash player files while waiting for ruffle to be fully developed:

This will involve downloading the latest and last flashplayer projector builds (Not needing to be installed) to run .swf files

Here are steps you can use to get the last flashplayer builds without timebombs. (Note that this solution will require you to download the sfw and play them off your computer)

1. Download and install flashpoint infinity: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/

2. to go where you extracted flashpoint: Flashpoint 9.0 Infinity\FPSoftware\Flash
and all your flash player files are here! The only thing changed with these is that they use something called FlashpointProxy.

Flashpoint proxy is fully open source here: https://github.com/FlashpointProject/FlashpointProxy
What it does is described here: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/How_Flashpoint_Works
YOU WILL NEED THE FLASHPOINT PROXY FILE IN THE SAME FOLDER AS THE FLASH PLAYER FILES FOR THEM TO WORK!

3. MAKE BACKUPS! Windows might remove these somehow in an update! We never know!

4.

Taken from the main post:

"Optional: You can set the projector as default for opening all flash files by following the below steps:
1.) Right click a flash file
2.) Select "Open With..."
2.5) If it already has an association this might change to "Choose Another App..." instead
3.) In the newly opened dialog box click "More Apps"
4.) Scroll down to "Look for another App on this PC" and click it
5.) Go in your flash folder and select "flashplayer_32_sa.exe"
6.) Click "Open"."

5. Enjoy using flash without timebombs!

Let me know if you have questions and I will try and update this accordingly

mairo said:
I will continue to be amazed of people needing to use flash directly from website when there are so easy solution to play them on standalone client instead, which is so much better from all aspects excluding the small inconvinience to need to download the file.

Except for the flash 64bit plugin on browsers which is faster but that's probably gone forever :( Its a shame the flash projector was never made 64bit. Its only 32bit

mairo said:
I will continue to be amazed of people needing to use flash directly from website when there are so easy solution to play them on standalone client instead, which is so much better from all aspects excluding the small inconvinience to need to download the file.

Some devices cannot download the file at all.

gattonero2001 said:
Some devices cannot download the file at all.

If you have extension support on your browser then you will just need to wait for ruffle to be developed I guess

Let me know if you have questions and I will try and update this accordingly

Does the projector currently offered by Adobe (in the same page as the regular versions) include a timebomb? I was under the impression that only the regular versions had timebombs and I already downloaded the "official" projector.

galaxyman74 said:
If you have extension support on your browser then you will just need to wait for ruffle to be developed I guess

Apparently, Ruffle will be available for me, according to their website. Thanks for the tip

Another possible option to implement is the Ruffle Flash Emulator, the Internet Archive is using it to emulate flash for it's archived game & animation content.

https://ruffle.rs/

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

I was also wandering over to mention Ruffle.

Related, I would be thankful for the appropriate MIME type for Web Assembly to be served for those of us already using the add-on in our local browsers. As a one-off change on the backend, it should not add any continuous maintenance to what's already present, and lets those of us who are wanting to use Ruffle use it (hopefully) without further involvement.

I see furaffinity has plans for an emulator so flash could still be used

Does e6 plan on doing something similar? Is fa going to work with e6 here?

I am on windows 7 but I still wanan dowload stuff before it goes out.

P.S common it is an easy fix if you do'nt know what to do.

So apparently, Adobe updated their EoL terms to specify that Flash player no longer read any Flash content past January 12, 2021.

3. What does Flash Player EOL mean?

After the EOL Date, Adobe does not intend to issue Flash Player updates or security patches. Therefore, Adobe will continue to prompt users to uninstall Flash Player and strongly recommends that all users immediately uninstall Flash Player.

To help secure users’ systems, Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021.

Major browser vendors will disable Flash Player from running after the EOL Date.

I get their commitment to killing the thing, but at this point it's startigng to look like damnatio memoriae.

fifteen said:
So apparently, Adobe updated their EoL terms to specify that Flash player no longer read any Flash content past January 12, 2021.

Ok, I looked into it further, here's how it works.

TL;DR, spare me the technical jargon.

From what I've tested, Flash Player in browser will completely stop working after January 12, even if you're keeping an old browser around just for Flash. The standalone Flash Projector doesn't seem to be affected, use that.

What's going to happen on January 12?

Recent Flash Player versions (Adobe are intentionally not saying when this change was made) check for the system date when the browser is launched. If the system date happens to be later than January 12 2021, it automatically activates a setting that's usually reserved for enterprises and enables an (empty by default) whitelist of URLs from which Flash content may be read.

All SWF files that do not match that whitelist will be replaced by an obnoxiously large button that redirects to https://www.adobe.com/go/fp when clicked, to remind you that "Flash is dead for realsies! >:(" or something like that, in case you were still using a long-term-support or out of date browser. With the right config, Flash Player also prints a warning in the browser console about how "AllowList blocks 'X.swf'" This applies to Chrome as well as Firefox (tested on Linux, so that's all the browsers I have) and applies to:

• SWF files that are contained within web pages (like this )
• SWF files accessed directly (like then you click on "Download" and your browser opens a full-screen .swf file from static1.e621.net (like this )
• SWF files that have been downloaded locally and are being opened through a browser (so even stuff like file:///home/Fifteen/Downloads/43cd0f38320fee7b525b810fd75611ce.swf)

All browsers have already said they would remove Flash Player support around December 31st 2020, so you already wouldn't have been able to read Flash files past that date unless you kept an outdated browser around (which people do).

What was that about a whitelist?

