Flash files were the single most efficient way of sharing something in lossless quality and honestly better than going through swivel with your ears bleeding every time you have to open that program
Yes we all know that flash is discontinued and now you need a standalone program to be able to view it
but being able to archive old flash files would be super great so maybe someone else could make a better conversion to webm than the one who have the flash file or for archiving funny games
maybe at least lock being able to upload flash files unless you have some sort of permission for it like replacements are(but still beta)

i have a heck ton of swf files here that could be archived here, some are just the original file of an already existing webm or gif

flash was discontinued from the whole internet

Mmm, security holes, delicious.

strikerman said:
flash was discontinued from the whole internet

god forbid a woman wanting to archive

votp said:
Mmm, security holes, delicious.

that's why the suggestion of being at least being locked behind permissions

Part of me honestly agrees, for purely the archival aspect of it. The security issues aren't exactly a good argument because anybody capable of getting flash to work in their browser (I personally have no idea how) is probably well aware of the risks they're taking. We've already got thousands of grandfathered flash files.

A flash animation's .sfw file is always going to be the best available source, no video conversion will ever compare to rescalable vectors.

In the future, as newer technology comes along it might even be justified to convert it into a more modern webm (or maybe even another container that has became the new standard). Is a 720p webm going to be enough when everybody's using 4K or 8K monitors? Will we have better compression algorithms that can provide better visual quality?

All those things are fine, we'll just go back to the original .swf file and re-convert it - but wait, all the third party sources for the .swf file have vanished over the years. Why didn't we, the largest anthropomorphic visual art archive, have a copy of this .swf file that we could use?

On the other hand I can see how this will be very problematic, somehow janitors are going to have to figure out how to review these files. Most webms are already dealt with solely by Mario because nobody else wants to learn, Flash files are just going to be even more problematic. It will only confuse 99% of users if Flash files start getting poster again because they'll have no way of even viewing them (some large % of e621 users are mobile-only now, this is the state of the modern Internet) so if it were allowed it might be reasonable to hide them by default.

Unfortunately (or maybe not) flash is completely dead, discontinued. It's amazing we even host the existing files. There aren't going to be any more made I don't think, and the ones staggering about the internet that we don't have are probably fine where they are.

rainbow_dash said:
Unfortunately (or maybe not) flash is completely dead, discontinued. It's amazing we even host the existing files. There aren't going to be any more made I don't think, and the ones staggering about the internet that we don't have are probably fine where they are.

Well there are some software for these flash games but also some websites that use an emulator like this one or that one .

But yeah, Flash is most likely to be dead as it's online period is over.

faucet said:
On the other hand I can see how this will be very problematic, somehow janitors are going to have to figure out how to review these files. Most webms are already dealt with solely by Mario because nobody else wants to learn

first of all you gave a very well written response which is the mindset i'm looking for, for archival purposes to archive lots of lost media files and as well games too

now for why i highlighted this part of your response
simply because what entitled me to make this forum topic was because Mairo was the one to suggest that in a voice chat and so after a long time i decided to make this forum topic to have other peoples opinion, maybe even Mairo to join the conversation as well

faucet said:
It will only confuse 99% of users if Flash files start getting poster again because they'll have no way of even viewing them

topic #22535
and flash should be a sort of archival, and i'm hell sure that if there are people that don't know what flash files are, shouldn't be here in the first place
in the other hand, "experienced users" can make a webm out of it using Swivel or something like that for video conversion (or ask Mairo directly because he helped me in the past with conversion)

rainbow_dash said:
There aren't going to be any more made I don't think

there is actually flash files still being made by people who have a love for them and share it on deviantart(and other places i don't know about) as you can still upload it there the swf files normally as it was just like back in the day

faucet said:
The security issues aren't exactly a good argument because anybody capable of getting flash to work in their browser (I personally have no idea how) is probably well aware of the risks they're taking.

To play devil's advocate, I don't think this is a good counter. The problem is that it's not just the person making the decision that takes the risk; if your system gets hacked and becomes part of a botnet, it can harm other people. Just like we require people to take some minimum level of caution and protection when they go out in public, because it could otherwise present a danger to bystanders, it would be good idea to take some minimum level of caution and security when using the public internet, because it could otherwise present a danger to other internet users. There is of course the argument about what "minimum level of caution and security" should be, or where the line between personal freedom vs public risk is, but security issues for a system connected to the internet isn't just a personal risk.

watsit said:
To play devil's advocate, I don't think this is a good counter. The problem is that it's not just the person making the decision that takes the risk; if your system gets hacked and becomes part of a botnet, it can harm other people. Just like we require people to take some minimum level of caution and protection when they go out in public, because it could otherwise present a danger to bystanders, it would be good idea to take some minimum level of caution and security when using the public internet, because it could otherwise present a danger to other internet users. There is of course the argument about what "minimum level of caution and security" should be, or where the line between personal freedom vs public risk is, but security issues for a system connected to the internet isn't just a personal risk.

This is how you get accounts with moderator powers hacked, yeah. "Oh, to prevent malware risks, we'll only have janitors review them and not distribute them!"
Now, if you had them running inside some (updated, isolated) VM with the Flash player in it, then most of those risks go away, but in theory, you can still get unpatched exploits in the emulator, itself.

alphamule said:
This is how you get accounts with moderator powers hacked, yeah. "Oh, to prevent malware risks, we'll only have janitors review them and not distribute them!"
Now, if you had them running inside some (updated, isolated) VM with the Flash player in it, then most of those risks go away, but in theory, you can still get unpatched exploits in the emulator, itself.

Ding ding ding, and from there once the initial target is hit, all it takes is an admin to view the supposedly-safe file and the entire site goes to hell, assuming they don't use, say, a staff slack/discord/skype (eugh) or similar to DIRECTLY target users via a trusted account.

votp said:
Ding ding ding, and from there once the initial target is hit, all it takes is an admin to view the supposedly-safe file and the entire site goes to hell, assuming they don't use, say, a staff slack/discord/skype (eugh) or similar to DIRECTLY target users via a trusted account.

https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/spear-phishing LOL, yeah, this goes through the differences between this and the normal spray-and-pray malware approaches. It also is used for emails and such, but the idea is the same.

To make an incredibly long and woe-filled story incredibly short; not one person who worked in cybersecurity or any other tech field shed a single tear for shockwave, and bringing it back is both a terrible idea from a security standpoint, and a horrible one from a resource dedication standpoint given the approval queue is already nightmarish. Imagine how much worse it'd be if every single flash had to be sandboxed and scanned, and verified, before being added.

That being said, nothing keeps you from just quarantining them for 5-10 years where hopefully said methods to escape virtualization are fixed. HDD space is cheap for such small files. ;)

One thing I have been throwing in the air is to allow uploading SWF files from known, trusted sources and using directl URL whitelisting to allow this. After all sites like Furaffinity also disallowed upload of new flash files around the same time.
Problem is that some sites like Inkbunny still allow upload of even new files.

E: also would love to have some way of figuring out what flashes people would like to have converted into other fileformats so I could be putting effort into some stuff people care, instead of just starting at random stuff that nobody cares about.

strikerman said:
flash was discontinued from the whole internet

Player went EOL, so it's not really "whole internet", but it's simply outdated software that no longer is being supported or get updates, which will slowly lead into not only security but also compatibility issues further down the line.

faucet said:
Part of me honestly agrees, for purely the archival aspect of it. The security issues aren't exactly a good argument because anybody capable of getting flash to work in their browser (I personally have no idea how) is probably well aware of the risks they're taking. We've already got thousands of grandfathered flash files.

A flash animation's .sfw file is always going to be the best available source, no video conversion will ever compare to rescalable vectors.

In the future, as newer technology comes along it might even be justified to convert it into a more modern webm (or maybe even another container that has became the new standard). Is a 720p webm going to be enough when everybody's using 4K or 8K monitors? Will we have better compression algorithms that can provide better visual quality?

All those things are fine, we'll just go back to the original .swf file and re-convert it - but wait, all the third party sources for the .swf file have vanished over the years. Why didn't we, the largest anthropomorphic visual art archive, have a copy of this .swf file that we could use?

On the other hand I can see how this will be very problematic, somehow janitors are going to have to figure out how to review these files. Most webms are already dealt with solely by Mario because nobody else wants to learn, Flash files are just going to be even more problematic. It will only confuse 99% of users if Flash files start getting poster again because they'll have no way of even viewing them (some large % of e621 users are mobile-only now, this is the state of the modern Internet) so if it were allowed it might be reasonable to hide them by default.

Firstly, vectors died out way before EOL, if you actually go and look at flash files, only stuff from 90's were pure vectors or bitmaps being manipulated with Flash itself, later on it was all just JPG image sequences, FLV video files or external MP4 loaders.
So in that sense, many flash to video conversions are instead just video to video conversions. It would maybe be nicer in those instances being able to upload FLV files, but as those are not web compatible directly, those would need to be sampled regardless.

I do remember there being talk of SVGs and Javascript being used to do vector animations and interactions, but those are also really hard to deal with unless you setup your own website for these.

And yes, if we start allowing flash files again, we would need to also implement stuff like Ruffle so that users don't get really confused and angry that nothing is working - or automatically hide from newest uploads or similar.
This has actually been one topic that comes up from time to time, when people start archiving older stuff, both users and artists are extremely dissatisfied seeing old material in the newest uploads and popular sections.

mairo said:
This has actually been one topic that comes up from time to time, when people start archiving older stuff, both users and artists are extremely dissatisfied seeing old material in the newest uploads and popular sections.