So the feature that's being enabled here is not new, the only thing that is is how it will automatically turn on past a certain date. In order to let enterprises deal with the death of Flash at their own pace (among other things) they decided to keep the ability to whitelist trusted URLs, and those will keep working just fine past January 12. The whitelist is specified in the mms.cfg configuration file, which is located in a bunch of different places.

If you still want to try your luck at using Flash in a browser, here are a few URL patterns you can paste in mms.cfg. Yes, AllowListUrlPattern can appear multiple times, that's fine.

# Allow all flash files from a single website, in this case the e621 server the files are hosted on.
AllowListUrlPattern = *://static1.e621.net/

# Allow this specific flash file.
AllowListUrlPattern = https://www.fenoxo.com/play/CoC_1.0.2.swf

# Allow all local files
AllowListUrlPattern = file:*

So what about the standalone Flash Player?

This is probably the question most people who are now running the official standalone player (like NotMeNotYou was reccomending at the start of the thread) are asking themselves: "Will the Flash Projector keep working?".

The Flash Projector is seemingly not affected by EnableAllowList=1, the setting Adobe are using to block content from being read after January 12 (tested both with local files and online content from e621). It is also not affected by date changes (even though it does check the date) and does not appear to "phone home" like some software often do when it comes to testing if some expiration date has come to pass. In short, there appears to be no issue with continuing to use the Flash Projector or debugger in the future to access existing Flash content, the update highlighted in my post above was only concerning the use of Flash in browsers (albeit with very vague and misleading wording).

Just be sure to download the Flash Projector before January 1st, because that's when Adobe are planning to remove it from their website.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/789242675521912882/794263802408468520/f3ffd8b.jpg

Also: [link removed]

Windoz update will eventually uninstall it for everyone on 10. (for Internet Explorer)

Adobe page no longer has the download, but you can get it @ the bottom of this page:

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/installation-problems-flash-player-windows.html

xial said:
I was also wandering over to mention Ruffle.

Related, I would be thankful for the appropriate MIME type for Web Assembly to be served for those of us already using the add-on in our local browsers. As a one-off change on the backend, it should not add any continuous maintenance to what's already present, and lets those of us who are wanting to use Ruffle use it (hopefully) without further involvement.

I'm just after installing ruffle, but it doesn't seem to work on some sites, e6 included. Tested with the most recent (as of time of posting) nightly on Vivaldi (Chromium), Chrome and firefox. Chromium and chrome give ruffle error messages, nothing shows in Firefox at all. Generally works on FA.

i got the EOL message from adobe a few days ago. there was a list of questions like a mini FAQ to offer advice. but surprise surprise, the question "what if i want to keep using swf files?" was not included

fuck you adobe. i hope this move destroys you

idk about browsers and stuff but if u want the standalone and cant get it anywhere online u can just always hit up my drive link now. let me know if its stops working though.

Any chance of integrating Ruffle on the site? (a certain other site has it integrated and it works really great aside from some loading slowness)
It works surprisingly well currently despite missing effects and can even outperform the real Flash player plugin in some ways when its not briefly freezing/jittering in its current state on some stuff.
Even a certain performance-wasting flash I don't want to mention can run at full speed in 4K dimensions on Android (dpi custom adjusted for true 4K) but it crashed after a few moments due to running out of the very limited device ram my Android Shield TV has.

The browser extension for it seems to never work for me while a site-integrated version works just fine even on Android,hopefully the extension version gets improved soon so it works on more types of Android devices such as Android TV which seems to always get the short end of the stick.

Why does e621 not just add https://ruffle.rs/ to their site, there is a version they can add to their server, and it will just run all flash content thru that. screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ynAQo9T.png

jdroo said:
Why does e621 not just add https://ruffle.rs/ to their site, there is a version they can add to their server, and it will just run all flash content thru that. screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ynAQo9T.png

Ruffle's flash support is too incomplete still, anything made in Actionscript 3 most likely won't run at all, and that means anything made after 2013 and most stuff from 2009 onwards. It's on their website's homepage.

It might be a good solution further down the line, but right now it would result in a terrible user experience right now, with most Flash files being broken.

I've downloaded Flash Player Standalone and I can finally play SWF files on my PC, but for watching them on the source site, how can I do?

I think I thwarted the timebomb. If you set your system clock to a date before January 12th, the plugin will work again, even after you set it back. I haven't tested this is too much so I don't know how long it works after setting the date back.

jscu20 said:
I think I thwarted the timebomb. If you set your system clock to a date before January 12th, the plugin will work again, even after you set it back. I haven't tested this is too much so I don't know how long it works after setting the date back.

Yes, I made a note of it in my above post describing what the january 12 killswitch entailed (forum #302104, above). Flash player only checks for the system date, so if you roll it back, it will keep working. That won't work forever, though, since browsers also use the system date to vetify if security certificates are expired or not, and a number of websites will stop loading once your system date and the real date drift far appart enough. Windows, Mac and Linux also use the system date when manipulating files and system logs, and manipulating that date could have a variety of unintended consequences in the long term.

What's more, Firefox 85 (due to release on January 21st) and Chrome 88 (due to release on January 19) will both remove support for the Flash player plugin, so unless you also stop updating your browser (which I would heavily advise against), Flash Player will no longer work on any browser by next week.

Really, if you need Flash, just use the Flash Projector/Standalone debugger instead.

max91 said:
I've downloaded Flash Player Standalone and I can finally play SWF files on my PC, but for watching them on the source site, how can I do?

You can't, not anymore, I'm afraid. My Flash projector has an address bar, so you can just paste the e6 download link in there and it will play without having to download it, but as the weeks go by, your options for keeping Flash working in the browser will keep dwindling until everyone stops using it.