Dafuq? I mean, people actually get upset about it not being the latest work? Well, I mean I can see a minority, but a large number doing it?

alphamule said:
Dafuq? I mean, people actually get upset about it not being the latest work? Well, I mean I can see a minority, but a large number doing it?

Yes. That is one huge reason for DNP and "only I can post" / "only posts after X are allowed" cDNP reasons, has happened to me personally more than couple times alone.
With users have seen it less because usually I'm simply fixing up BVAS or transcodes, but thanks to replacements that happens less, but even now when I once again started project of uploading older stuff everyone is super confused and constantly commenting about reposts or how it's amazing how artists post their best new stuff at november on stuff made in spring of 2015 :V

I don't see much point in uploading flash files anymore unless you can run them. Even if you can run the files there would be no new content. Even if you can make new content then why not just make a gif, video or a unity/godot game?

mairo said:
Firstly, vectors died out way before EOL, if you actually go and look at flash files, only stuff from 90's were pure vectors or bitmaps being manipulated with Flash itself, later on it was all just JPG image sequences, FLV video files or external MP4 loaders.

what? I feel like 90+ percent of everything I've ever seen that was in a swf throughout flash's lifetime on the internet was vector animations, with the exception of video hosting websites like YT using it as a container for a video player or websites using it as barely functional UI.

but like NG and ABS as well as the greater rise of self-hosted webtoons like H*R was like the early aughts to around 2010 when YT started to have video qualities above 240p, and with except for a few NG series like Knox' Klay World, that was all real-time animation. I'd say that most of the stuff uploaded here up to the discontinuation of flash was largely vector or rigged animation.

The site needs to add support for Ruffle, Most flash sites such as NewGrounds have it built-in to the site or at the very least, support the browser extension. Ruffle is safe and runs most flash content vary well

grey_scale_dragon said:
I don't see much point in uploading flash files anymore unless you can run them. Even if you can run the files there would be no new content. Even if you can make new content then why not just make a gif, video or a unity/godot game?

LOL, are you joking? It feels like every (even basic) Unity game I've seen is like running an entire another OS on top, resourcewise.

anyone saying flash is completely dead is an understatement. it's not evaporated, its player is heavily limited by entirety of the modern browsers and hard for casual user to find the way to play it, but a number of browsers utilizing decade old firefox engine like palemoon and waterfox classic allow to play flash content seemingly well.

waller said:
The site needs to add support for Ruffle, Most flash sites such as NewGrounds have it built-in to the site or at the very least, support the browser extension. Ruffle is safe and runs most flash content vary well

and i agree with waller, i don't think it will hurt for the site embed ruffle to play flash content or at very least make mention of recommend to install the extension of ruffle to play flash content, especially as ruffle is at the point of completion and as3 projects play kind of well.

Few kinds of "Flash" files.

• Flash games and vector animations, e.g. fenoxo, skycorp, fek, doom-the-wolf, askmeaboutloom.
• Video uses .swf as a container, e.g. commoddity, ikugo_(artist), nathanounce.
• Static image slideshow.

Most of the first are already uploaded or would probably fail artistic quality. Or they're broken; there's a few vector animations which are just utterly fucked because, I assume, they used some old-version ActionScript hack that doesn't work anymore or relied on the actual installed version of the Flash Player to give them system variables or something. (For example, https://www.furaffinity.net/view/7082983/ doesn't work in the standalone, it instantly crashes.)
Most of the other two shouldn't be uploaded as .swfs, they should be extracted and uploaded as non-dead formats.

alphamule said:
LOL, are you joking? It feels like every (even basic) Unity game I've seen is like running an entire another OS on top, resourcewise.

Might be the packages in the project and how well theyre optimized. Urp with post processing puts a strain on the system but its not that bad. But i think it was unreal that takes up too many resources.
Also heard game maker is making a new version that is free for non commercial use and lets you build for most devices. So if all other engines are too powerful for you.

I would also love to see us integrate Ruffle to revive the legacy flash games already uploaded to the site, but we do not need to bring back .swf uploads. Nearly all of the great furry flash games from years past are already on the site, modern games are being made in other formats, and animations/slideshows should really be uploaded as video files now.

grey_scale_dragon said:
Might be the packages in the project and how well theyre optimized. Urp with post processing puts a strain on the system but its not that bad. But i think it was unreal that takes up too many resources.
Also heard game maker is making a new version that is free for non commercial use and lets you build for most devices. So if all other engines are too powerful for you.

Hilariously, Java and Shockwave were infamous for wasting CPU.